hints, but it is
much easier to do so if something not too actual is the groundwork.
Figures which delight children are never wholly symbolic, mere virtues
and vices materialised as personages of the anecdote. Real nonsense such
as Lear concocted, real wit such as that which sparkles from Lewis
Carroll's pages, find their parallel in the pictures which accompany
each text. It is the feeble effort to be funny, the mildly punning
humour of the imitators, which makes the text tedious, and one fancies
the artist is also infected, for in such books the drawings very rarely
rise to a high level.

The "pretty-pretty" school, which has been too popular, especially in
anthologies of mildly entertaining rhymes, is sickly at its best, and
fails to retain the interest of a child. Possibly, in pleading for
imaginative art, one has forgotten that everywhere is Wonderland to a
child, who would be no more astonished to find a real elephant dropping
in to tea, or a real miniature railway across the lawn, than in finding
a toy elephant or a toy engine awaiting him. Children are so accustomed
to novelty that they do not realise the abnormal; nor do they always
crave for unreality. As coaches and horses were the delight of
youngsters a century ago, so are trains and steamboats to-day. Given a
pile of books and an empty floor space, their imagination needs no
mechanical models of real locomotives; or, to be more correct, they
enjoy the make-believe with quite as great a zest. Hence, perhaps, in
praising conscious art for children's literature, one is unwittingly
pleasing older tastes; indeed, it is not inconceivable that the "prig"
which lurks in most of us may be nurtured by too refined diet. Whether a
child brought up wholly on the aesthetic toy-book would realise the
greatness of Rembrandt's etchings or other masterpieces of realistic art
more easily than one who had only known the current pictures of cheap
magazines, is not a question to be decided off-hand. To foster an
artificial taste is not wholly unattended with danger; but if humour be
present, as it is in the works of the best artists for the nursery, then
all fear vanishes; good wholesome laughter is the deadliest bane to the
prig-microbe, and will leave no infant lisping of the preciousness of
Cimabue, or the wonder of Sandro Botticelli, as certain children were
reported to do in the brief days when the aesthete walked his faded way
among us. That modern children's books will--