LECTURE IV

FAIRY LAND

MRS. ALLINGHAM AND KATE GREENAWAY

(Delivered 26th and 30th May 1883)

88. WE have hitherto been considering the uses of legendary art to grown persons, and to the most learned and powerful minds. To-day I will endeavour to note with you some of the least controvertible facts respecting its uses to children; and to obtain your consent to the main general principles on which I believe it should be offered to them.

Here, however, I enter on ground where I must guard carefully against being misled by my own predilections, and in which also the questions at issue are extremely difficult, because most of them new. It is only in recent times that pictures have become familiar means of household pleasure and education: only in our own days-nay, even within the last ten years of those,-that the means of illustration by colour-printing have been brought to perfection, and art as exquisite as we need desire to see it, placed, if our school-boards choose to have it so, within the command of every nursery governess.

89. Having then the colour-print, the magic-lantern, the electric-light, and the to any row of ciphers-magnifying lens, it becomes surely very interesting to consider what we may most wisely represent to children by means so potent, so dazzling, and, if we will, so faithful. I said just now that I must guard carefully against being misled by my own predilections, because having been myself brought up principally on fairy legends,' my first impulse would be to insist upon every story we tell to a child

1 [Principally, but not wholly see below, § 102 (p. 335). And compare Præterita, i. §§ 1, 2.]

being untrue, and every scene we paint for it, impossible. But I have been led, as often before confessed,' gravely to doubt the expediency of some parts of my early training; and perhaps some day may try to divest myself wholly, for an hour, of these dangerous recollections; and prepare a lecture for you in which I will take Mr. Gradgrind on his own terms, and consider how far, making it a rule that we exhibit nothing but facts, we could decorate our pages of history, and illuminate the slides of our lantern, in a manner still sufficiently attractive to childish taste. For indeed poor Louise and her brother, kneeling to peep under the fringes of the circus-tent, are as much in search after facts as the most scientific of us all! A circus-rider, with his hoop, is as much a fact as the planet Saturn and his ring, and exemplifies a great many more laws of motion, both moral and physical; nor are any descriptions of the Valley of Diamonds, or the Lake of the Black Islands, in the Arabian Nights, anything like so wonderful as the scenes of California and the Rocky Mountains which you may find described in the April Number of the Cornhill Magazine, under the heading of "Early Spring in California"; and may see represented with most sincere and passionate enthusiasm by the American landscape painter, Mr. Moran, in a survey lately published by the Government of the United States.5

1

[See, for instance, Fors Clavigera, Letter 54 (reprinted in Præterita, i. § 54).] 2 [See the opening words of Hard Times: "Now, what I want is, Facts. Teach these boys and girls nothing but Facts." For the circus-tent, see ch. iii. There are other references to the book in Vol. XV. p. 371, and Vol. XVII. p. 31.]

3

["The Valley of Diamonds" was the title (taken from the story of Sinbad) of Lecture i. in Ruskin's Ethics of the Dust (Vol. XVIII. p. 209). For the Lake of the Black Islands, see "The Story of the Fisherman," passing into that of "The Story of the Young King of the Black Islands" (vol. i. pp. 91 seq. in Lane's edition).]

[Vol. 47, pp. 410-423.]

[Views of the Rocky Mountains are included among fifteen water-colour sketches by Thomas Moran, finely reproduced by chromo-lithography, issued at Boston (L. Prang & Co.) in 1876, under the title The Yellowstone National Park, and the Mountain Regions of Portions of Idaho, Nevada, Colorado, and Utah, described by Professor T. F. Hayden, Geologist-in-Charge of the United States Government Exploring Expedition . . . illustrated, etc. The publication was not official, but Professor Hayden refers to Moran's coloured sketches as supplementing the official survey.]

90. Scenes majestic as these, pourtrayed with mere and pure fidelity by such scientific means as I have referred to, would form a code of geographic instruction beyond all the former grasp of young people; and a source of entertainment, I had nearly said, and most people who had not watched the minds of children carefully, might think,inexhaustible. Much, indeed, I should myself hope from it, but by no means an infinitude of entertainment. For it is quite an inexorable law of this poor human nature of ours, that in the development of its healthy infancy, it is put by Heaven under the absolute necessity of using its imagination as well as its lungs and its legs;-that it is forced to develop its power of invention, as a bird its feathers of flight; that no toy you can bestow will supersede the pleasure it has in fancying something that isn't there; and the most instructive histories; you can compile for it of the wonders of the world will never conquer the interest of the tale which a clever child can tell itself, concerning the shipwreck of a rose-leaf in the shallows of a rivulet.1

91. One of the most curious proofs of the need to children of this exercise of the inventive and believing power, the besoin de croire, which precedes the besoin d'aimer, you will find in the way you destroy the vitality of a toy to them, by bringing it too near the imitation of life. You never find a child make a pet of a mechanical mouse that runs about the floor-of a poodle that yelpsof a tumbler who jumps upon wires. The child falls in love with a quiet thing, with an ugly one-nay, it may be, with one, to us, totally devoid of meaning. My littleever-so-many-times-grand-cousin, Lily, took a bit of stick with a round knob at the end of it for her doll one day;nursed it through any number of illnesses with the most tender solicitude; and, on the deeply-important occasion of [In the lecture as delivered, ". the shipwreck of a walnut-shell in a gutter" (Pall Mall Gazette, May 28).]

2 [Miss Lily Severn, elder daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Arthur Severn; strictly, Ruskin's second cousin once removed.]

its having a new night-gown made for it, bent down her mother's head to receive the confidential and timid whisper -"Mamma, perhaps it had better have no sleeves, because, as Bibsey has no arms, she mightn't like it." 1

92. I must take notice here, but only in passing,—the subject being one to be followed out afterwards in studying more grave branches of art, that the human mind in its full energy having thus the power of believing simply what it likes, the responsibilities and the fatalities attached to the effort of Faith are greater than those belonging to bodily deed, precisely in the degree of their voluntariness. A man can't always do what he likes, but he can always fancy what he likes; and he may be forced to do what he doesn't like, but he can't be forced to fancy what he doesn't like.

93. I use for the moment, the word "to fancy" instead of "to believe," because the whole subject of Fidelity and Infidelity has been made a mere mess of quarrels and blunders by our habitually forgetting that the proper power of Faith is to trust without evidence, not with evidence. You perpetually hear people say, "I won't believe this or that unless you give me evidence of it." Why, if you give them evidence of it, they know it, they don't believe, any more. A man doesn't believe there's any danger in nitro-glycerine; at last he gets his parlour-door blown into the next street. He is then better informed on the subject, but the time for belief is past.

94. Only, observe, I don't say that you can fancy what you like, to the degree of receiving it for truth. Heaven forbid we should have a power such as that, for it would be one of voluntary madness. But we are, in the most natural and rational health, able to foster the fancy, up to the point of influencing our feelings and character in the strongest way; and for the strength of that healthy imaginative faculty, and all the blending of the good and

[For another reference to this incident, see Fors Clavigera, Letter 95 (Vol. XXIX.

p. 508).]

grace, "richiesto al vero ed al trastullo,' we are wholly responsible. We may cultivate it to what brightness we choose, merely by living in a quiet relation with natural objects and great and good people, past or present; and we may extinguish it to the last snuff, merely by living in town, and reading the Times every morning.

"We are scarcely sufficiently conscious," says Mr. Kinglake, with his delicate precision of serenity in satire, "scarcely sufficiently conscious in England, of the great debt we owe to the wise and watchful press which presides over the formation of our opinions; and which brings about this splendid result, namely, that in matters of belief, the humblest of us are lifted up to the level of the most sagacious, so that really a simple Cornet in the Blues is no more likely to entertain a foolish belief about ghosts, or witchcraft, or any other supernatural topic, than the Lord High Chancellor, or the Leader of the House of Commons."1

2

95. And thus, at the present day, for the education or the extinction of the Fancy, we are absolutely left to our choice. For its occupation, not wholly so, yet in a far greater measure than we know. Mr. Wordsworth speaks of it as only impossible to "have sight of Proteus rising from the sea," because the world is too much with us; also Mr. Kinglake, though, in another place, he calls it "a vain and heathenish longing to be fed with divine counsels from the lips of Pallas Athene," "-yet is far happier than the most scientific traveller could be in a trigonometric measurement, when he discovers that Neptune could really have seen Troy from the top of Samothrace: and I believe that we should many of us find it an extremely wholesome and useful method of treating

2

*Dante, Purg. xiv. 93.

1 [Eothen, ch. viii. (p. 147, ed. 2).]

[For other references to Wordsworth's sonnet, "The world is too much with us," see Vol. V. p. 323, and Vol. XI. p. 130.]

3

[Eothen, ch. vii. (p. 104).]

Ibid., ch. iv. (pp. 64, 65). Neptune should be Jove.]