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 æsthetic 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 æsthete walked his faded way among us. That modern children's books will--some of them at least--take an honourable place in an iconography of nineteenth-century art, many of the illustrations here reproduced are in themselves sufficient to prove.
[Illustration: ILLUSTRATION FROM "GOULD'S BOOK OF FAIRY TALES." BY ARTHUR GASKIN. (METHUEN AND CO.)]
[Illustration: ILLUSTRATION FROM "LULLABY LAND" BY CHARLES ROBINSON. (JOHN LANE. 1897)]