5. The Child and Childlikeness
Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves. To be concerned about being grown up, to admire the grown up because it is grown up, to blush at the suspicion of being childish; these things are the marks of childhood and adolescence. . . . When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. Now that I am fifty I read them openly. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up.
‘On Three Ways of Writing for Children’, Of Other Worlds
Only those adults who have retained, with whatever additions and enrichments, their first childish response to poetry unimpaired, can be said to have grown up at all. Mere change is not growth. Growth is the synthesis of change and continuity, and where there is no continuity there is no growth. To hear some critics, one would suppose that a man had to lose his nursery appreciation of Gulliver before he acquired his mature appreciation of it. It is not so. If it were, the whole concept of maturity, of ripening, would be out of place.
‘Hamlet: The Prince or the Poem?’, Selected Literary Essays
The moral you put in is likely to be a platitude, or even a falsehood, skimmed from the surface of your consciousness. It is impertinent to offer the children that. . . . The only moral that is of any value is that which arises inevitably from the whole cast of the author’s mind. . . . The child as reader is neither to be patronised nor idolised: we talk to him as man to man. But the worst attitude of all would be the professional attitude which regards children in the lump as a sort of raw material which we have to handle.
‘On Three Ways of Writing for Children’, Of Other Worlds
The boy does not despise real woods because he has read of enchanted woods: the reading makes all real woods a little enchanted . . . the boy reading the fairy tale desires and is happy in the very fact of desiring. For his mind has not been concentrated on himself, as it often is in the more realistic story.
‘On Three Ways of Writing for Children’, Of Other Worlds