Читать книгу Budge & Toddie; Or, Helen's Babies at Play - Habberton John - Страница 3

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The many indulgent men and women who liked “Helen’s Babies” so well that they wished they had written it themselves would have changed their minds could they have been compelled to read criticisms of a certain kind that were inflicted upon the author as soon as his name and mail address became known. Some people were in such haste to relieve their minds that they rushed into print with their charges and specifications, all of which were of service to the book, as so much free advertising; at least, the publisher said it was, and his opinion on such a matter was entitled to special respect.

Some of the critics were parents of the earnest, forceful, but matter-of-fact kind that does not doubt its own infallibility in family government and regards all children as scions of one unchanging stock and needing to be treated exactly alike, no matter in what direction their tendencies may be. A larger number were unmarried persons with theories of their own which had not been marred in whole or in part by anything so utterly commonplace and exasperating as experience. These good people, whether uncles or aunts of children over whom they were not allowed to exercise any authority, or mere bachelors and maids unattached to anybody’ babies of any kind, joined in abusing Budge and Toddie as the worst trained children that ever were tossed into print and in declaring the boys’s Uncle Harry incomparably incapable as a disciplinarian, unless, indeed, the parents of Budge and Toddie were still less competent to bring up children in the way they should go.

Still another class was composed of professional teachers who had taken long, serious courses of instruction in juvenile humanity, its nature, possibilities, limitations, duties and mental conditions at specified ages. Apparently these regarded a child as something created for the special purpose of being subjected to personal, exact and continuous domination by adults, and to be let alone only when the adults themselves wearied of the strain. To prove the unfitness of the boys’s uncle and their parents to have the care of children they quoted fluently from standard authorities on education, all the way from Aristotle, concerning whose children history is silent, to Froebel, the founder of the kindergarten system, who was childless.

Others who joined in the effort to analyze this literary butterfly with a mallet were of the class that could not understand why the misdeeds and shortcomings of Budge and Toddie were not treated with reproofs and warnings deduced from certain catechisms, of which infant depravity is a popular feature. And there were the people that never read a book but on compulsion. Anyone errs greatly who believes that this class lacks intelligence, for the world has contained many wondrously clever people who could not read or write; nevertheless, men and women who seldom read anything do take any book seriously, no matter if it deserves as little attention as last year’s almanac. Some of them sought out the author, after reading “Helen’s Babies,” to tell him in good faith what they would have done to Budge and Toddie to correct some alleged deficiencies.

It was useless to assure any of these unexpected critics that the author was not himself the hero of his story, or that he had never been manager of other people’s children when he was a bachelor, unless unwillingly and for a few moments at a time, or that his book was not in any sense a disclosure of the methods he would have followed had such a responsibility been thrust upon him, or that it was no longer fashionable for a man to write an amusing sketch for the purpose of covertly inculcating a lot of moral principles, like so many sugar-coated pills, or that for some years he had been joint owner of some children to whose mental and moral well-being he had given more thought and care than to his business interests and almost everything else that men live for, and consequently he might be regarded as beyond the need of volunteer counsel and admonition.

The criticisms continued until the author repented of having written the story that was the cause of them. But one day a publisher asked for some more—much more—about Budge and Toddie, to be published serially, and the inducements he offered were so timely and convincing that regrets and critics alike were laughed at. The stock of available material was unlimited, for had not many mothers reproached the author for not having put into print the tales they had told him of their own boys’s doings— tales which they knew were far funnier than any recorded in “Helen’s Babies”—and had not many other mothers given him capital stories with positive orders to put them in shape for publication and do so quickly? Besides, he had a store of similar material in his own mind. How to use the aggregate mass of incident did not readily appear to his mind’s eye, for he had been too long engaged, professionally, in picking other men’s books to pieces to have found time to learn how best to put together a book of his own. He had not a novelist’s privilege of choosing from many meritorious models, for tales about children, yet written principally to be read by adults, were very few and of doubtful quality.

Suddenly out of nowhere, apparently, came the suggestion that the possible experiences of some one, any one, of the critics who knew exactly how other people’s children should be managed would be a good framework for the desired story. Naturally the person most confident of such ability would be the best character for the purpose, so it should be a young, whole-hearted woman of positive nature, who loved children dearly but had none of her own to disarrange her theories. Facts have always been the most pestilent enemies of theories, and children are facts, sometimes stubborn facts, always startling ones when they encounter any theory not founded on the rock of experience.

So the tale was begun in haste, as well as in glee over its probable effect on some of the men and women who had been burdening the author’s ears and mail-box with criticism and counsel. Whether any of them ever read a line of it when it appeared serially, or afterward in book form, remains unknown; probably it is better so, for the author was thereby spared the meanness of exultation over men and women quite as well-meaning as himself, or spared the humiliation of discovering that he had done his work so badly that they were unconscious of what he had attempted to do. And, really, none of them was any wiser in his own conceit than was the author himself before he had any children of his own yet was sure he knew how other people’ children should be trained, admonished, controlled, restrained, disciplined and otherwise tormented by their parents.

The new book was spared a depressing experience of its predecessor, for, instead of being declined by almost every reputable publisher in the United States, it was demanded by several before the second instalment appeared and the number of requests for it increased week by week as the serial issue continued.

But, like almost everything else from the same pen, “Other People’s Children” was written so hastily and put to press so carelessly that it abounded in repetitions and other errors that made cultivated readers grieve, so an opportunity to allow the book to drop out of print was welcomed by the author.

Nevertheless he was compelled to believe his friends and enemies when they insisted that “Other People’s Children” was an abler and more amusing story than “Helen’s Babies,” for their opinion agreed with his own. So he has responded gladly to the request of the present publishers that he should give the copy a careful revision. It is extremely unlikely that any reader of the old edition will detect any alterations in the new, for nothing has been added nor has anything of consequence been taken out; yet the author and publishers know that more than a thousand corrections and emendations have been made and that almost all of them were needed.