From The Adventures of Frankie and Jessie.

THE heavy burden of the growing 'soul Perplexes and offends more day by day,

ote Mr. Eliot dispiritedly, and I suppose ne such feeling lies behind our various ,scriptions to the Child-cult. Innocence has been slaid and we yearn for a hidden garden, Where flowers talk, laughter lurks in the bushes and gate bears a sign : 'Genders Will Be Prose- ed.' Children have a truth that we have lost sight And this proposition has dangerous extensions.

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By JOHN COLEMAN

Elizabeth Jennings assures us that 'the child is quick to detect the bogus because his own faculties have not been impaired by misuse or custom.' Bar- bara Ireson implies the same thing: 'My guide as to whether or not any individual poem is "success- ful" has been the reactions of children.' James Reeves mentions 'a sense of wonder.' Children see things with the fresh eye of the poet and have natural good taste. We are all liable to this fallacy : we forget, as we flip through our snap- shots, the overwhelming sense of confusion, the moments of sheer panic at being lost in a wood of unknowns; and, if some faint honest memory of all this does strike through, we call that con- fusion 'wonder.' Poor wretches that we were, of course we wondered! At the mercy of a world scaled a yard above our heads, forced to pass our time,. for the most part, with little savages no more literate than ourselves, our pleasures peasant pleasures, cruel, brightly-coloured, simplified. When we feel impelled to talk of 'seeing life again through a child's eyes,' we might remember what it mostly meant : being four feet tall and bewildered. rhyme proper an exclusively oral one. No, the trouble is that Miss Ireson has had the misfortune to pick out some stinkers, which will, in the long run, do more harm to the reading parent than the read-to child. They can only aggravate our national disease of Creeping Whimsy.

Magic figures largely in James Reeves's• anthology of some fifty stories and seventy poems and songs. Why we should be so concerned to exacerbate a child's already substantial sense of mystery I'm not quite sure : Mr. Reeves suggests that children 'don't always want to know what the secret is. They simply want the secret to be there, like the kernel in a nut.' It might be nearer the truth to say they don't yet know how to formu- late the nut-cracking questions. But anyone who knows Mr. Reeves as poet and story-teller will expect this to be a sensible collection, and so it is. Authors include De la Mare, Lear, Arthur Ransome, Robert Graves and William Words- worth—illustrators Ardizzone, Tove Jansson• and Lear again.

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