Dispatch from a bygone world

They held that one ought to set before children, and that children showed their own innate good taste in admiring, only such books and pictures as they would continue to admire when their minds were developed and mature. No doubt they regarded aesthetic merits as material objects which an unclouded vision could not fail to discern, wiwthout one's needing to nurture equivalents of them and let them slowly ripen in one's own heart.


The narrator is talking about his grandmother's sisters. It is the kind of observation that reminds us just how long ago this book was written, and what a bygone world he is reporting from. It can be easy to forget that when so many of his psychological insights seem not just up to date but sometimes, still, ahead of us. But here he gives us a glimpse of a mindset that predates our modern view of childhood. It is as fascinating as it is at once laughable and poignant--the knowledge that children have always been raised by adults convinced they know what they're doing, and yet if the adult lacks entirely any sense that a child is a being in development, then the adult is blind and the child, often, damaged.