shows a morbid taste which should be repressed. If he shrinks from them, he should be carefully guarded from anything which will give a shock to his sensitive nature. I recently heard of a little boy of five who was convulsed with grief over the fate of a picture kitten—left alone on a rock in a stormy sea. A friend of mine once confessed to me that she had never quite recovered from the horror of a vivid picture of the Deluge shown to her in her childhood.
The grotesque often has a certain comic element in it which has its value in amusing the child, but the line is sometimes hard to draw between the grotesque and the gruesome. I have seen illustrated books of fairy tales in which the ogre who looks so funny to the grown-ups is a very alarming creature to the child. The children who are terrified by the circus clown—and there are not a few such—are of the kind whose pictures must be carefully chosen.
Pictures which are outside a child’s range of interest should certainly not be forced upon him. If he is overdosed by zealous parents and teachers with subjects beyond his comprehension, or not appealing to his preferences, he may revolt altogether. Whatever a child likes to hear about, or read about, or look at in real life, that he enjoys in a picture. We must look, then, for the material which connects naturally with the average child’s experience, and we should provide it in sufficient variety. Some of us recall with amusement a period in the nineties when the schools “discovered” the Madonna, so to speak, and the children were treated to the subject till they
