We must meet children as equals in that area of our nature where we are their equals. Nothing seems to me more fatal, for this art, than an idea that whatever we share with children is, in the privative sense, “childish” and that whatever is childish is somehow comic. When I became a man I put away childish things, including the fear of childishness and the desire to be very grown up…Ī critic not long ago said in praise of a very serious fairy tale that the author’s tongue “never once got into his cheek.” But why on earth should it?-unless he had been eating a seed-cake. When I was ten, I read fairy tales in secret and would have been ashamed if I had been found doing so. But to carry on into middle life or even into early manhood this concern about being adult is a mark of really arrested development. And in childhood and adolescence they are, in moderation, healthy symptoms. 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. Critics who treat adult as a term of approval, instead of as a merely descriptive term, cannot be adult themselves.
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