Home Reading.

New Zealand Mail, Issue 994, 20 March 1891, Page 4

Home Reading.

A very important social item is the proposal to form a Homs Reading Association for Wellington on the lines ot the National Union Home Reading Association of England and the Chantauqua Literary and Scientific Cirole of America. The objects of the association are to promote continuous and systematic home reading among all classes of people in snob a manner as to make it truly educational. That such an association ha 3 great scope for its work in this Colony is without the shadow of a doubt. I hope the association will extend their operations and influence to the country districts, for there is more need of culture in the country than there is in the city. It cannot be said that the people of this Colony are not readers. Look at the multiplicity of newspapers. According to our population we have more newspaper readers here than there are in any other port of tho world. It is true that, ns far as home reading goes, that is, the reading of what we may term standard works, we are far behind the people of the older world. The young men of the Colony as a rule devote tho greater part of their leisure time to outdoor sport 3. They vote reading dull, stale, and unprofitsble. The talk of tho stable, the boating shad, the gymnasium is more interesting to them than quiet half hours with the great master minds in literature.

As with the young men so with the young women. In the bright summer time tennis takes the lead, and small talk over fashions and small Sonndala usurps all spare moments. How few houses one visits in this Colony where a member of the family is in the habit of reading aloud to the delight and improvement of the other members. I look baok with great pleasure to many pleasant evenings spent in England and in the United States, where in the cold season in a cosy room with its big blazing fire the entire family would be gathered. The mother, perhaps, mending Books, tho girls at fancy work, the boys carving, drawing, or patiently listening as the father reads the delightful romances of Scott, the weird word painting of Balwer Lytton, varying fiction with stories of travel and discovery and the revels of the world of science. There was amusement and instruction on those quiet evenings Girls in this Colony do certainly read. Question the first dozen yon meet. Ask them what they read and at least ten will at once answer, * Why, fiction of oourse.’ * And what sort of fiction ?’ you will ask. * Oh, I like my journal best of all,’ comes the reply, referring to one of those imported journals catering for women full of the wildest and most improbable fictional literature of the day. Frequently literature of an unhealthy kind ; stories of poor but beautiful girls wooed by haughty hooknosed bat wealthy men of title. Stories of sin and shame thinly veiled, stories of practiced fraud and deception, without one redeeming point of'true honesty of purpose. Stories that terrify, excite, creating a falsa appetite, conveying falsa impressions, and damaging to the expanding mind of an innocent girl. The percentage of young people in these oolonies who read for the sake of study is very small. They imagine that when thoy leave school all study should cease. They forget that at school they are but laying the foundation stone of their edifice of study. It is in the after days, in tho goldon time between the schoolroom and the altar that they have leisure to read those works which shall gladden their homes in the days to come,, when the little olive branches around the fireside at nights want and wait for instruction, amusingly conveyed, from tho mother. It isin those days when the husband returns from his work, tired, is pleased to hear his wife discuss the leading topics of the day with an enlightened mind, or to chat pleasantly upon the merits or demerits of an author whose latest work is taking the world bv storm. How small a woman looks, and no doubt feels, when In the days after the official honeymoon has passed and she is-comfortably settled in her new home, she finds her mind a hideous blank when her more widely read husband talks of books and their writers. More than ono woman I have known has in her quiet moments shed bitter tears, tears of regret, over lost opportunities of study, tears of remorse that she was not a more fit companion for her intellectual husband. Howcan a wife be a oompanion to a husband in the highest sense of the word if she be far beneath him in mental intelligence. Many a man with high culture has become a social wreck and his home ruined simply because his wife was not a fit mate for him intellectually. And on the other hand many a home has been made all the happier when the wife has been able and willing to converse with her husband on the wide world of books. ~ ... Speaking of reading, I hope the association will do what they can to encourage the gransful art of reading aloud. How very tew readers there are in this country who can interpret the true meaning of any ordinary author in public. The art of public reading is not taught in our sohools. It is actually painful to hear the average school girl read aloud. She reads mechanically with but slight regard to what wo term sense. it the assooiation will produce _ good public readers it will have done society and, perbaps, the State some service. EqrA