Books for Children.

New Zealand Graphic, Volume XXVII, Issue XXIII, 7 December 1901, Page 1102

Books for Children.

Any one who has kept tin „2 the literature of the last decade must have observed a decided tendency toward deterioration in what may be

called the edifying quality of books provided for children. This has come about no doubt largely as a re-action from the exaggerated didacticism of an earlier day, but whatever its cause the difference in effect on young readers is very noticeable. Children are wonderfully influenced in manners, in mode of thought and also one may believe in. morals by what they read. They are very quick to recognise and to scorn cant, pseudo-piety and sentimentalism. They respond readily to sincere apI>eals to honesty, truthfulness, courage and the manly virtues generally. They also, it is regrettable to say, are easily affected by coarseness and laxity of speech and action as depicted in the characters and situations brought before them in story book form. A child of ten or twelve of fail - intelligence may be given Shakespeare's plays, the novels of Scott, Dickens and Dumas the elder, and even of Richardson and Fielding, with the assurance that the naturally antiseptic qualities of his mind will extract from such reading only the good, and that passages dealing with the more subtle problems of existence, such as the relation of the sexes, will be passed over with uncomprehending indifference. The cardinal defeet of many writers of the day in appealing to young readers is in failing to make it clear either! or 'indirectly what ought to be approved and imitated, and what ought to, l»0 condemned and shunned. They write stories of boothlacks and newsboys, and fill their pages with more or less realistic quotations from the slang of the streets; and children read it, think it is funny and smart, and speedily

adopt it into their own speech. Writers for children bring into their stories coarse and brutal characters and make them do coarse and brutal things, and so great is their dread of being “goody-goody” that they leave their youthful readers to judge for themselves as to what is coarse and brutal. A child of refined temperament may always be trusted to do this, but how about the great majority of children who are neither refined nor unrefined in temperament and are easily swung to either side of the dividing line, according to circumstances? The same holds true of cruelty. Most chuldren are eager readers of stories of war and hunting. How many writers of such stories are sincere and well informed enough to depict war and hunting as they really are, without the glamour of romance and pseudo-patriot-ism over the one, or the supposedly heroic ardour of the chase to obscure the useless suffering inflicted by tne other? The average writer of stories of war for children lays emphasis on the courage, endurance and skill of troops in the field. He does not owe., upon the horrors of the battle ground after the battle is over, or the sights and sounds of the military hospital. In hunting stories it is the adroitness and bravery of the hunter that are made prominent. No one as a rule is asked to follow the victim to its lair after it has been stricken with the fatal bullet.