The morning call., 1893-10-16
1.-THE CALLS" BOY WRITERS.

The stories written by boys. which were
with pleasure. There is freshness about
the youthful Imagination which is always
attractive; even the errors OF inexperience
give piquancy to the narrative. They
enable the critic to point out the direction
in which education should be supplied.
The authors of the war tales which we
published yesterday will learn much that
will be of service TO them hereafter when
kind critics point out the errors into which
they have fallen; and their friends will
perceive which are the strong points of the
boy authors and will be able TO cultivate
them.
1t is better in one point of view, that
compe titive exercises in letters should
take the form of fiction rather than his
torical or philosophical essays. Few
boyish minds are ripe enough to grasp
economical or political problems. When a
class of children are required to write an
essay on the causes of the war of inde-
pendence or on the career of Napoleon
they are offered the alternative of prgging
or being crude. Their teachers themselves
are rarely competent to theorize on such
events. Whereas every intelligent youth
of 10 has composed in thought, if not on
paper, some romance of his own weaving,
in which he and his school friends per-
form doughty deeds of valor, and beauty
crowns the brave. Between the naive
story. in which a boy relates the adven-
lures of creatures of his own brain, and
sober history like Macaulay's, the gap is
wide; but the one is the stepping stone to
the other. It is safe to say that history
could not be written by one in whom the
fancy and the descriptive power had not
been awakened by the study of fiction.
The difference between history ard story
is that the one is supposed 10 be true,
while the other is admitted to be false.
But as matter of fact, very little Of what
is called history is true. Most of it is
romance foun led on fact. Take our own
history. Hardly one Of the tales which
boys and girls learn in school about John
Smith and Pocahontas, King Philip and
his war. the adventures of Jennie Me-
Crae, Putnam and his ride, Marion the
Swamp Fox, Sumter the Gamecocb, Ethan
Allen and the Great Jehovah, are sup
ported by evidence which omma1ds
belief. To the careful reader they all
appear to be grains of fact diluted in
flood of fiction. Foreign history is still
more unreliable. There is probably no
person more generally odious than Lucre-
za Borgia; but as q matter of fact there
is 70 reliable evidence against her char
acter, and much evidence that is fairly
credible in lis favor. All the historians
agree that the wife of Carlos Ii OF Spain
Al o1t,f fi,o
truth being that Eleanora was not within
thousand miles of Spain when the
Queen died. In this case the falseh0od
was the invention of a gossipiug chron-
icler. whose sources Of information no one
ever cared to investigate. Was there ever
any gunpowder plot?
Thus we are driven to the conclusion
that if history is largely fiction, education
may as well cultivate the taste for fiction.
Properly treated, fiction paints the work
ing of human instinct and human passion,
and exhibits vice and virtue in contrast,
with the advantage over history that the
writer can always point a wholesome
moral, which real history often fails to do.
In speaking of the mass of legendary lore
which foated down from the Middle Ages,
are better reading than history, because in
the former the honest man always tri-
umphs in the end. whereas In history vic
tory sometimes riots with the knave. 1t
may be added that the only use of knowl-
edge of things in the past is TO teach US to
deal with the things of the present, and in
this point OF view it is of no Importance to
know that Columbus discovered America
in the year of the fall of Granada; the
lesson would be the same if he had made
the discovery hundred years before or
after
THE CALL hopes that the boys whose
fancy has been walked over the warlike
voyage of the Oregon will continue to keep
their Imagination at work. The faculties
which they sharpen will come into play
later when they have to deal with the re-
alities of life.