The daily morning journal and courier., 1907-06-08
VALUE OF ROMANCERS. ENLISTING SYMPATHY So-Called "Fakirs" Teach ing Young Generation
 Valuable Facts.

The controversy which the President of the United States has entered into with Dr. Long. the nature writer, may or may not be becoming. but with that question we have nothing to do the attempt, however, of John Bur roughs and his friends to drive such animal observers and writers as Dr. Long, Thompson Seton and Roberts out of the literary profession, to dis credit them in the opinion of parents, and to deprive them of their readers is unworthy, and. we believe, actually harmful.
 Moreover, the wrong done threatens the children as well as it does these portrayers of animal life. Dor, if the books of these men are discredited. the children cannot be persuaded to read instead the canary bird disquisitions of Mir. Burroughs or to be interested in the thoughts that arise in MT. Bur rougbs' soul when robin chirrups or a house sparrow twitters. MT, Bur- roughs is no Thoreau, and, if he were children would not read him.
 The merit, the fine merit, of pr. Long and his fellows is that they have succeeded in engaging the attention of boys who otherwise might be reading dime novels and romances of the Jesse James variety. Many father knows the debt he owes to Dr. Long and Thompson Seton for his boys sake. Thousands of boys have not only been saved by the Long school of writers from lurid literature, but have been supplied with a wide range of innocent diversion and observation, besides be- ing given new world in which to dis port their fancies and to add to their | knowledge.
 And the forest life. the animal life which has been opened by these books to the children has been innocent and | good in all the Consequences. Besides opening their eyes, the books have created in children an eunobing sym pathy with dumb animals and more keenness for natural history than for merly could be even imagined for them.
 Now, as to the alleged falsitieation | in these books of the subjects dealt with. the habits and natures of birds and beasts Confessedly and rightful- 1 ly these writers have used art in the presentation of their matter, have breathed into the dry bones of facts the spirit of romance. And, in the name of common sense, why shouldn't t they?
 Children perhaps ought to be inter- ested in scientific natural histories, but they are not and cannot be forced to be. Their minds like those of their elders, require dramatic grouping and acton-demand story. The habits of the geological lupus, the abstract wolf, do not engage them, But the adventures of Lobo, brute person, a dramatic conception, summing up the observations made on perhaps a dozen different wolves, become intensely in- fteresting and are followed with eager ness.
 The small amount of romancing in- dulged in with such happy effect by Dr. Long, Thompson Seton, and others is necessary if appeal is to be made to the mind of the child. Moreover, the particular romancing of these writers is approximately veracious and legiti- mate.
 | Grown men, many of them, have learned half the history they know from Scott. James, and Dumas, from Sienkiewicz, and even Winston Churchill All these writers have em- bridered elaborately upon the plain stuff of historic fact yet the truth is lthat Walter Scott has more greatly determined the views of generation af- ter generation of the English speaking peoples than all the ponderous histori- ans together.
 And Scott has been a good influence If 'Ivanhoe" and "Kenilworth' are not history in the narrowest sense they succeed at least in presenting vivid picture, in grouping a multitude of facts, in creating living. personalities. Freeman and many other historians, who accumulate mighty heaps of veri- fled fact, are seriously open to the doubt whether they themselves ever grasped the vivid life which they fam cy their bare facts illustrate.
 What Scott accomplished for the lcourt of Elizabeth or the lists of Ash by these animal romances have &C., complshed for the forests, the prairie. land the stream. If they exaggerate some observations, if they are inaccur- ate at times, they yet render service of which naturalists are incapable, which John Burroughs has not the faculty to perform-they have made living, moving, dramatic pictures of animals, and given children personal acquaintance with the animal life that swarms around them.
 That's more by far than Mir. Bur roughs can do. Perhaps in this unim-
 portant fact lies the secret of all the
 present bother
 DEEDS OF GILBERT FARM.