New-York tribune., 1919-11-13

Any consideration Of the changing
fashion Of children's books must be
prefaced by the wholly trite reminder
that nothing in child nature has
changed in many thousands Of years.
Children are intensely stable and con-
servative. What they want now in
books they have always wanted, and
probably always will want. But the
making Of books is something in which
they have been helpless. 1t is the
work of grown-ups. With rare and
noteworthy exceptions, children's books
have been written by one parent for an
other. They bore in mind the parents
need, never the child's. Rollo and
Elsie, for instance, are eloquent Of the
form to which the Victorian adult
would have broken the child if he could.
What has happened in children's liter
ature in recent years reflects the
change in the consciousness of the
grown-up, not that of the child.
The most noteworthy change is the
recognition that it IS not SO 'mpor-
tant to teach the child as to serve
him. We are beginning to regard as
little dishonorable the attempt to in
sidiously purvey knowledge or morals
to him in sugar-coated form. The
more highly principled writers of
children's books even recognize what
bad form it is to patronize the child,
to write down to him. Of course, there
are still huge quantities Of books made
for children by people who want to
influence him, and as dull and unimagl-
native and patronizlng books are
written to-day in the cause of edu-
cation as anything in the Victorian
era. Children's literature is an out
growth of the philosophy Of the French
Revolution-the discovery of the child
by Rousseau-and child study and chill
dren's literature have never quite torn
themselves free, from the didacticism
Of its inception.
But there are already new land
marks. A marked change has come
about in boys books due to the war
1t has stimulated intensely the in,
tercst in scientific and mechanical
things-so that the Oliver Optic tales
have languished, while a whole body
Of tales of the air service, of modern
science and invention have grown up.
One writer of boys books told me that
he could not put in enough technical
details to satisfy the curiosity Of his
readers, and there were no mechanical
facts SO complicated that boys of to-
day did not seem competent to grasp
them. Of course the good adventure
story and the historical story are st7l
the backbone Of boys reading. In
fact, a curious psychological effect of
TIE war was to send boys back to read
ing historical romances of every
period of the country's history.
Joseph Altsheler, who writes frontier
stories with an unusually accurate his
torical background, was extremely
popular. His Daniel Boone stories, a
Texas series, series of the French
and Indian wars. The Young Trailers," :"
"The Forest Runners" have had a
stories. though they are no longer the
Enthusiastically impossible things they
seemed when they were written, still
hold the imaginations of boys pretty
we'll. They somehow connect up with
the present.
The school athletic series have
fallen off somewhat in popularity, but
boys show a more vigorous interest
than ever before IN biography,
vividly and dramatically told, if the
character is some one WHO stirs their
Boys Life of Mark Twain" and
Hagedorn's Life of Roosevelt are
two books to which boys have quick
ened And, of course. lives of Lincoln,
of Napoleon, of Washington and of any
other dynamic figure of history, are al
ways the most standard reading there
is for boys.
In curious way the whole modern
womans movement has affected pres
ent-day girls books. Girls books have
always been inferior to boys. There
was always more rigorous censorship
exercised in girls books than in the
books that boys read. Through them a
girl was early taught her limitations