Rensselaer Union, Volume 10, Number 27, Rensselaer, Jasper County, 21 March 1878 — Juvenile Literature. [ARTICLE]

Juvenile Literature.

Prof. Sumner has contributed to Scribner's Monthly a study upon juvenileJiteratnre founded upon the Hash story-papers whiph have a great currency among boys. He concludes that -the hoys- who <read~~these atorietrgffi taught by them that there is irrepressible enmity between fathers and sons; that fathers are monsters of vice and hypocrisy, who keep their sons short of pocket-money for their own vile purposes, and that the oppressed sons should avenge their wrongs by robbing their bloated oppressors. Prof. Sumner makes several citations from .the stories, none of them of a savory kind, and leaves with parents the consideration of the sort of food their sons are browsing. Sure enough, it must be a serious consideration with parents what to do with their young, who are imbibing these amiable sentiments. The sentiments do not seem to come within the province of Mr. Comstock. They are only very false and ridiculous. This will not hinder the human boy from reading them with delight and implicit belief. The capacity of an activeminded boy of fourteen or fifteen for printed matter of all kinds is a thing monstrous and incredible even to himself when he has arrived at riper years. Out of the continents of stuff which he reads he gradually arrives at a principle of selection, and forms his taste. This result can be hastened by putting good books in his way, though they must not be goody books. Nobody, not even a French critic, is quicker to detect a scheme seton foot for his moral improvement, under pretense of amusing him, and to revolt at the same, than the English-reading boy. But he

is as open, or nearly so, to receive good books as bad, and before very long he learns to discriminate between good and bad literature, generally before he begins to make moral distinctions in his reading matter. His sole test of the merit of a book, like that of the purely literary critic, is that it entertains him while he is reading it, and gives him sensations. The more he reads the more fastidious he becomes on this point, and the more he refuses to be amused on easy terms. The citations which Prof. Sumner gives -are marked by great vulgarity, and a boy who had arrived gt any sense of literary values would be more revolted by their obvious literary badness than allured by their more or less concealed immorality. It seems to us, therefore, that the remedy for tho’misohief for which Prof. Sumner complains is to cultivate as highly as possible- the literary tastes of the boys to whom this flash literature ] is supposed to appeal by substituting healthy excitement for morbid, and put-1 ting well-written adventure in their way | instead -of bungled accounts of “ seeing life.” Then let them read freely, subject only to Comstock and the Const!tution of the United States.—*V, Y. w»rw: