Part 6
S’pose we’d better begin with the Bedtime Story Man. Half the children in the United States of America are willing to call it a day when Thornton W. Burgess says the word. Mr. Burgess owes his success to the fact that he was born in a place called Sandwich in the State of Massachusetts. It made him realize that something was needed “between the dark and the daylight,” as Longfellow said. Having splendid eyesight and some excellent connections, he was able to enter the best animal circles, and early met Peter Rabbit, Lightfoot the Deer, and loads of others. The way to meet them is by all means under Mr. Burgess’s auspices, in _The Burgess Animal Book for Children_. Sammy Jay, Bob White and the feathered companions who have more or less dealings with Striped Chipmunk and Johnny Chuck are introduced in _The Burgess Bird Book for Children_. It is a point of honor with Mr. Burgess always to let his animal friends tell their own stories. Louis Agassiz Fuertes illustrates these books with pictures in full colors. For example, he shows fifty-eight birds in all their glory. _The Burgess Bird Book for Children_ brought cries of joy from Dr. W. T. Hornaday, who is America’s leading naturalist and who presides over more animals at the New York Zoo than went into the ark with Noah. But wait! Here’s a third volume to put with these two, _The Burgess Flower Book for Children_, also illustrated in color and black and white and showing 103 flowers. You should see the color pictures, for instance, of the yellow adder’s-tongue and the wild columbine! Let it be stressed: the books by Burgess are the most popular and most successful published for _little_ children. Their interest and joy is communicable to the child of four years—and they are read and re-read by boys and girls up to twelve, and sometimes by their elders.
Rose Fyleman, with _Fairies and Chimneys_, _The Fairy Flute_, and _The Fairy Green_, won some time ago chief honors as the children’s poet; and now she seems to be on the path to distinguished honors for her prose stories. _The Rainbow Cat_, whose color scheme included orange hind legs and a red, red tail, gave the greatest satisfaction, and so will _Forty Good Night Tales_, in which errant fairies explain themselves. But probably the most ambitious book is the new _Rose Fyleman’s Fairy Book_. Rose Fyleman for fairies, as the advertisers would say.
Did you see _Number One Joy Street_, ever? At any rate, you will see _Number Two Joy Street_, won’t you? Like the first book, it has a jolly cover and endpapers, and plenty of illustrations in color and otherwise. The collection of prose and verse for boys and girls in _Number Two Joy Street_ is from writers whose names will make even older people prick up their ears—Gilbert K. Chesterton, Walter de la Mare, A. A. Milne, Hilaire Belloc, Hugh Walpole, Laurence Housman and Rose Fyleman are some of them. With such an array of contributors, you will have very hard work to keep your copy of this book for your very own. It will be necessary to speak nicely but firmly to older people.
You will also need to explain that you must be left alone with Edna Geister’s new book, _What Shall We Play_. Grownups are almost certain to think that they ought to stick around and tell you how to go about the fifty best games in this book. They are wrong. Miss Geister herself says so. She says she took the very best out of her hundreds of inspirations for play and took pains to explain them so that children can play them without help or direction, and at sight. _Let’s Play_ is another one of her game books written especially for boys and girls. _It Is To Laugh_ is a little more grown-up (not a great deal).
_The Velveteen Rabbit_, by Margery Williams, has remarkable pictures. As you look at William Nicholson’s drawings (they were made on stone, which gives them their peculiar texture) you can really see the sawdust hero come to life and leap for joy! We will come in a moment to other books with glorious pictures, but first let us see if we have one or two more books for four and five and six years. Yes. Here is _Mother Hubbard’s Wonderful Cupboard_, by Maude Radford Warren and Eve Davenport, who also wrote _Tales Told by the Gander_ and _Adventures in the Old Woman’s Shoe_. The scheme in each of these books is the delightful one of continuing the Mother Goose stories. Mother Goose, with her unfinished tales, is extremely tantalizing. Probably the good woman told all she knew, but it is by no means enough. For instance, she appeared to know nothing of the circumstances in which Mother Hubbard acquired her dog. They were highly interesting. You see, she needed some one to work for and be interested in, and as no child was available she took Diccon, who was a trained, performing dog attached to a circus, but so ill that his owner thought he wouldn’t live long anyway. C. A. Federer has made the many illustrations, some of them in color.
_The Wiggly Weasel and Other Stories_, by Mabel Marlowe, is another book with many pictures that is full of the fun of clever animals, brownies, and their kin.
Perhaps you take part in plays? Then, if you are young enough, I think you will be enthusiastic over the seven gay masques in _The Magic Sea Shell and Other Plays_, by John Farrar. There is probably a place in the garden that looks as though a play were about to begin there, or a spot down the meadow or a roomy chimney-corner in the house. Home-made music and costumes, please!
For seriousness, and in moments when you want to know more about the world you live in, and how men came to live in it, anyway, the two most helpful books are likely to be Frederic Arnold Kummer’s _The First Days of Man_ and _The First Days of Knowledge_. These relate the _true_ fairy story of Creation and man’s coming-to-know. Moreover, it is told in such a way that any boy and most girls can make for themselves the simple tools that man first began by making.
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I spoke of books with pictures. If you are so lucky as to have the _Fairy Tales by Hans Andersen_, illustrated by Kay Nielsen, or those other books for which he made the illustrations, _The Twelve Dancing Princesses_ and _East of the Sun and West of the Moon_, I hope you will say a word to your older friends about this artist. They are likely to be as ecstatically happy as yourself, in the contemplation of the pictures, but not to know what it is they admire. Then you must tell them that Kay Nielsen is a Dane, the son of an actor and a famous actress, who was brought up in a home where the rich furnishings and beautiful colors came from Constantinople and the East. He went to London and saw drawings by Aubrey Beardsley in which all the lines combined elegance, suavity (or great smoothness), power (or sureness and ease), and a certain austerity (bareness, simplicity). And so, by what he had seen and by the nature received from his parents, he became a great artist who could do fiery work with an occasional effect of grim strength; but in these pictures you know he is riotously playful with his lines and his colors alike.
Edmund Dulac and Arthur Rackham are other great artists who have done much of their finest work in illustrating children’s books. You may have Hawthorne’s _A Wonder Book_, illustrated by Rackham, or _Edmund Dulac’s Fairy Book_, or _Stories From the Arabian Nights_, _The Sleeping Beauty and Other Fairy Tales_, or _Stories from Hans Andersen_, each with Dulac’s pictures. Perhaps the most wonderful of all Dulac’s books is the edition of Shakespeare’s comedy of _The Tempest_.
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You are old enough to be thinking about going away to school. You can’t get too many school stories. In particular, you are keen for a new book by Ralph Henry Barbour. Nobody writes better school sport books! _The Fighting Scrub_, Mr. Barbour’s latest, is a picture of life at a famous New England school; and the fellows and the incidents of the tale are just as actual as the setting. Clif Bingham and Tom Kemble are boys everyone can recognize among his friends, and while Loring Dean, a cripple confined to a wheel-chair, is a new character in a story of boys, his splendid head-work in planning a forward pass play that makes the winning touchdown for the school is proof that a boy need not be an athlete to count.
There are some very pretty points about _The Fighting Scrub_. It has been usual to write only about a fellow who “made the team.” The scrub team has been an unsung, unhonored aggregation on which the first team sharpened its teeth. Mr. Barbour’s hero is only a scrub; but even a scrub has been known to play in the big game and with crucial results. Here’s another thing: people have begun to recognize the fact that we are in danger of losing sight of football and other games as sport, and of thinking only of winning. Nothing could show better than the history of Clif Bingham and Tom Kemble in _The Fighting Scrub_ that the real joy of football lies in the spirit in which you play. Every fellow can see himself in Clif or Tom or Loring Dean.
Again, there are thousands of boys who will be able to see themselves in Joe Kenton, the hero of Mr. Barbour’s _Follow the Ball_. Joe is a fellow who is far from having things all his own way, but he is a sticker. He has to earn the money to get through school, and that never made it easier to make a record in athletics. But he shows up well, and _Follow the Ball_ has baseball, skating, hockey and camping in its pages as well as football.
The proved classics in the way of school stories are assuredly Owen Johnson’s. It is sixteen years since the first publication of his first book of Lawrenceville stories, but Hickey Hicks, Dink Stover, Doc Macnooder, Hungry Smeed, the Gutter Pup, the Tennessee Shad and Lovely Mead are as “generally and specifically bully” as when Booth Tarkington hailed them. Mr. Johnson’s success in _The Prodigious Hickey_, _The Varmint_ and _The Tennessee Shad_ is as great as Mr. Tarkington’s own in _Penrod_; immeasurably greater than Kipling’s effort in _Stalky & Co._ It is true to say that the Lawrenceville stories blend speed, surprise, mischief and humor with a smoothness and a perfection untouched by anything else of their sort. They avoid the utter priggishness and complacency of _Tom Brown’s School Days_, while having the same positive value of a real school, under its own name and with its own tradition, as their background. “The only real prep school story ever written,” said George Ade, crisply, after reading _The Varmint_. Why? No doubt the fact that the Lawrenceville stories are semi-autobiographical has much to do with it. For Johnson was a Lawrenceville boy in the 1890s; there is extant a picture showing him with the original (but somewhat older) Brian de Boru Finnegan, Turkey Reiter, the Old Roman, and the Prodigious Hickey. Johnson himself it was who held the skeleton while Hickey attached it to a rope hung from a ventilator. Johnson sat on the roof when Old Ironsides—afterward a New York real estate broker—slid off and got filled with gravel. It was Johnson who experienced the agony of muffing a ball and being attacked by the whole baseball team, which he has described as the Varmint’s first discouraging experience with Lawrenceville athletics.
And after a dozen years, Mr. Johnson recently returned to the Lawrenceville scene in _Skippy Bedelle_, which tells how Skippy planned to invent a foot regulator for bathtubs and of certain deplorable experiments which were to produce mosquito-proof socks. _Skippy Bedelle_ is largely the story of a sentimental progression and includes the first dress suit and Skippy’s first girl.
In the days when professional ballplayers still had mustaches and you could give people a thrill by riding down the post-office steps on a high-wheel bicycle, Irvin S. Cobb was goin’ on fourteen. And in _Goin’ on Fourteen_, his new book with pictures by Worth Brehm, the artist for Tarkington’s Penrod stories, Cobb has cut a few cross-sections out of a year in the life of an average boy. Now without in any respect being literal reminiscences, these chapters accurately and joyously reflect a scene and a period and a boy most unmistakably American. For Johnny Custer, otherwise John C. Calhoun Custer, Jr., is neither Tom Sawyer nor Penrod Schofield—though perhaps more like Tom and Huck Finn than Penrod—but he is as instantly recognizable and as entirely “boy” as either. And Johnny Custer was his own trained investigator; he did not depend upon others to tell him what would happen in untried circumstances, no, sir! The account of how he and Mr. Simons short-circuited the fowls of a chicken fancier should be read with caution; it is likely to leave you in the same condition of happy helplessness in which it left Johnny.
Albert Payson Terhune, like John Taintor Foote,[33] writes a capital dog story, and Mr. Terhune’s stories of collies, Buff and Lad and the others, are known wherever the dog has his due. In _The Heart of a Dog_, Terhune’s new book, there are one or two tales in which a collie is not the hero, but Lad and Buff and Treve and Lochinvar Bobby are familiar friends of the breed which Mr. Terhune himself raises and takes prizes with. Marguerite Kirmse has made the eight pictures in color and others in black and white. This is another book that grown-ups will borrow and neglect to return, if you don’t watch out.
Every boy and girl knows how hard it is to find a good, readable history. The difficulty was pointed out to Sidney Dark, who set to work at once to do something about it. And so far he has done magnificently, producing, in _The Book of Scotland for Young People_, _The Book of England for Young People_, and _The Book of France for Young People_, three histories more clear and interesting to boys and girls of ten to sixteen than any similar accounts. (I do not even except Charles Dickens’s _A Child’s History of England_, which is one-sided in spots.) Each of Mr. Dark’s books has sixteen illustrations from famous paintings of historic scenes.
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There is an Everyman’s Library—why not an Everychild’s Library? Well, one has been begun. It is called The Beacon Hill Bookshelf and already eight volumes are to be had. One of them, _The Boy Whaleman_, has never been published before; the others are all established favorites stamped with the approval of librarians and parents as well as of children themselves. But even the old ones are printed from new type and all the books are illustrated in color by well-known artists—five to eight color plates apiece.
The first book on The Beacon Hill Bookshelf is the book that still is first on children’s bookshelves everywhere throughout America. It is the book which, in a recent wide competition conducted by The Bookman, led all other “juveniles.” Its author was Louisa M. Alcott, and its title is _Little Women: or Meg, Jo, Beth and Amy_. Nowadays when you ask people like Hugh Walpole and Frank Swinnerton what American books they have read they have a way of recalling at once that Louisa M. Alcott was one of the first, and—without prejudice to other writers—has remained one of the most memorable. The Beacon Hill _Little Women_ has pictures by Jessie Willcox Smith, and is properly companioned in the series by its sequel, _Little Men: Life at Plumfield with Jo’s Boys_. Reginald Birch has done the pictures for _Little Men_.
Of the other six books, I must draw your attention especially to two: the one which is published for the first time and one by John Masefield. George F. Tucker’s _The Boy Whaleman_ has a place in the series because it deals with the experiences of an American lad more than sixty years ago—almost as far back as Richard Henry Dana’s _Two Years Before the Mast_. Based on fact, Mr. Tucker’s book is a thrilling account of a New Bedford boy’s three years’ voyage on a whaling ship.
Mr. Masefield’s book, _Martin Hyde, the Duke’s Messenger_, is illustrated by T. C. Dugdale, and is a spirited story of a boy who served the Duke of Monmouth in his attempt to gain the throne of James II. The tale is therefore one of the Monmouth Rebellion, as the rebellion of 1685 in England is most often called. Owing to the distinction with which Mr. Masefield writes, this book is one of the very best of adventure stories for boys’ or girls’ reading.
Besides the four books of which I have tried to tell something, the Beacon Hill Bookshelf also holds these four to date:
_What Katy Did_, by Susan Coolidge. This is the most popular of Susan Coolidge’s books, the story of a girl who would not let illness and invalidism keep her from doing things.
_The Story of Rolf and the Viking’s Bow_, by Allen French. Rolf avenges his father’s murder and earns the viking’s bow in a story with incidents drawn from the Icelandic sagas.
_Nelly’s Silver Mine_, by Helen Hunt Jackson. This book by the author of _Ramona_ is as popular today as forty years ago. It is the story of Rob and Nelly, twins in New England, who take a long journey to a new home in Colorado, where Nelly finds the mine of the title.
_A Daughter of the Rich_, by Mary E. Waller. The story is a great favorite with girls, who never fail to be interested in the account of a year spent on a farm in Vermont by a rich young city girl. Elizabeth Shippen Green Elliott has made the pictures in color.
AND HERE ARE A FEW OTHERS
_Billy Mink_, by Thornton W. Burgess, illustrated in color by Harrison Cady. The first volume in a new series of Burgess books which deals with the animals living in and around the Smiling Pool. For boys and girls of four to twelve.
_Ruffs and Pompoms_, by Beulah King, illustrated by Maurice Day. Finney Foo, the clown doll in the toy shop, goes out into the world to find a smile for the little Chinese Lady and has the strangest adventures that ever happened to a toy. For boys and girls of six to ten.
_The Valley of Color-Days_, by Helen B. Sandwell, illustrated in color by Alice Bolam Preston. The strange adventures of Jane and David, who were taken in charge by Burr, the fairy, while their parents were away for a few days. For boys and girls of six to ten.
_Round the Year in Pudding Lane_, by Sarah Addington, illustrated by Gertrude Kay. Twelve original and whimsical tales of the adventures that happened to the Mother Goose children who lived in Pudding Lane. For boys and girls of six to twelve.
_The Goblin’s Glen: A Story of Childhood’s Wonderland_, by Harold Gaze, illustrated in color by the author. Ruth and Norman and their Uncle Hal are taken by the fairies to unusual regions—the heart of Japan, Cloudland, the Arctic Circle and the Happy Isles. For boys and girls of seven to twelve.
_The Friends of Diggeldy Dan_, by Edwin P. Norwood, illustrated in color by A. Conway Peyton. The wonderful circus clown and his animal friends go to visit the king of Jungleland. For boys and girls of seven to twelve.
_Fifty New Poems for Children._ Here are verses about the things every child knows, such as dandelions, swallows, the wind, and the scissors-grinder, mixed with poems about the things of every child’s wish and fancy—cloud houses, magic wall-paper, goblins and ring-a-ring fairies. The poets include Robert Graves, Katharine Tynan, Eleanor Farjeon, Edith Sitwell, Wilfrid Blair and Madeleine Nightingale.
_Egyptian Tales of Magic_, by Eleanor Myers Jewett, illustrated in color by Maurice Day. The oldest stories in the world, full of magic and mystery, which make the kings and sailors and priests and peasants of ancient Egypt come alive again before our eyes. For boys and girls of ten to fifteen.
_Medicine Gold_, by Warren H. Miller. A story of adventure, of big game hunting and fishing and life in the open in the great north woods. Indians figure in the story and there is an exciting mystery ingeniously solved. Mr. Miller is known as a writer of boys’ fiction and of outdoor books for boys.
_Scott Burton in the Blue Ridge_, by Edward G. Cheyney. You can read this book alone or as the fourth of a series about a young forester. Assigned to government service in North Carolina, Scott plays an exciting part in the settlement of a mountaineers’ feud. The author has worked with the United States Forestry Service and is a professor in and director of the University of Minnesota College of Forestry.
_Rat’s Castle_, by Roy Bridges. The fascination of pirate gold hangs in the background of a slashing, well-told story.
_Fourteen Years a Sailor_, by John Kenlon. The Chief of the New York Fire Department tells the picturesque story of his boyhood and young manhood on deep water, including shipwreck on the desolate Crozet Islands.
_The Listening Man_, by John A. Moroso. A companion volume to the author’s _Cap Fallon: Fire Fighter_. This book shows how a retired detective of the New York City force still takes an interest in and aids in solving mysteries and in bringing criminals to justice. Cap Fallon is one of the characters. Mr. Moroso is a novelist who, as a New York newspaper reporter, covered many big police stories.
_The Boy Scout’s Own Book_, edited by Franklin K. Mathiews. This gathers into one volume those articles and stories from Volumes I-IV of _The Boy Scouts Year Book_ having to do particularly with Scouting. A book of especial interest to boys who expect to become Scouts. Joseph A. Altsheler, Henry van Dyke, Robert E. Peary, Dr. Grenfell and Warren H. Miller are a few of the authors represented in the book.
_The Boy Scouts Year Book_ (1924), edited by Franklin K. Mathiews. This year’s book features fiction, though the special article and handicraft features are well maintained. Dan Beard’s how-to-make-it articles, and stories by P. G. Wodehouse, Homer Croy, Dr. W. T. Hornaday, Joseph B. Ames, Richard Connell, Raymond L. Spears and William James are included.
_David Blaize of King’s_, by E. F. Benson. The story of David Blaize, hero of Mr. Benson’s _David Blaize_ and _David Blaize and the Blue Door_, at Cambridge.
_The Story Key to Geographic Names_, by O. D. von Engeln and Jane McKelway Urquhart. Takes geography out of the boredom of lists and figures and tells the stories back of place names.
And for Parents—
_New Roads to Childhood_ and _Roads to Childhood: Views and Reviews of Children’s Books_, both by Anne Carroll Moore, supervisor of work with children in the New York Public Library; and _A Century of Children’s Books_, by Florence V. Barry.
6. The Twentieth Century Gothic of Aldous Huxley
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In that closing chapter, classical in its quality, which rounds off his _Antic Hay_, Aldous Huxley writes:
“Shearwater sat on his stationary bicycle, pedalling unceasingly like a man in a nightmare.... From time to time his dog-faced young friend, Lancing, came and looked through the window of the experimenting chamber to see how he was getting on.... The sweat poured off him and was caught as it rained down in a water proof sheet, to trickle down its sloping folds into a large glass receptacle....
“Lancing expounded to the visitors all the secrets. The vast, unbelievable, fantastic world opened out as he spoke. There were tropics, there were cold seas busy with living beings, there were forests full of horrible trees, silence and darkness. There were ferments and infinitesimal poisons floating in the air. There were leviathans suckling their young, there were flies and worms, there were men, living in cities, thinking, knowing good and evil. And all were changing continuously, moment by moment, and each remained all the time itself by virtue of some unimaginable enchantment....