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either, since few or any of them contain what is known in literature classes as "the love element" (the serious, not the puppy kind!).

And yet, broadly considered, they are of two types: the one, the more familiar narrative on the order of Tarkington's "Penrod" and Walpole's "Jeremy"; the other, a combination of essay and short story or shorter character sketch a sort of philosophical contemplation of childhood illustrated by an incident in the life of a particular child. Kenneth Grahame's "Dream Days" and "The Golden Age" are the predecessors of the newer collection.

Let us consider, first, the array of stories about children. Strangely enough, all but one were written by men about boys. Perhaps this is not so strange, after all, for is not a boy's life a much more interesting affair than a girl's, and do not most men look back upon their childhood with chuckles and a feeling of satisfaction? Whereas many women still feel, as they did when they were little, that they have been cheated out of a lot of the best fun because they were born to wear skirts.

When I say that, so far as I know, but one woman in recent years has braved the task of writing a book about a little girl's reactions to life, I am not unmindful of the incomparable "Emmy Lou", written some twenty years ago, nor of one of the newest books, "A Nineteenth Century Childhood" by Mary MacCarthy. But the latter seems to me to have been written more to regale us with a delightful picture of "the calm and tranquil Nineties", to create a milieu, than to reveal the psychology of a child brought up in that atmosphere of purity and nobility. It is a delicious book, however, full of pictures of another day which make us wish it were not quite beyond recall.

Since "The Child's House" by Marjory MacMurchy is the only book before me which has essayed to plumb the depths of a little girl's soul, I wish the author might have brought to her effort the insight of a Grahame or a Walpole. I find her method a little strained, her point a bit flattened. Perhaps it is only because I believe so hopefully in the treasures to be uncovered in such a study as she has made of Vanessa, and because I did so want the one feminine contributor to measure up well against all the masculine ones, that I am somewhat disappointed. However, if for nothing else, I must always be grateful to her for this perfect description of what appears to be a universal characteristic of all children:

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... she had a suspicion that her mother wanted to make her different from other girls; and the one passion of Vanessa's existence was to be exactly like everyone else. If a mould had

been invented of the average little girl, she would have poured herself into it with sublime cheerfulness, her substance gurgling with satisfaction as it ran to the desired consummation."

If aching with laughter over a book is a criterion of its value as an interpreter of life, then we must give the verdict of success at once to Booth Tarkington and Owen Johnson. However, we all realize that nonsense and mischief do not make up a child's existence, and he who does not know how to make us suffer their sorrows and perplexities with them has told only half a story. Tarkington is frequently guilty, I think, of sacrificing truthfulness to a telling effect, as when for instance the dialogue smacks of an adult sophistication which you feel cannot be true to life even though you laugh over it uproariously. But no one can describe better than he the clever way of a boy in a hole excavating himself

by changing the subject; no one can better discern the deep dyed contempt of the older brother for his adoring sister who has aspirations to be apprenticed to his gang. And yet, when all his books are read, one still feels that he has skirted over the surface of childhood and forgotten, perhaps, that there are deeper depths to plumb.

"Skippy Bedelle", written about Lawrenceville in the Nineties when collars were worn standing and skirts trailing, is as true of boys today as it is of that time. Though Owen Johnson gives us much to chuckle over, he never lets us forget the great solemnity of life in the teens, the tremendous seriousness of many things which to our purblind souls may seem unimportant.

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Children in themselves are so amusing that it is no wonder they tempt the professional humorist. But just because they are, sui generis, so funny and because they are the most natural creatures in the civilized world, their chronicling requires no artifice. Children do not make a good theme for the stylist florid language and children are a contradiction in terms. If you do not agree with me, see what happened when Irvin Cobb, one of our best comedians of the pen, tried to write a book about boys. In "Goin' on Fourteen" you find, not a wise man interpreting childhood, but an author trying to maintain a reputation for humor.

Similarly, when Edgar Lee Masters starts out to write a book about boys and puts it into the vernacular of "the kids", he loses the value of the narrative because he has sacrificed its plausibility. I defy anyone to find a twelve year old boy who can report the proceedings of a court trial as Skeets Kirby does in "Mitch Miller". I know but one story purporting to be written

by a child himself that is convincing, "The Diary of Plupy Shute". That one small urchin should have been able to think of so many diabolical things to do taxes our credulity somewhat but it reads like an honest-to-goodness diary for all that! Unfortunately, when Judge Shute tried to recapture its charm in "Plupy and Old J. Albert", he proved again that it is always wiser to let well enough alone.

Joseph Anthony, in "The Gang", has succeeded most satisfactorily in catching the vernacular of the East Side kid, and his psychology too. Against a background of the Hebrew-Hibernian feuds of uppermost Park Avenue, he has etched in an amusing collection of credible Jews, any one of whom you will recognize the next time you travel on a Madison Avenue car northbound. But the most interesting thing he has done is to show how a high I-Q and the family's expectations can conspire to make a student out of a boy whose greatest joy is to read Horatio Alger and whose real ambition is to be Kid Diamond, Leader of the Twennies and dread foe of the Park Avenooers.

An outstanding book in this collection, to my mind, is "One Little Boy" by Hugh de Sélincourt, a book which all parents should read together to remind them never to regard a child's action with an adult's sophistication. It is a poignant study of a little boy's groping for the truth and of a mother, bewildered and helpless in her lack of understanding. We have here that simplicity of style with which all books dealing with children ought to be written. I have read no more lucid interpretation of the questionings about life which must arise even in the most wholesome little minds and which cry out to be answered honestly by their elders. There is much beauty here, and much wisdom.

And for a fine description of friendship between boys, I commend you to "David Blaize" and "David Blaize of King's", stories of English boarding school life filled with real young people. E. F. Benson and Hugh Walpole are to me the masters of the boy story (yes, even more so than Kipling!). I can only stand awed before their talent and exclaim: "How do these men remember what it was like to be a child?" For, surely, it is memory and insight they must depend upon; confidences cannot be wrested from the inarticulate creature which is a boy, and observation alone cannot suffice. But they do know, and they make you suffer and rejoice and discover the world anew with the children of their creation. And what is more, they succeed in depicting many wholesome little fellows who are not prigs, yet who are not everlastingly getting into scrapes like the Penrods and Varmints and the Plupy Shutes! There is a certain dignity of purpose and behavior in these English boys which makes our young Americans seem rather like hoodlums. Is it, perhaps, the influence of a discipline which is a tradition, and the effect, on the other side of the ocean, of substituting more freedom for discipline in home as well as school? Well, there's this consolation - the Britishers aren't one tenth as funny!

"We who are passing 'through the wilderness of this world' find it difficult to realize what an impenetrable wall there is around the town of Boyville", writes William Allen White in his preface to "The Court of Boyville", a collection of short stories which try, nevertheless, to penetrate this wall. "Storm it as we may with the simulation of light-heartedness, bombard it with our heavy guns, loaded with fishinghooks and golf-sticks and skates and base-balls and butterfly-nets, the walls

remain. If once the clanging gates of the town shut upon a youth, he is banished for ever. From afar he may peer over the walls at the games inside, but he may not be of them. Let him try to join them and lo, the games become a mockery and he finds that he is cavorting still outside the walls, while the good citizens inside are making sly sport of him."

If this be true, then Bertram Smith and Edmund Lester Pearson had X-ray eyes of memory or powerful telescopes of sympathy with which to penetrate this stronghold when they wrote, the former "The Days of Discovery" and "Running Wild", and the latter "The Believing Years". Like Kenneth Grahame, these two authors have an almost uncanny power of recalling the activities and the experience of childhood. And how delightfully they recall them to us who are so likely to have forgotten! They seem to know just what is the secret zest of taking risks and dares; the impulse to "talk big" and the joys of getting as near a good swear as the school law will allow. Do you know what it is like to be "the child in the middle" one who belongs neither to the bigs nor the littles? Do you remember how you vacillated in your ambition between the professions of pirate and lion tamer, and then decided to make it a plumber, thereby effecting a happy compromise? you think your children are silly when they whisper secrets about nothing-atall behind doors and chairs and fat relatives' backs? Didn't you?

Do

Do you remember how the first parlor car looked to you? The first hotel? "In the days when the world was 'so full of a number of things', before any film of indifference had come to cloud one's eyes, every new departure had about it an element of unreality", writes Bertram Smith in

"Running Wild". "Nothing ever looked the same the second time; every new door that one encountered was the threshold of an enchanted castle. Soon enough, it is true, we were caught up by the lagging atmosphere of everyday (which we had left behind) dispelling rosy mists, lopping off battlements, filling up moats, making our castle a very ordinary affair."

I wish there were space to quote at length from this book or to read to you the whole chapter about the Fourth of July in Pearson's book. You will be tempted to do the same to any contemporary within earshot, for to enjoy a good reminiscence one must have good company. These books constitute a corking reminiscence full of tidbits that will be a revelation about

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The other is a tiny book of verse which is a veritable sun of illumination into the secret soul of nursery inhabitants "When We Were Very Young" by A. A. Milne. You may buy it for your children but you will keep it for yourself. If it reforms you in no other particular, it must help you to remember that, when you reprove Johnny for dawdling at his dressing, you may be disturbing him in the midst of a momentous decision:

Shall I go off to South America?

Shall I put out in my ship at sea?
Or get in my cage and be lions and tigers?
Or-shall I be only Me?

A

ICE BELLS

By Letta Eulalia Thomas

WORLD of crystal, burning with multicolored flame

Lighted by arrows from the golden sun

That fall in shattered beauty

Against the shining, silver armor of the earth.

The soft winds touch to music,

Millions of tinkling bells of ice;

There is a whisper of the coming spring

In the light clashing of the branches,

Silver-chained and striving to be free;

Dropping long strips of silver on the mottled snow;
And from the sky, the high, blue, cloud-flecked sky,
Spring laughs down at the crystal world;

And plays upon the cloudy heights with rosy winds.

FOR RELEASE MONDAY

Autobiographical Disclosures in the Informal Manner By Robert Benchley

With Sketches by Herb Roth

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NCOURAGED by the form and subject matter of the Mark Twain autobiography, I have decided to write mine now. There are fifteen or twenty minutes each day when I have nothing to do, and I might as well be writing an autobiography as shaving. In fact, I find that I can shave and write an autobiography in the Mark Twain fashion, all in the same fifteen or twenty minutes.

My method is as follows: I sit by an open window in my farmhouse at Lexington Ave. and 49th St., smoking, reading, shaving, anything. Then, when something occurs to me that I think might possibly go into my autobiography, I shout it out the window at my brother-in-law who is puttering

around in the back yard. He takes it down on the back of an envelope or an old laundry list and, when he comes into the house at night, puts these notes away in a big box which he keeps for the purpose. As soon as this box is full of old envelopes with notes on them, it is to be locked and placed in the cornerstone of the new Merchants' National Bank Building, along with a copy of the New York "Times" of even date. When, in the course of seventy or eighty years, the Merchants' Bank Building is torn down to make room for an apartment house, the box is to be opened and the manuscript given to the world in book form. If it causes any hard feeling then, I shall be up in Maine trout fishing and won't hear about it.

Material for the first volume has already accumulated, and is herewith printed for private circulation in THE BOOKMAN. Readers are placed on their honor not to divulge the plot.

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