THE BEAUTY THAT REMAINS.

Otago Witness, Issue 4028, 26 May 1931, Page 63

THE BEAUTY THAT REMAINS.

Among all the other things that we supply with infinite trouble and expense for our children we don’t always remember to include the important detail of fine books. School is suposed to instil a love of reading in children, but even the best schools too often have exactly the opposite effect. They entertain, distract, and occupy our girls and boys to the last minute —but they don’t leave much room for literature. To-day’s young people are not readers, and they are the poorer. The humblest mother can afford to co-operate here, for books are so inexpcn. give in these days, so plentiful, so accessible, that to have a girl or boy growing up without the love of books is to rob him of something which costs nothing. Sometimes it makes me very tired to hear women complaining of all the things they can’t afford to do with their children; everything costs money, private schools are expensive, clothes are ex- ( pensive, cars and shows and dancing I lessons are horribly expensive. “ And is it fair,” they demand/* that ! some mothers should be able to pay for ; all these thing for their children, and other mothers, just as devoted, should have to deny them to their sons and daughters 1 ” I Ask these mothers why they don’t I train and guide and develop their chil- [ dren’s interest in books, and they look at , you, amazed. . i Books! Well, somehow Jackie and Jean don’t seem to care so much for reading. They have so much studying to do, you know. And, of course, they love to spend their holiday hours where their friends do —and that means money. if. VIt’s an expensive hallucination, this one that mothers have, that school books and reading books are all about the same things. They’re all books—arithmetic books and cookery books and Shakespeare, and you can’t expect the youngsters to take much interest in them!

This, it seems to me, is characteristic of the deficiency of to-day’s mothers. Some of to-day’s mothers, that is! Idle, aimless, extravagant, rcsourceless themselves, they have little to give their daughters, and nothing to give their sons. The rising generation has to seek for guidance, education, and amusement away from home; it will no longer find it under the family roof-tree. ' Mother doesn’t dig and weed and water baby plants out in the garden any more i in the cool autumn morning. She sleeps ; late. ! Mother, a small girl absorbed at her i knee, doesn’t busy herself with a mending basket beside an autumn fire. She ‘ is out at a bridge party. ■ Mother doesn’t bake cakes on Saturday : mornings any more, with Jean for eager i assistant. On Saturday morning mother , is at the hairdresser’s or on the golf i course. • And, above all, mother doesn’t read > good books in the evenng, quote them, ' interest the children in them, make them a part of the family life. A few detective stories in summer, a discussed novel that is decidedly not fare for Jean,'and the magazines are mother’s literary diet. Dad’s is even more restricted. if * VNo enemy to the family peace could rob or injure the children more seriously than do this man and woman, who love them so dearly, in thus letting them grow to manhood and womanhood ignorant of the fine art of reading good books. Good books are everything. They are that balanced food for young minds that .corresponds to the irons, starches, phos-

phates we are so careful to supply to the young bodies. They are amusement, employment, education, and inspiration all in one.

Not the finest play, lecture, talkie — not even travel —is as influential as a good book to the young. The play or talkie or scenery is for everyone; the passage that impresses him in his book is for himself alone. Books are the besl private schools. But many a mother who insists on the quart of milk a day, the prunes and custard and the spinach, many a good mother who holds the creamed carrots resolutely against the stubborn little mouth—never sees this parallel at all. She never realises that one has to cultivate a liking for literary spinach, food for brain as well as body.

The chances are that mother has never looked into the books her little boys read with such avidity; the rubbishy books that she lets them have, when they ask for bread.

Three small children in a slum were discovered some years ago to have been brought up on a diet principally consisting of fried fish, a pallid raisin pudding sold in cold, heavy slices from a stall, and lemon drops. All three died when placed in sanitary surroundings and given oatmeal, milk, and fruit. The similar tragedy is going on all the time. The starved minds of girls and boys are reaching maturity without the capacity to assimilate what is fine in books. This tremendous resource, this unlimited and inexhaustible delight, is denied them for life. A child who loves books lives in a world of continual adventure. At fourteen she browses along the bookcases and finds six or seven treasures that meant nothing to her last year; at sixteen she glories in a fresh haul. “ Would I like this? ” she asks eagerly A few days in bed with a cold are just so much pure gain to her. “ Ah, do go downstairs,” she pleads, “ and bring me up four—no, bring me up five that you think I might like! ” Reading children are educated children. There is perhaps no one other thing so quickly evident in men or women as just that. “He reads. He doesn’t read.” Remember that there is a wealth—a gold mine of reading all ready for your children. Stevenson, Kipling, Tomlinson, Pyle, Walpole, Galsworthy—will prove to them that style, knowledge, love of beauty, arc as visible in the written word as on the screen. Classic reading is not dull reading. On the contrary, a very brief acquaintance with the great writers develops taste. Let your children take the thrillers, the detective stories, along the route. There are rainy-afternoon moods when only light reading will do. But, with all that, encourage them to establish on a shelf near their own beds that little line of book treasures, that nucleus of what is going to be their most valuable possession some day. Give your children love. Give them health. Give them good books. And nothing that life can do will daunt them. —Home Chat.