COMMENT
WE hesitate a little to write a kind word about Children's Book Week (an institution which needs no kind words because it seems in the full tide of success) just after the two devastating judicial decisions which have ruined the cause of letters in America. It has now been established that you cannot, in America, read a few lines from a book, stressing a few words which otherwise used might be indecent, and expect the book to be barred from circulation; it has been further established that the decency and dignity of a great writer's position shall be considered in determining even the probable effect of a book on its reader; specifically it has been stated that the description of manners and customs in other (worser!) ages is not a criminal offence in this country. Worst of all, the young person is reduced to the ranks, uncapitalized and almost decapitated as an authority on literature. These, we take it, are the effects of the decisions rendered in the case of Mr Seltzer (defending Casanova's Homecoming, Women in Love, and a Young Girl's Diary) and Messrs Boni and Liveright (The Satyricon) and frankly we see nothing for Mr Sumner to do except discourage the reading of serious literature entirely by preventing the young from getting the desperate habit. For as surely as children will read they will read "books too old for them."
Quite as certainly they will read books which a few years ago might have been thought too good for them. We notice this year an addition to Mr Colum's beautiful series of stories and one to Mr Fillmore's renderings of European tales; as if in response to our suspired wish of last year a Don Quixote has appeared and, we think, a Rabelais. Beautiful books and great books, therefore, our children will possess; but there should be some method of preventing them from reading after a certain age. We have been told so long about corruption that we are almost eagerly awaiting its appearance.
