Love Still Ruling Motive in Life of the Modern Youth and Maiden. Interview by Marguerite Dean in The Evening World, New York, 28 June 1921. Note especially: “As a matter of fact I knew a charming fellow who did, in real life, just what my hero did in The Definite Object—took a little girl from the New York slums, educated her, loved and married her.”
Other references will be found in the footnotes to the text of this chapter. They do not include, by any means, all the interviews in newspapers.
5. Adults Please Skip[32]
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Not that age has anything to do with it. A man is as young as he feels and a woman is as young as her imagination keeps her. The idea of never growing up is a mistake. Everyone wants to grow up, but that’s no reason for not keeping youthful.
There’s something in fellows like Irvin S. Cobb and Owen Johnson and Ralph Henry Barbour which is just as good at forty as at fourteen—maybe better. And there’s something in books like Little Women that you keep coming back to....
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.