“You have shown,” she said, “some understanding of the immense influence exerted by literature upon the minds of our young people. But your discussion of ‘unprintable’ books is up in the air. You must meet peril definitely, perilously, or your readers won’t even believe that it exists. In a prairie fire, you must fight with fire; water, the flames snuff up like a perfume, and sweep on. You don’t come to grips with the facts. You asperse them with rosewater.”
“You mean,” I replied, fencing feebly, “that I did not furnish a guide to those new books which no young person should read? I had thought that would rather please you. The suppressive societies will supply the information which I omitted. I am not specially interested in the circulation of any questionable books—except my own.”
“Your innuendo is nasty and your tone is flippant,” she said. I bowed in acknowledgment of my entire agreement. “But the subject,” she continued, “is grave. It is very grave to those of us who have boys and girls of eighteen and twenty. We wish them in these formative years to be subject only to the finest influences. How can they be, when they read such books? How can any one who is interested in moulding the characters of the younger generation not desire to keep such books as you know they are reading out of their hands? When I think of my son or my daughter, with their clean sweet young minds, wading into the filth of our popular fiction, I repeat to myself those lines of Heine—you remember:—
‘Mir ist, als ob ich die Hände
Aufs Haupt dir legen sollt,
Betend dass Gott dich erhalte
So rein und schön und hold.’”
“Try it,” I suggested with studious brutality. “Call in the children. Lay your hands on their heads, and pray that God may keep them in their beauty and purity and sweetness. How will they take it? Demurely, I fancy—while they are in your presence. But when they meet in the garden afterward, they will exclaim, ‘Isn’t mother an old dear!’ And then they will laugh softly, and think of—all sorts of things. Heine’s prayer, you know, doesn’t hit off the aspirations of contemporary youth. Beauty is still ‘all right.’ But the quality of ‘sweetness,’ though it is not yet wholly unmarketable, is held in greatly diminished esteem. And as for purity—‘What is purity?’ asks the jesting younger generation, and will not stay for an answer.”
“Young people ask many foolish questions,” said Cornelia dismissively. “What troubles me is rather the changing attitude of so many parents and teachers. Have they lost that beautiful desire to shield the years of innocence? Have they quite lost their sense of responsibility?”
“No,” I conjectured, “they haven’t altogether lost their sense of responsibility. But they haven’t known quite what to do with it; and just now it seems temporarily to have slipped from their hands. They didn’t know how to use it when they had it; or they were afraid to use it, and cast the responsibility for the innocence of their children upon God; and now the children, sick of that evasion, are acting for themselves. And I am afraid that we have rather lost contact with the younger generation. It has experienced so much, it has read so much, it is so accustomed to the free discussion of all sorts of topics which we thought ominous even to mention—that I often suspect we have more to learn from it than it has to learn from us.”