chasers is
evidence that there are persons whose ideal standard of excellence is
even below these feeble efforts, and they are educated thereby.

But there are novels, we are told, which are immoral and positively
debasing. So there are immoral paintings and indecent plastic objects.
The act of photography, I am told, is debased to the lowest purposes.
Nobody would think of objecting to art because it can be and is
degraded. The librarian who should allow an immoral novel in his library
for circulation would be as culpable as the manager of a picture gallery
who should hang an indecent picture on his walls.

Young people, again, we are told, read too many novels. So they eat too
much, play too much, go too often to the lake to bathe, remain too long
in the water, and do too much of everything in which they take special
delight. The remedy is not to deprive children of these pleasures, but
that parents and guardians should regulate them. I have never met a
person of much literary culture who would not confess that at some
period in his life, usually in his youth, he had read novels
excessively. His special interest in them suddenly ceased. He found
himself with a confirmed habit of reading, an awakened imagination, a
full vocabulary, and a taste for other and higher classes of literature.
A novel was read occasionally in later life, as recreation in the midst
of professional or technical studies. My observation addressed to this
point, and extending over a library experience of thirty years, has
confirmed me in the belief that there is in the mental development of
every person who later attains to literary culture a limited period when
he craves novel-reading, and perhaps reads novels to excess; but from
which, if the desire be gratified, he passes safely out into broader
fields of study, and this craving never returns to him in its original
form.

Again, and finally, we are told that the reading of fiction should be
discouraged because it is not _true_. What department of literature is
true? Is it history? Whose history of the United States, for instance,
is the true history? Is it Bancroft's? Mr. Bancroft for forty years has
been changing the plates of his work to an extent that in pages we can
scarcely recognize the original text, and lately he has revised the
whole in the new Centennial edition. The accurate student of specialties
in American history will talk to you by the hour of mis-statements and
errors found