y be
safely allowed to ramble in any good library, however varied its
contents. So far from needing guidance they will usually show a
much more refined taste than their elders. At this age, when the
emotions are still virginal and sensitive, the things that are
realistic, ugly, or morbid, jar on the young spirit and are cast
aside, though in adult life, with the coarsening of mental
texture which comes of years and experience, this repugnance,
doubtless by an equally sound and natural instinct, may become
much less acute.

Ellen Key in Ch. VI of her _Century of the Child_ well summarizes
the reasons against the practice of selecting for children books
that are "suitable" for them, a practice which she considers one
of the follies of modern education. The child should be free to
read all great literature, and will himself instinctively put
aside the things he is not yet ripe for. His cooler senses are
undisturbed by scenes that his elders find too exciting, while
even at a later stage it is not the nakedness of great
literature, but much more the method of the modern novel, which
is likely to stain the imagination, falsify reality and injure
taste. It is concealment which misleads and coarsens, producing a
state of mind in which even the Bible becomes a stimulus to the
senses. The writings of the great masters yield the imaginative
food which the child craves, and the erotic moment in them is too
brief to be overheating. It is the more necessary, Ellen Key
remarks, for children to be introduced to great literature, since
they often have little opportunity to occupy themselves with it
in later life. Many years earlier Ruskin, in _Sesame and Lilies_,
had eloquently urged that even young girls should be allowed to
range freely in libraries.

What has been said about literature applies equally to art. Art, as well
as literature, and in the same indirect way, can be made a valuable aid in
the task of sexual enlightenment and sexual hygiene. Modern art may,
indeed, for the most part, be ignored from this point of view, but
children cannot be too early familiarized with the representations of the
nude in ancient sculpture and in the paintings of the old masters of the
Italian school. In this way they may be immunized, as Enderlin expresses
it, against those representations of the nude which make an appeal to the