Literature in the Elementary School
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Title: Literature in the Elementary School
Author: Porter Lander MacClintock
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Language: English
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LITERATURE IN THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
Agents
THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON AND EDINBURGH
THE MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA
TOKYO, OSAKA, KYOTO
KARL W. HIERSEMANN
LEIPZIG
THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY
NEW YORK
LITERATURE IN THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
BY
PORTER LANDER MACCLINTOCK, A.M.
THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS
COPYRIGHT 1907 BY THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
All Rights Reserved
Published November 1907
Second Impression October 1908
Third Impression September 1909
Fourth Impression November 1910
Fifth Impression March 1912
Sixth Impression October 1913
Seventh Impression November 1914
Composed and Printed By
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.
TO W. D. M.
TO A. C. D.
AND TO MY DEAR FRIENDS AND FELLOW-STUDENTS
LANDER
PAUL
HILDA
ELIZABETH
HERMANN
JOSEPHINE
ISABEL
BETH
ALBERT
IRENE
HENRY
RUTH
THIS LITTLE BOOK, THE OUTCOME OF OUR COMMON STUDIES,
IS MOST LOYALLY AND LOVINGLY DEDICATED
PREFACE
This book had its origin in several years of experience and experiment
in teaching classes in literature in the Laboratory School of the
University of Chicago, when that fruitful venture in education was being
conducted by Professor John Dewey; in many years of private reading with
children; and in many years of lecturing to teachers of children.
Indeed, all the material bears the unconcealable marks of its origin as
lectures, it being extremely difficult to turn into decorous chapters in
a book, stuff which first took shape as spontaneous and informal
lectures.
The central matter of the book was published as a series of articles in
the _Elementary School Teacher_ of October, November, and December,
1902, and a synopsis of the whole book was printed and widely circulated
in January, 1904. These facts may partially account for a certain
familiarity that many readers will perceive. May I venture to hope that
this sense of familiarity may also be partly accounted for by the fact
that the views expressed are consonant with those arrived at
independently by many recent students of literature and of children?
Were it not a matter of mere justice, this would be scarcely the place
to mention my debt of many kinds to Professor W. D. MacClintock of the
University of Chicago; the incalculable value of Professor Dewey's
influence and sympathy; and the unforgettable stimulation of Mrs.
Dewey's criticism. Neither is it more than justice to express my
gratitude for the patience of my publishers, which has endured both much
and long.
P. L. M.
UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO
June, 1907
TABLE OF CONTENTS
CHAPTER PAGE
I. LITERATURE IN THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL 1
II. THE SERVICES WE MAY EXPECT LITERATURE
TO RENDER IN THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN 16
III. THE KINDS OF LITERATURE AND THE ELEMENTS OF
LITERATURE SERVICEABLE IN THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL 38
IV. STORY 55
V. THE CHOICE OF STORIES 77
VI. FOLK-TALE AND FAIRY-STORY 92
VII. MYTH AS LITERATURE 113
VIII. HERO-TALES AND ROMANCES 131
IX. REALISTIC STORIES 156
X. NATURE AND ANIMAL STORIES 170
XI. SYMBOLISTIC STORIES, FABLES, AND OTHER APOLOGUES 183
XII. POETRY 193
XIII. DRAMA 212
XIV. THE PRESENTATION OF THE LITERATURE 229
XV. THE RETURN FROM THE CHILDREN 242
XVI. THE CORRELATIONS OF LITERATURE 259
XVII. LITERATURE OUT OF SCHOOL AND READING
OTHER THAN LITERATURE 277
XVIII. A COURSE IN LITERATURE FOR THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL 292
CHAPTER I
LITERATURE IN THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
According to the naively formal method of division of the old-fashioned
homiletics, the title itself offers a quite inevitable outline for the
discussion in this chapter--an outline that takes this form: (1)
literature; (2) literature in the school; (3) literature in the
elementary school; and while we may smile at the pat formality of the
little syllabus, we cannot resist its logic. Perhaps we can retain the
logic while we disguise the formality.
When one proposes to enter for any purpose or from any point of view, a
large field, especially a field that has already been much explored, he
feels that he must hasten to define his bounds, to stake out his
particular claim. But he makes a mistake if, in his haste to do this, he
fails to make clear his understanding of the location of the large field
and his conception of its nature. Any new discussion of literature must
justify itself at the beginning by declaring from what point of view it
will proceed and in what direction it will move. This seems a good
place, then, to declare that this whole discussion will concern itself
with literature as a part of the training of children. Yet this
discussion must constantly proceed in the light of certain fundamental
conclusions concerning literature in general, and in its essential
nature, and it will help us to stand upon common ground to state these
conclusions.
Literature, like every other subject that would claim a place as a
discipline in school, is called upon in our day of re-examination and
readjustment of the curriculum to make good its claim by showing that it
has in its nature something distinctive by virtue of which it performs
in the child's education some distinctive service. It is true, that no
subject of human interest is a quite detached island; pursued far
enough, its edges blur and mingle with the edges of neighboring
interests, so that there are regions where the two are
indistinguishable. But every body of material has a characteristic
center where it declares itself unmistakably. However widely it radiates
from this center, however many or however distant areas it touches and
mingles with upon its borders, in this center it is itself and nothing
else. This becomes clear when we consider some of the larger subjects of
educational discipline. There is, for example, a well-defined subject,
geography, though if one pursues it far, he comes in one direction upon
geology; in other directions, upon history or economics or sociology or
politics. Or to take another group of subjects, there is a region in
which you are dealing with anatomy, though on the edges of it you pass
imperceptibly into physiology or general biology.
For several reasons it is especially difficult to fix the bounds of
literature. It touches the margins of every other human interest; it may
reach into any of the areas about it for subject-matter; it shares with
all other subjects its means of expression; it lends to all other
subjects certain of its methods and devices, when these other subjects
must be presented effectively; its very name is applied loosely and half
figuratively to writing upon any subject, and for whatever purpose
produced. But for all this, literature, too, has its distinctive center,
where it can be differentiated from everything else.
We begin to make this differentiation when we say that literature is
art--that it is one of the fine arts. We set it apart from the other
arts by the fact that it uses language as its medium, and we set it
apart from other writing by the fact that it uses language in the way
art must use it--not for technical purposes, not as a medium for
teaching facts or doctrines, not to give information, but to produce
artistic pleasure; not to conserve use, but to exhibit aesthetic beauty.
When one's mind is clear on this point, he will not be confused by the
fact that literature handles matter from other provinces--history for
example--or by the fact that other kinds of writing borrow the devices
of literature to beautify or otherwise make effective their own
material. When Scott takes from history the figure of Richard Coeur de
Lion, it is not for the purpose of teaching historical fact, but for the
sake of putting into his picture a striking person and an effective
motive. When Macaulay employs many figures of speech, when he rounds out
his periods and balances them carefully, when he uses picturesque
concrete and particular persons and objects rather than abstractions and
generalizations, all to make clear and vivid the information he is
giving, he is still writing history and not literature, since he is
aiming first at fact and not first at beauty.
This recognition of literature as art, and the differentiation of it
from the other kinds of writing, so far from being a mere bit of
aesthetic theory remote from the teacher and his child, is the
fundamental and essential step in the teacher's procedure, because it
constitutes at once a clue to lead him in his choice of material, a
guide to direct him in the method of using it, and a standard to
indicate the nature of the result he may reasonably hope for. When the
teacher knows that he is to choose his literature as art he is freed
from the obligation of selecting such things as will contain technical
information, historical facts, desirable moral lessons, or other
utilitarian matter. This is far from saying that in choosing he will be
indifferent to the actual material details or to the moral atmosphere of
his bit of literature. The fitness or unfitness, the beauty or ugliness
of these will often be the ground of his adoption or rejection. It does
mean, however, that technical and professional details of fact and
teaching, matters which are always subsidiary and secondary in
literature as literature, cannot dictate his choice when he is choosing
from the point of view of art.
The habit of regarding literature as art clarifies immediately the
teacher's conception of his method of handling it. To teach literature
as literature is not to teach it as an adjunct to some other discipline;
it is not to teach it as reading-lessons, or spelling-lessons, nor as
grammar--though incidentally the lessons in literature will have great
value in all these directions; it is not to teach it as botany, as
history, as mythology, as politics, as naval or military tactics, or as
ethics--though again, by way of teaching it as literature, interesting
by-products in any of these subjects may accrue.
It is equally true that a clear understanding of the fact that the
results aimed at and legitimately hoped for are to be of the literary,
artistic kind, and not of the utilitarian or scientific kind, will
lighten and irradiate the teacher's problem and through him the
children's task, doing away with the sense of burden and substituting
for a vague and shifting end, a definite and delightful purpose.
To take a specific instance--it is very little to the purpose of
literature to have taught a class that Longfellow was an American poet
who lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and that, though the myth and
legend of Hiawatha properly belong to the Iroquois, Longfellow
transferred it to the Objibways. So far as the distinctively literary
result goes, these facts are neither here nor there. But the enjoyment
of the music of the verse, the loving appropriation and appreciation of
some of the beautiful images and pictures, some grasp of the large
meaning, the noble trend, of the whole poem, a general tuning-up of the
class to something like unison with its emotion, a better taste in the
whole class, and in a few members of it some improvement in their own
powers of expression--these are the kind of result at which the teacher
aims when he teaches literature as art.
The question of literature in the school has taken on a new aspect in
this our current day, and especially in American schools, owing to the
decidedly diminished place left for it in the modern curriculum. This
has come about most naturally in the vast enrichment of the course on
the side of scientific and occupational material. And naturally, too, in
the process of turning from a purely book-education, we have tended to
turn also from literature--a field which for many generations has seemed
to be inextricably shut up in books. But it is also true that, in a
large part, this turning-away from literature has been from literature
wrongfully apprehended and mistakenly taught. Whatever be the
explanation of the smaller place given to literature, no thoughtful
student of modern education, no matter how firmly he believes in the
function of literature, can regret that it should take in the curriculum
its due and proportionate place. Such a student knows best the follies
and absurdities achieved by untrained and inartistic teachers, in whose
hands literature is made the center to which they attach any and all
other matters of training; he best knows the fact that literature
leaves many of the child's powers and capacities untouched; he best
knows the danger of over-stimulating those powers and capacities that
literature does develop and strengthen, and that it is a misfortune for
a child or a class to live prevailingly in an atmosphere distinctively
literary; and he knows that a few specimens chosen aright and taught
aright produce the essentially literary result more surely and more
safely than such a programme as could once be seen in school--a
programme that seemed to reflect the teacher's desire to give the
children within the grammar school all the reading that they ought
reasonably to be expected to have up to maturity.
The choosing of literature for use _in school_ creates immediately
several important conditions. The bit chosen is elevated at once into
the dignity and isolation of a discipline, and is set apart from matter
to be read once and casually, for recreation or amusement, at home or in
hours of intellectual play, to the single child or a small group of
homogeneous children. In view of the fact that the specimen is being
chosen for use in class, it must be broad and typical, appealing, as it
were, to the universal child. It must not be merely fanciful, freakish,
satirical, or witty, because, while there is pretty sure to be some
child in every class who would appreciate its flavor, the others would
not, and could not be brought to such appreciation. It should not be too
imaginative, since it must make its appeal to a group whose experience
has been of many kinds and degrees, and it cannot count upon any uniform
body of apperception material that has paved the way into a very
delicate or very pervasive imaginative atmosphere. It must not be too
emotional, because the teacher must be aware of the hysterical children
in every class, and because it is next to impossible to tune up any
social group as large and as mixed as the class to anything like a high
emotional unison or complete artistic like-mindedness. What the class,
that composite child, needs are such things as display the broader,
simpler aspects of life and art, such as call out in them the simpler
and more direct responses.
If one is giving a story or a poem a single reading, and reading it
merely for recreation, he may pass so lightly over the details, and may
so handle its structure, that its weaknesses and faults may not appear,
or may easily be lost sight of in the emphasis laid upon the pleasant
and successful aspects. But a bit of literature selected for the class
must be worth while in every particular; it is to be lingered over,
digested, assimilated; it must be fitted to stand out in the light of
searching criticism--and the assembled class soon comes to be a very
acute and exacting critic; it is to stand the test of individual
question and community judgment. If, therefore, it is to become, as one
must hope, a part of the children's experience, a contribution to their
artistic and moral well-being; if it is to be a bit of real education,
it must be sound in structure, trustworthy in detail, satisfactory in
issue. No matter how simple it is, it should be good art, and chosen
upon the same critical principles that one would apply in choosing good
literature of any degree of complexity.
While it is a great mistake to suppose that literature for children is a
bit of garden ground to be considered apart from the general landscape,
it is true that there are certain characteristics of children within the
elementary period, and certain accepted conclusions concerning the
nature and spirit of their other work, that must be taken as guides in
the matter of their literature. It is not sufficient--though it cannot
be too often said that it is necessary--that the literature be good;
that, no matter how simple it be or how complex, it must satisfy the
demands of good criticism--however important it be that it be good, it
is equally important that it be fit.
One who reads the courses of study and lists of reading prepared for
the elementary grades, and examines the manuals for their teachers,
comes near concluding that the larger number of mistakes, and the
mistakes most disastrous, lie here--in losing sight of the principle of
fitness. For in these formal lists, and suggested in the manuals, one
may find, first and last, heaped up all that various teachers have
themselves happened to like; all that critics have praised; all whose
titles sound as if they ought to be good; all that is concerned more or
less remotely with other things the children are studying; all that a
generation of mistaken educational logic has suggested; all that a
mature reader ought to have read in a life-time; all that a blind
interpretation, both of childhood and of literature, has called
suitable--historical works, American literature, Shakespeare's comedies,
the _Idylls of the King_, sentimental and bloodthirsty juveniles--a
chaotic and accidental jumble. Out of some such haphazard impulse and
some such failure to apply the law of fitness come such mistakes as the
introduction of fifth-grade children into the mazes of a satiric social
comedy like _A Midsummer-Night's Dream_, or the placing of first-year
secondary children amid the bitter jests and baffling irony of _The
Vicar of Wakefield_. Such pedagogical misfits arise out of sheer
ignorance of the child's nature and its needs, and of the plainest
principles of literary interpretation. They persist year after year
because of the blind following of supposed authority, nowhere so blind
as in matters of literary opinion.
The preparation that should be made by the teacher who is to choose and
teach this literature is, after all, not so very formidable. We will
leave out of the discussion that mystic thing called the teacher's gift.
Undoubtedly there is such a thing; but it descendeth upon whom it
listeth, enabling him to choose by intuition and to teach by inspiration
the special bits of literature that prove to be best for the children.
But such a person is not safe, unless he supplement his gift with
knowledge; his choice is purely personal and esoteric, his principles
accidental and incommunicable.
What is the nature of the supplement such a teacher must make to his
gift? What is the training with which the teacher without the gift must
fortify himself? It is little more than one would like to have for his
personal culture, and little other than he is obliged to have for his
contact with the children in other directions. By dint of much reading
of literature and some reading in good criticism he must bring himself
to a sane view of the whole subject, realizing what literature is and
what it is not; what it can be expected to accomplish in human culture,
and what we cannot reasonably ask of it. He must know something of its
laws, that he may know how to judge it and when he has judged it aright.
This process will inevitably have refined and deepened his taste and
broadened his artistic experience in every direction. Of course, he will
not talk to his children about literature as an art, about critical
problems, structural principles, and all that; no more will he, when he
is guiding his class in evolving for themselves food and shelter by way
of beginning the study of history, talk to them about primitive culture
and social evolution. But he is an ill-equipped and untrustworthy guide
if he does not have in his own consciousness these large explaining
points of view. It is precisely so with the large fundamental principles
of literature. One gathers certainty and power for the choice and
teaching of the merest folk-tale, if he is able to see in it the working
of the great and simple laws of all art. And more specifically he must
imbue himself with the spirit of the childlike literature. He must know
and love the wonderful old folk and fairy tales, not regarding them as
matter for the nursery and the kindergarten, merely, but learning to
love them as great but simple art. He must read the hero tales and
romances till he knows them as a treasure house out of which he may draw
at his need. Many, many children's stories and poems he must read to be
able to judge them and he must read all those artists, Carroll,
Stevenson, Pater, Hauptman, who in _Alice_, _The Child's Garden_, _The
Child in the House_, _Hannele_, have done so much to interpret for us in
the artist's way the consciousness of the child.
In teaching literature, as in all that he does for the children, he will
have use for all the knowledge he can get of childhood and children; for
all that he can learn of the trend of conclusion in psychology and
educational philosophy; for all knowledge he can acquire as to the
meaning and import of all the other subjects of elementary instruction.
Only then can he choose and teach literature that is fit in both the
necessary senses--adapted to the children and harmonious in spirit with
the other interests they are pursuing. Out of such knowledge of his
material and his children there should grow a reasonably clear and
consistent vision of the result he hopes to reach and the steps he must
take to reach it. Out of all these elements should come the courage to
examine fearlessly the traditional material. Better still, out of this
combination will come that faith, enthusiasm, and respect for his
material, that confidence in its usefulness, that hopefulness as to its
results, which are desirable in a teacher of any subject, but which are
absolutely essential in the equipment of a teacher of literature;
because he must above all things radiate both light and warmth; he must
diffuse about his material and his children the breath of life and the
glow of art.
CHAPTER II
THE SERVICES WE MAY EXPECT LITERATURE TO RENDER IN THE EDUCATION OF
CHILDREN
It would seem to be no part of the present discussion to go into the
fundamental processes of determining and defining a child's needs and
tastes. In this matter we may assume and build upon the larger
conclusions of psychology and educational philosophy. And it is only the
larger and more general conclusions that we need, both because there is
no doubt concerning them, as there may be concerning those more detailed
and remote, and because when we are dealing with children in school, and
in class, we are dealing with the type-child--with a composite child, as
it were, to whom we can apply only the larger conclusions.
Everyone who helps to train a child must realize as a practical fact
that he has both needs and tastes. The emphasis wisely placed in our day
upon enlisting a child's interests and tastes has tended to mislead the
unwary and undo the unobservant, so as to produce a blindness or an
indifference as to his needs. Though, as a matter of mere justice, one
must add that the blindness and indifference have had their existence
chiefly in the indictments of those who opposed the movement when it was
new.
Few parents or teachers may now be found so benighted as to deny the
delight and profit of letting the child grow in all the joy and freedom
possible, following his instinctive interests, expressing his original
primitive impulses. But we must grant, however sadly, that the modern
child is not to be a member of a primitive society; that he is living
and to live in a complex, advanced community, to whose standards he must
be, on the whole, adjusted and adapted. Therefore, his interests and
activities must be channeled and guided; new interests must be awakened;
he must be in a certain sense put, while he is still a child, into
possession of what his race has acquired only after many generations.
In literature then, as in the other subjects, we must try to do three
things: (1) allow and meet appropriately the child's native and
instinctive interests and tastes; (2) cultivate and direct these; (3)
awaken in him new and missing interests and tastes. What is there in
literature serviceable for any or all of these purposes, and is there in
literature anything that is distinctively and uniquely useful in the
whole process? It seems only reasonable to look for the answers to
these questions among the distinctive features of literature.
The most conspicuous and distinguishing fact about literature is, of
course, its relation to the imagination. Now, when the student of
literature or any other art talks about the imagination, he must be
allowed to begin, as one may say, where the psychologist leaves off,
because, while the psychologist as a scientist likes to limit his
attention to the mind acting as imagination, the literary critic must
consider, not only this activity of the mind, but its product--a product
that presents itself as an elaborate phenomenon. This is the reason why
the natural process of the literary critic seems to the student of
psychology a beginning at the wrong end; because it is a beginning with
an objective product, and with the larger and more salient features of
that product.
Literature finds its material in nature, and in human nature and life.
It has no source of supply other than that of every other kind of human
thought. But before this material becomes literature, the imagination
has lifted it from its place in the actual world and elevated it to the
plane of art. Working upon this plane with this material, the
imagination modifies, transforms, rearranges it, making new
combinations, discovering unsuspected relations, bringing to light
hidden qualities, revealing new likenesses and unlikenesses; and at last
returns to us a product that is a new creation. Working in its larger
creative capacity, the imagination constructs out of material which may
be scattered or chaotic when gathered by observation, unified and
organic wholes.
Indeed this large whole, this completed edifice that the art-product
presents is itself an image, a vision present from the beginning of the
process of creating. As the architect sees before he begins to build,
the plan of his house as a whole and measurably complete thing, so the
literary artist has from the beginning this large image, this plan
presenting the main features of the thing he is to produce. This allows
for the fact that new details are added as he goes on, the plan modified
or transformed. But the artist's final result starts as an image.
This is not mere aesthetic prosing. We must set it down as vitally
important in the point of view of the teacher of literature, that he
must look at his material as the product of the imagination in these
four ways: first, the imagination presents the large image or plan;
second, it chooses the material; third, it decorates, purifies, or
otherwise modifies it; fourth, it organizes or recombines it. This
recombination into a new whole, no matter how simple it is, will, if it
be art at all, display in some degree the large qualities common to all
art-form--unity, variety, symmetry, proportion, harmony. It is the fact
that in literature you have a large but manageable whole got together
under laws producing these qualities and making for completeness and
beauty--it is this fact that gives to literature a large share of its
power in cultivating the child's imagination.
Now, there is a very common misapprehension of this phrase "cultivation
of the imagination," many people taking it for granted that it
invariably and exclusively means increasing the amount of a child's
fancy, or the number of his fancies. Undoubtedly this is one of the
effects of literature, and undoubtedly it is sometimes a desirable
thing. There are children born without imagination, or so early crushed
down by the commonplaceness of the adult world that they seem never to
have a fancy--to be entirely without an inner life or a spiritual
playground. But the average child has abundant imagination, and an
abundance of imaginations; while children of the artistic or emotional
temperament may often be found, especially in the period gathering about
the seventh year, living in a world of their own creating, moving in a
maze of fantastic notions and combinations of notions, unable to see
actual things, and unable to report the facts of an observation or an
experience, because of the throng of purely fanciful and invented
details that fills their consciousness. To increase the amount of such a
child's imaginative material would be a mistake; to throttle or ignore
his imaginative activities would be a mistake still more serious.
We all know the two paths, one of which is likely to be followed by such
a child. Either he drifts on, indulging his dreams, inventing unguided
fancies, following new vagaries, and later reading those loose, wild,
and sentimental things into which his own taste guides him, till all his
mental processes become untrustworthy; or he is taken in hand, given
fact-studies exclusively, becomes ashamed of his fancies, or loses
interest in them because they bear no relation to anything in the actual
world as he is learning to know it, and finally loses completely his
artistic imaginative power.
As an aid toward averting either of these disasters, the imaginative
child--who is the average child--as well as the over-fanciful one, needs
to have developed in him some ability to select among his fancies, so as
to cling to the beautiful and useful, and discard the idle ones. To do
this, he must get the ability to put them together in some plan or
system that satisfies both his taste and his judgment. They are
permanently serviceable either for work or for play only when they
attach one to another and cohere into a somewhat orderly whole. One is
tempted to think that to put the children into possession of such a
faculty or such an accomplishment is the most important step in
elementary training, because, as a matter of course, it at once radiates
from the handling of their invented or fanciful material into the
ordering of that which they gather from deliberate observation; and, as
most often happens, the artistic imagination lends a helping hand to the
scientific imagination. Undoubtedly the pleasantest way and the way that
lies most readily open in helping the children to acquire and develop
this faculty, is the way of literature. Here it is that they see most
easily and learn to know most thoroughly those complete and orderly
wholes made up from beautiful or significant details, with nothing left
fragmentary or unattached. Of course the teacher must choose his bit of
literature with a view to this effect--a lyric, a ballad, a story, that
actually does show economy of material, reasonable and effective
arrangement of details, and a satisfying issue. Not all the literature
available for children does display these qualities. Compare, for
example, Perrault's _Cinderella_ with Grimm's version of the same tale.
The former, whatever the faults of style in the English version we all
know, is so far as structure goes, a little classic, having plenty of
fancy, to be sure, but exhibiting also perfect economy of incident,
certainty and delicacy in the selection and arrangement of details,
restraint and truthfulness in the outcome; while the Grimm story shows
the chaotic, unguided, wasteful choice and arrangement of the mind which
remains the victim of its own fancies. The one is mere art-stuff, the
other is art.
Now, one would hasten to add that there are children in every class, and
it may be in every family--unimaginative, matter-of-fact, commonplace
children--who need to have given them, and to learn to enjoy, if
possible, the mere vagaries and haphazard inventions; and it would be a
pity to deprive any child of them in his hours of intellectual play. But
it is from his contact, frequent and deep, with the more artistic and
ordered bits of literature that we may expect the child to find that
special cultivation of the imagination, the power of seeing an organized
imaginative whole; and out of this experience should grow the further
power, so important in this stage of his education--that of grasping,
and constructing out of his own material, such complete and ordered
wholes.
Another way in which the imagination works in literature is of peculiar
importance, for the children. This, too, is precisely one of those
characteristics that distinguish literature from everything else. It
lies in the fact that, unlike other kinds of writing, literature
proceeds by the presentation of concrete, specific details, the actual
image, or images, combined into a definite picture, elevated from the
world of actuality to the plane of art, or created on that plane out of
details gathered from any source. In proportion as we find in literature
abstract thinking, statement of general truth or plain fact, facsimile
description or mere sentimentalizing, in that proportion do we find it
dull and inartistic. "The orange is a reddish-yellow semi-tropical
fruit," is a statement of fact plain and scientific. It would be so
inartistic as to be absurd in a line of poetry. "Among the dark boughs
the golden orange glows," lifts the object into the world of art, sets
it in a picture, even gives it to us in the round, makes it moving and
vital. "The foxglove blooms centripetally," one may say as dry fact, but
when the poet says
The fox-gloves drop from throat to top
A daily lesser bell,
while he conveys the same fact, he does it in the terms of a definite
single image, a specific individual process, that gives reality and
distinction. It is by virtue of this method of presenting its material
that literature performs another valuable and definite service for the
child. This lies in increasing and supplementing in many directions his
store of images. Of course, even the ordinary child has many images,
since he has eyes and ears always open and fingers always active. But
the sights and sounds he sees are not widely varied, and are rarely
beautiful. It is the extraordinary, the occasional child who sees in his
home many beautiful objects, who often hears good music, who sees in his
street noble buildings, who is taken to the woods, the mountains, the
sea, where he may store up many beautiful and distinguished images to
serve him later for inner joy and as material for thinking. The other
child whose experience is bounded by the streets, the shops, or the
farm, will find his store of images increased and enriched by
contributions from literature. And the fact that the images and pictures
in literature are given with concreteness, with vividness, with vitality
in them, not as abstractions nor as technical description, gives them
place in the consciousness side by side with those registered by the
memory from actual experience, and they serve the same purposes.
Indeed, the mere raising of a detail to the plane of art, the fitting of
an image or a picture into a poem or a story, gives it new distinction
and increases its value. Says Fra Lippo:
... we're made so that we love
First when we see them painted things we have passed
Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see.
So the child, when the details he knows or may know in real life are set
in literature, sees them surrounded with a halo of new beauty and value.
This halo, this well-known radiance of art, spreads itself over the
objects that he sees about him, and they, too, take on a new beauty, and
so pass into his storehouse of images with their meaning and usefulness
increased.
Whatever else may be the function of the imagination in literature it
has these two--that of seeing and creating organic wholes, and that of
presenting concrete images and pictures; these two would entitle it to a
distinctive place in the training of a child's imagination.
As an accompaniment, perhaps as a consequence, of the tendency of the
imagination to unify and harmonize its material by seeking always a
deeper basis and a larger category, and the other tendency to use in
literature the specific detail rather than the generalization, we have
the fact of figurative thinking and speaking as a characteristic of this
art. A figure involves the discovery of a striking or essential contrast
or contradiction between objects, or the recognition of a likeness or
affinity ranging in closeness from mere similarity to complete
identification. Whichever be the process, the result is the universal
and typical meanings of literature, its pleasing indirection of
statement, its enlarged outlook upon many other spheres, the vista of
suggestion and association opening in every direction, the surprised,
the shocked or delighted recognitions, that await us on every page. We
will pass by as mystical and not demonstrable the inviting theory that a
contact with these contrasts and resemblances may put into the hands of
the child a clue to the better arrangement of the fragments that compose
his world, and may help on in him that process of unification and
identification which is the paramount human task; we must leave out of
sight here, as too speculative and unpractical, the enlargement and
definition of his categories that would come to the child as it comes to
everyone, with even the most elementary recognition of the fundamental
separations and unions involved in figures; these we may leave aside,
while we take the simple and quite obvious aspect of the matter--that
the study and understanding of even the commoner figures quicken the
child's intelligence, and help to develop mental alertness and
certainty. Not even a sense of humor is so useful in his intellectual
experience as the ability to understand and use figures of speech. What
makes so pathetic or so appalling a spectacle as the person who never
catches the transferred and ironic turns of expression of which even
ordinary conversation is full? The poor belated mind stands helpless
amidst the play of allusion that flashes all about him, and not even
fear of thunder, which is the most alert sensation Emerson can attribute
to him, can put him into touch with his kind. The best place to train a
child toward quickness, the mental ease and adroitness that come of a
ready understanding and use of figure is in literature, one of whose
signal characteristics is the use of figure. The appreciation of remote
and delicate figures will, of course, come later in a student's
experience than the elementary years, after he has had more contact with
life and the world and a much widened experience in literature. But the
child who has been taught to understand and to use any of the simpler
figures has been helped a long way on the road of art and philosophy.
Literature differs from other kinds of writing in its use of language,
since it constantly aims at beautiful and striking expression. Since it
often seeks beautiful and delicate effects, it is more often closely
accurate than other kinds of writing; and since it sometimes seeks
strong, noble effects, it is sometimes more vigorous than other writing.
For the same and kindred reasons it seeks variety of expression, and so
displays a larger choice of words, including new and rare words. These
facts have an immediate and beneficial effect upon the style and
vocabulary of the children. The fact is plainly obvious to anyone who
has observed the superiority as to vocabulary and form of those children
who have had much reading or who come from a literary family, and has
seen the improvement of all the children in these matters as they add to
their experience in literature. This enrichment and refinement of
language must be reckoned among the distinctive services of literature.
Literature, in common with the other arts, but unlike other kinds of
writing, aims at beauty--cares first of all for beauty. One must
understand the term, of course, as artistic or aesthetic beauty, as it
has been interpreted for us from Plato down, as quite other than mere
prettiness or superficial attractiveness. First, in the selection of its
subject-matter it is the strikingly beautiful in nature, in character,
in action, and in experience that it seeks out for presentation. When it
uses ugly or horrible material, it is for one of these purposes: by way
of bringing into stronger relief beauty actually presented beside it; by
way of implying beauty not actually presented; by way of producing the
grotesque as a form of beauty; by way of awakening fear or terror, which
are elements in one kind of beauty; or by way of accomplishing some
exploitation or reform conceived by the artist as his duty or his
opportunity; so that the artist's use of ugly material produces in every
case some effect of beauty. Now the problem of the child's contact with
beauty as the material or subject-matter of literature is the problem of
his contact with it anywhere else. We cannot too often remind ourselves
that the material in literature is that of life and the actual world
chosen out, often freed from accidental and temporary qualities, and put
into suitable setting in art. It therefore makes an appeal not different
in kind, and in many cases not different in intensity, from the appeal
of objects perceived by the actual senses. Accepting once for all the
conditions of the imagination, we must conclude that the effect upon
the child's taste is the same as in his contact with beautiful and noble
objects under conditions of outer space. And as, when we adopt the
psychology and pedagogy of Whitman's "There was a child went forth,"
believing that all that the little traveler encounters becomes really
and truly a part of him, we are eager to have him encounter the most
beautiful sights and sounds of the physical world, so we earnestly
desire for him contact with the noble and beautiful objects and persons
of the other-world of literature.
In the second place, literature, whether it be handling beautiful
material or for any reason dealing with ugly material, is always seeking
beauty of form. There are the larger matters of art-form, such as unity,
harmony, completeness, balance--those large beneficent elements of
beauty which should be in the child's literature as in all his other
art, constituting the genial atmosphere which he breathes in without
knowing it. Of course, one does not talk to him about them, but there
they are in his story, his picture, his song, bringing their gift of
certainty and repose. Then there are the more concrete and obvious
details of formal beauty that belong distinctively to the literary art,
and are partly matters of craftsmanship--the musical effect of the
spoken word, prose or verse, the choice word or phase, the beautiful
arrangement of clause or sentence. Certain of these elements may be
deliberately brought to the child's attention, others may not. But in
either case they help to form the whole atmosphere of beauty and
distinction that surrounds a bit of good literature. And we cannot fail
to believe in the refining and stimulating influence upon the child's
taste of his contact with formal beauty in this as in the other arts.
As distinctive of literature, setting it apart from other kinds of
writing, one must note that it always has in it the warmth, the fervor,
of emotion, "Dowered with the scorn of scorn, the love of love, the hate
of hate," is the poet, and always the glow of feeling lights up his
line. "The foxglove blooms centripetally," is cold and colorless,
however interesting it may be as technical fact,
The fox-gloves drop from throat to top,
A daily lesser bell
quivers with emotional associations. "I come to bury Caesar not to
praise him"--the caesura of that line is Mark Antony's sob, and the
sympathetic throb of the elementary class.
The king sits in Dumfermline toun
Drinking the blude-red wine.
What strange thrill is this that goes down the eight-year-old's spine
at the sound of these words?
It was an ancient mariner
And he stoppeth one of three.
The mere lines submerge us at once in a new atmosphere tingling with
charmed excitement.
One would like to say with some new meaning and emphasis that it is
precisely this emotion, permeating, warming, and coloring literature,
that gives it its reality, that establishes its hold, that gives it its
relation to the world--on the one side reflecting life on the other
producing life.
But it is about this matter of emotion that the teacher's dangers and
misgivings lie. There are those who fix upon its emotional nature as
grounds for suspicion, if not of condemnation, of literature as a means
of discipline. And we must all hasten to confess that this atmosphere of
emotion is the snare of the weak teacher and the curse of weak
literature. Emotion displayed or aroused unworthily, or attached to
inadequate or ignoble stimuli, is either mere sentimentality or undue
enthusiasm. It should be reckoned nothing short of a crime to stimulate
unduly a child's emotion, and to awaken in him feelings for which his
nature is not ripe. But the policy or theory of ignoring his emotions,
of suppressing them, or of keeping them subdued in school within the
bounds of his mild pleasure in scientific observation or mathematical
achievement, is surely short-sighted. If the day has not already come,
it is fast approaching when we shall see that education means also the
calling out and exercising of the feelings--when we shall realize the
dessicating influence of American school training upon the emotional
nature of children. It should not be difficult for any teacher who has
studied the problems of childhood, and who has learned something about
judging literature, to choose such literary things as reflect and invite
the kind and degree of feeling suitable for a child, as give him
legitimate occasion for legitimate emotion, as exercise and cultivate
this side of his nature, effecting in him that purifying discharge of
emotion which Aristotle regarded as one of the helpful offices of
literature. It is a matter for rejoicing that in the atmosphere of
feeling which surrounds literature and music we may counteract and
balance in the child the hardening influence of his fact-studies and his
general school discipline.
The mere pragmatism of the teaching often turned against literature as a
discipline, that every emotional state should eventuate in activity, is
met by the contention that the admiration or contempt called out by the
record of the courageous or cowardly deed, the apprehension and
enjoyment of the musical line or the beautiful image, contain their own
issue and event. They register at once a higher moral standard or a
quickened and deepened taste.
It has already been said, and it must be said again, that it is by
virtue of this emotional grip coupled with the powerful and
ever-to-be-reckoned-with instinct for imitation, that literature takes
hold upon us, passes into our lives, affecting our judgment, our ideals,
our conduct.
We live by admiration, hope, and love,
And even as these are well and wisely placed,
In dignity of being we ascend.
says Wordsworth; and literature affords many opportunities of placing
well and wisely these living and life-giving emotions.
This brings us at once to the vision of another service rendered the
child by literature. Here he is as if he looked upon life. He sees
events worked out to the issue; he sees people expressing themselves in
deeds and words, transforming themselves and others for good or bad,
calling upon him for approval or condemnation, or for sympathy. He finds
here his heroes, his ideals, his models. He learns manners without tears
and morals without a sermon. In some sense he sees life steadily, and
sees it whole, so that he widens his social horizon to take in these
many groups of all sorts of men; mentally and morally he must enlarge to
contain the persons and events he learns to know. It is impossible to
overestimate the importance in a child's moral life, whether we
interpret this as a social or an individual matter, of the contribution
made by literature to his vision, his pattern, of society and of
character. This ability of literature to influence the child's inner
life and his conduct is so real that it has as many dangers as
advantages. There must be no mistakes in selecting for him, if he is to
ascend in dignity of being by the steps of literature. It must contain
those pictures of life and conduct that are fit and suitable for the
child to witness, and possible for him to comprehend. They must be sound
to the core, arousing and permanently engaging his genuine interest and
his best feelings.
And after all, the best thing we can do for a child in teaching him
literature is to give him a permanent and innocent joy. We all have our
moods in which we are ready to say that the first unconscious,
unpremeditated pleasure that comes of a bit of literature is the only
result worth having. And we who are professing teachers of literature
have times of abnormal sensitiveness to the scorn of the dilettante
critics who call us academical and pedagogical. And though we know that
pleasure in literature has its elements and its causes, both easily
observable, and that taste may be fostered and grown by well-known
processes, it is always a wholesome hour for us when we are thrust back
upon the fact that, though we may have disciplined his imagination, and
may have quickened his fancy; we may have awakened and strengthened his
sense of beauty; we may have exercised and cultivated his emotions; we
may have enlarged his outlook upon life, and have provided him with
social and personal ideals; it is nevertheless, better than all these
because it includes most of them, if we have opened up for our scholar
this permanent avenue of noble enjoyment.
Now, not all these results will appear in all the children. Some of them
the teacher will not see in any child of certain classes. They are not
easily ponderable and measurable--even less so than those of other
disciplines. It is easy to know when a child can multiply and divide. It
is not easy to know when he is in a hopeful stage of literary
experience. But it is only in the direction of the results we have been
discussing that the teacher of literature can always hopefully work.
CHAPTER III
THE KINDS OF LITERATURE AND THE ELEMENTS OF LITERATURE SERVICEABLE IN
THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
In modern literary study we have been placing much emphasis upon the
kinds or species of literary production. In the light of the aesthetics
of our day and the newer psychology of art we have been learning much
concerning the nature, the function, and one might say the habits of
these species. These studies have coincided in time, most opportunely
for the teacher of literature, with those that have aimed at the
establishing of the needs and tastes of the elementary and adolescent
ages. There is a real satisfaction born of the confidence one feels in
approaching his problem of choosing literature for children from these
two largest points of view--that of the species or fundamental kinds of
literature on the one hand, that of the child's actual needs and tastes
on the other. This method of approach seems to put the whole field
adequately before his view, and to give authority and certainty to his
final choice.
As a matter of fact there are certain characteristics invariable and
inevitable in each of the five species of literature--epic, drama,
lyric, fiction, essay--that tell us at once something of its fitness for
our purpose. The essay, for example in its typical form is by its
essential nature inappropriate. The literary essay, as it is actually
constituted, is in subject-matter too abstract and remote, in mood too
complex and intricate, and in style too allusive and evasive. Its
invitation is to a region for which a child has neither chart nor map.
The essay rests upon old, old presuppositions; these very
presuppositions it is that must be slowly and through many experiences
built into the mental life of the child. To be sure, there are a few
bits called essays--such as certain of Lamb's more anecdotal papers,
some of the narrative numbers of _The Spectator_, nature-studies with
marked literary qualities like some of those of John Burroughs--that the
grades can understand and enjoy. But these are not typical essays, and
they have not the true essay spirit. This spirit, which creates for
itself an atmosphere hard to describe, compounded as it is of universal
knowingness, ironic indirection, delicately intellectual emotion, and
faintly emotional intellectuality--this spirit is quite alien to
childhood.
And as it is actually constituted, the literary drama, too, represents
a life and presents an art-form so complex and so mature as to be beyond
a child's grasp. Not until this period is closing--and with many
children not even then--comes the hour of ripeness for the drama. This
question of the child and dramatic literature has so many conditions and
modifications that it must be discussed at length in another chapter.
But it is evident to every sympathetic student of childhood that this is
not the period to present the complex situations, the difficult
problems, the over-ripe experiences, that prevailingly constitute the
material of literary drama.
The literature we do give the children should correspond to the stage of
their development in matching as nearly as may be, in tone and spirit
their own activities and interests, or should be calculated to arouse in
them those interests and activities they ought legitimately to have. It
should be of that kind that gives a large free sweep of activity; that
reveals character and conduct in their simpler, open aspects; that
exhibits literary art phenomena in their plainer, more striking
varieties. These qualities are to be found in chosen specimens of the
three other species of literature--epic, fiction, lyric. Of course one
must select from each of the three those specimens that do exhibit the
qualities he seeks. He could not offer to children a developed epic in
its entirety; but there are many things of the epic kind--ballads,
hero-tales, fairy-sagas, certain detachable sections of the great epics
themselves--precisely suited to them. We would not introduce them into a
mature novel, but there are _Maerchen_ for them, tales of conquest and
adventure, stories of other children's doings. They would be lost and
bored in the presence of the elegy or the sonnet; but we may find
jingles and songs, and later on odes, fit and right for them.
In the epic kind of literature we include not only the epic, but all
those other poetic compositions whose principles of organization is
narrative--ballad, pastoral, idyll, etc. The presupposition in favor of
them as good for the children (and it is borne out by the demonstration)
lies in these two facts: they are concerned with events and
achievements, and are therefore likely to be active and objective; they
proceed by the method of story--the easiest and most helpful for the
child to follow and to grasp. It seems necessary to say again that the
members of the epic group must be scanned as narrowly with reference to
their fitness in subject-matter and suitability in form as those of any
other group. There is a fallacy in the assumption that epic is a
childlike thing, the product of the childhood of the race. This is akin
to the amusing opinion that myth--Greek myth, for example--is a
childlike accumulation of childish inventions. Nay, epic poetry, even
those epics that seem most nearly folk-poetry--the _Beowulf_, for
example--are built upon hoary civilizations, each of them having behind
it an art-tradition already old. And if there is an unwarranted
assumption in the theory that epic is childlike, there is an
unwarrantable presumption in the theory that the mature person outgrows
it--that its appeal is only to a primitive and undeveloped taste. The
value to the child of the epic is in its objectivity and activity, its
large horizons and big spaces. The taste for these things should survive
and grow stronger, as should every good taste planted and fostered in
childhood. The mature person but adds to his enjoyment of these things a
deeper enjoyment as he grows to appreciate the finer details and subtler
meanings hidden from the child. The merest primary child can love and
enjoy the heroic or amusing adventures of Odysseus; he should enjoy them
equally when he is forty; but by that time he will have added the
ability to appreciate also the wealth of artistic detail, the profound
knowledge of human nature, the large mental and religious atmosphere of
the poem. For most of this added enjoyment the child has and should
have no intellectual welcome, no space yet ready.
Therefore, in giving the great epics, the teacher must know what
aspects, details, and episodes to pass by or to pass lightly over. And
he must look carefully to the fitness of any piece of this kind he may
consider. It is not sufficient that it have a story. For example _Sohrab
and Rustum_ is a little epic which fits perfectly certain seventh or
eighth grades, because, in addition to a sufficiently good story, it has
an atmosphere of vast spaces and large movements, a wealth of broad,
noble details; and above all, it handles and evokes a simple, primitive
emotion, a sorrow which is as impersonal as the sorrows of Odysseus--a
true epic sorrow. In contrast, _Enoch Arden_, another piece of the epic
kind, is not adapted to children of any age, because it displays a
complex domestic and psychic situation which no child ought to be called
upon to realize, while the emotion called for is both in kind and amount
the sentimentality of adults. Even among the folk-ballads the same
discrimination must guide us. _Sir Patrick Spens_ is the boy's own;
while the poignant pathos of _Young Waters_, true and piercing as it is,
is not for the boy to feel.
So, as will be said many times, but always with meaning, we choose,
when we are sane, not the novel, complex in plot, involved in motive,
overcharged in emotional atmosphere, but the simple, direct-moving
romance, the hero-tale, whose subject-matter and method are so broad and
universal as to fit even the child. We can welcome, for example, the
hearty boyishness of _Quentin Durward_ or _Kidnapped_, where we could
not pilot our elementary class safe through the social and ethical
sophistications of _The Heart of Midlothian_, nor steer them
intelligently through the involved structure and difficult narrative
medium of _The Master of Ballantrae_.
So with the lyric form. If one's choice of a lyric lay between "The
splendor falls on castle walls" and "Tears, idle tears," he would
renounce the complex mature moods, the figures and allusions for which
the child's experience has given him no preparation, the pervading tone
of rich melancholy of the one, in favor of the buoyant objectivity and
more obvious emotional mood of the other.
Through all the earlier years of the elementary school with some
classes, and in some communities throughout the period, the literary
experience of the children may best be made up from specimens of these
three species. It may be, however, that certain seventh or eighth grades
(merely to name the older children) will be found mature enough to
profit by the study of certain of the more heroic literary dramas. The
same tests of objectivity and simplicity must be applied in selecting
these. We should choose, for example, the obvious, and boisterous fun of
_The Comedy of Errors_, rather than the half-hidden satire of _A
Midsummer-Night's Dream_; _Julius Caesar_, since it may fitly be taught
as a heroic tragedy; _Macbeth_, which, however violent in motive and
method, is still direct and simple enough to be within the child's
imaginative realization.
In most schools also, we may count upon finding in these oldest children
in the elementary grades some power of meditation, some interest in
abstract questions, some appreciation of humor and wit, much love of
eloquence; so that in this last year they may profitably read in class
some essays. To be sure, we will choose, not Montaigne, but Bacon; not
Pater, but John Burroughs; not _Dream Children_, but _A Dissertation on
Roast Pig_. In short, we will avoid the critical and the mystical in
essays, and give them objective out-of-door essays like _Wake-Robin_,
humorous anecdotal essays like _Old China_, eloquent oratorical essays
like Gladstone's _Kin Beyond Sea_.
Indeed, during this seventh and eighth grade period begins the child's
hour of ripeness for eloquence and oratory. And it is wise and easy to
meet and supply his interest with essays of the address variety, which
do for him the characteristic services performed by the literary essay,
at the same time that they satisfy his awakening hunger for the rolling
music of the oratorical form, answer to his dawning interest in the big
world and great questions, and help to build a bridge for him into the
public speaking and dramatic aspects of his literary work that he will
find, or ought to find, in the secondary school.
For want of a good term, I have used, in the title to this chapter, the
word "elements" to designate all the details that go to make up the
literary work of art. Into this term we cover, for mere convenience, and
to avoid cumbering ourselves with a tiresome and profitless bit of
syllabus-making, these and such matters: structure, story, plot,
incident, character, verse, image, figure, epithet, and many other
details used to produce the total effect of a bit of literature. It
becomes necessary to inquire which among these elements we shall expect
to find serviceable for our purpose. Of course, they are all valuable
even for a child in the sense that they all contribute to the general
effect upon his consciousness; but certain of them may profitably be
brought into high light and deliberately impressed upon the class;
others would best be left lying by for his adult appreciation.
Take for example, the matter of structure, by which we mean the larger
plan or composition by virtue of which the bit of art--poem or
story--has a beginning a middle and an end; by virtue of which it starts
somewhere, proceeds in an orderly manner, and reaches a destination; as,
for example, in our ever admirable _The Old Woman Who Found the
Sixpence_, where you have the sixpence found, the pig bought, the
obstacles on the road home, the acquiescence of the cat, the unraveling
of the difficulties, the safe return home--a most orderly
interdependence and sequence of incidents; or, as an example of a
different kind of structure, Stevenson's _Foreign Lands_: the child
climbing the cherry tree sees his own garden at his feet, his neighbor's
garden over the wall, follows the white road to its disappearance,
traces the river to its vanishment, follows it in his mind's eye to its
fall into the far-away sea, and then strays on and on into the
other-world of his own fancy--a perfect vanishing perspective; or
examine with this matter of structure in mind Tennyson's _Bugle-Song_,
where you will find a balanced, orderly composition--the horn, the
actual echo, the spiritual echo.
Nothing in literature has a higher educational value than this element
of orderly structure, of good "composition." It should be unobtrusively
present in practically everything the class learns, and should be
deliberately brought to notice, and should be provided for in everything
the children produce. It stands to reason that the story is the form
which will most constantly and most easily present this element of
structure, and that in their study of stories the children can best be
impressed with a sense of their bit of art as a whole made up of parts.
This aspect of story, as well as the consideration of plot, incident,
and character, will receive a more extended treatment than can be given
here, in the special chapter on story.
As to the smaller elements of literature, it is rather contrary to the
best educational thinking of our day to expect the elementary child to
show much appreciation of them. It would be a mistake to place any
emphasis in teaching him upon delicate or obscure phases of these
elements; though there will be, naturally, within the period a growing
fineness of appreciation and quickness of perception in these matters.
Among the youngest children the elements to be emphasized are chiefly
those concerned with the musical effects of speech. The teacher will do
everything possible to develop and cultivate in the child a love of
rhythm--the musical flow of language, whether of verse or prose. In the
verse he will try to awaken an enjoyment of rhyme and of meter, of any
specially musical collocation of words, of instances of tone-color or
other poetic harmony. This cultivation of the child's ear for literature
should go on through his whole school life. It should be one of the
considerations that weigh in choosing the material for his literary
training even throughout his college experience, in order that his ear
for musical speech may grow ever more subtle, more responsive to the
delicate and noble cadences of poetry and of beautiful prose. Beautiful
and musical speech is the crowning quality of literature, and the final
note of distinction in style, and no amount of originality in image or
figure, no degree of delicate fitness in word or phrase, no perfection
of skill in logical coherence and arrangement, should persuade us to
forgo it.
In a class of the younger children the teacher may hope to get attention
to an occasional image or larger picture; he may even occasionally
secure some deliberate consideration of a figure. And he may be sure,
whether their interest in these minor matters be steady and deliberate
or not, that he is at least helping them all the while to new and
useful words, and to a constantly improved sentence-form.
As they grow older, and capable of more attention and patience, they
grow rapidly more able to give conscious consideration to literary
details. The children of fifth and sixth-grade age will linger over
especially beautiful and appropriate words, will stop to realize in
detail the pictures, and will consider figures long enough to
appropriate them artistically. The normal child has an interesting
history with regard to figures of speech. Personification he accepts at
once. Indeed, it is perhaps not a figure to him, but a reality, though
he seems to get out of it a conscious artistic joy. Such personification
as "the daffodil unties her yellow bonnet" he can see and appreciate as
figure. Metaphor is his native speech, and, so long as it involves no
material beyond his power of realization, he has no trouble with it--in
appreciating it or in producing it. Simile is more baffling; it is
easier to go immediately and intuitively to the meaning of a metaphor
than to carry in the mind the two expressed sides of the simile. The
younger children are puzzled and confused by the details of a Homeric
simile. But children old enough to read _Sohrab and Rustum_, if they
have been taught how to hold their minds on an artistic detail, are
willing to stop and appreciate the two groups of details in each of
Arnold's similes. But no elementary child will make a Homeric, or indeed
any simile, except as a _tour de force_. Antithesis as a striking and
obvious figure is easy and illuminating to children, and seems to come
to them quite spontaneously in their own composing. The more subtle
figures they will neither appreciate nor use within our period. The
fable as allegory and the more extended allegories, even those complex
enough to be called symbolistic stories, the seventh and eighth grades
in the average school will read and interpret acceptably. On the whole,
we may expect to give most of the children some knowledge of the
literary nature and function of simple figures, and to awaken in them an
ability to enjoy and understand the figurative and allusive atmosphere
characteristic of literature.
This seems to be the appropriate place to speak of irony, which, while
not, of course, a figure of speech, but rather a way of thinking, does
frequently help to produce the allusive and indirect tone in literature.
It must be the art-playfulness of irony that tempts most people, when
they write for children or talk with them, to adopt some form of this
method of speaking. But this method of communing with little people is
full of dangers; while a pervading and abiding atmosphere of irony is
most unfair to them. Slow children are baffled and stupefied by it;
quick children all too soon catch and adopt the element of insincerity
underlying it. Nevertheless, passages of ironic intent, together with
occasional brief bits in the ironic manner, are educative, quickening
the children artistically and intellectually. A little girl of five
beamed with intellectual delight and artistic triumph when she said to
her mother: "_Now_ I can almost always tell when grown people are
_speaking irons_."
Concerning the whole matter of wit and humor in literature the same
thing may be said that is said of irony. Children are quickened and
stimulated intellectually by frequent calls to understand and appreciate
passages of witty and humorous writing, or by an occasional and short
piece whose whole atmosphere is of this kind. But from the point of view
of their literary training and general appreciation of art, it is better
to awaken in them and maintain a serious appreciation of greatness and
beauty. Besides, the child's out-of-school experience may, in many
communities, be relied upon to give him sufficient contact with the
ironic and humorous forms of art, literary and otherwise.
To sum up, then, may we say that it is safe to conclude that within the
elementary period we will rely for the children's literary experience
upon specimens of the three species--epic, lyric, fiction--introducing,
in the older classes, when the conditions seem to justify it, a few
simple and heroic dramas, and perhaps a few essays, choosing them from
those that exhibit the more direct kind of humor, that are objective in
character, or that serve as an introduction to oratory and eloquence?
We may feel contented if we have succeeded in cultivating an
appreciation of the musical side of speech--among the younger children
an enjoyment of the obvious things of meter and rhyme, reaching in the
older children enjoyment of the rhythm of prose, and many of the more
subtle harmonies of arrangement and tone-color. We may hopefully labor
to impress upon them a sense of structure, an appreciation of
"composition." We may refine and build upon their instinctive love of
story, until we see it taking on within this period the certainty of a
cultivated taste. We may develop in them some power to linger over
epithet and image and figure, thus beginning to build up in them a sense
of craftsmanship, and love of beautiful detail, both of which must enter
into one's appreciation of any art before his judgment is safe and his
appreciation satisfying. And the teacher who knows how may hope to do
all these things joyously and unobtrusively, so that literature may
remain what it should always be--a charming and refined variety of play.
CHAPTER IV
STORY
Story is, in general, the narrative of a succession of incidents or
events. It is a large, general form or device, useful, indeed
inevitable, in all subjects. Like language itself, story is a universal
medium, conveying the facts of history, of science, of life. Whenever we
have the steps of any experience arranged according to any of the laws
of subsequence or consequence, we have story; such as the story of the
dandelion seed, the story of the life of Mary Stuart, the story of the
invention of the steam engine, the story of a day in the city. Now, the
narration of the events in mere chronological sequence is _story_. As
soon as they are arranged in the order of cause and effect--or in any
other chosen order; as soon as the narrative leads up to an end or a
signal event; as soon as it shows that there has been for any purpose a
selection and ordered arrangement of the steps or incidents, we have _a
story_. The literary story--the story which is art--differs from other
stories in the fact that in it the principle of selection and
arrangement operates more thoroughly than in the others. A narrative
detailing for technical purposes the steps of an occurrence in nature or
in history must follow closely either the sequence of time or the order
of cause and effect; and such a report cannot choose among the steps or
incidents, but must as a matter of mere fairness, suppress nothing and
heighten nothing. It is otherwise with the literary story. Here the
incidents may be selected at the discretion of the author and arranged
in whatever order may best serve to produce his effect; insignificant
steps may be eliminated, certain steps may be elaborated and brought
into higher light. The will of the artist and his artistic effect
constitute a force which may abrogate the laws of cause and effect, or
of precedence and subsequence in time.
The interest in story is instinctive and universal; the merest string of
incidents will attract and hold attention. Interest and attention
naturally increase and deepen with the greater organization of the
material. It is this principle of organization that gives to literary
stories some of their unique and distinctive values in education. No
method of organization but that of story keeps the younger child's
attention long enough and closely enough to carry him undistracted
through a large whole. He cannot follow, as can his elders, the flow of
emotion which constitutes the thread of continuity in a lyric; he
cannot follow a train of thinking through an essay; but he can follow
the run of a narrative through even a long story. This fact enables us
to put him satisfactorily and pleasantly into the presence of a large
organized bit of material, in which he can discriminate the parts, yet
which he can grasp as a whole; which he can see as an entity beginning
somewhere, proceeding in order, reaching an end.
The temptation to amplify the statement of the influence in the child's
whole mental experience of this fostering and disciplining of his powers
of attention is difficult to resist. But we will leave it with these few
words in order to speak of the specifically artistic and literary
results of this matter of structure in the story. It is a thing hard to
insist upon as a matter of general theory, because written down in cold
black and white it seems to convey the impression that emphasis is
placed upon mere colorless organization; as if one obliged his children
to make an analytical syllabus of their pleasant tale before he regarded
it as taught. But it is no such dull thing. Beauty and economy of
structure lie upon the very surface of the best bits of literature, and
need but the most unobtrusive reinforcement from the teacher to work
their effect of pleasure and discipline. This pleasure is an artistic
product which should expand and develop with the child's reading,
until, when he is a mature student, the formal structure of poem or
story gives him the same aesthetic and moral satisfaction that he gets
from a picture well composed, a monument well balanced. It is not a
fancy or a mere pretty theory that a good story, taught as a structure,
becomes a norm, a model, a clue to the child in the preservation of his
own material, and in the arrangement of it economically and effectively.
His attention is trained, his patience is rewarded, his taste refined,
his judgment exercised and steadied, his imagination guided and
channeled by his contact with a complete, beautiful, and logical
creation, whose elements he can see and handle as he can those of the
story.
From the point of view of the larger structure of the story its elements
are the incidents. This term is employed in this chapter rather
arbitrarily to designate those smallest separable units of progress by
which a story goes forward. It does not necessarily designate a section
of the story which records a happening; the introductory and explanatory
paragraph we call an incident; a paragraph of description is an
incident; the separable sections of the story as it moves are its
incidents. A new incident begins when a certain aspect of the action
closes, when a new day opens, a new person enters, a change of scene
occurs, or even a shift from dialogue to narration; any of these and
many other things may cause or signalize a new incident. Study for
example, Grimm's _Briar-Rose_, which divides naturally and inevitably
into ten separable incidents, and which exhibits a beautiful and
artistic organization.
A teacher should master this aspect of every story he proposes to teach.
He should know it intimately as a series of incidents; for these are the
things he can manipulate as he uses the story--in case he must shorten
it or dramatize it, or otherwise modify it to suit his needs. If he
knows how to handle incidents, he may often by a little editing
eliminate superfluous matter and convert a loose, overburdened, or
merely long story into a usable bit of art.
Practically every story that has the length and dignity to justify its
use for a class, gathers its incidents into movements that correspond to
the three or five acts of a drama. There is something almost
biologically necessary in at least three parts or movements in every
organized narrative--Aristotle's obvious beginning, middle, and end. In
a story it is but natural that we should have (1) a section presenting
the people and their surroundings, the circumstances which call for or
dictate the action; (2) the central event, the essential adventure; (3)
the denouement, conclusion, reconciliation, adjustment, or what not.
These three movements are beautifully distinct in the _Briar-Rose_. It
helps to impress upon the children the structure of the story if in the
study of it these movements are brought to notice--quietly and
unobtrusively, perhaps indicated by a mere pause in the telling, or on
occasion, more deliberately by some other means. The story should not be
so handled as to make the impression that there are abrupt gaps between
the movements; rather these movements should be treated as essential
parts of a larger composition. In the stories of the dramas the children
may study, and in all such stories as they themselves dramatize, they
will inevitably see that these stages or movements are essential and
vital, dictating the organization of the material into acts.
Within the arrangement of the story as incidents and movements lies a
deeper kind of organization which exhibits many kinds and degrees of
complexity. A story may be a run of incidents that report mere activity.
So deep and eager is the hunger for story, so unfailing is the primitive
epic interest, that almost anybody's attention may be held for a long
while by the recital of the merely juxtaposed incidents that constitute
this story of activity. But there is no art in this; it is mere
story-stuff, not _a story_. Under the manipulation of the literary
artist, the tale-teller, it takes shape, shifts its incidents about,
arranges its stages and emerges a created and organic thing, telling now
of action, not of activity. It may be a long narrative, or it may be a
mere anecdote. But it has a purpose and a plan, and it reaches an end.
This straightforward, single-minded tale does not, however, give
complete and final satisfaction. In the first place, it does not
represent life, which never proceeds far by single, uninterrupted
threads; events are interlinked and complicated, modified and diverted
in many directions. In the second place, it does not satisfy the
instinct of workmanship in the artist. Even the most primitive artist,
the very folk itself, has this instinct of craftsmanship which expresses
itself in the elaboration and enrichment of its product. In story this
instinct displays itself in the more skilful arrangement of the
incidents, looking ever to the heightening and deepening of effect, in
the enrichment of the presentation by weaving together more than one
action into a more and more complex whole. Such increased elaboration,
and more conscious organization either in the arrangement of the
incidents of a single action, or in the interweaving of two or more
actions, gives the story _a plot_.
It is from the use of stories elaborate enough and developed enough to
have a plot that genuine disciplinary value may be expected. The merely
chaotic or haphazard run of incidents may amuse and interest the
children, but it yields nothing of artistic training. Two very simple
specimens (useful for so many purposes) will illustrate the point. Take
the story adumbrated in _The House That Jack Built_. This is a series of
incidents linked together in the accumulative fashion, but proceeding in
a straight line and stopping short off without issue or event. Compare
it with the equally primitive accumulative tale of _The Old Woman Who
Found the Sixpence_, from which invaluable tale one can exemplify all
the main devices of successful plot-making; the incidents are arranged
in a charming pattern, so that the action rises to a summit, descends to
an end, and produces an effect; there is the proper proportion of
involution (save the mark!), of the making of difficulties, stating the
problem, awakening our sympathies; this is followed by the due process
of resolution, unraveling the difficulties, with the final restoration
of the action to the normal level with the purpose of the story
achieved. It is this kind of story that adds to interest and amusement
that additional charm of artistic structure which distinguishes
literature from mere writing.
Now, while it is true that a symmetrical plot constitutes in part the
educational value of a story, it is quite obvious to those who know both
children and stories that intricate and elaborate plots should not be
given to folks in the elementary classes. A story in which the threads
of the plot are many or disparate, or one in which the actions must be
often, or for any long while, kept separate, confuses rather than trains
the young children. Better for them are those stories whose plots are
open and simple, where the actions of the interlinked threads coincide
as much as possible. Certain traditional plot devices are out of place
in a story chosen for these children; suspense and mystification, for
example, those devices so dear in their myriad forms to the cheap and
sensational novelist, and so indispensable to the interest of the
uncultivated reader, are not desirable in the children's class. Their
interest needs no such stimulus; their attention should not be subjected
to the strain, nor their nerves to the shock, of a sustained suspense
with its consequent surprise. Rather, their story should move openly and
directly, depending for its power upon the skilful interrelation of its
interests, yielding the pleasure of recognition and sympathy, so much
more artistic and disciplinary than the pleasure of surprise. For this
reason plots of the type of Shakespeare's great plots, of the type of
Perrault's _Cinderella_, in which the reader is in the confidence of the
author from the beginning, are to be desired for the little people. If
for any reason it seems well to tell to the younger children a long
story built upon suspense and surprise, it is generally well to let them
know very soon the issue of affairs--the ultimate disaster or
reconciliation--so that they may be free from anxiety and able to attend
to the more real matter of the story as it proceeds. This teaching
applies to the younger children; as they grow older, they become able to
get desirable intellectual experience out of a good detective story, or
one with a fairly deep mystification in it, like _Treasure Island_. The
older children, too, may profitably handle a more intricate
plot--_Ivanhoe_ with its four threads of interest and activity, _The
Merchant of Venice_ with the action shifting about from scene to scene
among its various groups.
By handling a plot as a matter of literary study we mean, examining it
from these points of view.
1. What are the difficulties set up?
2. By what devices are the difficulties constituted--conspiracy,
intrigue, disguise, quarrel blood-feud, race-hatred, etc., etc.?
3. How are the difficulties removed?
4. How many threads of interest has the plot?
5. How are they linked together or interwoven?
6. How logical and how fair is the outcome?
Other questions to be considered in studying the plot will arise in the
study of an actual story with an actual class.
Of fundamental interest in the story are the persons or characters, and
it is of prime importance that teachers--be they mothers or
masters--should know how to educate the children in this matter.
From one point of view--that of the activities of the story, in which
the younger children are mainly interested--there are two kinds of
persons: those who do things; those who receive things, or for whose
sake, or merely in whose presence, things are done. The former are the
agents--the pushing, active adventurous persons, who, good or ill, make
things happen; the latter are often mere figures, important and perhaps
beautiful, put into the story to represent institutions or ideas--like
the father of Cinderella, who is merely an institutional father; or they
are devices for getting on with the plot, like the fairy godmother; or
they are the rewards of endeavor, like the King's daughter given in
marriage in many a folk-tale. From another point of view, which regards
the actors in the story, not as persons, but as characters, they may be
divided into two types; those who are fixed, static, from the
beginning--who come into the story fully equipped, and do not change at
all within its limits; those who change or develop under the influence
of others and of their experiences.
In the study of characters more than in any other aspect of story, we
must allow for the growth of the children within the elementary period.
The youngest children are prepared to appreciate the activities of
people, and are interested in the active persons, and by transfer of
sympathy, in the persons for whose sake the deeds are done. Their
typical readiness in reading character does not fail them when the
character has been transferred to literature. They are quick to
discriminate the main lines and the distinguishing traits of
personality. They need only a few facts and signs. The merest nursery
child will be found to have settled views of the general character of
Little Boy Blue and Jack Horner, built upon the slender but significant
data of the rhymes. But the children I have known have not, up to the
sixth grade, followed with much interest or profit any but the
slightest and simplest character progression or modification. They are
satisfied that the wicked should become more and more wicked, to their
final undoing; that the stupid become stupider, to their ultimate
extinction; but any evolution of character other than this cumulative
one, any transformation more subtle than the conversion of Cinderella's
sisters, or more delicate than the degeneration of Struwelpeter, finds
them languid.
From these facts the wise teacher takes his hints and builds his plans.
He will give these younger children very little of what is known in
mature classes as _character-study_--which so easily in these same older
classes, degenerates into gossip and the merely idle or pernicious
attributing of motives. He will help the child, on the whole, to judge
from his deeds whether a man is good or bad, helpful or hindering. But
no deed is all mere activity; back of it lie motives and passions, and
beyond it lie moral and social results. There is a name for Little Boy
Blue's failure in duty, and for Jack Horner's self-approval; and these
qualities have manifestations in forms and circumstances other than
those of these two heroes. To these simple deed-inspiring motives and
passions, and to their effects on the persons themselves, the teacher
must see that the children's attention is directed; so that, as he
builds up stroke by stroke the image of his hero and model, the features
that he gets from literature at least may be supported by his judgment.
Of course, as they advance the children awaken, or should be awakened,
to some of the more delicate discriminations of motive and action--to
the conception of a man who is mixed good and bad; and to a realization
of a character changed under our eyes by some experience or by the
influence of another person; to some estimate of the farther-reaching
consequences of the deeds we witness in our story. And before they have
finally passed out of the elementary grades, we may expect them to be
able to consider the problems and contradictions that lie, for example,
in the character of Shylock; they could see his fundamental
passions--race-hatred, avarice; they could estimate his
motives--personal dislike of the merchant, revenge of his own wrongs and
loneliness; they could try to estimate the effect of his character and
conduct on the fortunes and characters of the whole group, and finally
upon his own fortunes. They might, in the same general and simple way,
follow the spiritual struggles of Brutus: his great underlying
passions--patriotism and love of friend; his immediate motives to save
his country; the effect of his deed; the telling contrasts between him
and Cassius, him and Mark Antony.
The study of character in these broader lines--the fundamental qualities
or passions, the motives that bring about the action, the obvious
results in personal and social ways of these actions--constitutes the
utmost we should try to do in this direction, leaving for a later
period, when the children's social interests are broadened, and when
they have developed from within a deeper sense of moral experience, the
more delicate and difficult matters of the evolution and interplay of
character.
Of equal importance in a story with the run of events or plot, and with
the persons or characters, is this third thing--the outcome or issue. It
is surely wise to follow, for the younger children, the hint given by
their own tastes and by the primitive story-tellers, to the extent of
giving them prevailingly such stories as have a distinct and signal
outcome, leaving the uncertainties and inconclusions of a thoroughgoing
realism for a much later period. It is best, on the whole, that the
children see the issues of their story settled, the actions passing on
to accomplishment--this for the artistic as well as for the moral effect
of the tale. It enables them to regard it as a finished whole, having
unity and completeness; and it throws light on all the events and
persons in the story, to see how things come out in the end.
The outcome or issue can be looked at from one or the other, sometimes
from both, of two points of view; as a denouement or round-up of the
particular story in hand; or as a solution of a human problem, a
universal situation. The entirely satisfying denouement of _The Old
Woman Who Found the Sixpence_, the removal of her many difficulties,
goes no farther than getting her home that night; though, of course, a
mature mind of mystic tendencies may see in it a triumph of social
co-operation. It will be enough for the third grade to feel a certain
luxurious physical well-being, arising from the final safe arrival of
the old woman and the pig that night. But in the exquisite little
novella of _Beauty and the Beast_ the outcome of the story is not only a
settlement of the affairs of the persons in whom we are interested, but
it is also a comment on life of universal application--that in a world
where things go as they should, good, gentle, and pretty persons are
rewarded with their hearts' desire, while rude, haughty, and cruel
persons are either punished or left entirely out in the award of good
things.
This sort of ending, conclusive and fortunate, the children and the
primitive story-makers always prefer; any other kind of ending must be
prepared for and defended. The younger children will not accept
tragedies; the older ones accept them with difficulty. Death and failure
are not realizable to them. It may be true, as Wordsworth undoubtedly
meant us to see in his little cottage-girl in "We Are Seven," that this
refusal to believe in death is due to some supernal truth of vision
which we, their elders, seeing only by the light of common day, have
lost.
But we all know that tragedy is sometimes the way of life, and often the
way of art, being ineradicably written in the events of many of the
world's great stories. It would be an ethical and artistic folly to
substitute a fortunate ending in these stories--quite as unpardonable in
the tragic folk tale as in _King Lear_ or in one of the Greek tragedies.
It is well to study with the children occasionally a tragic tale, to
give them that sort of artistic experience and to secure the exercise of
the tender sides of sympathy and pity. But because they are not provided
by their experience with reasons for expecting and accepting tragedy
they should be prepared for the calamity and led to justify and accept
it--not as a visitation of justice, for a true tragedy is never of that
kind--but as a beautiful pathos or grief. To this end one would choose
his tragic tale among those which have disaster inwoven from the
beginning, so that the class may not have the shock of surprise and the
feeling of resentment that come of an unexpected and avoidable
catastrophe. Take for example, the folk-tale of _Little Red
Riding-Hood_, a poor story for a class in any form, but poor as a
tragedy because there is nothing in the events to warn them of the
tragic end. To be sure there is the treacherous wolf, but he is stupid
and should by rights be defeated and outwitted; it is simply
preposterous, in the code of childhood, that he should triumph. This
lack of the inevitable and necessary element in the disaster is
doubtless what tempted the folk themselves to divert it by a denouement,
possibly reminiscent of certain mythical stories--the recovery of the
maiden from the wolf's stomach, which by its improbability and
grotesquerie tempts the skepticism of the class, however young. As an
example of the other sort, consider the old ballad long ago adopted as a
nursery tale--_The Babes in the Wood_, which carries in its very nature
and in every incident the prophecy of tragedy; so that, however grievous
the calamity may be, it does not come upon us with the additional shock
of surprise and the additional injury of unreasonableness. This kind of
story accomplishes the result of discharging the tender emotions
without complicating them too deeply with anger and revenge.
But, on the whole, the stories taught the elementary class should be
those that end conclusively and fortunately. This principle not only
matches and satisfies the child's taste, but it is in entire consonance
with the principles of his procedure in other things--it grows out of
the method of affirmation and inclusion, regarding elimination and
denial as useful in a much later period of his education.
As to the way in which the conclusion is brought to pass, there is to
the child and to the childlike mind, in literature as in life, something
eminently satisfying in poetic justice. Legal justice is cold and formal
to them, except indeed in those frequent cases in which it is a vehicle
of vengeance. Besides, it seems to produce an effect really alien to the
cause; as in the penalties of the sufferers in the _Inferno_, the
inevitableness of the effect is obscured by the many complex stages that
intervene between it and the cause. Logical justice--the natural,
uninterrupted working of the forces and motives to a conclusion, or to
their absorption into a new combination--is both too slow and not
striking enough. Besides, logical justice, working in its impersonal,
undiscriminating way, is too likely to hurt someone in the piece whom
we love, or to spare somebody we hate. In short, your elementary class
demands poetic justice--demands it strong and desires it quick. Now,
poetic justice is, on the whole, the way of art, until we come
practically to the realistic art of our own generation. It tends to
secure completeness and unity. As a matter of fact, in practically every
short and completed story of the kind we choose for children the end is
precipitated and adjusted by the operation of poetic justice.
One would be blind indeed who was unaware of the fact that precisely
here lies one of the dangers of the training in literature. It is this
that tends to give the mind that has had too large a diet of literature,
or to which literature has been unwisely administered, a distorted view
of life, obscuring its vision with sentimentality and unreality. To
guard against these effects we should see to it that the children do not
have an unduly large amount of literature; and we should select those
stories in which the operation of poetic justice is as little misleading
as possible. Poetic justice may be, and usually is, an ideal, an
artistic distribution of rewards and punishments; but it need not be a
haphazard and lawless distribution. There is an artistic flaw in a story
in which the rewards go to a person who has not legitimately awakened
our sympathies; it is not safe to say that the reward should go to him
who has deserved it, for in some of the most acceptable children's
stories sympathy sets aside deserving--_The Musicians of Bremen_, for
example. We are satisfied with the success of the musicians, because,
being innocent and persecuted, they have gained our sympathy, and are
therefore in the line for reward. But the youngest child whom I have
tested on this point disapproves the outcome of the folk-tale of "Lazy
Jack" (Joseph Jacob's _English Fairy Tales_), in which a noodle whose
stupidity has caused a king's daughter, previously dumb, to laugh, and
so to gain her voice, is rewarded by being married to the restored
princess. It is not difficult to avoid those stories in which poetic
justice is perverted justice.
And then, in the long run, when we have studied many stories and fitted
the literary stories in with history and the observation of life, we can
counteract any effect of unreality we may suspect, by placing the
rewards and punishments in their proper places and classes--translating
them, as it were, into terms of experience. The fairy-tale may say in
effect: "Be good and gentle and pretty, and you will marry a prince,"
or, "If you are mean and spiteful, you will be transformed into a toad;"
but it is not so difficult to convert these propositions into terms that
have a reality for the third grade, so that marrying a prince and being
turned into a toad take their places as typical or symbolistic rewards
and punishments.
CHAPTER V
THE CHOICE OF STORIES
As a summary and by way of applying the facts, principles, and theories
discussed in the foregoing chapter, let us try to decide what
constitutes a good story to study with a class of children under
thirteen years of age. Not to be aware of the critical pitfalls that
yawn for one who would say what constitutes a good story for any
purpose, would be entirely too naive; and they beset the path of him who
would choose a fairy-tale quite as thickly as that of the critic of
mature masterpieces. But many of these pitfalls may be avoided if one
narrows his path and walks circumspectly in it. In the present
discussion the path is narrowed by two considerations.
First, we will leave out of the discussion matters of mere personal
taste and instinctive feeling--that region in which impressionism and
amateur criticism flourish, confining it as closely as may be to those
matters that yield to judgment, and that are, as nearly as possible,
matters of fact. There is about every bit of literature a sphere in
which the individual taste is sole arbiter. One man's meat is here
another man's poison. The merest lay reader here makes up his mind: "I
like it," "I like it not;" and there is no appeal from these judgments,
and no way of modifying them short of a complete training in criticism,
or a complete remaking of the reader's experience. It is quite true that
the region in which these differences lie may be greatly reduced by a
knowledge of a few fundamental critical principles, and by a mere
suppression of prejudices and sentimentalities. But in the last analysis
there always remains a margin, a border of this every man's territory.
If the bit of literature be a story, it is likely to be matters of
character-growth, motives of conduct, interplay of personal influence,
social, philosophical, and ethical interpretation and influence, that
lie within this region and are subjects of disagreement and uncertainty.
Here lies, too, that more or less elusive, but very real, thing that
belongs to every bit of literature--what we call "charm." This may be a
matter of structure, of style, even of vocabulary, of persons, of
furniture, of architecture or other mere accessories--of geography, of
the temperament of the reader, a combination of all these or of any
number of them, or of other things too numerous or too elusive to be
named. Every good story has it, or gets it as soon as a sincere and
sympathetic reader learns how to read it. If one should ever find a
story which after repeated readings develops nothing of this most
essential and intangible quality of charm, let him not try to teach it.
Either it is not a good story, or he has no temperament for art.
But, however interesting these matters may be to readers of the gentle
guild, and to the impressionist critic, they do not carry us far upon
our practical educational choice. This must be guided by a study of
those aspects and elements of story which yield to plain observation;
which, however artistic, are yet amenable to judgment, and may therefore
be impersonally and unemotionally discussed--such as the structure of
the story, its use of incident, its movement, its plot, its outcome, the
fitness of the whole for the training and best amusement of the
children.
In the second place, we limit and define our discussion, if another
reminder of this important fact may be allowed, by the determination to
discuss, not the art of literature, not all or any literature, not all
literature for children, but such literature as it may be found
expedient and desirable to give to a class of children.
1. In order to get it into the summary, it having been sufficiently
amplified in a previous chapter, and being indeed, self-evident, we will
say again that a story, good to teach in class should be one whose
material corresponds to the needs and tastes of the children. The
experiences portrayed should be, not necessarily those that they have
had, but such as they can conceive and imaginatively appropriate, or
such as they might safely experience. And since children of this age are
living, or ought to be encouraged to live, active, achieving lives, and
are not, or ought not to be, introspective or too meditative; since they
know little or nothing of intricate social complications or psychic
experience, and we do not desire that they should, we will choose their
literature with these things in mind. We may safely say that there
should be nothing reflected in his story which the inquisitive child may
not probe to the very bottom without coming upon knowledge too mature
for him. This must be reconciled with the fact that one of the valuable
services of literature is to forestall experience and to supplement it.
The reconciliation is not difficult to make when once the teacher has
grasped the principle of fitness and really walks in the light of what
he may easily know about the nature of children.
2. The larger number of their stories should be of things happening, of
achievement, of epic, objective activity. Single children should often
have a quiet, idyllic story to read. The class should occasionally have
such a story or poem to consider and should be carefully guided to the
enjoyment of it. But for the class in the larger amount of its work we
will choose stories of action, as corresponding most nearly to the
experience and interest of the children, as harmonizing most completely
with the character of their other disciplines, as serving best to create
an atmosphere of artistic _rapport_ in any group large enough to compose
a class, while they serve equally well with other stories to effect
those other aspects of literary training which we desire.
However, all persons who choose and write stories for children should
suspect themselves in regard to this matter of activity. When we say
that these stories should contain much activity and should move forward
chiefly by the method of adventure, we do not mean that there should be
unlimited or superfluous activity. The two marks of the sensational
story are too much activity, or merely miscellaneous activity, and
activities unnecessarily and unnaturally heightened and spiced. It is
not difficult to test our stories on either of these points. A good
story has a central action to be accomplished; toward this many minor
activities co-operate; there should be enough of these to accomplish
the result, but there should be economy of invention and skill in
arrangement, so that one does not feel that there has been a waste of
material nor a bid for overstimulated interest. The danger to the
child's culture, artistic, intellectual, and moral, of the ordinary
juveniles lies just here, the heaping-up of sensations, the effort to
provide a thrill for every page, throws the story out of balance,
strains the child's nerves, and helps to produce a depraved taste.
3. To bear the strain of class use the story should present a sound and
beautiful organization. This plea for a good and trustworthy structure
should not be mistaken for a plea for a formal and artificial use of a
story. It is rather an appeal for the use of the logical and rational
side of literature--an urgency that we bring into the training of the
children the plain and fundamental matters of art-form that the story
exhibits, at the same time that we get out of it the intellectual value
it has for the class. If it be a short story, it should go to its climax
by a direct and logical path, and close when its effect is produced. If
it be a longer story, it should have that arrangement of details and
parts that corresponds to the movements of the action, and that serves
to get the material before us in the most effective and economical way.
Stories that are elaborate enough to have a genuine plot are desirable
for all classes except perhaps the very youngest. It is not necessary to
say again, except by way of an item in the summary, that the plot should
be simple and easy to see through, containing very little of the element
of suspense, and only a legitimate amount of the element of surprise.
Some more elaborate plots, with more mystification in them, are
intellectually stimulating to the oldest grades, and create an interest
of curiosity. But all teachers should learn to regard this stimulus as a
mere by-product of literary study, and this curiosity as a merely
adventitious ally.
4. Clearly connected with the matter of good and sufficient structure is
that of economy of incident. A story which displays a profusion of
details may be interesting, and under certain circumstances valuable, to
a child. But for the class that is a better story which uses just those
incidents essential to the production of its effect. Compare our old
friend, Perrault's _Cinderella_, in this matter with Grimm's. It needs
but two nights at the ball--one when the maiden remembers the
godmother's injunction, and one when she forgets it. Grimm's version
gives us three nights, and fills the story with all manner of irrelevant
details, which indicate, indeed, the prodigal wealth of the folk-mind
and the unbounded interest of the folk-audience; but they show no
superintendence of the folk-artist.
Of course, when one is judging a story from this point of view, he must
take into account the effect to be produced before he pronounces as to
the sufficiency or superfluity of the incidents. There must always be
enough to be convincing, to give to the story the atmosphere of
verisimilitude, and to justify and reward our interest in the affairs of
the persons. In Andersen's _The Ugly Duckling_ he needs to produce the
effect of lapse of time, the experience of many vicissitudes, and the
repeated refusals of the world to receive his genius; every incident
then, though it may to some extent reproduce a previous one, is valuable
as contributing to the effect.
5. As a part of the artistic economy of the story, it should have a
close unity--closer than we would demand of a story read to our children
at home, and closer than we should demand for an adult novel. The
threads of the action should be so closely related and interlinked that
they are practically all in action all the time. This is particularly
true for the younger children. It may not be too great a tax upon the
patience and attention of the older children to leave the hero in
imminent danger on his desert island, while we return for several
chapters to the heroine in the crypts of the wicked duke's castle; but
the little ones should not be asked to endure it.
The action should be all rounded up within the one design and stop at
the artistic stopping-place. To appreciate this aspect of unity, read
Grimm's _Briar-Rose_--that wonderful little masterpiece of structure--in
comparison with Perrault's _The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood_, which
trails after it the ugly and inorganic episode of the ogre
mother-in-law. Even in the cycles of stories the separate episodes
should display these qualities of unity.
6. When we choose our standard class-story, we will have in mind other
aspects of the principle of economy, or of due artistic measure. In such
a story there should not be an undue appeal to any one emotion. Too much
horror or disgust will undo the very effect one desires to produce. Such
a story as _The Dog of Flanders_, for example, affords a sort of
emotional spree of pity and pathos through which the steadier members of
a class refuse to go, and which the more emotional members do not need.
Especially should there not be any unnecessary profusion of magic, of
supernatural agencies, of daring and danger. This brings us to the
difficult point of the degree or kind of unlikelihood one may risk in
such a story. When one is reading to the single child, or to a few
children, or if one is a real dramatic genius, this unlikelihood is not
so important a matter, because it is not difficult under either of those
conditions to create an atmosphere of artistic faith in which any story
"goes." But in a big class, with the ordinary teacher it is difficult;
some inquisitive or skeptical minds will call for proof or detailed
statement, and quite destroy the _rapport_ demanded for the perfect
appreciation of the story. In a class I once knew such a skeptic, who
was indeed a mere scientific realist, brought the otherwise enraptured
class violently to earth during the reading of the passage of Odysseus
between the whirlpool and the cliff, by the sardonic suggestion that
Scylla must have had a "rubber-neck." When it can be avoided, do not
tempt your skeptic or your cynic by the kind or degree of unlikelihood
liable to excite his protest.
7. The story should be serious. This does not preclude humorous and
comic stuff. But the funny things should be sincerely funny, as
contra-distinguished from those things that are ostentatiously
childlike, elaborately accommodated to the infant mind, ironical, or
sentimental, and the teacher must so know his story, and so honor it
and his children, that he can render it to them whether it be an
improbable adventure of Odysseus, or the merest horse-play of a
folk-droll, sincerely and cordially.
8. In the earlier typical years of the elementary school, through the
sixth grade (twelve-year-old children) at least, the persons of the
story should be those who do things rather than those who become
something else. They should display the striking, permanent qualities
rather than the elusive, evolving qualities; they should act from simple
and strong motives, not from obscure and complex ones. Only in the
latest years, if at all within the period, should the class be asked to
consider more intricate types, more subjective qualities, and more mixed
motives. No mistake is likely to be made in this matter, if the stories
and plays are well chosen from the point of view of fitness in other
respects. Every teacher who is conscientious and informed, will realize
that these persons in the stories contribute their quota--and a very
large one--to that "copy," that ideal self, that broods over every
child's inner life, inviting him on, giving him courage and hope,
reproof and praise, leading him to whatever he attains of social and
personal morality. And every such teacher can help the children to build
into their ideals the permanent and valuable qualities of these persons
of their story.
9. The story should be ethically sound. On this point one would like to
make discriminating statements. One does not teach literature in order
to teach morals and he cannot ask that his fairy-tale should turn out a
sermon, or that his hero-tale deliberately inculcate this or that
virtue. Indeed, literature may be completely unmoral, and still safely
serve the purposes of amusement and of distinctively literary
training--as witness the nursery rhymes, the _Garden of Verses_, _Alice
in Wonderland_. But if it be immoral, it is also artistically unsound,
and does not yield satisfactory literary results. No teacher is in
danger of teaching a story which depicts the attractions of vice or
glorifies some roguish hero. But let him beware also of those less
obvious immoralities, where the success of a story turns upon some piece
of unjustifiable trickery or disobedience, or irreverence, or some more
serious immorality, which thus has placed upon it the weight of
approval. In the chapbook tale of _Jack and the Bean-Stalk_, to take a
chance example, the hero's successful adventures hinge upon a piece of
folly and disobedience; the kindergartenized version of _The Three
Bears_ excuses an unpardonable breach of manners. The pivotal issue,
the central spring of a story must be ethically strong, so as to bear
the closest inspection and to justify itself in the fierce light of
class discussion.
Of course, one should be cautious here, so as not to seem merely
puritanical or Pecksniffian. Subtlety is the savage virtue; along with
horse-play it is the child's substitute for both wit and humor. The
wiles and devices of Odysseus only endear him the more to his
sympathetic child-followers, as they did to Pallas Athene herself. We
cannot give to the classes the things best for them in other ways, and
exclude all tales in which wiliness or subtlety constitutes the method,
if not the motive. But we can do this: we can see to it that the trick
tends to the securing of final justice, and we can discriminate between
mere deceitful trickiness and that subtlety which is, as in the case of
Odysseus, quickness of wit or steady intellectual dominance. And we must
make many allowances, setting ourselves free in the child's moral world
as it really is to him, by constant imaginative sympathy. According to
the nursery code there is no harm in playing a trick upon a giant; by
very virtue of being a giant, with the advantage of size on his side,
and more than likely stupid besides, he is fair game for any
nimble-witted hero. The children and their heroes use the deliciously
frank and entirely satisfying argument of the fisherman who freed the
monstrous Afreet from the bottle: "This is an Afreet, and I am a man,
and Allah has given me sound reason. Therefore I will now plot his
destruction." The butcher and the hen-wife, hereditary villains of the
folk-tales, are such unpitied victims. The misfortunes of Kluge Else, of
Hans in Luck, and of the countless other noodles, are but the proper
fruit of their folly. Every child will instinctively--and indeed
ultimately--justify the legal quibble by which Portia defeats Shylock,
as but the just visitation upon his cunningly devised cruelty. Let it be
a clear case of the biter bitten, and of the injustice or stupidity of
the original biter, and one need not fear the result--certainly not the
artistic result--upon the sensible child or upon the average class--the
average class being, in the end, always a sensible child.
At the same time one hastens to say that to use a large number of such
stories would place the children in an atmosphere of trickery and petty
scheming which would be most undesirable. I have read with a group of
children where the presence of one incurably slippery member so poisoned
the air that it would have been unwise to study even one story in which
success was achieved by the use of a trick or a bit of subtlety.
Let your stories be ethically sound, even the stratagems and wiles
making for justice, and the right sort of mercy.
10. It is best, on the whole, that the stories given in class have a
satisfying and conclusive ending of the romantic sort. It should, of
course, be the ending for which the events have paved the way, and the
ending which the children, in view of the direction in which their
sympathies have been enlisted, will feel to be just. When a tragic
ending is inevitable, it should, in the case of the younger children, be
provided for and justified. All things considered, it is better,
emotionally and artistically, for these younger children to consider in
class those stories which have a fortunate ending, displaying the
working of poetic justice, leaving for the older groups the tragedies,
and the logical justice of a convinced realism.
CHAPTER VI
FOLK-TALE AND FAIRY-STORY
Whatever may be our attitude toward the culture-epoch theory of a
child's training and experience, or however much we may vary in our
conscious or unconscious application of it, no observer of children will
have failed to notice that in the three or four years lying about the
seventh, they have their characteristic hour of social and psychic
ripeness for fairy-tales. Upon this point the philosophical deductions
of the technical pedagogues coincide perfectly with the intuitive wisdom
of all the generations of mothers and nurses. The imaginative activity
of the six- or seven-year-old person coming to school out of the
environment of the average modern home is practically on the same level,
and follows the same processes, as that of the folk who produced the
golden core of folk-tales--not primitive savage fragments of legend, not
developed artistic romance, but complete little tales, simple and
sincere, molded into acceptable form by generations of use. The vision
of the world physical and social that these tales present, and their
interpretation of its activities, is that which is normal to the
seven-year-old child, and constitutes therefore the natural basis on
which his literary education begins, and affords his first effective
contact with imaginative art.
But when we have agreed that the fairy-tales constitute precisely the
right artistic material for these children; when we have fixed with
satisfactory definiteness the hour of their ripeness for them; when we
have indicated those elements in the tales that render them serviceable,
we are still at the beginning of our task. For we find ourselves in the
presence of a vast mass of material from which we must choose those
things that are so typical as to accomplish for our children the
characteristic service of folk-tales, and so beautiful as to perform the
added service of good literature. And so wide is the range of
subject-matter and form in the stories constituting the mass that it
becomes evident at a glance that the educational and artistic efficacy
of the fairy-tales depends upon the wisdom used in choosing the actual
specimens. The most useful thing to be done, then, is to determine a set
of trustworthy and practical principles of selection.
We should understand, to begin with, what we mean by fairy-tales. It is
now impossible to limit this term to those stories that deal with the
activities of an order of invented preter-human beings called fairies;
or even to those that contain preternatural or supernatural elements.
With the old fairy-tales in this narrow sense, have been incorporated
folk-tales dealing with matter which involves only natural and human
material--beast-tales and bits of comic adventure, for example. It is
possible to treat them, however, in one category, because of the fact
that in all those that are worth using for the children in class,
whether there be fairies involved or not, the imaginative process is of
the same kind, the vision of the world, its activities and its
possibilities, is on the same level of imaginative combination and
artistic interpretation; and this is the level of the children for whom
we are choosing.
The traditionary stories, the real folk-tales, have been divided into
four classes.
1. Sagas--stories told of heroes, of historical events, of physical
phenomena, of the names or location of places, and intended to be
believed. They are to be differentiated from myth by the fact that they
have never assumed any religious or symbolic signification. They are, as
a matter of fact, hero-tales in the making--of the same stuff in many
cases as the great hero-tales, but having remained in the hands of the
folk, have never received the enrichment and beauty of those hero-tales
which the poets took up. Such folk-sagas are _Whittington and His Cat_
and _Lady Godiva_. Most of these stories have preternatural or
supernatural elements, and even such as have no such elements have still
the atmosphere of wonder, and those fanciful or fantastic
interpretations characteristic of the folk-imagination.
2. _Maerchen_, or what we call "nursery tales"--those told for artistic
pleasure, pure imaginative play, the creative exercise of the
art-instinct. They may or may not exhibit the supernatural or
preternatural elements; in some of them animals are among the actors.
These constitute the large mass of popular and nursery tales;
_Cinderella_, _Beauty and the Beast_, _Puss in Boots_, _Briar-Rose_,
_The Musicians of Bremen_ will do for examples.
3. Drolls--comic or domestic tales which may or may not make use of the
impossible, the marvelous, or the preternatural. Generally they are
tales of funny misadventures, cunning horse-play, tricks, the
misfortunes or undeserved good luck of "noodles." Such, chosen from many
examples, are _Kluge Else_, _Lazy Jack_, _Mr. Vinegar_, _Hans in Luck_.
4. Cumulative tales--those in which incident is inter-linked with
incident by some more or less artificial principle of association,
constituting in some cases a mere string of associated happenings, in
others a fairly rounded out story. Such, in its simplest form, are _The
House That Jack Built_ and _Titty-mouse and Tatty-mouse_, _Henny-penny_
and the old swapping ballads.
The modern stories corresponding to these are of three kinds: those
written in imitation of the folk-sagas and _Maerchen_; those which
introduce preter-human elements as symbols; those which personify the
phenomena and forces of nature.
It is not mere convention that leads one to choose for the children in
class the traditionary or folk-tales in preference to the modern
fairy-story. Many new so-called fairy-tales are doubtless harmless and
amusing enough, and may serve a purpose in hours of mere recreation. But
they lack those abiding qualities one seeks in a story he gives as
discipline and to a class. Failing to possess the very fundamental
characteristics of the folk-tale, they fail to perform the typical and
desirable service of the folk-tale. First of all, modern fairy-tales are
neither convinced nor convincing; they are imitations, which cannot fail
to miss the soul of the original. There can be no new fairy-tales
written, because there is no longer a possibility of belief in fairies,
and no longer among adults a possibility of looking at the world as the
folk and the child look at it. The substitution of the pert fairies and
dapper elves of literature and the theater for the serious preterhuman
agents of the folk-tale creates at once in the new stories an atmosphere
of dilettantism, of insincerity. Titania and Oberon, flower-fairies,
dew-fairies, gauzy wings and spangled skirts, were not in the mind of
the people who told these tales of the sometimes grim and _schauderhaft_
and always serious beings--fairies, elves, goblins, or what not. Wicked
little brown men disappearing into a green hillock with the human child,
in exchange for whom they have left in the cottage cradle a brown imp of
their own; the godmother with the fairy-gift who brings justice and joy
to the wronged maiden; the slighted wise woman foretelling death and
doom over the cradle of the little princess; the kind and gentle Beast
whom love disenchants and restores to his own noble form--all these were
to those who made them serious art, as they should be to the child. If
one could make the old distinction without dreading to be misunderstood
in these days of opposition to "faculty" criticism, he would say that
the folk-tales exhibit the working of the deep human _imagination_,
using all the powers of the mind, and reorganizing the world; the modern
fairy-tale exhibits the exercise of the _fancy_, disporting itself in a
very small corner of the world of art.
It is, first of all, as one cannot say too often, the imaginative level
of the folk-tales that fits them for the child's use. They are the
creative reconstruction of the world by those who were rich in images
and sense-material, unhampered in the use of it by any system of logic
or body of organized knowledge, simple, sincere and full of faith--as
our own well-born children are at six-seven-eight. It is this
simplicity, sincerity, and earnestness that gives them their
childlikeness--all qualities that one fails to find in the modern
fairy-tale written by a grown person for children. Nothing is so alien
to the consciousness of the child as the consciousness of the grown-up
educated man. It is by nothing short of a miracle that he can keep his
own sophistications out of what he writes for children. His fairy-tale,
failing in simplicity, will betake itself to babbling inanity; failing
in earnestness, it gives itself over to sentimentality; failing in
belief, it is likely to be filled with cynicism and cheap satire under
the guise of playfulness. These faults may be found, all too plentiful,
even in the best work of Hans Christian Andersen, while they poison
practically everything done for children by Kingsley and Hawthorne. The
immense advantage of the traditionary tales is that they were not made
for children. The _Maerchen_ of our day was the novel or romance of the
people among whom it had its earlier history. It therefore escapes
entirely the "little dears" appeal and method. The obviously amateur
heat-fairies, snow-fairies, flower-fairies, and all the others which
figure in the merely fanciful and always misleading myth-making of the
belated kindergarten and the holiday book of commerce, serve chiefly to
bewilder the child's judgment, to confuse his imagination, and to
cheapen the supernatural in his art, which should be sparing and
serious, as it should be in all art. Besides, the natural phenomena with
which these fancies are connected are much more beautiful, more
appealing to the imagination, and ultimately more serviceable to art, if
they are rightly presented as plain nature.
There are certain modern symbolistic stories containing elements of the
fantastic and supernatural kind that are good and beautiful enough to
make a genuinely desirable contribution to the child's experience. It is
advisable to reserve these, however, until the children are old enough
and experienced enough to understand them as symbols. Such stories are
Stockton's _The Bee-Man of Orn_, slightly edited; _The Water Babies_,
always expurgated of Kingsley's ponderous fooling; _The Snow Image_,
_The Ugly Duckling_.
It is not only that the world of imaginary beings and marvelous forces
in the folk-tale enchant the child and further his artistic development
in the most natural way; the human world of these tales is a delightful
and wholesome one for him to know. It is a naive and simple world, where
he may come close to the actual processes of life and see them as
picturesque and interesting. Where else in our modern world can a child
encounter the shoemaker, the tailor, the miller, the hen-wife, the
weaver, the spinner, in their primitive dignity and importance? There
are kings, to be sure, and princes, but except in certain of the stories
that took permanent literary shape in the seventeenth century, they are,
like the kings and princes in the _Odyssey_, plain and democratic
monarchs, on terms of beautiful equality with the noble swineherd and
the charming tailor. King Arthur in the nursery ballad stole a peck of
barley meal to make a bag-pudding, in the homeliest and most democratic
way, and the picture of the queen frying the cold pudding for breakfast
seems only natural to the little democrats of six and seven in our own
day. This world of genuine people and honest occupations is charming and
educative in itself, and constitutes the most effective and convincing
background for the supernatural and the marvelous when that element is
present.
When we have said that it is the folk or traditionary tales that we
should choose, we do not mean that we should consider the whole realm of
folk-lore material, primitive and savage tales--African, Indian,
Igorrote; though, as a matter of fact, every teacher of children should
be something of a scientific student of folk-stories. It increases his
respect and sympathy for the specimens he actually chooses to know where
they stand in the large whole--their history and human value. Besides,
the experienced teacher will often find in the outlying regions of
folk-tales the germ of a story precisely suited to his needs, and he can
have the very real pleasure of endowing it with an acceptable form and
putting it into educational circulation.
But on the whole, the teacher must be very expert, and must have
extraordinary needs, to feel justified in going outside the established
canon of fairy-tales for his material. For there is a canon more or less
fixed, into which have entered those stories that have from long and
perpetual use taken on a more or less acceptable form; stories from
those nations whose culture has blended to produce the modern occidental
tradition. The canon includes Grimm's tales, Perrault's _Mother Goose_
tales, a few of Madame d'Aulnoy's, a few Danish and Norwegian stories,
some from Italian sources and through Italian media, some from the
_Arabian Nights_, some unhesitatingly admitted lately from collections
of English folk-tales made in our own day, two or three chapbook
stories, a few interlopers like _The Three Bears_, _Goody Two Shoes_,
and some of Andersen's--not popular tales at all, but having in them
some mysterious charm that opened the door to them. One cannot attempt
to fix the limits more narrowly, for he has no sooner closed the list
than he realizes that every teacher who has used them, every mother who
has read them to her little people, every boy or girl who loves them,
will have some other tale to insert, some perfect thing not provided for
in this tentative catalogue. Besides, from time to time there does
appear a new claimant with every title to admission, such as some of the
Irish tales told by Seumas McManus or Douglas Hyde, or certain of the
Zuni folk-tales collected by Cushing. But on the whole, may we not agree
that the list indicated constitutes the authentic accepted canon of
fairy-tales established and approved by the teachers and children of
occidental tradition and rearing?
Still, there are choices to be made among these folk-tales of the
accepted list. No child should be told all of them. Practically all
children do have too many fairy-tales told them, and suffer in this, as
in most of the things supplied them, from the discouraging and confusing
"too much." For a whole year in which the main stories are taken from
the folk-tales, a half-dozen stories will be enough.
It is not among the folk-sagas that one will find the best stories of
this kind for his children. These, indeed, are scarcely to be called
literature. Most of them are tales explaining by a legend some natural
feature, the name of a place or a person, or attaching to some historic
person a stock adventure, wonderful or preternatural. Some of them are,
as has been said, germs of hero-tales that never obtained popular
artistic favor, or they are far-away echoes of hero-tales, or they are
stories of the _pourquoi_ kind--semi-mythical in import, and
consequently lacking the universal appeal and fitness of literature. Any
teacher may find one of the stories of this group adapted to his
purpose, but he will not find most of his folk-material here. In the
cycles of hero tales, _King Arthur_ and _Siegfried_ for example, we can
find many of these minor sagas imbedded in the larger cycle, but still
detachable and often easily adaptable for the younger children.
It is among the _Maerchen_ that we find our supply of stories. This is
not the place to discuss the science of nursery-tales, their origin,
genesis, dissemination, or any of the other scholar's aspects, inviting
though all these topics be. One is quite aware that even in the most
social _Maerchen_ there may be found detritus of myth; one should be
equally aware that in certain other _Maerchen_ he finds the original germ
which finally evolved into a myth-story. But let not the teacher and
lover of folk-tales as art allow himself to become ensnared in myth
interpretations of his tales; that way literary and pedagogic madness
lies. Countless generations ago those which perchance had a mythical
significance lost it and became art, completely humanized in life and
experience.
The drolls, when one chooses well among them, are precisely adapted to
add the element of fun that should never be long absent from the
children's literature. There are, of course, numberless comic folk-tales
too coarse and too brutal to be used in our day, except by the
scientific student of culture. The fun of the drolls is, as a matter of
fact, not on a high level--practical jokes, perfectly obvious
_contretemps_, the adventures and achievements of noodles, are their
typical material. But this is the comic level of the average child for
whom we choose them. It is the first step above physical fun, and from
this step we can undertake to start him on his delightful journey up the
ever-refining path of literary comedy. From tricks and horse-play he may
pass rapidly to humor and nonsense. But at six-seven, having had the
_Little Guinea Pig_ and _Simple Simon_ as an undergraduate kinder, he is
ready for _Hans in Luck_ and _Mr. Miacca_. Like the Olympians
themselves, he will roar at Hephaestus' limp, and with the council of
Homeric heroes he will laugh at the physical chastisement of Thersites,
and enjoy the none-too-penetrating trick that Odysseus played upon the
blundering Polyphemus. There is no danger that the children will not
outgrow this stage of comic appreciation--the danger is that they will
outgrow it instead of adding to it all the other stages. There is
something wrong with the artistic culture of the man who cannot at forty
smile at the follies of the Peterkin family, at the same time that he
completely savors the comedy of _The Egoist_.
The accumulative tales have their service to render. Perhaps their
characteristic moment comes a little earlier than even the first year of
school. Before he is six the little citizen of the world will have been
building up his vision of the interdependence and interaction of men
and things. To this vision the accumulative tales bring the
contribution of art. Many of them, being the simplest adjustment of
incident to incident, such as _The Old Woman Who Found the Sixpence_ and
_The Little Red Hen_, are ideal for the nursery and kindergarten child.
Others still, built upon the accumulative principle, but more complex or
more artistic in form, will charm and instruct the first-year
scholars--_Henny-Penny_, for example, and _Hans in Luck_, and _The Three
Billy Goats Gruff_. From the point of view of composition, they may well
be studied by the older children, because they permit the examination of
the separate incidents, and exhibit in most cases the very simplest
principles of structure.
But coming still closer to the choosing of the actual specimens for the
classes, it would be only fatuous to ignore the fact that when we come
to the matter of the final choice, we are upon difficult ground,
educationally and critically. But we can save ourselves from presumption
and dogmatism by discussing a few practical, but general, grounds of
choice, reminding ourselves that in the specific school and with the
specific class many modifying minor principles will arise.
The teacher will be much comforted and steadied if he remember that he
is teaching _literature_, and is therefore freed from any obligation to
the stories as myth, or as scientific folk-lore, as sociology or as
nature-study; let nothing tempt him to the study of the first member of
the company of musicians of Bremen, as "a type of the solid-hoofed
animals," of _Red Riding-Hood_ as a "dawn-myth," or of _The Three Bears_
as "parenthood in the wild."
The teacher will select those tales that have somewhere in their history
acquired an artistic organization, rejecting in favor of them those
which remain chaotic and disorganized. Compare, for example, in this
matter, the perfect little plot of Madame Villeneuve's _Beauty and the
Beast_ with Grimm's _The Golden Bird_--a string of loosely connected,
partly irrelevant incidents. He will prefer those that display economy
of incident--in which each incident helps along the action, or
contributes something essential to the situation. Of course, it is
rather characteristic of the folk-mind, as of the child-mind, to heap up
incidents _a propos de bottes_; but as this is one of the
characteristics to be corrected in the child by his training in
literature, so it is one of the faults which should exclude a fairy-tale
from his curriculum. To make the difference among the stories in this
regard quite clear, compare the neat, orderly, and essential flow of
incident in _The Musicians of Bremen_ with the baffling multiplicity
and confusion displayed by Madame d'Aulnoy's _The Wonderful Sheep_.
Other things being equal, he will prefer for discipline those
fairy-stories which use the fairy and other preternatural elements in
artistic moderation, to those that fill every incident with marvels and
introduce supernatural machinery apparently out of mere exuberance. This
element is much more impressive when used in art with reticence and
economy. Even a little child grows too familiar with marvels when these
crowd one another on every page, and ceases either to shiver or to
thrill. In the fairy-tale, as in art for mature people, the supernatural
should appear only at the ultimate moment, or for the ultimate purpose,
and then in amount and potency only sufficient to accomplish the result.
Perrault was very cautious upon this point; in all his tales he seems to
have reduced the element of the marvelous to the smallest amount and to
have called upon it only at the pivotal points. Compare in his
_Cinderella_ the sufficiency of his single proviso, "Now, this godmother
was a fairy," with the tedious superfluity of irrelevant marvels in
Grimm's version of the same tale. Is this bringing the fascinating
abundance of the Teutonic folk fancy to a disadvantageous comparison
with the neat and orderly, but more common-place, Gallic mind? By no
means. One has many occasions to regret, when he reads Perrault's
version of the wonderful tales he found, that he was a precisian in
style and a courtier in manners; and we may find in the most apparently
artless tales told by Grimm or by Asbjoernsen the most perfect
organization and economy; as, for example in _Briar-Rose_ or in _The
Three Billy Goats Gruff_.
Besides, one hastens to add that every child should hear and should
later on have a chance to read some of the free, wandering, fantastic
things which his teacher cannot feel justified in giving to the class.
One is obliged to take some attitude in mediating the folk-tales to the
modern child, toward the fact that we often find them reflecting a moral
standard quite different from that which the average well-bred child is
brought up by; and this situation is complicated by the fact that the
children are too young to understand dramatically another moral
standard. This aspect of the stories has been pretty well covered by the
general discussion in the previous chapter. But, luckily, it is quite
possible to reject all those folk-tales of questionable morals and
objectionable taste and still have plenty to choose from. Be slow to
reject a folk-tale unless the bit of immorality--a lie, an act of
disloyalty, or irreverence--or the bit of coarseness really forms the
pivot of the story. Only then is the story unsafe or incurable.
One must take an attitude, not only toward the morals of the folk-tale,
but toward its manners as well. There is some violence in many of the
most attractive nursery tales; many of them reflect a rather
rough-and-tumble state of social communion; many exhibit a superfluity
of bloodshed or other grisly physical horrors. We quickly grant that it
is not wise to read enough of these, or to linger long enough over the
forbidding details, to create a deep or an abiding atmosphere of terror.
But it is certainly true that the modern child of six or seven has so
little apperception material for physical horrors that they do not take
any deep hold upon him. Indeed, the safety of modern life, and the
absence of visible violence, have taken the emotional appeal out of many
grim lessons of Spenser's and of Dante's. Murder in the _Maerchen_ is to
the modern child actually a bit of fine art--merely a neat and
convincing way of disposing of iniquitous elder brothers and hostile
magicians. The fact that the child's experience and information enable
him to make no image of the physiological sequelae of the cutting-off of
heads, for instance, makes it easy for the teacher to carry him
harmless past details that would seem brutal to his nervous and
squeamish elders. And these details are never the point of emphasis in
any good story. And on the whole, those persons whom the children like
and are likely to incorporate into their "pattern," have manners either
just or gentle even in the folk-tales.
It might be well to introduce among the folk-tales an occasional short
story of contemporary life, recording the activities of persons such as
the children actually know. This is not so important in this stage of
their experience as it will be later; first because the folk-tales do
not seem antiquated nor, if they are wisely selected, unduly fantastic
to them, since they find themselves imaginatively so much at home with
material and the method; and, in the second place, because in every
well-regulated school their fact studies and occupation work are at this
time concrete and charming, and keep them rightly and sufficiently in
touch with the world of actuality.
Of course we must accompany and supplement the folk-tales by verses,
since even at this age we may impress upon the children the music of
speech, and some of the minor literary beauties. They will probably be
delighted to repeat (in many classes many of the children will be
learning them for the first time) the lovely hereditary jingles and
ballads from Mother Goose--"The Crooked Man," "I Saw a Ship a-Sailing,"
"Sing a Song of Sixpence," the rhymes for games and for counting-out.
There are a very few of Stevenson's simple enough for this period; and
there may be a further choice among things found here and there, simple,
objective, and perfectly musical. It is not so much the content and
meaning of poetry that we can hope to impress upon little people under
eight, as the music and motion of the verse. There will be, however,
many members of every class who will be interested in the meaning, the
images, and the persons, if there be persons. We will take all pains,
therefore, to see that these be not unsuitable.
These--folk-tales and simple singing lyrics--with a fable or two told as
anecdotes, and repeated until even the little children begin to see that
there is something more than meets the eye--all graded and modified in
the light of the personnel and experience of the actual class, may
constitute the literature of the first two years of school.
CHAPTER VII
MYTH AS LITERATURE
The presupposition that myth is _par excellence_ the literary material
for young children doubtless grew out of a misinterpretation of the
so-called mythopoeic age in the children, and some fundamental
misconception of the nature of myth and its relation to other folk and
traditionary material. There is no place in this little book even to
suggest the problems that surround the nature and genesis of myth. But
it does seem desirable to make in a simple way a few distinctions that
may serve to set us on the right road.
First of all, myth is religion, and not art. It is not a thing of mere
imagination. It is the explanation or interpretation of some physical
fact, some historical occurrence, some social custom, some racial
characteristic, some established ritual or worship. It is the religious
or emotional response to some influence or activity in the world so
impressive or so efficacious as to seem to call for explanation in terms
of supernatural agencies.
This explanatory or interpretative stage or aspect of myth may be first
historically, or it may not be. It is probably first in most myths in a
simple and crude form, which in all developed myths has been enriched
and modified by influences from the other stages and aspects. The second
stage--or shall we call it merely another aspect--is the assigning of
distinct personality and individuality to the agencies assumed to
account for events and appearances. Then follows rapidly the
interrelations and interactions of these persons, the surrounding of
them with friends and subordinates, the building-up of a whole intricate
society of divinities after the model of human society--all at first
symbolistic and of religious significance. A third stage or aspect is
that of the cult, the worship, the establishment of a priesthood
delivering authoritative messages, mediating influences to the people,
and adding constantly to the body of explanations and interpretations
surrounding each divinity. The fourth stage or aspect is that in which
it becomes, or becomes identified with, a body of moral doctrines or
ethical principles; where the personal divinities, with their qualities,
insignia, and associations, are taken as symbols of inner human forces,
of moral and social achievement, as expressions of spiritual influences
operant in human nature and life.
Let it be understood that in naming these stages or aspects there has
been no attempt to place them either in chronological or in logical
order, and no intention of saying that they stand apart from one another
in an easily recognized distinctness. But, however interlinked and
mutually modified they may be, we must in any discussion of myth, be
aware of these four sides or steps.
Take, for example, the Greek myth of Apollo. As an explanation of
physical phenomena he is light or fire, sometimes specialized as the
spirit of the sun. But he is embodied and endowed with a personality; he
has social conditions and subsidiary functions assigned to him. As a
person he is the son of Zeus and Leto, twin brother of Artemis, leader
of the nine Muses, guardian of pastured flocks and herds, as Artemis of
the wild creatures who feed or frolic by night. As his worship spread
and deepened, there gathered about him many other functions--he was the
god of healing, of music, of law, of atonement; and many tributary and
subordinate divinities were associated with him in all these activities.
There gathered into his myth also an enormous and complex body of
stories, romantic and mystical, explanatory and prophetic--stories of
adventure, of contact with the other gods, of sojourns with men, of
pilgrimages to unknown regions; some of them merely romantic, some of
them symbolistic, many of them profoundly significant of his powers and
offices.
And the myth of Apollo is remarkable for its ancient and elaborate
worship. Already when the Homeric poems were made, the shrine of Apollo
at Delphos was the scene of an old and complicated ritual. There was
even then a temple rich with the accumulated treasure of the votive
offerings of generations of worshipers. Priests and prophets, the mystic
offices of the Pythia, poets and musicians, stately processions of kings
and warriors seeking oracles, combined to maintain the dignity and
sanctity of this most impressive worship.
From the very earliest times of which we have record of this myth,
Apollo was known to be a spiritual and ethical force at work in man's
soul. He was named when men tried to speak of those experiences which
wrought expiation and purification. He stood for milder law, for
beneficent and benevolent social order, for art, for the songs of the
sacred bard, the dirge of grief, the paean of victory, the games--all
the gentler things of social culture and personal experience.
In these and in many other ways did the myth of Apollo express the human
soul and act upon it. It was a religion--as every developed myth is--to
be handled reverently. We might have chosen other examples quite as
elaborate and as full of mystic significance--the myth of Dionysus, or
the more widespread and deeply devotional myth of Demeter.
Art, too, concerned as it is with everything that promotes or reflects
man's spirit, has uses for the elements of myth, and has its own way of
handling them. On two of the four steps of myth art, especially
literature, finds acceptable material. On the stage named second--the
stage in which the influence or power becomes personified, takes on
relations to other personified influences, and calls into being other
divine persons, his children, his helpers and subordinates, takes his
place in a society of divinities, and exercises his more or less
specialized function in this society, and also in human life and
activity--have the poets and romancers found many opportunities.
Adventures and romantic experiences of all sorts easily attached
themselves to the person of some divinity, especially as the character
of the personal divinities became more and more humanized by the
accretion of such tales. And while we find echoes of myth in _Maerchen_
and romance, we quite as constantly find apotheosis of merely human
romance and adventure in myth. Among the literary peoples, poets and
dramatists found it often desirable to use the foundation of this group
of divine personalities as the starting-point for a performance purely
artistic; it gave them the immense advantage of starting without
explanation and preparation, since their audiences could be counted upon
to know the divine personages and circumstances; and the further
advantage of adding dignity and size to their inventions by accrediting
them to superhuman agents. These literary additions, these variations
upon the religious meanings, invented for artistic purposes, often
gradually incorporated themselves into the myth, and by modern students
are not carefully distinguished from the other, the religious and
devotional elements. A comic adventure told of Hermes may not have in it
any more of myth than a similar story told of Autolycus.
Literature finds much use for material of the mythical kind on what we
have called the fourth step. To express and render concrete, impulses,
influences, and powers that sway and dignify human conduct, and that
form and ennoble human character, the literary artist gladly employs the
persons of the great myths. All human experience has elements and
influences coming into it from an apparently mystic sphere, that must
either be described in abstract terms or embodied in concrete persons
and symbols. The latter is ever the method of art. So we find everywhere
in literature the use of the great symbols already constituted in myth,
or the invention of new symbols for the purpose. Homer would convey to
us the sense of the presence that guided and guarded the wise and
resourceful Odysseus; so the stately Athene, ages long the goddess "who
giveth skill in fair works, and noble minds," comes and goes through the
poem. Hauptmann would convey to us in _The Sunken Bell_, some impression
of the magic and the charm of that beauty which lies in the free soul
and wild nature, so he invents Rautendelein. But neither Homer nor
Hauptmann is priest or devotee interpreting facts or conserving worship.
They are artists picturing human life and introducing, each in its
place, the various elements of human experience.
It is in regard to this literary use of myth that there exists much
confusion, and that most mistakes are made as to the educational use of
myth. Many persons who contend that "myths" can be given to children as
literature call the _Iliad_ and the _Odyssey_ "myths;" indeed, they are
likely to call all legendary stories in which the supernatural element
is large "myths;" and they call all romantic stories that have become
attached to any divinity "myths."
We should distinguish myth from saga, from legend, from merely fanciful
symbolistic tales, from tales of human heroes. The Homeric poems make
much of the religious side of human nature, and the poet chose in order
to give to his action and issue a superhuman dignity to set that action
in the presence of the gods themselves. Yea, in the climaxes of the
Titanic struggle the Powers themselves take a hand, so deeply does the
poet feel that everything noblest and most passionate in human nature is
involved; and, despairing, as it were, of conveying to us in merely
human terms the implications of the strife between the two kinds of
ideals, he sets Aphrodite over against Athene, not merely Trojan against
Greek. But the _Iliad_ is, for all that, not myth nor a collection of
myths, but the story of the wrath of Achilles--a very human hero, who
loved his friend. The story of Baldur is myth--explaining and
interpreting, personifying and glorifying, a superhuman influence and
effect beyond the reach of human experience; the story of Siegfried is a
saga, a human experience, under whatever enlarged and idealized
conditions, yet still a type-experience of the human being. The garden
of Eden is myth-interpretation and explanation of many, some the
grimmest, facts of man's nature, and his relation to a supernatural
power; the story of Abraham is a saga--a typical history of human
experience, a typical picture of human culture. The whole artistic
purpose and effect of the hero-tale and the saga are different from
those of myth; the center of interest is a human being; the emphasis is
upon human life; the meaning is upon the surface. In true myth the
purpose is not artistic, but religious; the emphasis is upon superhuman
activities; the meaning is buried beneath symbols--the more beautiful
the myth, the more difficult and complex the symbol.
So one has almost to smile at the statement, commonly made that myth,
implying all myth, is childlike, and should therefore be given to little
children as literature, especially while they themselves are in the
mythopoeic age--presumably from four to seven. There are so many
fallacies in this statement that one pauses embarrassed at his many
opportunities of attack.
First as to the childlikeness of myth. There are, of course, undeveloped
races that have a naive and childish myth, but it is also so crude and
unbeautiful that it would never commend itself to one seeking artistic
material for children. The developed myths, those that have achieved the
elaboration of beautiful episodes, are most unchildlike. They are far,
far away from the crude guesses of the primitive mind. They have all
been worked over, codified, filled with theological and symbolistic
content by priests and poets. One can be very sure that no sensible
teacher who has mastered the material, would attempt to teach the whole
of any Hebrew or Greek or Scandinavian myth as myth within the
elementary period. If he takes one of the especially romantic or
beautiful episodes out of the myth, he is obliged to thin it out to the
comprehension of the children, and to mutilate it so as to make of it a
mere tale. When one reads Hawthorne's version of Pandora and Prometheus
and realizes the mere babble, the flippant detail, under which he has
covered up the grim Titanic story of the yearnings and strivings of the
human soul for salvation here and hereafter, the very deepest problems
of temptation and sin, of rebellion and expiation, he must see clearly
what is most likely to happen when a complex and mature myth is
converted into a child's tale. To make a real test, leave the alien
Greek myth and try the same process with one that we have built into our
own religious consciousness--the temptation and fall in the Garden of
Eden; a story, which is, by the way, much more naive in conception and
detail than that of Prometheus. We must conclude that such myths are not
childlike, and that to make such a version of them as will appeal to
the little child's attention and feeling gives but a shallow and
distorted view of them.
There should undoubtedly be a place in education for the study of myth
as religion and as an influence in human culture; should it not be
somewhere well within the adolescent period, when the symbols of the
great myths attract and do not baffle the child, when their religious
content finds a congenial lodging-place and a sympathetic interpretation
in his own experiences? It would seem only fair to reserve the beautiful
and reverential myths of the Greeks, Romans, and Scandinavians for this
period, rather than to use them in the age when there is little more to
appeal to than the tendency, so short-lived and shallow-rooted in the
modern child, to see personal agencies behind appearances. For this,
confused with a degree of grammatical uncertainty of speech, is
practically all that we can find under close analysis, of the mythopoeic
faculty in little children brought up under modern conditions.
There are still those, one discovers, who contend that myth should be
given to children as literature, because later in life--when they come
to read the _Aeneid_ in High School, or _Paradise Lost_ in college, or
_Prometheus Unbound_ or even Macaulay's essays--they will come upon
references to Zeus, to the fall of Troy, to the Titans, to Isis and
Osiris, and they ought to be able to call up from what they had as
literature in the elementary school such information as would enable
them to understand these allusions and fill out these references.
Luckily, the number of people who hold the fundamental theory of
education adumbrated in this view is becoming so rapidly smaller that
this chapter will, let us hope, be too late to reach them. The
multiplication table is a tool; the mechanics of reading and writing are
partially mere tools; but mythology, especially mythology substituted
for literature, can in no sense be regarded or treated as a tool.
Occasionally one meets the statement that myth, and mythical episodes,
are more imaginative than stories of human life, and should therefore be
given to little children as literature. So far as the persons who hold
this view can be pushed to definite terms, they mean either that the
conditions of ordinary human life are completely abrogated in mythical
stories, and that therefore they are more imaginative than stories of
mere human experience could be; or that the details given by the
imagination are arranged in some more unusual way--that there is less of
judgment and order in the arrangement than in stories of men and their
affairs.
Of course, we realize that the human mind cannot invent ultimate
details independent of experience. It is in the number and arrangement
of these details that originality inheres--that the varying quality or
quantity of imagination lies. Now, it is true that in mythical stories
the images, the details, are likely to be more numerous, and to be
arranged in a less orderly manner than in an art story; this is of the
nature of myth.
Ruskin, in _The Queen of the Air_, makes so clear a statement of this
principle that I shall borrow it for this chapter:
A myth in its simplest definition is a story with a meaning
attached to it other than it seems to have at first; and the fact
that it has such a meaning is generally marked by some of its
circumstances being extraordinary, or, in the common use of the
word, unnatural. Thus, if I tell you that Hercules killed a water
serpent in the lake of Lerna, and if I mean, and you understand,
nothing more than that fact, the story, whether true or false, is
not a myth. But if, by telling you this, I mean that Hercules
purified the stagnation of many streams from deadly miasmata, my
story, however simple, is a true myth, only, as, if I left it in
that simplicity, you would probably look for nothing beyond, it
will be wise in me to surprise your attention by adding some
singular circumstance; for instance, that the water-snake had
several heads, which revived as fast as they were killed, and which
poisoned even the foot that trod upon them as they slept. And in
proportion to the fulness of intended meaning I shall probably
multiply and refine upon these improbabilities; or, suppose if,
instead of desiring only to tell you that Hercules purified a
marsh, I wished you to understand [that he contended with envy and
evil ambition], I might tell you that this serpent was formed by
the goddess whose pride was in the trial of Hercules; that its
place of abode was by a palm tree; that for every head of it that
was cut off, ten rose up with renewed life; and that the hero found
at last he could not kill the creature at all by cutting its heads
off or crushing them, but only by burning them down; and that the
midmost of them could not be killed even in that way, but had to be
buried alive. Only in proportion as I mean more I shall appear more
absurd in my statement.
Is it fair to conclude that, if there is any ground for the statement
that myth is more imaginative than literature, it is either that it is
extremely symbolistic, constantly substituting one thing for another, or
that, not being art, it heaps up details profusely, unregulated by the
ordering and constructive side of the imagination? In the one case, it
would have small disciplinary value for the class; in the other, it
would be hopelessly beyond their comprehension; and in either case it
would not perform the characteristic service of literature.
There is much more to be said by those who feel that they find in the
mythic stories a large and vague atmosphere, a sort of cosmic stage
where things bulk large and sound simple, a great resounding room where
the children feel unconsciously the movement of large things. But this
is a religious mood. It is precisely the response we should like to have
when we tell our children the Hebrew myth of the creation--an emotional
reaction, vague but deep, to the dim and sublime images of the Days--a
response that constitutes itself forevermore a part of his religious
experience. If we are willing that he should have a similar reaction
upon the story of Zeus and the Titans, if we are willing that he should
lay this down, too, among the foundations of his religious life, by all
means tell it. But we can not quite fairly tell one to awaken a
religious response, and the other an artistic one.
This is all quite consistent with an utter repudiation of a hard and
fast "faculty" education. There are, of course, borders where myth and
literature inextricably intermingle, as there are certain effects of the
teaching of mythical episodes which are not to be distinguished from
those of the teaching of purely literary material. But the teacher
should clear up his mind upon this point; telling a romantic adventure
of a god is not teaching myth; telling a story of a hero in which the
gods take a share is not teaching myth, any more than the telling of the
story of the Holy Grail is teaching Christianity; symbolistic stories
whose setting happens to be Greek or Roman or Scandinavian are not myth.
It should not be difficult to handle for the children such stories as
contain a large amount of religious element. To have them get out of the
_Odyssey_ the characteristic and desirable effect, it is necessary to
give only a few words as to the offices of Athene and Poseidon in the
action, and then put the emphasis where Homer puts it--upon Odysseus,
his character and his experiences. It is no more necessary in reading
the _Odyssey_ to go into the myth of the divinities concerned, than it
would be in teaching _Hamlet_ to make an exhaustive excursus into the
pneumatology of the Ghost.
Now, there are a great many folk-tales that out of convention have taken
on as a sort of afterthought, as it were, an explanatory character. This
can be noticed in the charming Zuni folk-tales collected by Cushing.
Often the _pourquoi_ idea is appended in the final paragraph, a belated
bit of piety not at all inherent in the tale. Then there are, of course,
a great many fanciful _pourquoi_ tales, both folk and modern, whose
purpose was never more than playful. These cannot be seriously regarded
as myth, and must be estimated on their merits as stories.
It is hard to be so tolerant with the modern imitations of mythical
tales designed to render palatable and pretty facts in the life of the
world about us. One cannot believe much in the dew-fairies and
frost-fairies and flower-angels, speaking plants and conversing worms,
whose mission in life is really a gentle species of university-extension
lectures. Such stories are not literature; neither are they good
technical knowledge. Is it not true, as we shall elsewhere have occasion
to show, that, with our modern facilities for teaching the facts of
nature, we can make them attractive and impressive rather by showing
them as they are, than by attributing to them merely fanciful and often
petty personalities and genii?
Of course, in very advanced scientific theory we are driven again to
myth-making. One cannot speak of radio-activity except in terms of
personality, nor of the final processes of biology without using terms
implying purpose and choice. So does the wheel come full circle and all
our lives we are mythopoeists. But myth is not literature.
As has been intimated previously, it would seem that the time to teach
myth as myth is much later--perhaps within the secondary period, when it
can be examined as religion, or when the children have gained enough
experience, and developed enough dramatic imagination, to take hold of
it as a vital element in another culture. The place for the study of
the great symbolistic stories, whose background happens to be another
people's myth, such as King Midas, or Prometheus, or Apollo with
Admetus, should be, in any event, as late as the seventh grade, by which
time the children are able to look below the surface and begin to
understand the types and symbols of art.
CHAPTER VIII
HERO-TALES AND ROMANCES
In the days before books, when a tale was a tale, they knew how to
conserve interest and economize material. When a hero had gained some
popular favor, had established his character, had drawn about him a
circle of friends, and had just proved himself worthy of our love, he
was not lightly cast aside for a new and unknown hero. He was given new
conquests, new sorrows were heaped upon him, new minstrels arose to sing
his fame, until there gathered about him and his group of friends many,
many songs and tales. Luckily, in many cases there came a great artist,
bard or romancer, who gathered these scattered songs and tales together,
gave them a greater or less coherence and something of unity, and so
preserved them. Some of these cycles of hero-tales are adapted for the
delight and discipline of the elementary children. From the cosy and
homely atmosphere of the _Maerchen_--the mother-and nurse-stories--they
would pass naturally to the wider and bolder world of the epic tales.
The spirit of these tales harmonizes easily with the general tone of
their work. They are simple and bold in spirit, full of action,
generous and noble in plan and idea; they conserve interest and
attention by centering about a single person or a group; they are made
up of separable adventures or incidents, which take shape, or with a
little editing from the teacher may be made to take shape, as manageable
and artistic wholes; it is easy to associate other bits of literature
with them, because, in the first place, the tales themselves reflect
aspects of life and nature that have appealed to artists in all ages,
and because they have themselves inspired many more modern artists. It
is therefore easy to constitute one of these cycles the center of the
work in literature for some long period--in some cases for a whole
year--joining to it such harmonious or contrasted bits of literature as
the class may seem to need.
Some consideration of the best known and most available of the
hero-tales may help in the matter of choosing.
The _Iliad_ is not available without a great deal of editing and
rearranging for such use in class. There are several reasons for this,
the first being its want of an easily grasped unity. Doubtless the
mature and experienced reader finds the essential unity of the _Iliad_
more satisfying and artistic than that which comes of a more compact and
complete plot. But the children cannot easily see that the history of
Achilles' wrath and love is a complete thing. To them the action seems
to be suspended, the events left without issue, the poem unprovided with
a legitimate ending. The organization and the organizing principle are
obscure to children, since Achilles' emotional history cannot easily be
made clear or interesting to them. Homer's splendid art in glorifying
Hector and dignifying the Trojan cause as a means of reinforcing
Achilles' triumph, and deepening the sense of the Greek victory, is
likely to be lost on the children, while it leaves them with a
hopelessly divided sympathy. Helen, to a mature mind so full of interest
ethical and artistic, is beyond the comprehension of the children as
anything more than a lay figure. The vast enrichment of epic detail that
has gathered into the _Iliad_, constituting it for the grown-up lover of
all the arts an inexhaustible mine of archaic, artistic, and psychic
wealth, has, except in a few picturesque details, which the teacher must
make special effort to bring before them, no charm for the children,
seeming to them to cumber and delay the action. So the _Iliad_ as it
stands is not serviceable for the grades in literature.
But, as we all know, the poems that form the _Iliad_ were songs out of a
much larger cycle. If one desires to use sections of the _Iliad_, then,
it is comparatively easy to collect out of all the material a complete
and unified form of the legend of the siege and downfall of Troy--using
the Homeric episodes when it is possible. From sources other than the
_Iliad_ must be gathered the causes of the war, the education of
Achilles, the summons of Odysseus, the sacrifice of Iphegenia, the death
of Achilles, the building of the wooden horse, and the fall of Troy.
Into this can be inserted in their places the parts selected from the
_Iliad_--perhaps the quarrel in the assembly from the second book; the
deeds of Diomedes, from the fifth and sixth; the visit of Hector within
the city and his farewell to Andromache, from the sixth; the Trojan
triumph, in the seventh; the vengeance upon Dolon, in the tenth; the
main incidents of the battle among the ships; the deeds and death of
Patroclus; Achilles' arming and his appearance in the fight; the main
incidents of the funeral of Patroclus; the visit of Priam to Achilles.
These should be arranged in a sort of "say and sing" narrative, the
events previous to the action of the _Iliad_, and those subsequent to
it, to be told in prose narrative; those taken from the _Iliad_ itself
to be read or recited in some poetical form, linked together, of course,
by a running and rapid narrative. Only a verse translation--or, if a
prose translation, one much more picturesque and eloquent than any we
have yet had--will at all represent the nobility of the _Iliad_.
Bryant's translation is the best we now have, and it is too formal and
difficult to be understood by the children to whom one desires to give
the hero-tales.
One can easily see that an arrangement of the _Iliad_ made under all
these conditions would not finally convey to the children many of the
best things we want to give them in their literature.
The case is quite different with the _Odyssey_. It is the child's own
cycle, full of the interests and elements that delight him while they
cultivate him. The adventures are linked together by the central hero,
and by the design of getting him home; the cycle, therefore, presents a
clear unity, and a unity of the kind that takes hold upon the children.
The adventures themselves organize easily into smaller separable wholes.
They are always interesting, offering us the varieties of the grotesque,
the humorous, the sensational, the horrible, the beautiful, the sublime;
and they are practically all on the imaginative level of the children in
the classes to which they are otherwise adapted. The details are
charming and adapted to interest the children, with very little effort
on the part of the teacher. It is quite unnecessary to point out how the
occupations and employments, the beautiful buildings and
objects--plates, cups, clasps--the raft, the palace and garden of
Alcinoous, the loom of Penelope, the lustrous woven robes, the cottage
of the good Eumaeus, the noble swineherd, build up a world full of
charm, not only for the grown-up reader, but for children if they are
being properly taught. There is throughout the poem what Pater called
the atmosphere of refined craftsmanship, and all the occupations and
tasks of men here appear surrounded by the entrancing halo of art.
Odysseus combines in himself all those characteristics that endear a
hero to the child and the childlike mind. He is active and ever-ready;
strong, too, beyond the measure of any ordinary man; quick in the
battle; good at a game, resourceful and handy in any emergency; subtle
and quickwitted; full of tricks and riddles; equipped at every point for
the effective undoing of his foes. Inevitably in any class of modern
children as old as the nine-ten-year grade the delicate problem of
Odysseus' moral character will come up for discussion. It is not likely
that children younger than this will open the matter themselves, or take
any vital interest in the discussion. For, as I have said elsewhere,
subtlety is a child's virtue, and any device by which their hero, who is
in the main just, outwits or removes hostile forces, is acceptable. For
the older children, who are somewhat "instructed," and who on the
average will have acquired sufficient dramatic sympathy to apprehend an
alien standard, a few words as to the Greek notions of truthfulness,
together with a few explanations as to the privileges allowed to an
adventurer hard beset by trickery and stupidity, will generally clear
the ground; these explanations should take the emphasis from this aspect
of Odysseus' character and leave the children free to place it where it
belongs. If the _Odyssey_ were used with children older than ten, their
questions as to Odysseus' truthfulness might afford a good occasion for
warning them to expect some human imperfections in a hero with whom in
most respects they are in complete sympathy. This point of view,
acquired somewhat early, saves one many shocks and misconceptions in
later reading. It should not be necessary to say that the discussion of
Odysseus should not amount to "character-study," and should not drift
anywhere near hair-splitting moral discriminations.
All teachers will agree that it is better to start the _Odyssey_ with
the fifth book--the experience of Odysseus himself--leaving the
_Telemachiad_ unread, or to be read later. Into his few introductory
stories the teacher should fit some account of the iniquities of the
suitors and the fact of the journey of Telemachus--this to pave the way
for the delightful story of his return. For our generation--and, one is
tempted to believe, for several generations to come--Professor Palmer's
prose translation of the _Odyssey_ is the ideal reading version. For the
sake of the slight heightening of style, the class might occasionally
hear recited a passage in Bryant's verse translation. But the poetical,
musical, faintly archaic prose of Professor Palmer has caught perfectly
the gentle spiritual tone of the _Odyssey_.
I have known a class of nine-ten-year children conducted through the
_Odyssey_ making a side interest of the _Realien_, the pottery and
weaving, and metal working. Such hand-work was a part of their school
tasks, and there were collections of pottery and fabrics which they
could be taken to see. The experience seemed to co-operate with their
own hand-work to develop in them some of that artistic love of beautiful
things--things costly, but not expensive--that pervades the _Iliad_ and
the _Odyssey_; and they were distinctly helped on toward that attitude
we desire for every child, that of "reverence for the life of man upon
the earth." The _Odyssey_ will be used, however, in schools where there
is no handwork and no chance of seeing collections of suitable objects.
Pictures are of some service in getting the image of objects--colored
prints of Greek pottery and costume. Engelmann and Anderson's _Atlas of
the Homeric Poems_ seems to help and interest the children, though there
is constant danger that the archaic forms will seem merely ludicrous to
many of them. The teacher may correct this by explaining them as
decoration and as traditional figures. But we should not depend much
upon black-and-white print to help young children to visualize objects
and scenes in which color and motion are all-important.
Now, what follows must be taken as suggestive, and not as a pat formula:
You can enrich your central bit of literature by other literature in one
of two ways--by reinforcing the impression derived from the main story,
or counteracting it And every long story or cycle of stories,
particularly the heroic cycles, has its characteristic atmosphere that
needs both to be reinforced and to be counteracted. It is true, too,
that practically all the stories we use for the elementary children are
translations or derived versions of some sort, and do not therefore
exhibit the smaller beauties of literary form. It is therefore well to
join with them poems or other bits of literature which emphasize the
matter of inevitableness of form.
By way of enlarging and varying the atmosphere of the _Odyssey_, we
should not add other Greek things, because we are not trying to teach
our class about Greek civilization, nor to initiate them into the Greek
spirit, still less to give them instruction in Greek legend and
mythology. We should rather read them ballads and lyrics which harmonize
with the human spirit of the _Odyssey_, or which supply something which
the _Odyssey_ fails to give. For example, since there is so much of the
sea in the story, it would be a good moment to teach the children some
of the fine things in English verse about the water. They will certainly
notice the characteristic Greek dread and terror of the sea--"the
unvintaged, unpastured, homeless brine." It would be well to balance
this in their minds by some of those verses which reflect the English
mastery of the sea and the romance of modern sea-going--some of
Kipling's sea-ballads, for example, or such simple things as Barry
Cornwall's "The sea, the sea, the open sea."
We should not fail to build upon another dominant note in the _Odyssey_
much that we should like the children to have--the note of home and
home-coming, the hearth-stone, and the sheltering roof. Of the exciting
adventure and the joy of physical contest they will get enough from the
stories themselves. It is not necessary to say again that the judgments
given here as to the actual practical choice, are always to be taken as
suggestions, not as hard and fast directions. Every teacher may have,
and should have, his own idea, both as to how his central bit of
literature should be supplemented, and as to whether or not it needs
supplementing. Later I shall give the titles of certain of these minor
things--still by way of suggestion; ballads and lyrics that have been
found to harmonize with the _Odyssey_ either as enforcement or addition.
Most elementary schools have found now the value of the _Robin Hood_
legend. The bluff, open qualities, the effective activities, the
wholesome objectivity of these activities, the breezy atmosphere with
which the stories surround themselves, make them acceptable in many
aspects. Teachers are saved most of the labor of making their own digest
of the Robin Hood material by Howard Pyle's _Robin Hood_. In this he has
drawn together the whole legend, using not only the English ballads, but
Scott and Peacock, and whatever scattered hints and details he could
gather from what must have been a pretty exhaustive reading of English
romantic literature. Everywhere there are charming reminiscences of
Chaucer, of Spenser, of Shakespeare; echoes of ballad and song and
romance; making, on the whole, a notable introduction to literature and
the literary method. One quickly finds that it is much too literary in
places for younger children and has to be simplified; here and there are
long idyllic descriptions that the fifth grade, eager for the story,
will not brook; occasionally a page of false sentimentality that the
teacher with a true ear will infallibly detect and skip. But these minor
things can be forgiven in view of the sheer energy, the marvelous
objectivity, the epic colorlessness, of the book as a whole. Readings
from the ballads themselves should be interspersed, read by the teacher
to the class. These readings should again be arranged in the
_cont-fable_ fashion, turning into suitable form the less interesting
passages, and then reading in their original verse form the dramatic and
picturesque parts. It need not be said that much better poems may be
found than those which Pyle has composed for his _Robin Hood_.
Timid parents and teachers who have never used these stories have some
misgivings as to the effect of the strenuous, not to say lawless,
atmosphere. They say that the burden of approval is placed upon an
outlaw, who constantly and successfully flouts the officers and
processes of the law; that the merry-men are, after all, the gang; that
the multiplicity of quarrels and cracked crowns accustoms the children
to blood and violence; in short, that the legitimate outcome of a
genuine dramatic sympathy with the story is general Hooliganism. The
good teachers who have used the stories never say these things because
they never see these results. It needs but a word to transfer the
emphasis from Robin Hood's outlawry to the cruel and unjust laws against
which he stood; to keep to the front his generosity to his men, his
tenderness toward those in trouble, his sense of personal honor, his
readiness to accept and acknowledge a fair defeat, the loyalty of his
men. It is the transfiguration of the gang; and as a social matter it is
the transfiguration rather than the destruction of the gang which we
desire to accomplish. One hastens to acknowledge, however, that the
rough-and-tumble atmosphere of the stories calls for some antidote,
which we may find partly in the literature we choose to accompany this
cycle. Very naturally one thinks of the greenwood, and at once finds
many bits that fit into the scenic background of the story and introduce
the gentler aspects of the woods and woodland things.
With the _Odyssey_ we should choose some things to reinforce the love of
home and the longing for the hearth-fire, and we must use some of the
same things to provide an element otherwise lacking in the _Robin Hood_,
and to modify the fascination of the wildwood life and the unattached
condition. Some of the ideas on the surface of the stories may be
enlarged and enriched--as loyalty and devotion to a leader. There is a
fine opportunity to launch into the children's experience upon the wave
of their enthusiasm for Robin Hood, other and nobler ideals of the
leader and the hero; though we must never expect the child, glowing with
the satisfaction of deeds done, to give any appreciation worth
considering to the suffering hero or to the heroism of peace. This
properly belongs to a much later period--to what it is not mere jargon
to call the lyric age, when some more effective appeal can be made to
those powers that come of introspection.
The cycles of stories of King Arthur unquestionably contain much that
should contribute to the pleasure and wholesome culture of the
elementary child. Epic activity, bold and generous deeds tempered by
gentleness and reverence--this is the atmosphere of the best of the
Arthur stories, and it is precisely the atmosphere into which one longs
to lead the older children of the elementary school. But these good and
suitable Arthur stories are so tied up with others entirely unsuitable
that the choosing and arranging of them becomes the task of the expert
psychologist and critic. When one chooses stories out of this legend, he
must do with his material--his Malory, his Chretien, his _Mabinogion_,
his Tennyson--as these collectors and artists did with theirs: regard it
as the stuff of human nature and life, a storehouse of treasures out of
which he may draw according to his pleasure or his need. In this case it
is the safe pleasure and the artistic needs of his children that will
dictate his choice. And he must know thoroughly well his stories and his
children; for the pitfalls are many--quite as many in Chretien de Troyes
and Malory as in Tennyson.
The first of the pitfalls to be avoided is that fantastic feudal
gallantry which Chretien and Malory substituted for the forthright
chivalric business and earnestness of the older legendary stories. In
the _Song of Roland_ one fights for reasons of patriotism or religion;
in the Arthur romances, and others of their type, one fights for his
lady's sake. In the elementary grades the children are still
undifferentiated human beings, and should be kept so. To thrust upon
them suggestions of "ladies" to be "won" and to be "served" is to usher
them into an unknown world, an undemocratic and unbrotherly world from
which we should like to keep them, especially the girls, as long as
possible. While it is not easy to leave out this element in choosing
material from these cycles, it is possible to treat it lightly, since
there is in the same material a sufficiency of lions to be hunted,
giants to be overcome, and hostile Paynims to be exterminated.
Everyone who has ever read much with children knows that to normal
children before their thirteenth year the psychology and _modus
operandi_ of love and love-making, innocent or guilty, are so alien as
to pass harmlessly by them as a mere bit of the machinery of a story,
when these notions do constitute such a bit of machinery in a story
otherwise suitable. But it is a mistake to choose matter which obliges
us to linger with the little people over these experiences or to
emphasize them. He who would retell the Arthur stories must be wary
here, so difficult is it to put together any series of the adventures
that will at all represent the material, and constitute a whole, without
using the scarlet thread of guilty passion, or substituting for it
something "nice" but wishy-washy. We have only to compare the grim
justice of Malory's Modred with Tennyson's sentimental and unconvincing
handling of his character and function.
When Malory wove into the Arthur cycle the legend of the Holy Grail, he
introduced an element very hard to handle for children--that religious
mysticism, not to say fanaticism, which Tennyson chose to set as the
pivotal motive of the downfall of the Table Round. Tennyson, writing for
mature modern readers a deeply symbolistic poem, and presenting a whole
cycle, could, stroke by stroke, build up the impression of this burning
zeal, this hypnotic trance of enthusiasm, that led men away after
wandering fires, forgetting labor and duty. But simplified to fit the
comprehension of the wholesome twelve-year-old it is likely to appear a
vague and mistaken piety, producing a practical effect quite out of
proportion to its importance.
To the modern teacher, with the witchery of the Tennysonian music in his
blood, it is all but impossible to keep out of prominence that symbolism
which lay obvious upon the surface, even in the _Morte d'Arthur_, but
which Tennyson heightened into an almost oppressive system of
sophisticated and parochial doctrine. An occasional symbolistic nut to
crack is not a bad thing for the older children of the grades. But would
it not be a mistake to immerse them in a great system of symbolism? To
the younger children the sacred outside appearance, the entrancing
_Schein_, of things is best, and symbolistic art only baffles them or
unduly forces their powers.
The spirit of dilettante adventure which pervades the mediaeval romances
gives them a tone entirely different from that of the epics. In these
latter the activities attach themselves to deeds that have to be done,
to misfortunes that the hero would willingly have avoided. Some of these
sought-out adventures have crept insidiously into Howard Pyle's _Robin
Hood_; but they are entirely foreign to the spirit of the original epos.
The idea of "worshipfully winning worship," of seeking adventure for
mere adventure's sake, or for the mere display of one's own powers, or
for the sake of getting trained, is a corrupting one in our society, and
should not be implanted in our children's consciousness. Like the old
epic heroes, what we have to do we will do--often boldly; but, like the
old epic heroes, we will do it because it needs to be done.
We can get together a series of stories from the Arthur romance that
will touch but lightly the exaggerated, false devotion to ladies; that
will leave out of sight the guilty passion which lies at the center of
Malory's poem and of most of the other literary versions; that will put
into a minor place the mystical religious element that lingers about the
Holy Grail side of the romance; that will make little of the symbolism,
ignore the dilettante and merely amateur adventure, handling the heroic
rather than the romantic deeds--that will do all these things and still
be a romance of King Arthur. He who would make such a version must
choose out from Malory or _The Mabinogion_, material that belongs in
such a series. Or he may find his material more sifted for him in
Lanier's _The Boy's King Arthur_, and _Knightly Legends of Wales_. Let
him make much of Arthur, simple of nature, guileless and strong, looking
to conquest and the good of his people rather than to his own "worship"
or to his own love-affairs; let him by no means neglect Merlin, the most
permanently interesting figure; he is Odysseus among the Greeks, the
sacred bard among the warriors, Tusitala in Samoa, the subtle one,
always so appealing and so satisfying to a child's imagination--the
embodiment of that intellectual dominance which, be it wisdom or magic,
always stands beside epic achievement in the child's estimation. And
having got it together, he may reassure himself, as regards his epos of
King Arthur, that there is no one Arthur; that the whole legend is a
mine out of which every student may draw a treasure; or, to change the
figure, a great, beautiful field in which many people may gather grain
according to their need and their taste.
Much later when, as growing youth, they are waking up to certain mature
social problems, the children will be ready for the style and matter of
Tennyson's _Idylls_. But they will not get the characteristic value of
the legend till, as mature and experienced readers of books and livers
of life, they come back to Malory and Chretien de Troyes.
Many wise teachers will dissent wholly from this view of the Arthur
stories, and in many schools they are presented in some form in the
fourth or fifth grade, and read in the _Idylls of the King_ in the
seventh and eighth. Suggestions for literature to accompany them will be
found in a later chapter.
Anybody who has read thus far can easily foretell what will be said
about the Siegfried legend. In the huge accumulation of sagas, romances,
and operas that now go to make up the legend, there are all sorts of
material--much of it totally unsuited for children. So far as I have
been able to find, there has not yet been made--certainly not in
English--a collection of the stories good in itself and good for
children. The teacher must do his own sifting and arranging, if it seems
well to study the Siegfried stories within the grades. The collection
of the stories that makes up the _Niebelungen Lied_ is particularly poor
in fitting material, being sordid and coarse in the domestic parts, and
tediously bloody in the heroic parts. Among the mass of stories given by
Morris and Magnussen in the _Voelsunga Saga_, and in Morris' _Sigurd the
Volsung_, one may find material for making his own epos of Siegfried,
simple, heroic, triumphant--the Siegfried who killed Fafnir, escaped the
snares of Regin, got the Nibelung treasure, rode through the magic fire
and freed Brunhild. You may be sure some old saga-singer closed the
story here and so may we. This leaves for a much later day in the
child's life the tragic Siegfried, whose domestic experience, with its
sordid motives, its bitter quarrels and ugly subterfuges, is surely not
beautiful or fitting for the children; and whose treacherous taking-off
is followed by a vengeance too grim and too merely fatalistic to be
planted in a child's consciousness.
As we find a sort of canon of fairy-tales, so we find a somewhat
accredited list of hero-tales, and the five we have discussed comprise
it. Occasionally a teacher may enrich his material by an episode from
_The Cid_, from the _Song of Roland_, from the heroic sagas of Iceland,
from some other mediaeval romance; but they will not detain him long,
nor will any one of them constitute a really good center for a prolonged
study.
In the later years of this period certain classes and certain schools
may find it well to read some of the literary stories of adventure, such
as _Ivanhoe_, or _Treasure Island_, or _The Last of the Mohicans_. In
the really great stories of adventure we find many of the things we know
to be good for the children--the "large room," the open atmosphere,
forest, sea, prairie, all the most disastrous chances of war and of
travel, noble deeds and generous character. Every parent and teacher
recognizes the danger which lies in the child's having too much even of
good story of adventure. And this sort of story is the peculiar field of
the cheap story-teller, in whose work the weaknesses and dangers of the
species especially abound. Since the "out-put" of such stories is
enormous, and since the children's access to them, in communities where
they can buy books, or have the use of a public library, is practically
unlimited, all teachers and parents should know the marks of the
undesirable story of adventure, and be able to guard against it. The
weakness and dangers of such a story are these:
1. The details are exaggerated until the event is too striking and too
highly flavored, so as to corrupt the taste and create an appetite that
continues to demand gross satisfaction.
2. There are likely to be too many sensations. The inartistic story of
adventure does not work up its incidents with an accumulation of details
and an effect of the passage of time that gives it verisimilitude, but
rushes forward with a crude and ill-digested happening on every five
pages. It is hard to believe that any artistic impression is made upon
children whose minds are excited and jaded by such books. They are a
mere indulgence.
3. In all but the best adventure the strain of suspense and surprise is
more than the children should be asked to endure. Too many experiences
of long tension and final hair-breadth escape weaken a child's credence
and harden his emotions so as to ruin his power of responding to such
appeals. The devices of suspense and surprise are employed, to be sure,
by the masters, but generally in due amount; while they are invariably
overworked by the cheap writer of adventure.
4. The facts of life and history are distorted and discolored. This is
the condemnation of such books as the Henty books. They profess to
attach themselves to historical events or periods, wh
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