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+The Project Gutenberg EBook of Literature in the Elementary School, by
+Porter Lander MacClintock
+
+This eBook is for the use of anyone anywhere at no cost and with
+almost no restrictions whatsoever.  You may copy it, give it away or
+re-use it under the terms of the Project Gutenberg License included
+with this eBook or online at www.gutenberg.org
+
+
+Title: Literature in the Elementary School
+
+Author: Porter Lander MacClintock
+
+Release Date: February 21, 2011 [EBook #35341]
+
+Language: English
+
+Character set encoding: ASCII
+
+*** START OF THIS PROJECT GUTENBERG EBOOK LITERATURE ***
+
+
+
+
+Produced by David Edwards, Martin Pettit and the Online
+Distributed Proofreading Team at http://www.pgdp.net (This
+file was produced from images generously made available
+by The Internet Archive)
+
+
+
+
+
+
+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, while as a matter of
+fact, they have nothing of the event or the period in them, except a few
+names and reflections of the most obvious aspects of the mere surface
+facts. As reflection of a period, or as illumination of an event in it,
+they are worse than useless--they are absurdly misleading. Only a
+genius, or a student who has immersed himself in the matter, can produce
+a story whose psychology, sociology, and archaeology will throw real
+light upon a bygone age or event. There are such stories, but they are
+not for elementary children; or, if they are, only as adventure, not as
+history. No one who chooses books for children should be misled by these
+cheap manufactured stories which claim as their reason for being that
+they have a historical background. After all, it is Scott who has given
+us the best big stories of adventure. _Ivanhoe_, _Quentin Durward_,
+_Anne of Geierstein_, _Guy Mannering_, with the proper condensations and
+adaptations, are of the best. Cooper, in certain of the Leatherstocking
+novels, creates the atmosphere of really great adventure. Stevenson knew
+the art of writing a "rattling good story," which yet keeps that balance
+of judgment and sense of proportion, that faithfulness to the truth (not
+the fact) of experience, which prevent its ever degenerating into
+sensationalism. Quiller-Couch and Joseph Conrad are two more modern
+writers who have achieved in many cases the level of great stories of
+adventure.
+
+It is not probable that children who are given the older epics and
+romances in school will have time for these more modern romances of
+adventure in the class. But whoever guides their out-of-school reading,
+be it parent or teacher, should have in mind these few simple grounds of
+choice.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER IX
+
+REALISTIC STORIES
+
+
+In the material we use for children, while it is not profitable to draw
+any close distinctions between romantic and realistic stories, we can
+not fail to distinguish in general between the hero-tale or the folk
+_Maerchen_, where we must expect preternatural powers and marvelous
+events, and the story which purports to deal with real people, and with
+experiences which, however rare, are still possible or probable. And
+these stories of real people and actual experiences have their value for
+the children--their own value, first of all, as making a distinct
+contribution to the child's education, and another value as tending to
+counteract and balance the effects of the thoroughgoing romances. No one
+questions the fact that there are ill effects from too much romance and
+too many marvels. A child's vision of the world does become distorted if
+it is too often or too long organized upon a plan dominated by the
+wonderful or the fantastic; his sense of fact dulled, if his imagination
+is called upon to appreciate and to produce prevailingly the unusual
+combinations; his taste vitiated, if he is supplied too abundantly with
+those striking and super-emotional incidents which fill the romances.
+All these dangers are counteracted in part by the child's fact-studies,
+and by his experiences in actual life. But this is not sufficient; it is
+artistically due him that the antidote should have the same kind of
+charm as the original poison. It is well, too, to bear in mind that even
+the small children should be appealed to on several sides, and that
+their taste should be made as catholic as possible. One is sorry to find
+a child of eight or ten who likes only fairy-tales, or war-stories, or
+detective stories; he should like all stories.
+
+But we are more interested, naturally, in the positive services
+performed by the stories of real life; or to be more explicit, those
+stories told with the effect of actuality, and with the atmosphere of
+verisimilitude. Of course, we should require of these stories good form
+and good writing, so that we may expect from them on that side what we
+expect from any good literature. In addition, we may expect them to
+perform for the children and for all of us certain distinctive artistic
+services. First, they operate to throw back upon actual life the glow of
+art. Those stories which use people and circumstances that we can match
+in our own actual surroundings and experiences impress upon us most
+vividly the fact, so important for our real culture both in art and in
+life, that literature is in a very real sense a presentation of life;
+that these charming people and things are but images taken up from the
+real world, chosen and raised to this level, by which very process they
+are invested with a halo of beauty and distinction. This nimbus of art
+casts back upon life some of its own radiance, dignifying and enriching
+it, and to many minds revealing for the first time beauty and meaning
+which they would otherwise never have seen; so that we truly see and
+rightly interpret many of the people and things in our own lives only
+after we have seen the mates of them in a story or a poem. A group of
+children who had been helped to make a verse about rosy radishes, and
+had then done a water-color picture of a plate of the same vegetable,
+found for many days new and artistic joy in a grocer's window. The same
+children, having learned Lowell's phrase of the dandelion's "dusty
+gold," were not satisfied till they had made a beautiful phrase to
+render the burnished gold of the butter-cups. The same class on a picnic
+labored with ardor to make a beautiful verse about Uneeda biscuits and
+ginger-ale, to match the Persian's "A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread."
+They were much baffled when they finally concluded that it would not
+go--that these modern and specific articles refused to wear a halo.
+
+The obverse and counterpart of this glow caught by the actual world from
+art is the vital interest that surrounds a person, or an object, or a
+sentiment which we come upon in a poem or a story, and which we
+recognize as corresponding to something in our own experience--a
+recognition all the more satisfying if the correspondence be that of
+actual identity. Every teacher of younger children recalls at once the
+tingling interest they feel in practically every story they are told, as
+some incident or detail parallels or suggests something they have
+known--"My father has seen a bear;" "Once I found an eagle's feather;"
+"There are daffodils in my grandmother's garden." A little girl of ten
+had been given a very simple arrangement of a melody from Beethoven's
+_Fifth Symphony_ to play on the piano. Soon after she had learned it,
+she was taken to hear the symphony. When her melody came dropping in
+from the flutes and violins--birds and brooks and whispering leaves--she
+threw up at her friend a flash of radiant surprise and delight. Her
+whole soul stirred to see here--in this stately place, with the great
+orchestra, in the noble assemblage of glorious concords--her friend,
+her little song. For days she played it over many times every day, with
+the greatest tenderness of expression.
+
+The wise teacher sees in this eager recognition and identification one
+of the most desirable results of literary experience, and utilizes it as
+the most precious of educational opportunities, since this mood of
+delighted recognition is with the younger children also the mood of
+creation, and with the older children the most useful and practical clue
+to the finding of their own literary material.
+
+It is in this kind of story--those that reflect the events of actual
+life and are concerned with ordinary people--that we are able to
+introduce our children in art to their contemporaries and coevals. It
+means much for a child's consciousness that he should develop a quick
+and dramatic sympathy with lives other than his own, and yet like his
+own--with the experiences and characters of other children, other folks'
+ways of living. This sympathy is among the literary products, since it
+is best developed and fostered by literature; this because it is
+literature only, that handles its material in that concrete and
+emotional way which produces the impression of actual reality and serves
+as a substitute for it. Teach the little children Stevenson's
+
+
+     Little Indian, Sioux or Crow,
+     Little frosty Eskimo,
+     Little Turk or Japanese,
+
+
+and teach it with the natural implications that will occur to any
+teacher of expedients, and you will have taught them a certain attitude
+of confidential understanding toward their brown brothers (in spite of
+the decidedly chauvinistic character of this masterpiece) that they
+would not have got out of a year of social history.
+
+The difficulties of choosing stories of modern child-life for teaching
+in school are serious. They are most likely to be thin in material,
+flimsy in structure, trivial in style, sentimental in atmosphere, so
+that they fall to pieces under the test of study in a class of acute and
+questioning children. It is best not to choose any long book of this
+sort. For the younger children use the shorter bits of story, such as
+may be found in Laura Richards' _Five Minute Stories_, or such as any
+teacher may collect for herself from many sources; occasionally one may
+find a perfect specimen in one of the children's periodicals, and there
+is now a wealth of such things in verse. We must be wary of those books
+about children, interpretative of children, of which our own day has
+produced so many charming specimens, whose appeal is entirely to
+adults. Such are Pater's _The Child in the House_, and Kenneth Graham's
+_The Golden Age_. Part of _A Child's Garden of Verses_ is of this kind.
+Of this sort, too, is the pretty little _Emmy Lou_, an interpretation of
+a child's consciousness, not a children's story.
+
+The general question of the reading of juveniles will be left for a
+chapter of miscellanies farther on. It is not possible to make any long
+book about children the center of a class's work. Such material is best
+used as a sort of reserve, a recreation from time to time, and is best
+given in short stories that can be read at intervals; or if it be a long
+story, one that can be distributed among the other reading. It is true
+of this kind of story too, that the best results come of using material
+not made especially for children, but which appeals to children,
+however, because it appeals to universal and elemental human nature.
+
+Among the folk-tales are many of the realistic type that are most
+serviceable. Like the folk fairy-tales they have that mysteriously but
+truly universal appeal, which makes them childlike, though originally
+they were not made for children. They are those comic and realistic
+tales which may originally have been coarse, but which have been refined
+by years and winnowed by use until they have taken on a form and value
+like those of some piece of ancient peasant hand-work--they are simple,
+genuine, homely art. Such are _Kluge Else_, _Hans in Luck_, _Great Claus
+and Little Claus_, _The Three Sillies_ and all the delightful company of
+noodles, and the great family of plain folks with their homely affairs.
+
+Of course, the great classic of the realistic method suited for children
+is _Robinson Crusoe_. From the days of Rousseau who designated it as the
+one book to be given to his ideally educated child, teachers have
+appreciated its value. Indeed, a very curious, but not unnatural, thing
+has happened, in the fact that this book has been so long and closely
+associated with children that it has come to be considered a sort of
+nursery classic, a wonder-tale composed for infants, by hosts of people
+who have no idea that it is in reality a masterly realistic novel and a
+profoundly philosophical culture-document--an epoch-making piece of art.
+Fortunately, it is easy to prepare it for the children; it is largely a
+matter of leaving out the reflective passages, and of translating into
+modern English the very few phrases and turns of expression now
+obsolete. One would deplore the reduction of the story for any purpose
+to mere babble--to words of one syllable, or any other form that
+destroys the flavor of Defoe's convincing style. It is easy to arrange
+the experiences so that the story serves the purposes of a cycle--a
+single experience constituting a portion which may be treated as a
+complete thing; for example, the making of the baskets, the construction
+of the pots, the saving of the seed.
+
+_Robinson Crusoe_ is a treasure to many a grade teacher, because it
+really "correlates" beautifully with work that the children are doing,
+or might well be doing, in the third and fourth grades; whether in their
+history study, where they are devising food and shelter, or have
+advanced to the study of trades and crafts; or, under an entirely
+different scheme, have started on the study of voyagers and colonists.
+The art and the charm of _Robinson Crusoe_, and the secret of its
+literary value for the child, lie in the power of the sheer realism--a
+realism not so much of material as of method--to hold and convince us. A
+part of this realism is the richness and homeliness of detail; the
+painstaking record of failures and tentative achievements; the calm,
+judicial view of experiments; the colorless flow of long periods of
+time; the homely, and as it were domestic, worth of Crusoe's successes.
+Oh, it is a great and convincing book! How great and how convincing one
+may realize when he reads the only one of the innumerable "Robinsons,"
+taking their inspiration from Defoe's book, that really survives--the
+_Swiss Family Robinson_, with its facile and too often fatuous ease of
+accomplishment, its total lack of reality, its stupid and blundering
+didacticism, its impossible jumble of detail, its commonplace romance;
+yet, we must reluctantly add, its unfailing charm for the children. That
+a book with all these faults keeps its hold upon the successive
+generations of children is testimony to the fact that its basis of
+interest, which is also for children the essential interest of _Robinson
+Crusoe_--the old foundation process of getting fire and roof and coat
+and bread--is the romance that is forever fresh and thrilling.
+
+The exceedingly thoroughgoing realism of the method (notice, not the
+large frame-work, which is sufficiently romantic) of _Robinson Crusoe_
+would suggest at once that it might profitably be accompanied by some
+bits of literature that would throw a more romantic and idealistic
+coloring upon the primitive craftsman and his craft, and upon the
+experiences of voyager and colonist. Such would be Bret Harte's
+_Columbus_, Mrs. Hemans' _The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers_, Marvell's
+_Bermudas_ (with a few difficult lines omitted). Longfellow's _Jasper
+Becerra_, the twenty-third Psalm, and several chapters from _Treasure
+Island_. Every teacher could add other titles.
+
+The older children--those of the seventh and eighth grades--may
+profitably read in school, for the sake of the intellectual experience,
+a classic detective story or a story whose plot and evolution present an
+almost purely intellectual problem. It is true that the air of
+intellectual acumen that pervades most of these stories is specious, and
+that they are in reality, and as a rule, shallow and unlogical pieces of
+reasoning. But it takes an older and more expert person to see this for
+himself. The teacher should try to qualify his children for judging a
+good story of this kind, and save them, if possible, from the
+detective-story habit, which wastes much good time and fills a child's
+mind with very cheap problems. But if he choose a good story of this
+kind for reading with his class, he may help to set their minds going in
+that region where the imagination must ally itself with logic and with a
+reasoned and inevitable progress of events. Properly channeled, this is
+a most valuable experience, both from the purely mental and from the
+literary points of view. After all, the best detective story in English
+is Poe's _The Gold Bug_. There is, of course, that element in _Treasure
+Island_, but, being there so interwoven with the romantic and
+adventurous details of that delectable tale, it is not likely to yield
+for the children that peculiar bit of training which they might get
+from the more unmixed intellectuality and more obvious realism of _The
+Gold Bug_.
+
+It is difficult to know what to say, and where to say it, concerning
+_Don Quixote_. That triumphant book is assuredly a masterpiece of the
+realistic method. It came as an antidote and tonic, helping to restore
+health and sanity to a romance-sick world, and it ought to have a place
+in the discipline of certain kinds of young people. But it cannot be
+said that this place is always within the elementary period, unless a
+certain grade or certain children have had a peculiar experience and can
+be said to need it. If the grade has had the King Arthur stories of
+Malory or Tennyson in large amounts with a very earnest teacher, they
+can very certainly be said to need _Don Quixote_--always, of course,
+shortened and expurgated, and in carefully chosen episodes; from which
+process--such is its essential greatness, and such the character of its
+unity--it suffers less than any other story in the world. We should be
+quite aware of the danger of giving the children any large amount of
+this peculiar kind of realism--that which constitutes itself a satire
+and a sort of parody on some over-serious bit of romance. Nothing is
+more deadening and more commonplace than this peculiar form of wit,
+when it becomes a habit or offers itself in a mass. But the peculiar
+vitality and richness of _Don Quixote_ lifts it far above the level of
+parody, constituting it a magnificent original piece of art in itself.
+However, the whole question must be left open. It may be that not until
+he is far along in the secondary school or in college is the scholar
+suffering for _Don Quixote_, or capable of appreciating it.
+
+Among the older children the note of realism and wit may be sounded in a
+wisely chosen essay. Of course, they are not ready for the indirect and
+allusive manner, nor for the lyric egoism, of the pure literary essay.
+But there are essays of Lamb's, a very few of Steele's, some of Sidney
+Smith's, some of the more literary of Burroughs' nature-studies, bits of
+Oliver Wendell Holmes and Charles Dudley Warner, that are ideal for
+them.
+
+Shall we sum up by saying that, on the whole, we find the romantic and
+fanciful stories best suited in form and spirit to the elementary
+children; since realistic stories that are really good art, are, as a
+rule, too mature and too difficult for the children, and realistic
+stories of the juvenile type are not good enough either in form or in
+content to justify long class study? However, certain distinctive and
+desirable results may be expected from specimens interwoven here and
+there of that kind of story which represents real life, which uses
+events both possible and probable, and which handles its material by the
+method of realistic detail. In the earliest years these may be secured
+by the reading of well-chosen little stories of modern children--indeed,
+of any modern material, provided it be simple enough--and by the
+teaching of verses which reflect aspects of actual life--human life or
+nature. In the third or fourth grade _Robinson Crusoe_ forms a desirable
+basis for the year's work. It should always be accompanied by shorter
+bits of a more romantic and heroic type. Later in the elementary
+period--say in the sixth or seventh grade--the reasonable and practical
+element may be introduced in the form of a story of the detective
+kind--a story whose plot presents an intellectual problem, whose
+atmosphere and method make the impression of actual fact. And in the
+seventh and eighth grade these same purposes--that of exhibiting to the
+children actual human life as art sees it, that of bringing them into
+educational contact with the realistic method, that of counteracting any
+possible mental danger from too much romance and adventure--may be
+served by essays chosen on principles already many times suggested.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER X
+
+NATURE AND ANIMAL STORIES
+
+
+In a discussion of these stories we should again take to ourselves the
+warning that we must guard constantly and carefully against too narrow a
+view of literature. The reckless lack of knowledge and experience that
+sweeps into the category of literature everything expressed in words is
+so irritating to a careful student that he is always in danger of
+allowing his irritation to help carry him to the other extreme--that of
+an uncatholic exclusiveness. We must, however, be aware of the fact that
+other kinds of writing, entirely technical and special in their simpler
+varieties, are constantly approaching the borders of literature, as they
+become more and more humanized, draw about them more and more of
+emotional association, and take on more of the graces of the arts of
+writing. We must be aware of this, and we must be, as it were,
+constantly on the lookout for a possible new arrival among the kinds of
+literature, and be prepared to give it hospitality; and we must
+acknowledge that some of the results which we desire to accomplish
+through genuine literature are accomplished through those things that
+have only some of the characteristics of literature. But still, for the
+sake of the good pedagogical and critical conscience, and for the sake
+of keeping the fundamental distinctions as clear as possible, the
+teacher needs to know precisely what he is doing when he is using this
+material. He must decide, in the very earliest years of a child's
+education, whether he is teaching facts and theories, or presenting art,
+in his story.
+
+The custom of using animals and plants to represent human beings and to
+express human meanings is as old as folk-art itself. Quite as old, too,
+is the revelation that the creatures have individualities and
+personalities of their own to be dramatically and sympathetically set
+forth in terms of human psychology, in default of a truer one. The mind
+of man goeth not back to the time when the fox, the cock, and the
+ass--Reynard, Chanticleer, and Brunel--the rabbit, the eagle, the oak,
+and the vine, were not well-defined characters, well provided with
+affairs. But this early folk treatment of the creatures was distinctly
+art, occasionally morals, but not science. It did not aim to teach the
+facts as to the structure and habits of the creatures as life-forms. It
+interpreted human life through them or them by means of human terms.
+
+Precisely here we must begin our discrimination between real literature
+and "nature-stories." The longing to pass down to the infant mind the
+results of scientific discovery has produced in our generation (perhaps
+it was really produced in the generation preceding ours) an enormous
+crop of most anomalous growths in this field of nature-stories. A
+favorite method of teaching a child the facts about any object or
+process in nature has been to translate it into a story of human
+affairs, or draw it up as a picture of a human situation, involving
+naturally and inevitably, a multitude of extraneous or misleading
+details. For example, we would teach a child about the distribution of
+the dandelion plant. So we construct the "Story of the Dandelion Seed."
+Now, there undoubtedly is a _story_ of the dandelion seed. Incident
+follows incident, stage follows stage, from bloom to bloom again--every
+step beautiful and interesting in itself, and to be completely trusted
+to make its own appeal, just displayed for itself. But some people doubt
+this. They have lost, or have never acquired, that faith in nature and
+her processes which trusts to this appeal; and then they long--and this
+is quite natural--to enlist in aid of their fact-studies the charm and
+the emotion that lies in literature. So they endow the Dandelion Seed
+with a papa and a mama--a jovial suburbanite of a papa, and a fussy,
+sentimentalizing mama--with a cradle, with a vocabulary, with a system
+of morals (there are even "naughty" Dandelion Seeds), and with many
+feelings. They tell about his "home," his infancy, his training, his
+departure, his settling in a new home--all the while with the intention
+of teaching their infants the facts, but all the while covering them up
+under a trivial and unnecessary myth. In the end the product is scorned
+by science for its overlay of misleading detail, and rejected by art for
+the obnoxious intrusion of work-a-day and professional fact. Now, let
+who will believe that such stories and verses are a legitimate way of
+conveying or of illuminating scientific fact; but let him not suppose
+that they are literature. The case is different when the teacher of fact
+happens to find in art, in real literature, some picture or detail with
+which to emotionalize and beautify his fact. It does sometimes happen
+that the poem, the folk-tale, the fable, has set in some charming human
+light certain aspects of the object which the children are studying.
+They are entitled to these to help them to see their object or event in
+the round.
+
+It is true, of course, that no piece of literature that handles for its
+purposes natural objects can afford to be flagrantly inaccurate. We all
+know how neatly John Burroughs punctured Longfellow's bit of pathos,
+"There are no birds in last year's nests," by proving that many species
+of birds devote themselves to securing and occupying last year's nests.
+But in the main it is truth rather than fact that literature gives
+us--truth, or fact colored and interpreted by personal association and
+emotion; we must not ask colorless fact of her, and it is the most
+unprofitable quibbling to demand of her scientific exactness, which is
+always prosaic. On the other hand, there is no place in nature-study for
+the imagination of invention, nor for any of those striking and dramatic
+effects arranged and calculated, secured by manipulation and choice of
+material--effects which are the very native method of literature.
+
+But writing about animals and objects in nature may become literature
+when, losing sight of the need of teaching fact, of giving professional
+instruction, it presents them as personalities, when it humanizes them,
+either by attributing to them human qualities and feelings, or by
+surrounding them with an atmosphere of human emotion and experience; it
+may become good literature when it does these things well; the chances
+are all against its becoming great literature at all.
+
+If the nature-story making use of literary devices, but designed to
+teach scientific fact, is anomalous, the case is no better, artistically
+or educationally, when the story of an animal is made the propaganda of
+the Humane Society, or of the anti-vivisectionists, or of any other
+believers, no matter how just and important may be their belief or
+doctrine. I have known a child whose outlook was prejudiced, and whose
+mental repose most seriously disturbed, by an over-earnest and
+over-colored story of the sufferings of a deserving and phenomenally
+sensitive cab-horse; and this morbid sense of suffering was the result
+of reading a book whose style was commonplace, whose structure was
+chaotic, whose sentiment was melodramatic, and whose psychology was
+guesswork--which did not yield, in a word, a single one of the desirable
+fruits of literature. We must devise some way to preserve and to deepen
+in our little people that humorous, loving sympathy with our furry and
+hairy brothers, more wholesome and natural than stories of suicidal
+ponies, revolutionary stallions, persecuted partridges, and heart-broken
+mastiffs. Better than any library of books about them is the friendship
+of one dog or horse, or the care of any, the humblest, pet. And at least
+we may remind ourselves that we do not have to accomplish the awakening
+of that or any other sympathy at the cost of teaching as literature
+stories undesirable and inartistic.
+
+The oldest of beast-tales available for occidental children is the story
+of Reynard the Fox. We all know how there grew up about the original
+core of the story a vast accretion of material, which became ever more
+and more satirical and abstract, until finally the original folk-cycle
+was buried under it. Of course, in the later forms the tales are most
+unchildlike. But it is not so difficult to extract from the cycle the
+original simpler one--or at least to get together a cycle which has the
+simplicity, the sincerity, and the objectivity of genuine folk-art. The
+children love the tales, and get so much out of them that it is a pity
+for any child to miss them completely; though I should never advise that
+many of the tales be read to them continuously. To do this would be to
+immerse them in an atmosphere of trickery. It is better to keep the
+story lying by, and to read them an episode now and then in the
+intervals of something more serious. Many people will question the moral
+effect of stories in which the rascal uniformly triumphs, as in
+_Reynard_. But I have observed, among the children with whom I have read
+it, that they are never in sympathy with Reynard, and are never pleased
+with his triumphs. This is in striking, and in some respects puzzling,
+contrast with the fact that the triumphs and successes of Bre'r Rabbit
+in _Uncle Remus_ always delight the children. The tales that Joel
+Chandler Harris has assembled in this collection constitute a most
+charming and usable beast-epic. The universal sympathy with this hero
+may be encouraged and enjoyed without misgiving, because Bre'r Rabbit
+succeeds by subtlety, where Reynard succeeds by knavery. Bre'r Rabbit's
+triumphs are those of sheer intellect, as truly as are those of
+Odysseus, while Reynard's are those of low and cruel cunning. It is
+impossible to exaggerate the access of charm and interest that invest
+the _Uncle Remus_ stories because of Uncle Remus himself. He is the
+genuine folk story-teller, full of faith and sincerity, yet steeped in
+humor, and gifted with the sense of essential reality; add to this that
+he is a gentle soul, a devoted lover of childhood, with a never-failing
+sense of the reverence due the child. While to those who know the negro
+dialect the stories lose much by translation, still they are good enough
+to bear even this test, and such translation is necessary for some
+groups of children. Like the Reynard tales, those of Bre'r Rabbit are
+best inserted here and there throughout the year and not read in a mass.
+
+The fables--all those oriental and classic ones that are called
+Aesop's, as well as many of La Fontaine's--are, from the literary point
+of view the best of the animal stories. Leave quite out of view their
+moralistic and figurative meanings, and most of them are sympathetic and
+dramatic presentations of the animals themselves, with those wider human
+implications that make an anecdote about an animal literature rather
+than science. The family or the schoolroom that can possess a copy of
+Boutet de Monvel's _La Fontaine_ has in the pictures the most charming
+and penetrating criticism and interpretation of the fables themselves,
+of the animals who appear in them, and of the motives and experiences
+that lie behind them.
+
+Scattered throughout the folk-tales and among the fairy-stories that we
+know best are some fascinating animal stories. The folk-mind is always
+impressed in an imaginative way with the relation between man and the
+animals--not always a loving or sympathetic relation. They feel, what
+the modern writing humanitarian seems to have determined to ignore, that
+deep, psychic, inscrutable animosity, be it instinct or race-memory or
+whatever it may be, that has always existed between man and the beasts;
+though there are among practically all the folk whose tales we have
+collected, stories of "grateful beasts," of friendly and serviceable
+animals. Then there are such classics as _The Little Red Hen_,
+_Henny-Penny_, _The Three Billy-Goats_, and _The Musicians of Bremen_,
+whose perfection of art as stories and as presentations of life is
+beyond criticism.
+
+The native stories of many of the North American Indian tribes have a
+charming way of presenting the animals. Unfortunately, most of our
+Indian folk-lore was collected and reduced to literary form in what one
+may call the _blaue Blume_ period of folk-lore collecting, and is
+spoiled everywhere by the oversentimental strain of the period. We could
+well spare an occasional account of what one might infer to be a common
+habit of love-lorn Indian maidens--that of casting themselves headlong
+from inaccessible cliffs at sunset,--to make room for some of the
+humorous and fanciful tales of the animals that the Indians knew so well
+and to which they lived so near. The Zuni folk-tales collected by Frank
+Cushing have much of this element in them, and it constitutes one of
+their many charms.
+
+East Indian folk-lore is peculiarly rich in tales of animals--fables,
+bits of beast-wisdom and beast-adventure. It may be that this fact
+co-operated with his own gift to make Rudyard Kipling the greatest of
+all modern makers of animal-stories. The _Jungle Books_ stand unique
+and imperishable as one of the perfect art-products of the nineteenth
+century. Like everything else that is true art, these stories never
+become stale. This gives them a peculiar value. For the children who
+have had them at home are always willing to hear them again with the
+class. We can read them _to_ the third grade for the story, and _with_
+the sixth grade for the style, and the eighth grade is not above hearing
+_Toomai of the Elephants_ at any time. The teacher himself will find
+unfailing satisfaction in them because, in addition to all their charms
+as interpretations of the beasts and presentation of human nature, they
+show all the marks of expert workmanship. This appears in the masterly
+structure of the story, the organization of the material, the economy of
+incident, the successful style which combines in a most unusual way, a
+reserve and finish that would become a literary essayist, with a power
+of vivid and striking phrase that characterizes the most successful
+journalist. So that teacher and children are both interested and
+disciplined by every reading of the _Jungle Books_.
+
+Among all their verse literature, from the Mother Goose melodies to
+Wordsworth in the eighth grade, the children will find poems about
+animals. A catalogue of the nursery and fairy-book animals is a very
+instructive document--indeed, a catalogue of poetical beasts in general,
+is very illuminating. All the verses about animals that have come down
+to us in the traditionary jingles are good as art and on the whole, fair
+to the animals. "Baa, Black Sheep," "The Mouse Ran Up the Clock,"
+"Johnny Shuter's Mare," and all the others, yield the fruits of
+literature, but only after much torturing, the fruits of science.
+Gradually to these we add such as Cowper's tame but touching pictures of
+his pets; Wordsworth's tender and far-seeing poems about the shepherds
+and their flocks, the doe and the hart, the pet lamb, the faithful dogs;
+Blake's wonderful pair of poems, "The Tiger" and "The Lamb;" Mary Lamb's
+exquisite picture of the boy and the snake; Emerson's "The Bumble Bee;"
+those splendid imaginative characterizations of the beasts from the
+thirty-eighth to the forty-first chapters of Job; "The Jackdaw of
+Rheims;" "How They Brought the Good News." Why extend the actual list?
+They are all things that place the animals which appear in them in their
+romantic or tender relations to human beings, or interpret in a dramatic
+and literary way the imaginary consciousness of the animal.
+
+There is little danger of making poetry that is good enough to be given
+as poetry, do the work of information-teaching. It seems easy to see in
+the case of the poem, with its more imaginative method and its more
+artificial form, that you spoil it as art when you teach it as science.
+This fact is equally true of a good literary story.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XI
+
+SYMBOLISTIC STORIES, FABLES, AND OTHER APOLOGUES
+
+
+It is not possible, in the plan adopted for this little book, to keep
+the topics always strictly apart. It is not possible, for example, to
+relegate to one section all one has to say about folk- and
+fairy-stories, and to another all about fables, because each type has so
+many aspects and radiations. Fables are stories; most of them are
+animal-stories; they are symbolistic or figurative or allegorical--so
+that one must approach them from many points of view, and take them into
+consideration in many connections. There need be, therefore, no apology
+for taking up in this new section topics partially discussed elsewhere.
+
+It seems quite consonant with our best conclusions about younger
+children to say that, on the whole, in the earlier years of their school
+life their literature should be of that objective kind where no more is
+meant than meets the eye. They may have tales of adventure, of plain
+experience, of highly imaginative experience, of animal life, of
+fairyland; but as far as possible let them be such as contain no occult
+and secondary meanings. There are many things desirable for all
+children, and under certain school conditions compulsory or
+indispensable for some children, which do have this secondary meaning.
+Such, if one uses them, are the stories from the great myths; such are
+practically all of Andersen's _Maerchen_; such are the legendary stories
+of the Hebrew patriarchs. Of course, the parent or teacher who presents
+these things to his children may say that the children never perceive or
+even suspect an inner meaning. And it is true that, with great care and
+skill, the objective upper surface may be kept before some children.
+But, on the whole, it is good morality and good pedagogy to give to the
+children nothing that you are not willing, even desirous, that they
+should probe to the bottom. It is always a misfortune when one must say
+to a child, "I can't explain that to you now;" "You can't understand
+that yet;" so much a misfortune that no teacher should ever invite it.
+If you have ever looked into the faces of the fifth grade when they were
+searching you with questions to get at the meaning of Andersen's
+pessimistic story of _The Little White Hen_; if you have seen the sixth
+grade grow melancholy, with a vague augury of trouble they could not
+fathom, when you have read to them the brilliant but tragic little
+apologue of _Mr. Seguin's Goat_; if you have been obliged to explain to
+some puzzled and suspicious eight-year-old the _raison d'etre_ of the
+clock-ticking alligator in _Peter Pan_, you have resolved hereafter to
+give them no symbolism, or to give them symbolism whose presence they
+could not possibly suspect (a most difficult thing to do in the case of
+that many-minded, hundred-eyed child, the class), or to give such
+symbolism as would invite them into paths where you would gladly have
+them walk, whose most ultimate implication you are at least _willing_ to
+explain to them. Of course, this principle cannot be pushed to its
+logical extreme; merely logical extremes are always absurd. One does not
+go into the philosophical depths of the special historical epoch he
+chooses for his children, nor does he instruct them in the remote
+scientific principles behind their window-garden or their aquarium of
+polywogs and salamanders. But, if he is wise, he hopes to choose such
+work, and present such aspects of it, as contain no insoluble mystery,
+and do not tempt the children into paths for which their feet are not
+ready.
+
+So, when one is choosing literature it is very easy to fill all the time
+the children have for it in the first four or five years of school with
+things that are largely objective, and that, so far as their large
+framework goes, mean just what they say. Indeed, will not most modern
+teachers concede that throughout the period and in all his subjects it
+is for the mental good of the child not to be called upon too frequently
+to formulate principles, or habitually to look below the surface of his
+facts for interpretations and secondary meanings? Of course, he must be
+led by the natural stages to see through figures of speech, and to
+understand and apply proverbs, and the proverbial manner of speech.
+
+Proverbs, indeed, exemplify and epitomize the essentially literary type
+of thinking and speaking. They are concrete and picturesque rather than
+abstract, specific rather than general, though we are to understand by
+them also the abstract and the general; this is the fact that gives them
+their unique value as literary training. The teacher must call upon his
+wisdom in choosing proverbs suitable for the children. Many proverbs are
+pessimistic, even cynical: "It never rains but it pours;" many embody a
+merely commonplace or unmoral code: "Honesty is the best policy;" some
+are ambiguous: "There's honor among thieves;" some the modern world has
+outgrown; many are too mature, too occult, or too worldly for a child.
+But a great store remains--vivid, practical bits of experience and
+tested wisdom which will develop a child's mental quickness, will do
+something toward equipping him with the common wisdom of his race, and
+will accustom him to one of the most characteristic methods of
+literature. This is a good place to say that good results never seem to
+come of asking the children for an exposition of the proverb. Indeed, it
+is extremely difficult to get from children an exposition or definition
+of any kind. The better way of making sure that they have appropriated a
+proverb is to ask them to invent or re-call an incident or a situation
+to which the proverb will apply. Naturally this is not an exercise for
+the youngest children.
+
+In the earlier years a great many of the simple old fables may be
+taught. One is tempted to say that the traditionary or given moral
+should never be told to the children; but that is a little too sweeping.
+As a rule, however, it is better to lead them to make their own
+interpretation or generalization, in those cases where such a thing is
+desired. For, as a matter of fact, many of the fables are so good as
+stories that they may often be left to stand merely as pleasant tales.
+
+But as the children grow more penetrating, the fable is the best
+possible form of symbolistic literature to set them at first. These,
+with the minor exercise in the apprehension and interpretation of
+figures of speech, will be their share of the symbolistic kind of
+writing for several years. Then we may introduce more specimens, and
+more complex specimens, until in the sixth- and seventh-grade periods
+they may be able to interpret the universal and symbolic side of much
+that they read, and to handle with ease and delight such parables as
+_The Great Stone Face_ or _The Bee-Man of Orn_. Their experience in
+literature will then harmonize with their experience in other
+directions; for they should then, or immediately afterward, be beginning
+to look for generalizations, to carry abstract symbols, and to
+substitute them at will for concrete matter. At the same time, then,
+they will study these fables as apologues, making in all cases their own
+moral and application.
+
+Perhaps this is the place to insert a caution against the practice of
+extracting a "deeper meaning" out of a child when he does not easily see
+it, or of so instructing him that he comes to regard every story that he
+reads as a sort of picture puzzle in which he is to find a "concealed
+robber" in the shape of a moral or a general lesson. It is a trivial
+habit of mind, a pernicious critical obsession, of which many
+over-earnest adult readers are victims--that of wringing from every and
+any bit of writing an abstract or moralistic meaning. Another practical
+caution may be needed as to these interpretations: Do not leave the
+discussion until the class has worked out from the fable a moral or
+application that practically the whole class accepts and the teacher
+indorses. Do not accept numerous guesswork explanations and let them
+pass. Even the little children, if they are allowed to interpret at all,
+should be pushed on and guided to a sound and essential exegesis--to use
+a term more formidable than the thing it names. Do not let them linger
+even tentatively in that lamentable state of making their explanation
+rest upon some minor detail, some feature on the outskirts of the story.
+Help them always to go to the center, and to make the essential
+interpretation. Make a point of this whenever they have a story that
+calls for interpretation at all. To the end that they may be sincere and
+thorough, choose those things whose secondary meanings they may as
+children feel and understand. The sixth-grade children could, in most
+schools, interpret _The Ugly Ducking_. They may easily be led into the
+inner significance of _The Bee-Man of Orn_ or _Old Pipes and the Dryad_.
+They may go on in seventh grade to certain of Hawthorne's--perhaps "The
+Great Stone Face" and others of the _Twice Told Tales_; though Hawthorne
+is so sombre and so moralistic that it is not good for some children to
+read his tales, still less to linger over them and interpret them. A
+mature and experienced eighth grade could study "The Snow Image"; but it
+is too delicate and remote for all eighth-grade classes. "The Minister's
+Black Veil" is an example of the peculiar Hawthornesque gloom, which the
+children would not understand or by ill luck would understand, and
+suffer the consequent dangerous depression. Addison's "The Vision of
+Mirza" is an example of a standard little allegory, simple and easy, and
+at the same time full of meaning and fruitful of reflection for the
+children. The parables of the gospels are quite unique in their beauty
+and ethical significance, and afford an opportunity for a most valuable
+kind of training in literary exegesis. Certain tales from the _Gesta
+Romanorum_ might be read in these older grades, adding the
+interpretations of the ecclesiastics for the gaiety of the class, and as
+a terrible warning against wresting an allegory out of a story by sheer
+violence.
+
+There are several reasons why the extended allegories do not yield good
+results with a class. In the first place, it takes too long to get
+through them, so that the process keeps the children too long in an
+atmosphere of allegorical and symbolistic meanings, which will confuse
+and baffle them. In the second place, all the extended literary
+allegories have each behind it a complex system of abstract theology or
+morals, or some other philosophy, which cannot be conveyed to children,
+but which cannot be hidden from the class. Then in any long allegory,
+such as _The Pilgrim's Progress_ or _The Fairie Queene_, the multiplied
+detail all loaded with secondary significance is extremely misleading to
+all but expert readers. As Ruskin says of myth, we may say of all other
+allegory: the more it means, the more numerous and the more grotesque do
+the details become. And we would not choose in a child's literary
+training any large mass of material in which grotesqueness is a
+prevailing note. Nearly all children are interested in _The Pilgrim's
+Progress_, and will listen with eagerness to the romantic and
+adventurous side of Christian's experience, but not, of course, to the
+didactic and theological passages. And as a matter of fact, modern
+religious teaching and the new race-consciousness of our generation have
+taken all sense of reality out of Bunyan's theology and religious
+psychology; and of course, it can be read to the modern child only
+cursorily, as in the home--never in detail and with the privilege of
+questioning as in the class.
+
+One would expect a really good eighth-grade child to be able to detect
+and express the lesson in Lowell's _The Vision of Sir Launfal_, or
+Tennyson's _Sir Galahad_, or Longfellow's _King Robert of Sicily_. It
+need hardly be said that the exercises in the symbolistic kinds of
+literature are to be inserted here and there among the other lessons. It
+would be a serious mistake to give any class a whole year--or a whole
+month, indeed--of this experience in reading.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XII
+
+POETRY
+
+
+There are certain results in literary training that can be secured with
+children only by the teaching of poetry. In story we and they are intent
+upon subject-matter, and on the larger matters of the imaginative
+creation. And, while we older students know that the choice and
+arrangement of material involved in the making of a story are extremely
+important and most truly educative, we also know that they belong in the
+larger framework of the story and do not lend themselves to close
+inspection or detailed study when our scholars are elementary children.
+
+Again, most of the stories best suited to the children must be used in
+translated and adapted versions, and all of them should be told in a way
+that varies more or less from telling to telling, in vocabulary, in
+figure, and occasionally in material detail. As a result, the stories,
+until we come down to the very last year of the period, make on the
+children no impression of the inevitableness of form, or of any of the
+smaller devices of style and finish. These may be brought to bear in
+verse. It should not be necessary to say again that the children will
+know nothing of "larger effects" and "smaller details;" but the teacher
+should know them, and should have some plan that will include both in
+his teaching. Neither is it necessary to say that these minor matters of
+style and finish that we will pause over with our elementary class will
+prove to be very simple matters from the point of view of the expert and
+adult critic.
+
+It is verse that gives the child most experience in the musical side of
+literature. The rhythm and cadence of prose have their own
+music--perhaps more delicate and pleasing to the trained adult ear than
+the rhythm of verse. But the elementary children need the simple
+striking rhythm of verse, of verse whose rhythm is quite unmistakable.
+Indeed, it is profitable in the first verses that children learn to have
+an emphatic meter, so that the musical intention may not be missed, and
+that it may be possible easily to accompany the recitation of the verses
+with movement, even concerted movement as of clapping or marching. One
+who is trying to write a sober treatise in a matter-of-fact way dares
+not, lest he be set down as the veriest mystic, say all the things that
+might be said about the function of rhythm, especially in its more
+pronounced form of meter, among a community of children, no matter what
+the size of the group--how rhythmic motion, or the flow of measured and
+beautiful sounds, harmonizes their differences, tunes them up to their
+tasks, disciplines their conduct, comforts their hurts, quiets their
+nerves; all this apart from the facts more or less important from the
+point of view of literature, that it cultivates their ear, improves
+their taste, and provides them a genuinely artistic pleasure. If it
+happens that the sounds they are chanting be a bit of real poetry, it
+further gives them perhaps more than one charming image, and many
+pleasant or useful words.
+
+Most children are pleased with the additional music of rhyme. This is
+true of all kinds of rhyme, but of course it is the regular terminal
+rhyme that most children notice and enjoy and remember.
+
+
+     Sing a song of sixpence,
+       A pocket full of rye,
+     Four and twenty blackbirds
+       Baked in a pie.
+
+
+all the children will rejoice in _rye_--_pie_. But there will be some to
+whom _sing_--_song_--_sixpence_--_pocket_, _full_--_four_,
+_blackbirds_--_baked_, are so many delights, and there may be some to
+whom the wonderful chime of the vowels will make music. Anyone who knows
+children will have noticed the pleasure that the merest babies will
+take in beautiful or especially pat collocations of syllables. A child
+whom I knew, just beginning to talk, would say to himself many times a
+day, and always with a smile of amused pleasure, the phrases
+"apple-batter pudding," "picallilli pickles," "up into the cherry tree,"
+"piping down the valleys wild." It is probably true that some of his
+apparent pleasure was that species of hysteria produced in most babies
+by any mild explosion, and the little fusillade of _p's_ in the examples
+he liked best would account for a part of his enjoyment. But we must
+think that there was pleasure there, and, whether it were physical or
+mental, it arose from the pleasing combination of verbal sounds. Most
+children have this ear for the music of words; and some attempt should
+be made to evoke it in those that have it not.
+
+This quality, then, is the first thing we ask of the verse we choose for
+the youngest children. The mere jingles, provided they are really
+musical, are useful to emphasize this side of verse, because, being free
+from content, they can give themselves entirely to sound. It is also
+most desirable that some of these earliest verses be set to music that
+the children can sing; that the class march to the rhythm of recited
+verses; that they be taught, if possible, to dance to some of them.
+Some such form of accompaniment of the verses, deepens the impression of
+the music, records in the child's consciousness an impression of the
+poem as an image of motion, and opens a channel for the expression of
+the mood produced in the children by the verses--a more acceptable
+channel of expression, certainly, for all the lyrics and for most of the
+narrative verses, than mere recitation, and a more artistic one than
+what we commonly know and dread as elocution.
+
+The teaching of verse gives a chance and an invitation to linger over
+and enjoy many fine and delicate aspects of the art that we are likely
+to miss in the story. Something in the nature of verse--the
+condensation, the careful arrangement, the chosen words--seems to call
+upon us to go slowly with it. It may be that we linger to apprehend one
+by one the details of an image or picture, like--
+
+
+     Daffy-down dilly has come up to town
+     In a yellow petticoat and a green gown,
+
+     The captain was a duck, with a jacket on his back;
+
+          The cattle are grazing,
+          Their heads never raising,
+          There are forty feeding like one;
+
+     In the pool drowse the cattle up to their knees,
+     The crows fly over by twos and threes;
+
+
+some apt or beautiful phrase--
+
+
+     Snowy summits old in story;
+
+
+some bit of simple wisdom that deserves pondering; some flash of wit or
+epigram, or enticing touch of nonsense.
+
+These are really about all that we would pause over in teaching verses
+to the younger children. Indeed, are not these elements about all of
+what we call the smaller matters of literary art that elementary
+children may be expected to concern themselves with--the music of the
+spoken verse, appreciation of the beauty or adequacy of striking
+pictures and images, recognition of some specially fit epithet,
+interpretation of an aphorism or a paradox or a bit of nonsense? We will
+discuss later some possible ways of getting these things done.
+
+When we say that a poem gives us our best chance to study these finer
+details, we should not by any means understand that in teaching a poem
+we are to ignore the other matter of plan and structure. The very
+condensation and beautiful organization of a poem are likely to result
+in a charming plan, which both adds to the children's sense of its
+beauty and helps to fix it in their memory. Every teacher will
+notice--merely to mention examples--the perfect structure, what we have
+called the "pattern," of Stevenson's "Dark brown is the river," of
+Allingham's "I wish I were a primrose," of Wordsworth's, "I heard a
+thousand blended notes;" and every teacher will realize the greater
+class utility of a poem with such a structure.
+
+The kinds of poetry suitable by virtue of their content for the children
+throughout the whole elementary period are first, lyrics of the simpler
+varieties, beginning with those which are practically only jingles, and
+going on to those that are more complex in form and more mature in
+thought, but which still record, as it were, the first reaction of the
+mind, the primary mood, not the complex and remote moods of developed
+lyric poetry; and second, poetry of the epic kind, beginning with the
+Mother Goose ballads, and advancing to the objective heroic ballads in
+which English literature is so rich, and perhaps (undoubtedly in certain
+schools) including some of the longer narrative poems of the type of
+idyls.
+
+It is clear to most teachers that the less the earlier lyrics say, the
+better. The simplicity of the content makes it possible to emphasize all
+the more the music and the motion. As the lyrics increase in content,
+and as we begin to expect the children to enter into the mood which
+their poem reflects, it becomes important to select such as record a
+mood or an experience which they can apprehend or might legitimately
+apprehend. Luckily, in our day it is no longer necessary to remonstrate
+against what one may almost call the crime of requiring children to
+study and to return "The Barefoot Boy," "Still sits the schoolhouse by
+the road," "I remember, I remember the house where I was born"--adult
+reminiscence of childhood, which is undoubtedly the most alien of moods
+and processes to the child. But we are likely to be caught by the
+apparent simplicity of certain verses which, written after the pattern
+of _A Child's Garden_--indeed, the class includes some of these very
+poems--record feelings about children and childhood. These verses, like
+some of the delightful stories and studies mentioned in a previous
+chapter are studies and realizations of the child's consciousness
+calculated to delight and illuminate the adult reader. If children read
+and understood them, the result would be that ghastly spectacle--a child
+conscious of his own childhood.
+
+No poetry given to children should be too imaginative, too figurative,
+or too emotional. Here, to be sure, one must judge afresh for each
+class. It is obvious that children of the eighth grade can apprehend a
+poem that would bewilder the sixth; that children in one community,
+even in one neighborhood, will understand a poem which children of a
+different community and upbringing could not fathom. But the standard
+is, after all, not infinitely variable. A good average seventh grade
+almost anywhere would appreciate without difficulty, including the
+spiritual application, Tennyson's "Bugle Song;" they could not find
+their way among the many figures and the alien imaginative mood, the
+poignant unknown emotion, of "Tears, idle tears."
+
+It is not easy to go wrong in choosing the ballads. And by "ballads" we
+are to understand the short narrative poem, traditionary or artistic.
+The folk-ballads need translation here and there, and are scarcely
+available at all for the youngest children. But those who are old enough
+to hear the Robin Hood tales will enjoy the folk-ballads, if the teacher
+take pains to prepare them and read them aright. As in the case of some
+of the heroic epics, some editing is necessary for most of the ballads.
+They should be given in the "say and sing," manner, turning the duller
+or the link portions into prose narrative, and reading the exciting and
+beautiful passages in the original form. Even this accommodated form of
+the folk-ballads may prove impossible in some classes. There are ballads
+ideal for the grades in nearly all the modern poets--Cowper, Scott,
+Wordsworth, Campbell, Browning, Longfellow, Whittier, Kipling.
+
+It is not so easy to choose for elementary children among the longer
+narrative poems. As a matter of fact, a great number of them are of the
+idyllic kind, and there is in this class of poems something soft and
+meditative, or over-emotional and, if one must say it--sentimental or
+super-romantic, that fits them for the comprehension of older readers,
+and spoils them for the children. Others, such as Scott's narrative
+poems, are too long and a bit too difficult for children younger than
+the high-school age. Here and there one finds a poem, like "Paul
+Revere's Ride," really more ballad than tale; a tender simple tale like
+"King Robert of Sicily," for a mature eighth grade. "The Vision of Sir
+Launfal;" not forgetting Morris' _The Man Born to Be King_, "The
+Fostering of Auslag," and perhaps other things from _The Earthly
+Paradise_. The simple but lofty style and feeling of "Sohrab and Rustum"
+makes it possible for the older children. Any teacher who knows both
+literature and children will see at once what it is that constitutes the
+fitness of these poems, and what the unfitness of "Enoch Arden," "The
+Courtship of Miles Standish," or "Lancelot and Elaine."
+
+Perhaps the only library of literature that is perfectly suited to its
+purpose and its public, and the only collection of masterpieces to be
+put into the hands of its readers without misgiving, is the nursery
+rhymes that we call _Mother Goose's Melodies_. It needs no more general
+praise, and there is no room for specifications. But it is always in
+order to urge teachers in this case, as in that of the fairy-tales, to
+increase their knowledge of those traditionary bits of art. When one
+knows their origin and something of their social and literary history,
+they take on new dignity and importance. One ceases to look upon them as
+mere nonsense to be rattled off for the amusement of the baby, and
+learns to see them as little treasures of primitive art, miraculously
+preserved and passed down from baby to baby through these many
+generations: bits of old song and ballad, games and charms, riddles and
+incantations, tales of charming incidents and episodes--a gallery of
+unmatchable portraits, sallies of wit just witty enough for the
+four-year-old, mild but adequate nonsense; all freed by the lapse of
+years and the innocence of its devotees from every taint of
+utilitarianism and occasionalism, winnowed and tested by the generations
+of mothers and babies that have criticized them, they yield a new charm
+at every fresh reading to the most experienced reader. They should
+constitute the first literary material of every English-speaking child.
+Every well-nurtured child will come to school already in possession of
+many of them. But he will be glad to go over them for the sake of those
+less fortunate, as well as for the sake of enjoying them with the whole
+community, and in consideration of the new pictures, games, and songs
+that will be joined with them.
+
+Stevenson's _A Child's Garden of Verses_ is in some sense a quite unique
+poetic production; and this remains true in spite of the many things
+produced in imitation of it and inspired by it. It is a wonderful
+example of the recovery by a grown person of the thread of continuity
+leading him back to actual childhood; the recovery, too, in many
+instances of the child's consciousness. It is the gate for us all to the
+lost garden of our own childhood, pathetic in every line with the
+evanescence of childhood, "whose hand is ever at his lips, bidding
+adieu."
+
+Yet in spite of this most poignant appeal to the grown-up person, many
+of the verses are ideally suited to children. They do not induce in them
+our mood of pathos and regret, nor do they set their child-readers
+imaginatively in another experience. They do very really constitute, as
+Stevenson suggests, a window through which the child sees
+
+
+     Another child far, far away,
+     And in another garden, play;
+
+
+a child with whom he tenderly sympathizes, at whom he lovingly smiles,
+at whose games he looks on, whose toys and books he knows and loves.
+
+The Child in the Garden is an only child, a lonely child, and a very
+individualistic child; there is no comradeship in the verses; they
+cannot be becomingly recited in concert; there is not a chorus or a
+refrain in the whole book, in which all the children may join; there is
+nothing communal about them. In spite of all the efforts, they cannot be
+set to music, except as solos; and if the music matches the mood, it is
+likely to be difficult for a child to sing. Several of them are too
+imaginative--"Windy Nights," "Shadow March;" some are a bit
+ironic--"Good and Bad Children," "System," "A Happy Thought;" some too
+poignantly pathetic--"The Land of Nod;" some look at childhood too
+obviously with the man's eyes--"Keepsake Mill;" but all these exceptions
+leave many altogether suitable for children; and their perfect
+structure, their musical verse-form, their childlike objectivity, and
+the divine simplicity of their style render them an unceasing delight.
+
+Though the Child of the Garden was a solitary child, he had a
+constantly haunting sense of the world beyond--other children in other
+lands, the foreign countries he might see by climbing higher, the
+children who would bring his boats ashore far down the river, the
+children singing in far Japan, the long-ago Egyptian boys, hints at the
+wider experience and bigger world to which the six- and seven-year-old
+children are so eagerly reaching out. At the same time nobody but
+Stevenson--nobody at least, that has written a book--has ever taken
+adequately the point of view of the human being three feet high--his
+tiny horizon, the small exquisite objects to which he comes close, the
+fairy-dells he sees, the rain-pool sea, the clover tree; nowhere else in
+art is the little world of the little people adequately pictured--the
+little world, and its obverse, the colossal grown-ups, with their
+elephantine furniture amidst which the little men and women must
+ordinarily move.
+
+Many of these poems should be read with the single child at home. For
+the class at school we may use "Foreign Lands," "Singing," "Where Go the
+Boats," "My Shadow," "The Swing," "My Ship and I"--the more objective
+and universal of them.
+
+There are many pretty bits for the youngest children in Christina
+Rossetti's _Sing-Song_--a book of nursery rhymes not sufficiently
+known. Certain of Blake's _Songs of Innocence_ the children should know,
+though they are always found too delicate and contemplative for the
+whole class. Every teacher of children should know for his own
+enlightenment the poems of Jane and Ann Taylor, and Dr. Watts's _Poems
+for Infant Minds_. Psychologically speaking, they are in a world
+completely alien to the modern student of children and of education; but
+there is a stray verse or two like "The Violet" or "How doth the little
+busy bee," that may some day fit the needs of the class. Every friend of
+children, teacher or parent, should know Keble's _Lyra Innocentium_; he
+cannot afford to miss the tone and atmosphere of Wordsworth's poems
+about children and childhood. As a matter of fact, it is only a few of
+Wordsworth's poems that will go well for class study, though a really
+enthusiastic teacher may carry even a large class through "The Idle
+Shepherd Boys" or "The Blind Highland Boy;" the older children should
+know "Heartleap Well" and "Peter Bell." The true Wordsworthian is born,
+only occasionally made; if he declares himself in a class in elementary
+school, the teacher should guide him.
+
+But we should soon learn, and aways remember, that the contemplative and
+idyllic lyric, however it may delight the chosen child and the adult,
+will, as a rule, neither please nor train the class, and that poems
+written for children and about children are not at all likely to be the
+things children love best and most profit by; the poetry should not
+linger long in the nursery stage. The class should be pushed on as early
+as possible into simple but heroic ballads, into lyrics, musical and
+noble, but simple and easy as to content--all chosen from the great
+poets.
+
+Even if one desired it, it would probably be impossible to dislodge
+_Hiawatha_ from its shrine in American elementary schools; and no one
+ought to covet the task, for the iconoclast is likely to be set down as
+a vulgar and egotistic person. _Hiawatha_ has become entrenched in the
+schools by some such reasoning as this: Here is a poem written by an
+American on aspects of life among the American aborigines; American
+children should study it as literature. Children ought to be instructed
+in primitive life and in myth; therefore they should study _Hiawatha_ as
+literature. Children should learn much about nature and should learn
+nature-poetry; therefore they should study _Hiawatha_ as literature.
+
+Of course, there are pretty things in _Hiawatha._ Some of the passages
+about the forest and the waters, the making of the canoe, the conquest
+of Mondanim, the picture-writing, may most profitably be interwoven
+with other things. It is instructive both as to literature and as to
+fact to put the making of Robinson Crusoe's boat beside the building of
+Hiawatha's canoe. But there are objections to a long and exclusive
+course in this poem. The mythical side of it is baffling and
+discouraging. Once more let me say that a _class_ is an extremely acute
+and inquiring personality; after a few days it "wants to know." And it
+is puzzled and dismayed, and finally frightened off, by the fact that
+everything means something else. Furthermore, the details both of Indian
+life and of Indian belief are so chosen and sifted and beautified as to
+be most misleading, if we are emphasizing that side of the poem. Lastly,
+it is not good for the young children to have a long-continued and
+constantly renewed experience in the alien and wearing meter, and the
+unmusical rhythm of _Hiawatha;_ and the verse-form dictates certain
+trying peculiarities of style, in especial the slightly varied iteration
+of detail:
+
+
+     Ah, my brother from the North land,
+     From the kingdom of Wabasso,
+     From the land of the White Rabbit,
+     You have stolen the maiden from me,
+     You have laid your hand upon her,
+     You have wooed and won my maiden.
+
+
+This redundancy and repetition do not constitute the direct,
+forward-moving style we should like to impress on the children. All
+these considerations are offered to justify the judgment, held in great
+modesty, that _Hiawatha_ should not be given in its entirety nor should
+the children be kept at it for any long drill, but, if at all, in chosen
+episodes and from time to time.
+
+Of course, any teacher may see fit to draw out from Hiawatha the story
+of any episode and treat it as a story, for dramatization, or as
+illuminating some phase of the children's interest and activity. And
+students old enough to interpret the mythical meaning of the poem may
+profitably read it.
+
+Occasionally, and as something apart from their regular lessons, the
+children should hear beautifully read passages of the incomparable music
+of some of the great masters, regardless of their understanding of the
+content--the first sixteen lines of _Paradise Lost_; some especially
+musical sonnet of Shakespeare's, or some passage of lofty eloquence from
+the plays; some vague and haunting bit of music from Shelly, or Poe, or
+Keats; some fanfare of trumpets from Byron, or Macaulay, or Kipling.
+
+Every teacher will realize that all the titles and authors and kinds
+mentioned in this study cannot be put into the children's lessons. It
+is to be hoped that he will realize that they are mentioned as concrete
+examples, or suggestive instances of things that are good, and to
+support the principles under discussion.
+
+The distinctive service of poetry will be the cultivation of the
+children's sense of the musical side of literature; the opportunity for
+appreciating some of the minor beauties of the literary art; and among
+the older children, acquaintance with the more highly imaginative
+method, and the more intensely emotional moods.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIII
+
+DRAMA
+
+
+There are many of the elements of drama that are eminently serviceable
+in the child's literary and artistic training. One cannot use the word
+"elements" in this connection without explaining that the word as used
+here does not designate absolutely simple and primitive things. They are
+elements only with respect to the complex whole which we call a drama.
+The elements of drama are story, plot, character, impersonation,
+dialogue, gesture, stage requirements; add to these the matter of
+literary expression, a pronounced structure which divides the production
+into clearly distinguished parts or acts; and add the further fact that
+in all its developed and typical specimens drama is the expression and
+presentation of a complex social situation, or the vehicle of a mature
+philosophy. It is quite evident, then, that the fully constituted
+literary drama will be both too complex and too difficult for children
+under twelve, and in most communities for any elementary children.
+
+But the elements of drama are not of necessity always in the difficult
+and elaborate combination which constitutes a literary drama. They
+appear singly and in simpler combinations here and there in many of the
+experiences and occupations of the child. They may be selected and
+combined for him in such products as will secure for him the distinctive
+joys and discipline of the drama.
+
+For example, there is the element of gesture, which in its elaborated
+form becomes technical acting. In its primitive and fundamental form it
+is instinctive with children--well-nigh purposeless at first,
+uncontrolled and fantastic like the early activities of their
+imagination, but easily organized and directed toward a purpose. The
+first step in this direction is the game. Some of the charming
+group-games the children learn even in the kindergarten are genuine
+dramatic art. Such games are, at any rate, the first opportunity to
+channel and to turn into something like artistic expression the
+children's ceaseless activity.
+
+We have all learned to appreciate the social and physical value of play.
+We may well add now a respectful estimate of games as art. The
+group-game may seem at first glance far from the child's literary
+training; but, as a matter of fact, a good game which has in it, as a
+good game always has, an orderly process and a climax, is just such an
+artistic whole as a story. Besides, many of our best group-games are
+accompanied by a rhythmic chant, often by pretty or quaint verses, such
+as "Itisket, itasket, a green and yellow basket;" or, "How many miles to
+Babylon?" or "London bridge is falling down." Acting upon this hint, we
+may substitute for these verses more artistic lines, or we can furnish
+more artistic lines with the fitting game. And these activities,
+channeled and disciplined by the group-game, are receiving the best
+possible training for dramatic acting by and by.
+
+We must consider dancing as a form of dramatic gesture, and as a
+training for it. We may all rejoice in the current change of attitude
+toward dancing, which bids fair to replace it in education and among the
+arts. We are learning again to regard it as such a controlling and
+refining of motion as makes an appeal to one's sense of beauty, not as
+the vulgar, one might almost say sordid, accomplishment it has been in
+average society for many generations. The rediscovery of the charming
+and simple folk-dances has given us a new art for the children, which we
+may substitute for the unnatural waltz, and the mongrel two-step we have
+been teaching them for years. A dance is a medium for expressing a mood,
+and a means of communicating it; like the games, it is a method of
+channeling and training activity. From this point of view one may see
+its two-fold relation: on the one hand, to the child's natural
+activities, taking them up, selecting among them, and combining them
+into a beautiful whole; on the other hand to dramatic acting, training
+and controlling the physical movements of gesture and pose and poise.
+Ideally it may have a closer connection with literature. Not only may
+dancing reflect a mood; it may tell a story or present a situation; many
+primitive dances were of this kind. In a previous chapter I have spoken
+of dancing as a method of motion to accompany spoken verse, as a means
+of deepening the sense of rhythm. It is possible to represent in this
+way, not only the movement of the words, but the mood of the lyric, and,
+_mutatis mutandis_, the events of the ballad. I have seen the
+fourth-year class present a little dance of "Hickory dickory dock"
+invented for them by their teacher, and another class a little older do
+a humorous dance of "There was a man in our town," than which two
+performances nothing could be more charming. Of course, these were not
+in any sense reproductions of the actions suggested by the jingles;
+there was no gesture that told of running up the clock, or scratching
+out his eyes; that would be the business of the old gesticulating
+elocution so deplorable in the artificiality of its would-be realism.
+The dances were felt to be merely the active response to the rhythm and
+the mood of the recited words--bits of dramatic tone-color, as it were.
+
+One wonders why all teachers do not make a game of "Charades" a frequent
+class recreation and discipline, since it has in it so many elements of
+educational value--the contributions to the children's vocabulary, the
+sugar-coated persuasion to attend to spelling, the frequent need for the
+invention of dialogue, the sharpening of everybody's wits, and, best of
+all, the call for significant pantomime, genuine dramatic gesture, and
+the fun, which is always educative.
+
+When we come to the element of impersonation, we are nearer the heart of
+dramatic art, and perhaps deeper into the circle of the child's
+interests and instincts as well. Imitation is one of the absolute and
+fundamental aspects of a child's activities. It is impossible to escape
+calling it an instinct, when one sees that it is deeper and more
+universal than any impulse or tendency. The interpretation put by more
+recent psychologists upon the term and the fact of imitation throws a
+new and grateful light upon it as a principle in drama. In the light of
+this interpretation, we can not longer think of imitation as a servile,
+and more or less formal, copying of the thing seen. We are now saying
+that in these activities of the children, when they are playing horse,
+or playing hunter, or playing soldier, they are not copying something
+they have seen or heard of; they _are_ keeping house, they _are_
+hunting, they _are_ marching and fighting. Not even bodily activity is a
+more incessant and absolute aspect of play than this of make-believe.
+Imaginative children, and those that have some variety of experience,
+are rarely at leisure to appear in their own characters--so constant is
+the dramatic and imitative impulse in exercise. Indeed, two little girls
+I knew, after a forenoon of unceasing and strenuous impersonation of a
+repertoire ranging from a door-mat and a cake of ice in the Delaware on
+through the ghost of the murdered Banquo, were finally obliged to sit
+down in utter weariness, when one of them suggested: "Now let's play
+we're just plain little girls." In the same nursery of four children the
+child who returned to the room after any absence always cautiously
+inquired of each of the others, before taking up affairs: "What are you
+being now?"
+
+In certain hours of his study of literature and literary appreciation
+one is ready to believe that this impulse toward impersonation is the
+very fundamental fact in that appreciation. It is the door through which
+one enters into the situations and feelings which make up the life
+represented in the story, poem, or drama. This it is that gives that
+strange grip of reality to literature; it is this that turns the
+appreciation of literature into personal culture, so that in a very real
+sense one may substitute literature for experience. It is easy to
+utilize this passion very early, turning it in the direction of art. In
+the kindergarten they have long known how to adapt it in the play which
+they so wisely interchange and amalgamate with their games; and the
+little pantomimes of "Bo-peep" and "Little Boy Blue," of flocks of
+birds, of butterflies on the wing, and what not, are on the road to true
+dramatic art. But, alas! this is cut all too short in the school--the
+average school, where the scholars are converted immediately into the
+veriest little pitchers--all ears; and, instead of being twenty selves
+in a day, they are denied the privilege of being even one whole one.
+This gift for impersonation should, like all their imaginative
+experiences, be conserved by exercise and guidance; otherwise it remains
+merely chaotic and accidental, and very soon the child himself is
+ashamed of it and regards its exercise as a "baby" performance to be
+left behind in the kindergarten. This exercise and guidance may be given
+by training the children in little plays, which, to begin with, are not
+much more than pantomime, but which add, as they go on, other elements
+of the real drama--an organized action and dialogue.
+
+Of course, there is the dramatic monologue--the recitation. But this
+does not meet the needs of the class. It is impossible that all the
+children should sympathetically impersonate the same character and
+realize the same experience. Neither does this sort of exercise--the
+recitation--give a chance for co-operation in the production of a bit of
+social art; it does not give them the discipline of apprehending and
+producing a large whole, and it tends to develop and foster an
+unendurable kind and degree of egoism.
+
+Where are we to get these plays, since there are practically none of
+respectable literary quality ready to our hand? One must say
+"practically none," because there are a few in print which can be used,
+chiefly dramatizations of folk- and fairy-tales. But, for the most part,
+and just as it should be, the teacher and the class will have to make
+their own plays, until in the eighth grade or thereabouts they are ready
+for some literary drama. As will be pointed out later, these
+co-operatively produced dramas constitute the best possible return which
+the children can make of their literary training, and at the same time
+the best possible means of securing their apprehension of the story they
+use; since in recasting a story as a play they will come to know it as
+plot, as activity of persons, and as a structure made up of essential
+parts.
+
+Almost the first thing the child sees is the fact that there is
+something organic and necessary about these divisions and subdivisions.
+He sees them separate themselves out from the narrative as things in
+themselves, and then reunite to form a complete whole again. It matters
+not whether the story be one that he has been taught, a historical
+episode, or a story invented by himself, the emphasis upon structure,
+upon organization, which is one of the elements of drama, will be
+helpful, as a matter of literary training.
+
+As to the dialogue--the actual literature of this communal drama--we
+must be most indulgent, and on the whole uncritical. A marked
+peculiarity of the dramatizations of the little people, as indeed of
+those of their elders, is that they forget to be literature at all, so
+that what is not dumb-show must be set down as noise. It is a
+troublesome and delicate task for the teacher who is guiding them to
+manage to give the dialogue a tone better than mere commonplace and
+different from mere bombast. It is wisest, on the whole, to get them to
+choose stories and events that will sway their dialogue toward the
+bombastic and away from the commonplace; they will certainly be more
+spontaneous, and probably more artistic. And it is easy to set into
+every play some genuine gem of literature--a lyric to be sung, a little
+story to be told. It is desirable to introduce as much music as
+possible--really artistic little songs that fit into the atmosphere of
+the play and help to create it; it makes better "team-work." A dance
+too, always provided it harmonizes with the tone and spirit of the play,
+helps the feeling of co-operative production. The children's acting, in
+the sense of gesture and stage-business, is very likely to be stiff and
+artificial. Marches and dances that belong in the play make an
+imperative call for movement, and accustom them to action without
+self-consciousness and formality.
+
+The story, then, is generally given--it is something the children have
+read, it is a historical event, though of course it may be furnished by
+some inventive member of the class, or evolved by them together.
+Whatever it is, it will in all probability not differ in any way from
+the story of any narrative. The plot will be the plot of the narrative
+story; it will be either an accident or a very noteworthy fact, if the
+material furnished displays a true dramatic plot. There will probably be
+no true dramatic characterization. The teacher cannot aim at it, and
+must not expect it; though occasionally the born actor declares himself
+and presents us "a man in his humor" in true dramatic fashion. But, on
+the whole, we are contented if up to the time we are twelve or thirteen
+we move about the stage, as the persons move through the story,
+delivering ourselves of such dialogue as is needed to put the action
+forward--and nothing more. It goes without saying that place must be
+made for a large number of "sups." An army is a great device, for in the
+marching and manoeuvering most of the class can manage to appear upon
+the stage first or last. _Briar-Rose_ makes a great play for the third
+or fourth grade, for every man in the grade can appear as a thorn-bush
+in the hedge. There may easily be two different casts for every play.
+Occasionally there is the opportunity for the whole class to appear in
+character as audience.
+
+It is almost impossible to say anything concerning the staging, the
+theatrical side, of these plays that will be helpful everywhere because
+the facilities vary so widely in different schools and different
+communities. In general, it is best to have what answers for a stage.
+There is some mystic influence in the raised platform, the curtain, the
+proscenium arch that cuts off this performance from the rest of the
+world and gives it at once the distinction of art. Every dramatic guide
+of young people should help forward as much as possible the movement to
+free drama from the tyranny of the stage carpenter, the scene-painter,
+and the costumer. And with children as with the early folk-players it
+takes very little to create the illusion. A feather in his head makes
+the six-year-old a noble red man without more ado. A sash over her
+shoulder converts a little maiden of the third grade into a haughty
+princess. But the feather and the sash are good pedagogy as well as good
+art. An arm-chair makes a parlor; a half-dozen arm-loads of boughs makes
+a forest. I witnessed a stirring performance of _Siegfried, the Child of
+the Forest_, where the illusion of the deep-forest glades was created by
+three rubber plants, a potted palm, and a sword-fern in a jardiniere! A
+golden-haired Siegfried with an angora rug thrown over one shoulder, a
+blackened Mimi with a mantle of burlap fastened about him with a
+trunk-strap--the whole atmosphere of art was there.
+
+As the children grow older, and alas! in most cases less imaginative,
+they will require more properties. If possible, they should work
+together to make the scenery and provide the properties, and should be
+prevailed upon to make their own costumes. The wise teacher will keep
+the costuming out of the hands of the "tender mamas" all he can; for in
+most cases the participation of the mothers in this side of the
+preparations, unless they are given specific directions and compelled to
+follow them, means the introduction of the fatal spirit of competitive
+finery. The children should be taught to see that the costuming is a
+part of the art, and that everybody's costume must be brought "within
+the picture."
+
+Now, up through the sixth or seventh grades (this will depend upon the
+average maturity of the children, upon the kind of culture in the homes
+from which they come, upon the character and knowledge of the teachers
+in the grades through which they have come) the plays that the children
+have should be of the kind we have been considering--epic material, mere
+direct story put together under the simplest of dramatic
+principles--those of analysis into movements, of dialogue and of action
+in its simpler forms. But in the eighth school year (merely to set a
+limit), and bridging the children over into their ninth or first year of
+high school, there may be a change. The child has gradually become
+conscious of the complexity of life and human interests; he begins to
+make his adolescent readjustment to the world, to realize in a conscious
+way its history and its institutions; his own studies in history have
+become studies in the interweaving of complex factors; the great social
+institutions begin to press their claims and offer their attractions;
+college looms ahead, conditioning all his undertakings; the church makes
+its appeal or asserts its rights; upon all too many children the
+institutions of business and industry make their call; in most children
+their own moral and religious problems, and those of their mates, rise
+to consciousness. Epic directness and singleness now no longer seem an
+adequate picture of human affairs. It is now that the child has his
+first moment of ripeness for the characteristic inner things of the
+literary drama: the clash and combination of institutions; the revolt of
+the individual against the institution, with his final destruction or
+adjustment; the plot which is an interweaving of ethical and complex
+social forces--the characters generally intricate to begin with, and
+undergoing profound modification in the process of the action, different
+from the static epic characters he has known hitherto. In short, we may
+find that the eighth grade is ready for some specimens of that literary
+type which is the truest artistic presentation of the social and moral
+complex, the literary drama. Luckily, there are grades and shades of
+complexity, and a wide range of choice as to the nature and difficulty
+of the problems involved. One would scarcely encourage the eighth- or
+ninth-year school children to attack the intricate adjustment and
+interplay of _Hamlet_; he would not like them to follow the baffling
+complexities of social, personal, and economic considerations through
+_The Pillars of Society_. But _The Merchant of Venice_ offers problems
+and situations which he can understand; in _Julius Caesar_ and in
+_Macbeth_, in _Wilhelm Tell_, and in the _Wallenstein_ plays, noble and
+finished dramas as they are, he encounters nothing that he cannot grasp.
+On the contrary, the ideas and the situations are such as he readily
+understands, and such as legitimately enlarge his horizon. The
+Shakespeare, at any rate, will probably be studied as poetry, and the
+children should be encouraged to act, in whole or in part, any play that
+they can study as literature.
+
+It may be that the facilities of the school will prohibit any attempt to
+stage one of these larger plays. In that event chosen bits may be given
+as dialogue or monologue fitted into a recital of the story, and a
+description of the situation. The teacher should always remember that
+the drama is oral literature, and the literature of it makes its
+legitimate appeal first to the ear. Children memorize so easily, that
+they will know the play by heart practically as soon as they have
+finished such a consideration of it as enables them to read it
+intelligently. If not, the striking and beautiful passages should be
+deliberately memorized.
+
+Should these dramatic performances be produced before a public? Most
+certainly yes. Let it be however small a public--two neighboring grades,
+invited parents and friends; but let the study and effort bear its
+legitimate fruit in the public presentation. Only when we lead them to
+turn back what they have gained into a community asset, have we done
+anything to train our children in social art. And this is so natural and
+easy in the case of an acted drama that it is a pity to miss the
+opportunity. Of course, they must love the thing they do. It must be
+made good enough to give, and be therefore offered. We shall gradually
+recover from the fright we have been in now for some time as to the
+children's desire to "show off." How can we be sure we should have had
+any art, if this motive had not mingled with the others in the
+production and publication of the art-product? Let us cease to give it
+an invidious name; instead of calling it the desire to "show off," let
+us call it the artists' passion--be he poet, painter, actor, what
+not--to communicate, to turn back into the common life this thing he has
+but drawn out of the common life to elaborate and beautify.
+
+The child and the theater makes a difficult problem. One need not say
+that a habitual theater-going child is a social, and most likely a
+moral, monster. But children should occasionally see a play with the
+pomp and circumstance of the stage. In the large cities it is not
+difficult to find a play or two each year that it is good for a child to
+see--something of Shakespeare, or some other heroic spectacle; some
+innocent programme of horse-play and frolic; some pretty pantomime, and
+occasionally a melodrama neither banal nor over-sentimental. If we but
+realized the theater as an educational and aesthetic force, we might
+secure many more such things by an intelligent appeal for them and an
+intelligent reception of them.
+
+After the children have had these few heroic plays we have discussed for
+the eighth or ninth grade, they mature so rapidly that their contact
+with the literary drama ceases to be a child's problem at all; it passes
+into the field of secondary training, where it must, as things now are
+in our schools, be approached from a somewhat different point of view.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XIV
+
+THE PRESENTATION OF THE LITERATURE
+
+
+In this day of reaction, not to say revulsion, against "methods" in
+teaching, it is with much misgiving that one brings one's self to speak
+of the practical details of teaching a subject, lest he be suspected of
+having a method or even a system, or lest those suggestions which he
+tries to give out as genetic and stimulating merely, be taken as a
+formalized plan. However, each body of material that has any degree of
+separateness has a handle by which it ought to be taken; disregarding
+the poor figure--paths by which one most easily comes to the center of
+it; certain points of view from which it looks most attractive and
+manageable. Some such handles, or paths, or points of view it will be
+the business of this chapter to indicate; and the suggestions to be
+offered are, it is to be hoped, so simple and so reasonable as to have
+occurred to many observing and growing teachers.
+
+The somewhat small body of literature to be used in the classes should
+practically throughout the elementary period be read to the children in
+class, not read by them. The relation of the literature to
+reading-lessons will be discussed elsewhere. It may well be that in the
+last years of the period many of the members of the class will have
+reached the stage of reading needful for the interpretative and
+apprehensive reading of literature; but the majority of the class will
+not. They will master the difficulties of mechanical reading; they may
+achieve the plane of intelligent reading. But here the large majority of
+them linger. Vast numbers of people never push on to the next
+plane--that of appreciative reading. And it is small wonder; for the
+combination of mechanical, intellectual, and emotional processes that it
+involves constitutes it well-nigh the most difficult of achievements.
+Hosts of estimable and intelligent persons, respectable citizens, live
+out long years of greater or less usefulness, and never have a glimpse
+of this kind of reading. It is by no means true that even every good and
+useful citizen who teaches literature, can do this kind of reading; many
+times he cannot. But he can read better than the children. They,
+involved in the difficulties of their inexpert reading, cannot see the
+woods for the trees; they are obliged to go so slowly, and to absorb so
+much energy in what one may call the manual work of reading, that they
+miss the essentially literary things--the movement, the picture, the
+music.
+
+Of course, when we say "read," we use the word in the broad sense of
+rendering the matter _viva voce_, whether it be actual reading from the
+text or reciting. While the person who is reading a story to children
+must be most concerned with spirit and meaning, he must not, if he
+suppose himself to be teaching literature, neglect the matter of style.
+If the story is a translated one, he must make or choose some beautiful
+translation. Everything that he reads to them he must work over
+beforehand, so that he can give it with effective certainty. He more
+than defeats his purpose who transmits to his children no matter how
+good a story in slip-shod sentences, commonplace phrasing, go-easy
+enunciation; or, worse than that, in the ostentatiously childlike
+language and manner that constitute official kindergartenese, or in the
+hilariously cheerful manner which marks traditional Sunday-schoolese;
+or, worst of all, in that tone of cheap irony that so many people see
+fit to adopt for all their communications with children. It is the tone
+of the average adult whenever he enters into conversation with any
+acquaintance under twelve--an underbred or quite uncalled-for tone of
+badinage, of quizzing, of insincerity. It is an unpardonable
+misunderstanding of the dignity and seriousness of children to offer
+them babble when they ask only simplicity, or to treat with flippancy
+what to them are the serious things of art. It should be quite possible
+to be serious without being solemn, and cheerful without being
+hilarious. This matter of a good style and form is so important that a
+teacher should achieve it at any cost of trouble and study. I like to
+use every opportunity to say that he should so thoroughly know his story
+or poem, be it the simplest old fairy-tale, or the veriest
+nursery-jingle, that he loves and respects it as art; and should so know
+and respect his audience and his purpose that a good and suitable
+literary form flows from him inevitably; or, if he is reading an actual
+text, that every sentence is both appreciative and interpretative. But,
+if he cannot achieve this, let him in the first instance write out a
+good form of his story, or find one and memorize it. There is no denying
+that in the hands of a cold and mechanical person this production will
+display some priggishness and false propriety. But the failure as
+literary training would be less disastrous in this case than if the same
+person gave a haphazard and commonplace impromptu version.
+
+There is such a thing as literary reading as distinguished from the
+reading of matter technical in content and merely intellectual in
+appeal. Teachers, accustomed as they are to read for facts and intent
+upon the logical emphasis, are peculiarly prone to read literature
+poorly--missing the music and the emotion, rendering it all in the hard
+intellectual manner that is acceptable only as the vehicle of the
+colorless matter of a technical treatise. There is also such a thing as
+the telling of a literary story, as distinguished from the telling of
+any other story. A narrative of events in history, an account of some
+occurrence in nature or ordinary affairs, may be expected to proceed
+from point to point without arrangement or succession other than the
+order of incidents as they occur. The interest is the interest of fact;
+the thread is that of cause and effect, or any other plain sequence.
+
+But in the literary story the incidents are sifted and arranged. Certain
+details are prophecies--foreshadowings of things to come; certain
+incidents are vital turning-points in the action; certain phrases are
+the key and counter-sign of the whole story; some paragraphs are plain
+narration; some are calm description; some are poetic interpretation;
+some roar with action; some glow with emotion; some sparkle with fun;
+some lie in shadow, others stand forth in the brilliant light; there are
+movements in the story, marked by a change of scene, a change of
+situation, a pause in the action--parts which would be marked in the
+drama as scenes or acts; there is the gradual approach to the center,
+the pivotal occurrence, the readjustment of affairs to ordinary life.
+Ideally, all these things will be indicated in the presentation that an
+accomplished story-teller makes of a literary story. This seems to set
+the standard very high--too high for the discouraged attempt of the
+overworked grade teacher. If so, she may reflect that it is triumphantly
+true that such is the affinity between the child and the story that he
+will get much delight and nourishment out of any telling of it. Who has
+not hesitated between a smile and a tear at the spectacle of a child or
+a class hanging enthralled and hungry upon a story rendered by a mother
+or a teacher whose every pronunciation was a jar, whose every cadence a
+dislocation, and whose every emphasis a misinterpretation?
+
+And remember, the art of story-telling is not the art of the theater,
+not the art of the actress, but the art of the mother, the nurse; the
+art of the "spinsters and the knitters in the sun;" the art of the
+wandering minstrel, of the journeyman tailor, of the exiled younger
+brother; art designed to reach, not an audience beyond the footlights,
+but one gathered on the sunny bench of the market-place, on the
+hearth-stone, under the nursery lamp, in the shady garden, and in their
+own teacher's schoolroom.
+
+As a practical matter, the teacher, in presenting a story or a narrative
+poem, should take advantage of the natural pauses, the end of one
+incident or movement and the beginning of the next, in dividing his
+material for the actual lessons, so that in a long story or in a drama,
+the end of the lesson coincides with the close of a series of incidents
+or the close of one of the larger movements. Nothing spoils a bit of
+literature more effectually than taking it in accidental or fragmentary
+bits. At any cost of time and pains, let there be a sense of
+completeness in each lesson, a feeling of repose, if only temporary, at
+the end of each instalment. And whether he closes his lesson or not, the
+teacher should at the close of every such movement in a class of older
+children pause to discuss, to review, or to summarize. When he makes
+this recognition of the close of a series of incidents, or of a
+movement, he accomplishes two things: he secures a certain amount of
+completeness, and he helps on in the children the desirable sense of
+organization, of composition, in their story or play.
+
+The nature of the bit of literature chosen must guide the teacher in his
+first presentation of it. When it is a thing in which the movement is
+rapid, or the interest in the action or the plot intense, it will
+doubtless be best to go rapidly through the whole, not pausing for any
+details. Then go over it slowly again, pausing for appreciation and
+comment. It seems well to repeat here that if the story is long and the
+plot involves any intensity of suspense, it may be well to let the
+children know the issue early in the story; the wisdom of this step will
+depend largely upon the average nerves of the class. There may well be
+several readings of a thing worth reading once. Every teacher knows how
+well content the younger children, especially, are to go over a thing
+many times. The interest of the class of older children may be kept up
+through the many readings of a story or poem, by shifting each time the
+ground of comment or discussion, opening up a new question or revealing
+a new point of interest at each reading. In other pieces, the slower
+moving stories and lyrics, the children are willing to linger over the
+details at the first reading.
+
+It is all but impossible to indicate what such details are, or what we
+mean by lingering over them. I have pointed out in some detail, in the
+chapter on poetry, the kind of thing that one would linger over for
+comment and question.
+
+If it is a new, rare, or especially picturesque word, we may ask
+questions and receive comments, or according to the situation, give
+quick and direct information about it: "The golden orange _glows_;" "He
+strung the bow _deftly_;" "The butter-cup catches the sun in its
+_chalice_." These three words call for attention for different reasons,
+in addition to the fact that any or all of them might be new and unknown
+words to the class. In the case of a figure or image we would pause and
+discuss the various terms and details of it, until most members of the
+class have at least intellectually apprehended it. Such a complex little
+figure and image as "footsteps of the falling drops down the ladder of
+the leaves" calls for leisurely appreciation and assimilation. A
+peculiar musical onomatopoeic line will interest them; "Burly dozing
+bumble-bee," is such a line. They will be delighted to discover why this
+peculiar assemblage of sounds was chosen in connection with this insect.
+"The long day wanes, the slow moon climbs," indicating and imitating by
+its slow movement and long vowels the passage of the lingering hours, is
+an effect they should be led to realize. We should pause to point out,
+or to inquire into, the implications of some pregnant or pivotal
+sentence, such as: "Now, Cinderella's godmother was fay;" or, "Cyclops,
+you asked my noble name, and I will tell it: My name is Noman." The bit
+selected for detailed study may be larger, amounting to a complete
+incident--for example, Nausicaa with her maids washing her beautiful
+clothes by the river; some scene or incident full of character and
+symbolical meaning, as the scene with the hen and the cat in _The Ugly
+Duckling_; some ethical or moral question that calls for judgment, such
+as Robin Hood's treatment of the unjust abbot, or Portia's decision as
+to Shylock's bond.
+
+These examples, chosen at random, are intended simply to suggest the
+kind of thing to be stopped over. It would be a grave mistake to pause
+over every such detail, or to try to make sure that the children
+apprehend even intellectually every item as it appears. Leave many of
+them for subsequent readings; let many of them lie permanently,
+depending rather on the effects of the general tone and spirit of the
+production for your results. One of the first lessons to learn about the
+teaching of literature is that it will not do to teach the whole art on
+the basis of one specimen--that it will not do to teach in any case all
+that one could. One must rather try to teach the characteristic, the
+inevitable lesson--the lesson demanded by the genius of his piece. Let
+the teacher avoid by all means the pitfall of "talky-talk" and lecture.
+Keep the literature as near play as possible--the play that cultivates
+and disciplines through the avenues of refined pleasure.
+
+It will often be necessary for the teacher to shorten and otherwise edit
+the thing he chooses. There will come from time to time dull passages,
+descriptive passages, passages whose subject-matter is too mature, or in
+some other way undesirable for his class. He will often be able to
+economize effort and to secure a better unity of impression, by omitting
+what is mere enrichment of the picture or reinforcement of the teaching;
+such incidents may be removed without altering the meaning or the
+movement. The teacher must be experienced enough to recognize such
+unnecessary or superfluous incidents; otherwise he only mutilates his
+story in condensing it.
+
+When the children have advanced to some proficiency in reading, they
+will, of course, begin to read some of their own literature, reading
+aloud in the class and often having the text before them as the teacher
+reads. All the children that can read at all should, as a rule, have a
+printed copy of anything they are asked to memorize; and as a matter of
+social duty, the teacher of literature, or the teacher in the literature
+class, will from time to time have a careful exercise in reading for the
+younger readers; while he will have much reading aloud from the older
+grades; remembering that the inevitable obverse of receiving literature
+through the ear is the rendering it with the voice. But, on the whole,
+they will fare best if up to and probably through the sixth grade they
+receive what is distinctively literature through the ear. And even after
+that they should often hear their material rendered by a good reader in
+class, even though they may be required to read the same material over
+beforehand, or subsequent to the class reading.
+
+Every teacher should have in reserve a store of stories and poems, and
+beautiful passages from great masterpieces which he produces from time
+to time as a surprise to his class. This is many a time the most
+effective lesson possible--adding to the children's pleasure the delight
+of surprise, creating in them the impression of the inexhaustible supply
+of beautiful things, and testifying to their teacher's own joy in the
+things he wants them to love.
+
+Other minor and practical matters, more closely connected with the
+return from the children than the presentation to them, will be
+discussed in the next chapter.
+
+Finally, the whole matter is conditioned and colored by the fact that in
+any case the literature is transmitted to the children through the
+personality of the teacher. This is partially true of all a child's
+subjects and his whole experience in school; but the fact that
+literature is so inwoven with feeling, and so bound up with matters of
+personal taste, that it concerns itself so much with matters of ethics
+and conduct, makes it peculiarly liable to take on color, to narrow or
+to widen with the personality of him who chooses and renders it. A
+teacher must accept this fact, and profit by the obvious warnings that
+arise out of it; but better than that, build his work upon the many
+beneficent aspects of the fact. The teacher before his class is the
+sacred bard at the feast; he is an exhaustless spring of joy, a tireless
+playfellow, a preacher who never proses, a schoolmaster who never
+scolds.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XV
+
+THE RETURN FROM THE CHILDREN
+
+
+The discussion must naturally limit itself largely to the immediate
+return that we may ask of the children from their lessons in literature;
+since it is not possible to do more than hint at their ultimate effects.
+It is, of course, a matter of pedagogical morality to ask from them some
+immediate and practical return, or some actual literary contributions to
+the lessons. There are certain modifications of the modern doctrine that
+every stimulation of the mind or the emotions should eventuate in
+activity--modifications that apply to all the fine arts. The aesthetic
+experience is a complete experience in itself; the apprehension, the
+enjoyment, and the final appreciation which one passes through in his
+contact with a beautiful piece of art--a picture, a symphony, an
+ode--constitute a complete psychic experience; they eventuate in a
+better taste, a higher ideal, the record of a pure and noble joy. They
+do not demand further activity. We need not feel, therefore, that it is
+a matter of necessity to ask that in every case the class make some
+tangible response to every literary impression.
+
+But the teacher of literature must feel that he shares with all their
+other teachers the responsibility and the duty of making social beings
+of the children, of equipping them with the means of expression and
+communication, so that they may turn back into the sum-total a product
+in exchange for the material they draw out. He must, therefore,
+associate with the lessons a legitimate amount of exercise for his class
+in imparting what they have learned and in creating literary products
+for themselves.
+
+The first and simplest return we ask is the oral comment, the immediate
+discussion that accompanies the presentation of the work. When a story
+has been read, there should always be opportunity for question and
+comment. This the teacher must guide and restrain. Of course, he should
+be hospitable to suggestions and contributions, patient, and generous to
+questions. But he must be cautious never to let the talk even on the
+part of the smallest children remain mere prattle, or degenerate into an
+aimless scamper around the paddock; he will see that there is a point or
+a line to cling to, and he will manage that this shall be done. Every
+teacher knows how one petty or commonplace child, one would-be wit or
+skeptic, can drag the discussion into the dust and keep it there, unless
+he is promptly and perhaps vigorously suppressed. Of course, in these
+discussions there is very small opportunity for training the voice and
+criticizing the language. Let there be, if possible, a free flow of
+comment and contribution, uninterrupted by any corrections except those
+of the most egregious errors. The teacher who guides it should study his
+questions, and even with the little ones should bring into the light of
+discussion the vital and salient things, and by means of a question from
+time to time, keep the conference away from triviality and gossip. He
+will begin to train his children from the beginning to make legitimate
+inductions from their material, and will require them to give reasons
+based upon the actual story or poem. He will be able to lead them to
+find the precise point of departure in the story for the introduction of
+their personal experience or their new incident, and he will help them
+in every case to make clear the application of their own material to the
+discussion.
+
+It is in this spontaneous and free, but guided, conference that the
+children get most good out of the literature lessons. Of course, as they
+grow older the discussion of persons and their conduct, and the ethical
+and social bearing of events and opinions, may be broadened and
+deepened. As they grow older, too, more correctness and style and
+fulness may be demanded in their impromptu contributions to the
+discussion. A child may, without suspecting it, and consequently without
+self-consciousness, acquire some considerable skill in extemporaneous
+speaking and some genuine intellectual ease in conversation from these
+class discussions.
+
+Another natural return to be asked from the children is the repetition
+of the story, in whole or in part, by members of the class in their own
+words; though of course, after many hearings of it well told the
+children will have incorporated into their own vocabulary the most
+useful and characteristic words. This exercise should never be allowed
+to pass into a careless and slipshod performance; the children should be
+alive and responding alertly to the call made upon them. Their grammar,
+their sentences, their emphases and intonations may appropriately be
+corrected more vigorously in this exercise than in the spontaneous
+discussion.
+
+The best literary effect is not secured by having the story retold
+immediately after the children have heard it, nor by having them
+understand beforehand that it is to be retold as a formal exercise. It
+may be brought out of them on some later occasion so as to give it the
+air of an independent contribution to the pleasure of the class.
+Nothing is more deadly to the atmosphere of a story than the certainty
+on the part of the children that they are going to be called upon to
+retell it. This should never become a habitual exercise. It helps in a
+literary as well as a social way to divide the story in the retelling
+among the children according to movements, or even according to
+incidents, since this calls attention to its parts and organization.
+
+We may reasonably expect all the poems taught as literature to be
+memorized, since it does not take many repetitions of a poem to fix it
+in a child's memory. The vocal production of this poem gives the best
+opportunity for cultivating the child in voice, in enunciation and
+pronunciation. The teacher should not, of course, seem querulous and
+exacting in small matters, and it is better to leave a few careless
+spots in any one poem than to spoil the children's pleasure in it by too
+close criticism; but he can do much to help all the children toward a
+distinguished manner of expression. These memorized poems, like the
+stories they learn, should not be regarded as formal exercises to be
+recited once and be done with. They should be called for from time to
+time as contributions to the pleasure of the whole class. Time is
+profitably given now and then to a story or verse tournament, a
+_sang-fest_, when the whole store of things acquired is brought out and
+enjoyed. In the two older classes each child may be required to choose,
+prepare, and present to the class a bit of literature. The choice and
+preparation must be done in consultation with the teacher; the
+presentation to the class regarded as a contribution to their artistic
+experience and accepted without criticism.
+
+Paraphrasing is a process of doubtful value. It is never possible to
+express the precise meaning or mood in other words, and in the case of
+verse it serves to destroy the sense of inviolability of form that one
+would desire to develop and deepen. The direction, "State the same
+thought in other words," should never be given. To one delicately alive
+to the value of words and the shades of thought, it is a mere
+contradiction in terms. The same may be said of the practice of getting
+the children to substitute synonyms; in literature, especially in
+poetry, there can be no true synonyms, and no precisely synonymous
+expressions.
+
+Many pleasant experiments are to be made in connecting some of the
+handwork of the youngest children with their literature. The attempt to
+realize some of their images in actual stuff constitutes an artistic
+experiment that has its literary reverberations, and helps to deepen
+the association. Let them make a cloak for _Little Red Riding-Hood_, a
+fairies' coach of a nut shell, a boat, a tent--or whatever little object
+or property is imbedded in the story. Out of practically every story,
+and out of many of the poems, they get an inspiration for a picture or a
+bit of modeling. Such associations with literature are legitimate and
+natural. This appears very clear when we reflect that we are hoping to
+cultivate the taste and imagination of the children, and to teach them
+to love human life, with all that this implies, as well as to drill them
+in language, grammar, and writing.
+
+It seems necessary to handle aspects of the problem of language and
+writing in connection with literature in several different places, as we
+come upon the topic from different points of view. As has been said
+before, it is the duty of the teacher of literature, and of the lessons
+in literature, to help along the work in the language arts. It is even
+fair to assume that the children will take more interest in their
+composition lessons, and will get more profit out of them, when they are
+attached to something they have done in literature; but this is because
+they get out of literature more impulse toward creation, and more
+inspiration toward a beautiful and striking manner of expression. But
+composition is not merely a medium of creative expression; it is a
+means of plain communication, and should be developed in both directions
+and from both sources. This means that the children should write in
+connection with all their subjects, so that they do not, on the one
+hand, associate "English" and writing with literature only, and do not,
+on the other hand, run the risk of forming no style but a literary
+style.
+
+It is certainly true that we disquiet ourselves and persecute the
+children unnecessarily concerning the whole matter of writing during the
+elementary period. The children scarcely acquire the process of writing
+as a manual thing in the first four years. During the next four by good
+luck and much toil, most of them manage to reduce it to the stage of a
+tool. Their consciousness of the process added to their consciousness of
+their spelling and grammar, leaves them little freedom in using the
+written composition as an avenue of spontaneous expression. Add to this
+the fact that a large part of this period--the period of ten to
+fourteen--is the beginning of the great reticence. They are not telling
+what they know or feel; they have narrowed their vocabulary down to the
+absolutely necessary terms; they have seen through every device by which
+the teacher seeks to get them to express themselves. Their written
+compositions will be, therefore, dogged exercises, and should be
+connected, as far as possible, with colorless information subjects.
+There are exceptional children and exceptional classes, indeed, to whom
+these generalizations do not apply. We have all heard of classes in
+distant elementary schools which "loved" to write.
+
+But there will of necessity be a certain amount of composition that will
+fall in with the work in literature, and will constitute one of the
+logical returns we ask of the children. This the teacher would like to
+have as spontaneous and as literary as possible. In general, we should
+like it to be creative, and not critical or reproductive. We would
+encourage them to devise new adventures of Odysseus, or of Robin Hood,
+to give an experience of their own organized into a genuine story, an
+interpretation and effective description of some incident or event that
+has interested them or been invented by them. It is necessary, if you
+expect to get anything literary or creative out of them, to help to put
+them in the creative and literary mood. Talk over with them the thing
+they mean to do; see that they have the vocabulary they will obviously
+need; enlarge their range of comparison and allusion by discussion; lead
+them to divide their material into suitable parts with some acceptable
+sequence; enrich their topics by kindred material; guide them into the
+observation and interpretation of material in the imaginative and
+literary way.
+
+Some aspects of this process are illustrated in the following
+experience: A teacher had been reading Howard Pyle's _Robin Hood_, with
+occasionally one of the original ballads interspersed (but not the
+traditional "Robin Hood and the Potter"), for three months; the children
+had also memorized during the same time three short lyrics; and in every
+lesson there had been discussions; the time had come when they must make
+something. They decided to follow the plan of their book and tell how
+Robin Hood added a new member to his band. These children were making
+pottery by way of handwork, and had lately had an interesting visit to
+see a potter working with his wheel. So the suggestion naturally made by
+some member of the class, that the new member of Robin Hood's band be a
+potter, was received with instant favor. The teacher read them "Peter
+Bell," and their hero promptly became a peddler-potter--the very same,
+suggested an agile child, whom Tom, the Piper's son, found beating his
+ass, and upon whom he played the merry trick. By this time the class
+could be restrained no longer. They climbed over one another's
+shoulders, literally and figuratively, with eager suggestions and
+copious details. After discussing the plan long enough to suggest an
+organization of the material into three natural parts, the children were
+set to work. The orderly and patient children produced satisfactory
+stories, abundant in material and beautiful in detail. All the others
+produced stories which, however disorderly and careless, were breathless
+with feeling and overflowing with stuff. Some of them adopted Tom, the
+Piper's son, as the new member of the band, not being able to forgive
+the potter for beating the ass; some adopted them both; others, only the
+Potter, duly lessoned and converted; all provided for the donkey. When
+they were aroused and provided, there was a spontaneous outflow of what
+was in every case, allowing for the varying temperaments and
+acquirements of the children, a really literary production.
+
+As long as the children are seriously hampered with the mechanics of
+writing, they should be allowed to dictate their work, when any
+practical plan can be devised for this. When the class is not too large,
+they should be taught to make a co-operative product, the teacher taking
+down what they agree upon, revising it to suit them. In the case of the
+older children these spontaneous and "literary" productions should not
+be too minutely criticized, and the revising and rewriting of them
+should not become a matter of drudgery. They should have other and more
+colorless written work upon which they may be drilled, lest the drill
+should kill their creative impulse or spoil their pleasure in the
+created product. Their more important productions may be filed and given
+back to them six months later for their own correction. This critical
+review of their own work is generally an occasion of much pride, and the
+acquisition of some wholesome self-knowledge.
+
+It is possible that this attempt to distinguish literary writing from
+other composition may convey the impression that literature and literary
+production are set off, quite apart from life, and the children's other
+experiences and interests. This would be a misfortune. Whenever any
+aspect of their lives, their work, or their play appeals to their
+emotions and their imaginations, when they are provided with a large
+vocabulary and have opened for them avenues of comparison, they will
+turn back a literary product. But it is seldom desirable to create this
+atmosphere in connection with their other studies, and the literary
+style and method is not a desirable one for all subjects.
+
+For the sake of the practice in writing and composing, and for the sake
+of acquiring ease in telling in writing what they know or desire to
+communicate, the children may write something every day. But not oftener
+than once in six weeks can we build up in a class the atmosphere,
+furnish the material, and bring up the enthusiasm for the production of
+something worth while in a literary way--story, essay, play, or poem.
+
+To set the elementary child, or even the high-school scholar, tasks of
+investigating in literature, as if he were a little college student is a
+serious mistake; or to set for him themes which call for such opinions
+and judgments as could be safely given only by a mature person. For
+instance, to ask the eighth grade in the average school to write a
+character-sketch of Shylock is to make a bid for insincerity and
+unfounded judgment. But satisfactory results may be obtained by giving
+the children a simple syllabus of questions and suggestions, indicating
+quite suitable problems for them to work at in their out-of-school
+reading; this little syllabus is then made the basis of class
+discussion, and parts of it finally, of written work. It requires some
+skill to make such a syllabus, since it must not be made up of leading
+questions nor of tediously detailed suggestions, neither must it attempt
+to exhaust the material; but must be calculated to stimulate the
+children to observe and to think, and must be designed to guide them
+into those aspects of the story, play or poem that they may suitably
+and profitably consider. Such a guide should be placed in the hands of
+young students including secondary children, whenever they are studying
+a mature and complex masterpiece.
+
+The dramatization and acting of any bit of literature that yields to
+this process is in many ways the most satisfactory return we can ask. In
+a previous chapter much has been said about the various dramatic
+settings and accompaniments of literature. From the treatment of rhymes
+and jingles as suggestions for games and plays, on through the genuine
+dramatization of a story, to the presentation of _The Merchant of
+Venice_ or some other developed literary drama, the teacher should
+forward as much as possible this mode of calling out the children. They
+must, of course, be guided by the teacher in the choice of a story for
+dramatization, seeking one that has clearly marked movements, some
+distinct events, a pretty well-rounded plot, occasion for dialogue, and
+other dramatic possibilities. The class may early be guided to the
+division of the story into its natural acts and scenes, which implies
+the omission of superfluous incidents and details. The difficulty comes
+in the supplying of the actual dialogue. The resourceful teacher will
+secure this dialogue by various means; for some of the scenes it will
+flow off without effort from the class in lesson assembled, one child
+suggesting a remark, another the reply, these being recorded and
+criticized by the class. For certain other scenes the dialogue may be
+prepared by groups of two or more children working apart from the class.
+For certain crucial and lofty scenes the teacher should make the "book."
+The whole must be submitted for discussion in the class, and may in the
+end call for considerable revision from the teacher; for the younger
+children cannot be expected to know and to meet the demands of dramatic
+dialogue--it must not only be speech, and fairly good as conversation,
+but it must forward the play with every sentence. Of course, this
+revision must never be so sweeping as radically to remake the play, or
+even to alter the essential character that the children have given it,
+no matter how crude it may seem to the teacher and to other mature
+persons who hear it. Let it stand as a bit of child-art, just as we
+rejoice to let crude productions stand as folk-art.
+
+Of course, when the older children present a literary play or any part
+of it, they must memorize and give it conscientiously as it is written.
+Indeed, the rendering with understanding and appreciation, of whatever
+they have learned of good and beautiful literature is, after all, the
+most satisfactory and natural return. If even in high school we asked
+this of the children, instead of those themes of crude or stale literary
+criticism which we all too often get, great would be the gain in
+freshness, in sincerity, in appreciation, and in ultimate taste.
+
+If we accustom the children to it from the beginning, and never intimate
+to them that it is difficult, it is about as easy to get verse out of
+them as prose. This is particularly true if the exercise is a social or
+co-operative one, in which the whole class unites to produce the ballad
+or the song. What the single child could not accomplish, the group does
+with perfect ease. And when the poem is done, nobody can tell who
+suggested this rhyme, this word, this whole line; but the whole is a
+product of which each child is proud, though he alone could never have
+compassed it. The communal story, ballad, song, or play is a unique and
+interesting performance, and any teacher who has ever assisted in making
+it feels sure that he has seen far into the social possibilities of art
+and the philosophy of literature. Every teacher must devise his own plan
+of getting this co-operative, communal, social bit of literature made,
+but every teacher of literature should try it.
+
+All this, of course, has to do with the immediate practical return from
+the studies in literature. Concerning the ultimate, distant return we
+cannot speak in terms of teaching and learning. Art is long; like the
+human child, being destined to a long and vicissitudinous life, it had a
+long childhood; and this is true of its growth in each individual as of
+its growth in the race. So far as regards many of the most desired
+results of literature, we can but sow the seed, and wait years for the
+bloom--a lifetime, maybe, for the fruit. But though we may not reach a
+hand through all the years to grasp the far-off interest of our toil, we
+have every reason to believe that the harvest will be fair.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVI
+
+THE CORRELATIONS OF LITERATURE
+
+
+The term "correlation" is not to be used in this chapter in the
+specialized and technical sense that it has taken on in pedagogical
+discussion. It will be used, with apologies, to designate all
+connections of literature with any other subject or discipline in the
+elementary curriculum.
+
+No one interested in education can have failed to notice the fact that
+the doctrines of concentration, correlation, condensation, by whatever
+name called or under whatever aspect approached, have undergone many
+modifications and shifts of emphasis. Like every other educational
+doctrine that has much of the truth in it, it was welcomed in the early
+days of its promulgation as the final solution, and seemed for a time to
+sweep out of existence, or into its own radius, every other theory or
+practice.
+
+One is obliged to wonder if educational people are peculiarly liable to
+be caught by a formula or an apparently axiomatic statement, build
+everything upon it, and silence every question by a reverential appeal
+to it. Such seemed to be the attitude toward the doctrine of correlation
+when it first sifted down from the savants to the actual teachers in
+the actual schools; and many and monumental were the follies committed
+in the name of this pedagogical religion. Modified and adapted under
+actual practical conditions, and criticized by the present generation of
+educational philosophers, it has come down to the school of today--that
+is to say, the school that is sensitive enough and free enough to
+respond quickly to new thinking--as, on the one hand, a protest against
+isolation and abstraction, and on the other hand, an appeal for such a
+conservation of the unity and naturalness of the child's consciousness
+as is consistent with the natural and legitimate use of material. In its
+present form the doctrine no longer justifies the violent wresting of
+subjects and topics from their natural settings, to be fitted together
+in some merely logical and theoretical system of instruction.
+
+In the days of determined and thoroughgoing correlation no department of
+discipline suffered more than the arts; and none of the other arts
+suffered as did literature. This is not difficult to account for. Music
+and painting are quite professedly and obviously unconcerned with
+subject-matter--are, as a rule, entirely empty of definite intellectual
+content. But literature has ideas, it embodies concrete images,
+mentions specific objects, reflects experience, and sometimes even uses
+actual persons and historical events; above all, it employs the same
+medium of expression as the other subjects. All these matters made
+literature the peculiar prey of the ardent correlationists; to each or
+any, perhaps to all, of these phenomena in literature they could attach
+bodies of teaching in technical subjects, and systems of discipline in
+formal training.
+
+The case was equally bad when literature was constituted the center of
+the scheme, and when it was attached to a scheme having some other
+center--geography, for example, or history. For in the first case it was
+altogether likely that some detail or aspect of the piece of literature,
+merely subsidiary in the literature, would be selected for emphasis and
+elevated into the correlating detail; the background or setting would be
+taken out for study and elaboration, crowding the action, the human and
+really literary elements, out of sight. As, for example--and it is an
+authentic example of a scheme of correlation--the first-grade children
+are given as the center of their work _The Old Woman Who Found the
+Sixpence_; from this story we take out the dog, which we study as the
+type of _digitigrade carnivora_. Or--again an authentic example--having
+read to the first grade _The Musicians of Bremen_, as one of them
+happens to be a donkey, we seize the opportunity to teach in detail and
+over several weeks of time, the physical peculiarities of the donkey and
+his kinsman the horse, among many exercises drawing out of the children
+some speculation or information as to how much water or hay the horse
+consumes; to which hook we attach instruction as to weights and
+measures; and so on into the remote fringes of information about objects
+and persons used in the story only in the literary way.
+
+In the second case, that in which literature is attached to some other
+center, in feeling about for some bit of literature to fit into a
+geographical fact, a meteorological condition, or a historical event,
+the teacher was quite likely to hit upon a third- or fourth-rate
+specimen, unsuitable for his children in other respects, and in teaching
+it he was likely to force from it a meaning and an emphasis that as
+literature it would not bear; as, when the children were studying the
+migration of birds, he taught them Bryant's "To a Waterfowl,"
+emphasizing the migration and ignoring the true emphasis of the
+poem--the lesson of a guiding providence; or as, _apropos_ of December
+weather, he set the fifth grade to reading Whittier's slow-moving,
+meditative, and much too mature "Snow-Bound."
+
+As a matter of fact, no art yields kindly to any method of adjustment
+to other subjects that emphasizes the subject-matter or information
+material that may perchance be involved in the art. Information-giving
+is not the method nor the mission of art; the four, or five arts if we
+include acting, with which we may have to do in elementary discipline
+combine and play into one another without difficulty. It is not
+necessary to speak again of the close and easy association of literature
+with all the forms of acting that the children have, from marching,
+dancing, and simple gesture, on to the acting required in an organized
+drama. On the musical side, particularly the verse-form of literature,
+it combines most acceptably with music. A great many of the lyrics that
+are simple enough for the children to learn, and many of the verses that
+they write, are also adaptable as songs to be sung. And even when they
+cannot be set to melodies they share, in their spoken form, with the
+actual musical notes, in the training of the ear. The exercises in
+drawing, painting, and modeling co-operate to fine advantage for the
+objectifying of the visual images, of which the children get so large a
+store from literature. As a matter of fact, when the children are set
+the task of objectifying an inner image, it is most likely to be some
+figure or scene from literature that comes up for expression--Nausicaa
+throwing the ball, Robin Hood stringing his bow, Siegfried tempering his
+sword, Paul Revere mounting his horse, the lodge of old Nokomis. This is
+because the images and pictures they find in literature retain in the
+minds of the children the glow of imagination, the warmth of emotion,
+the vitality of a remembered joy. And it is true, as every teacher knows
+who has taught it aright, that a bit of literature arouses in the
+children a mood of creative imagination such as no other subject ever
+can awaken. This mood of imaginative creation instinctively expresses
+itself in literary composition, in drawing, painting, designing,
+modeling, acting, or music.
+
+On the very surface of the problem of the correlations of literature
+lies the somewhat difficult question of the relation of the children's
+literature to their lessons in reading--as regards both their beginning
+to read and their later practice in reading. It remains true that with
+all our experimenting and in spite of all the enthusiasm we can muster,
+to the majority of children and in the hands of most teachers the
+mechanics of learning to read is drudgery. This drudgery literature
+should share with the other subjects in its due proportion. One would
+not ignore the fact that this "due proportion" may be very
+large--larger than that of any other subject. It is quite legitimate to
+employ the charm and interest of literature in the service of reading;
+and it would be a serious misfortune for the children to learn their
+reading entirely through the medium of colorless fact. We have agreed
+that there is such a thing as literary reading, different in many ways
+from the reading of history or science. Even the younger children can
+feel this, and can produce it if correctly guided. But they should not
+always be doing literary reading; they should acquire the colorless but
+good style of merely intellectual reading. This they will not do if in
+their early reading exercises they are given more than their due
+proportion of literature.
+
+It is undoubtedly wise to make upon the teacher and the children the
+impression that reading is a tool, a key--perhaps we would better call
+it a gate through which one gets at many things--the joys and rewards of
+literature, to be sure, but also the images of history, the facts of
+nature, the details of handicraft. A reading-book, or any system of
+reading-lessons that contains nothing but literature is therefore a
+mistake.
+
+From another point of view it is a misfortune to identify the
+reading-lessons with literature. As has been said more than once in
+these chapters, the alert teacher of our day is eager to emancipate
+literature again from its bondage to the printed page, and to set free
+once more its function as a truly social art; making it also once more a
+matter of the listening ear and the living voice.
+
+To identify the reading-lessons of the younger children with their
+literature lessons is to keep them at things much too immature, and to
+retard their mental and artistic growth. They can apprehend and
+appreciate many things that they cannot read. It is a commonplace that a
+child's listening vocabulary is far in advance of his reading
+vocabulary, no matter how or how early he learns to read. Of course,
+this is the secret of the revolt against book-reading of the children
+who learn to read late--the simplicity of the thought and expression in
+the matter they are mechanically able to read, makes it unacceptable to
+them intellectually. It is in the literature received by his ear that a
+child grows and exercises his maturer powers. The older children should
+be taught and exercised in literary reading, the simple interpretative
+reading of their literature. The best results in this most profitable
+aspect of the teaching of literature can be obtained in the secondary
+period, when the children are expert enough as readers to think while
+they read, and when their voices are, as mere mechanical organs, more
+completely under control.
+
+The objections to the association of drill in writing, in spelling, in
+grammar, and in compositions are of like kind. It may be granted that
+there is something in the fact that literature represents the most
+effective use of language, and is, all things considered, the most
+interesting kind of writing. Still this does not constitute a sufficient
+reason why the burden, and in all too many cases the odium, of teaching
+these things should attach to literature. It is a perfidious breaking of
+the promise of literature, or of any art, which should keep as much as
+possible of the atmosphere of play. Of course, drill in language and in
+written expression should be attached to every subject in the elementary
+curriculum; and this not only for the sake of relieving the literature
+from a burden of unattractive tasks, but because of the fact that the
+literary style and vocabulary are not good for all subjects and
+purposes, and the children should not be trained exclusively in these.
+On the large scale of things, it is a pity at any stage of the child's
+education to identify "English" with literature, since there is and
+should be so much English that is not literature, and so much literature
+that is not English.
+
+One of the pleasantest and most profitable co-operations of literature
+is with the training in languages other than the vernacular. In those
+elementary classes where the children have instruction in either German
+or French--or, for the matter of that, in Spanish or Italian--every
+effort should be made in their use of story and verse to secure the
+characteristic and universal literary effect. The German lyric has all
+the beauty of music and of image that the English has; the French
+fairy-play has most of elements of dramatic art that the children could
+use in English translation.
+
+A few of the fallacies of correlation, or mere co-relation, of
+literature with other aspects of the children's school experience are
+these:
+
+The fallacy of setting out to teach children the love of home, or
+country, or nature, or animals, by teaching them literature that
+expresses or reflects those emotions.
+
+The love of one's own country must be in our day a thing of slow and
+gradual growth. Our feelings about our country should arise out of our
+knowledge of the heroic things in her history, out of the noble plans
+for her growth, out of the generous things she provides for her children
+and the children of other lands. Out of this or some such basis arises
+the emotion of patriotism, a poem or a story which reflects this emotion
+has some such back-ground by implication. To hunt about for a poem or
+story which teaches patriotism is a putting of the cart before the
+horse. First arouse in your children the emotion--an original personal
+emotion of their own, growing out of the legitimate background; then, if
+perchance you are so fortunate as to find a poem or a story which also
+reflects this emotion, and which is at the same time good as art, you
+are so much the richer. The children will find their own feeling
+reinforced and nobly expressed, and consequently deepened and dignified.
+
+The same thing is true as to the love of animals. If the children have
+the literature first, or only the literature, they may have only a
+second-hand and perfunctory love of the beasts. But first give your
+grade a dog, or a cat, or a canary; or give your child in the country a
+pony, or a lamb, or a pig; that they may feel at first hand the throb of
+dramatic brotherhood, of humorous kinship, that constitutes love of
+animals. Then, when, judging by the proper canons that test good
+literature, you find a piece that reflects and deepens this, it is so
+much pure gain.
+
+The same thing is true of nature. The children should have many things
+that reflect feelings about nature and natural phenomena, and that give
+the interpretations which great and gifted artists have made of these
+things. But one should no more go to literature for creating first-hand
+love of nature than he would go to the same source for facts about any
+specific phenomenon in nature. Of course, this is not saying that we
+demand that a child shall have had a previous experience of every image
+and phenomenon of nature that is presented to him in literature. Indeed,
+we expect literature to complement and supplement life in the matter of
+imagery; to deepen and to arouse experience in the matter of emotion.
+But the fallacy lies in choosing literature on this ground, and in
+depending upon literature to create at first hand what is, and should
+be, an extra-literary feeling. Now, from time to time there comes the
+teacher's way one of those rare chances when he finds the time, the
+place, and the poem all together, as when on some March day of thaw he
+can teach "The cock is crowing," of Wordsworth; on the first morning of
+hoar-frost he can read "The Frost;" on another day, "The Wind"--the
+things that harmonize with the spirit of an experience.
+
+Another of the fallacies of correlation is the determined, if not
+violent, association of the work in literature with the festivals. As a
+matter of fact, there is not much more than time in certain schools to
+teach the younger children the things they are expected to know about
+Thanksgiving, Christmas, Washington's birthday, Easter, June. The work
+for the next celebration begins just as soon as the foregoing one is
+past. The partitioning of the year into these very emphatic sections,
+and the carrying of the children through the same round year after year,
+are questions too general to be treated here. But we are interested in
+the fact that in most cases the specimens of literature that can be
+considered applicable to the festivals would never be chosen from out
+the world of things for their absolute value as literature, nor for
+their peculiar suitability for the children. So it comes about that the
+children--the younger classes, at least--spend as much as two-thirds of
+their time at second- or third-rate specimens of literature.
+
+There is not much reason for protesting in our day against that species
+of correlating literature with something else which consists in teaching
+in connection with this literature things that the children ought to
+know later, regardless of their immediate fitness or acceptability; as
+for example the facts of Greek mythology, the characters and plots of
+Shakespeare's plays; we can never be too grateful for that
+interpretation of childhood and of education which has made this
+hereafter impossible. At the same time, if we choose wisely now, choose
+in the light of our best knowledge, the children will be glad all their
+lives to know the things we choose for them.
+
+The connection of literature with history is a many-sided question, and
+is not easily disposed of. As a matter of fact, the partnership between
+history and literature, so vaguely asserted and so complaisantly
+accepted in many quarters, is a combination in which the literature has
+usually gone to the wall. Indeed, the practical adjustment of history
+and literature wavers about between two equally fallacious schemes. One
+of these is to give the children the literature produced by the nation
+whose history they are studying; as for example, the Homeric poems when
+they study the history of Greece, that they may imbibe the true Greek
+spirit from the poems. Now, children of elementary age cannot
+distinguish, or even unconsciously feel, a national spirit in a poem. It
+is the broadly human, the universally true, elements and spirit that
+they feel. Besides, the Greek national spirit, the spirit of the
+characteristic Greek period, was not Homeric, and the literature of the
+characteristic Greek period would never do for the elementary children.
+In the case of Greek literature one cannot unreservedly demur because
+the Homeric poems are never bad for the children. But the same
+principle applied to other nations and their literature may bring
+disaster.
+
+The other scheme for relating history and literature is to choose the
+literature on the basis of the fact that it deals with some person or
+event or period with which the history is concerned; as, when we have a
+class in the history of the Plymouth colony, we give them Longfellow's
+"The Courtship of Miles Standish" for literature, which, except for one
+or two picturesque scenes, one would never choose as literature for
+young children; and as, when we study the American Revolution, we give
+them as literature some mature and sentimental modern novel, or some
+sensational and untrustworthy juvenile, choosing these merely because
+they profess to incorporate events connected with the historical period.
+
+The whole matter of the historical romance is important and
+complicated--too complicated and involving too many critical principles
+to be handled here. It must be sufficient to say in this connection what
+is sufficiently obvious to any thoughtful critic--that he who takes up
+and handles legitimately and justly an epoch, an event, or a group of
+historical persons, and at the same time produces good literature, is a
+master and produces a masterpiece--much too mature and developed for
+elementary children. Only Scott possessed the faculty of keeping
+generally in sight of his history, or of segregating it in an occasional
+_longeur_, and adding to it a rattling good story. But Scott is too
+mature and complex for elementary children up to the very oldest, and
+they are not likely to be studying the periods in history that
+interested him.
+
+No, the kinship between history and literature, and the co-operations
+between them in the children's experience, are not of this external and
+artificial kind. It is for the mature and philosophical student to study
+literature as a culture product--its relation to the country and the
+times that produced it. It is for much older students to read the great
+romances, like Tolstoy's _War and Peace_, that adequately mirror an
+epoch or an epoch-making event.
+
+For the children there is a deeper spiritual kinship between history and
+literature. It has to do with the personal and dramatic side, the
+biography and adventure of history. It lies in the spirit and atmosphere
+of human achievement, in the identity of the motives that express
+themselves in literature and in actual accomplishment. When we study the
+pioneer and the colonist--the born and doomed colonist--we find his
+kinsman and prototype in Robinson Crusoe. When we study the Revolution,
+the revolt against unjust laws, the protest of democracy against
+class-oppression, we find the spirit of Robin Hood.
+
+I hasten to disclaim any intention of advising these particular
+combinations. The examples should merely serve to make clear certain
+aspects of the kinship of spirit between literature and history. Of
+course one does now and again, and as it were, by special grace, find a
+story or a poem--like the "Concord Hymn," or "Marion's Men," or "The
+Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers"--precisely _apropos_ of his event and
+beautifully adapted to his literary needs. And one often comes upon a
+historical document--like _The Oregon Trail_ or _The Autobiography of
+Benjamin Franklin_--so picturesque and concrete, so observant of effects
+of unity and harmony, so full of appeals to the imagination, and so
+effective in verbal expression, as to yield many of the effects of
+literature.
+
+In spite of all protests against forced and mistaken associations of
+literature with other subjects in school, we must constantly insist that
+it is no isolated thing, detached from life. On the contrary, literature
+arises out of life, and is always arising out of it and reacting upon
+it. It is effective and practically operative in a child's life
+precisely because it, too, is life. It is closer, therefore, to his
+business and bosom than any item or system of knowledge could be. It is
+not to disturb its trustworthiness and value to say that it does not
+primarily convey information and cannot be called upon to deliver facts.
+It does render truth and wisdom, the summary and essence of fact and
+knowledge. It does not destroy its educational value to say that we
+shall search it in vain for a body or a system of organized discipline;
+for, since it is art, it disciplines while it charms and teaches us
+while it sets us free.
+
+The natural correlations of literature are with the other arts, but,
+above all, with the spirit of childhood, and with the consciousness of
+children; with the tone and spirit of their other work, rather than with
+its actual subject-matter.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVII
+
+LITERATURE OUT OF SCHOOL AND READING OTHER THAN LITERATURE
+
+
+Were it not for appearing captious or extravagant, one would like to say
+that in these days of cheap and easy books, and amidst the temptations
+of the free libraries, the problem is that of keeping the children from
+reading too much, rather than of inducing them to read enough. This is
+particularly true of children in our large American cities, whom we
+must, in our first generation of city-dwelling, guard against
+eye-strain, and nerve-strain, and library-air, and physical inactivity
+of all sorts. Luckily, our generation has learned some things about the
+educational processes that have tended to lessen materially the danger
+of over-reading. In many homes, and to many children out of school,
+books and magazines have hitherto been a sort of opiate, from the point
+of view of the child deadening the hungry sensibilities and lulling the
+stifled activities; and from the point of view of the parent securing
+silence and providing an apparently innocuous occupation. This is all
+too little changed now, though more and more homes are providing
+opportunity and encouragement for other occupations: shop and studio,
+and more abundant material and opportunity for play. In the cities the
+public playgrounds and gymnasiums--and all too rarely the public
+workshop and studio for children--begin to share with the public library
+the task of safely taking care of the children out of school.
+
+But there will always be time for reading, and by all means the
+legitimate share of the children's time should be given to it. The
+so-called supplementary reading given them by the school is largely, I
+take it, a question of the much reading that will make the process
+easier, and not a matter of accumulating facts, or of acquiring a wider
+knowledge of literature. In many schools that I have observed it is
+often unwisely and carelessly chosen, so far as the literary share of it
+is concerned. It should be selected partly for its bearing upon the
+fact-studies, and not wholly made up of things of the literary kind. The
+bearings of the question of the school's supplementary reading are not
+literary, or, so far as they are, they have been discussed in other
+connections.
+
+Every child should ideally have free access to a collection of books got
+together with reference to his needs and tastes. It may be serviceable
+to indicate the kind and number of books that might be included in such
+a library of a child up to his fourteenth year.
+
+There should be in such a collection several biographies. On the whole,
+let them be of the older, idealizing type, not of the modern young
+university instructor's virtuously iconoclastic type. Children get at
+their history first through heroic and dramatic figures and events. In
+their earlier years it is the imagination that appropriates the images
+and events of history. It is therefore only good pedagogy to present the
+figures on their heroic and ideal side. Let these biographies include
+the record of different sorts of men--a statesman, a pioneer, a
+preacher, a soldier, an explorer, an inventor, a missionary, a business
+man, a man of letters--so that many types of character and kinds of
+experience may be reflected.
+
+As the children grow older, they will dip into history for the
+images--the persons and detachable events. The search for facts and
+philosophy will come many years later. Some tempting books of history
+should appear on their shelves; _The Dutch Republic_, _The Conquest of
+Mexico_, Parkman's romantic narratives, and John Fiske's; if possible
+the illustrated edition of _Green's History of the English People_. Most
+of the history they get from their own reading, however, should be what
+they get from the biographies of the central figures in the
+events--Columbus, William of Orange, Francis Drake, and all the other
+picturesque and heroic persons. Other historical reading would best be
+done under guidance and in connection with the work in school.
+
+There should be a few books of travel and exploration. Among these there
+should be some of the original sources, if possible the _Bradford
+Journal_, the _Jesuit Relations_, the _Lewis and Clark Journals_.
+Froissart and Marco Polo should be included; the fable-making travelers
+perform a very useful function. To these may be added a few most recent
+explorations--African, Arctic, Andean, Thibetan.
+
+Children, barring the exceptional child, will not read formal science;
+but it may develop or help on a desirable taste and interest to have
+some of the many pretty out-door books in their collection--not romances
+of the wild, but simpler treatises about the things to be found in the
+door-yard and the home woodland. And when a child develops a taste or a
+gift in any scientific direction, he should have access, as easy as
+possible, to some good reference books suited to his needs. All children
+should have access to some of the more popular technical and scientific
+journals which give interesting accounts of current discoveries and
+inventions.
+
+By way of nature and animal books we will include the _Jungle Books_, an
+expurgated edition of _Reynard the Fox_, _Aesop's Fables_, and, of
+course, _Uncle Remus_. Other semi-scientific nature-writers will
+doubtless appear in most collections of children's books--and may do no
+harm.
+
+A book of Greek myth seriously and beautifully told should be
+accessible. No other myth is so beautiful or so imaginative, or so
+artistically put together. The children do not need to have to do with
+many myths until they know something about interpreting them. Of course,
+they should have access to the Bible in some attractive form. A large
+illustrated edition--Dore's or Tissot's--will please and instruct them
+from their earliest days. This is one of the cases in which
+pictures--good and imaginative pictures--form a desirable gateway into a
+realm where the children are not naturally at home, and where they need
+the help of a great and serious artist in finding their way. Of course,
+poor and materialistic pictures are a misfortune, especially those that
+attempt to body forth preternatural events and supernatural beings.
+Dore's pictures are not undesirable, because they often help a child to
+a noble and imaginative conception of a thing he is himself powerless to
+construct; while Tissot's are good because they set forth with beauty
+and richness of detail the many phases of life which the child must try
+to image in reading the Hebrew stories--from the nomadic simplicity of
+the saga of pastoral Abraham to the luxurious refinements of the
+Romanized and cosmopolitan Jerusalem.
+
+The little scholar should find on his shelves Lanier's _King Arthur_,
+Pyle's _Robin Hood_, Palmer's _Odyssey_, some translation of the
+_Iliad_; in short, some form of each of the great hero-tales; a selected
+few of Scott's romances--_Ivanhoe_, _Quentin Durward_, _Guy Mannering_,
+_Anne of Geierstein_; a few of Cooper's; _Robinson Crusoe_, _Don
+Quixote_, William Morris' prose tales, a pair of Quiller-Couch's, and as
+many of Joseph Conrad's; these might constitute his romances. But unless
+he is a very unusual child, he will never read in these masters, if he
+is given masses of cheap and easy reading, such as the Henty books and
+the Alger series; or if he finds in his mother's sitting-room a stack of
+"the season's best sellers" and the ten-cent magazines. The cheap and
+easy style and the commonplace material of this sort of books offer the
+line of least resistance to the young reader. They flow into his mind
+without effort on his part, while, if he would apprehend the masters,
+he must actively co-operate with them at every step, arousing his best
+powers to comprehend their expressions and to grasp their ideas. One
+would hesitate to say that there is absolutely no use for books of the
+Henty and Alger type. One can imagine a child whose every bent was
+against reading, being enticed to begin by some such easy and
+commonplace experience. And one can imagine their being useful to wean
+children away from really vicious books. In a certain boys' club I know,
+organized in a social settlement, which was really a reorganization of a
+gang, these particular books were for a year or so an acceptable
+substitute for the bloody romances they had been reading. Many of those
+boys have never passed beyond them; but to many others they were, as was
+hoped, stepping-stones to better things. There is no place for them in
+the ideal collection of children's books. Certain books, harmless and as
+recreation even desirable, will inevitably make their appearance on the
+children's shelves--Miss Alcott's, Mrs. Richards', and others of the
+many series of girls' books and boys' books; they are doubtless innocent
+enough, and to be discouraged only when they keep the children from
+something better worth while; to be encouraged, on the other hand, only
+for those children who must be tempted by easy reading into any habit of
+using books. To be sure, you will probably find that your child has
+found one of them, perhaps a whole series, to which for a certain period
+she seems to have given her whole heart; but if treated with wisdom this
+symptom will disappear, and you will find her at some surprisingly early
+day re-reading the tournament at Ashby, and patronizingly alluding to
+the time when she was enslaved to "The Little General" series, or the
+"Under the Roses" or the "Eight Half-Sisters" series, or any other
+particular juveniles, as "when I was a child."
+
+In the matter of fairy-tales one must discriminate and renounce quite
+resolutely. It is not good for a child who has early mastered that edged
+tool of reading to have access to all fairy-tales and all kinds of
+fairy-tales. Eschew all the modern ones. Of course, if you have a
+personal friend who has written a book of them, for reasons other than
+literary your children will read them. But as to those you choose freely
+for them let them have Grimm and Perrault, and the _Arabian Nights_, and
+after a while Andersen; which, together with what they will pick up here
+and there in magazines and in their friends' houses, will be enough.
+
+For poetry, the child should have on his own shelves some pretty
+edition of the _Nursery Rhymes_, _The Child's Garden_, some really good
+collection of little things--_The Posy Ring_, for example, Henley's
+_Lyra Heroica_, Lang's _The Blue Poetry Book_, Allingham's _Book of
+Ballads_. For the rest he should be read to from the poets themselves,
+and as soon as he is old enough, sent to the volumes of the poets for
+his reading. As in school so at home the children should hear their
+poetry read until they acquire some real degree of expertness as
+readers. Children who can not understand at all, poetry which they read
+silently, will delight in it read aloud.
+
+This little collection should contain the classic nonsense, but not all
+kinds of inartistic fooling and rude fun. There should be _Alice in
+Wonderland_ and _Through the Looking-Glass_ (always the one with
+Tenniel's pictures). We must remember that _Alice_ is very delicate art,
+and that its final and deepest appeal is to the mature person. Certain
+very imaginative children take to it as a fanciful tale at the moment of
+ripeness; others miss it then, and must wait until the wonderful
+dream-psychology of it, and the delicate satire of its parodies can make
+their appeal to them as older persons. Lear's _Nonsense Rhymes_ in
+judicious doses every child should have; "John Gilpin's Ride;" certain
+of the _Bab Ballads_; a little of Oliver Heresford's delightful
+foolishness. Among the folk- and fairy-tales he will find many comic
+bits whose kind or degree of humor will suit him admirably in his
+younger years. In Clouston's _Book of Noodles_ may be found a mine of
+such funny tales. _The Peterkin Papers_ is the best of modern
+noodle-tales. No family can be brought up without the help of _Strewel
+Peter_, nor should they miss _Little Black Sambo_. Most American
+children are enchanted with the fun of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn though
+one must sadly acknowledge that it is woven into back-grounds of a
+sensational kind not at all improving to an unformed taste.
+
+One cannot feel that parodies are in general good for children; though,
+after they have had a good share of serious enjoyment out of their
+fairy-tales, and especially if they seem too much or too long absorbed
+in them, they ought to have _The Rose and the Ring_ and _Prince Prigio_.
+
+Picture-books and illustrated books are another independent little
+problem. It is a curious fact that it is not the beautiful lithographs
+of birds and animals, flocks and landscapes, children in irreproachable
+Russian dresses and short socks, seated in the corner of ancestral
+mahogany sofas, refreshing themselves from antique silver porringers,
+that the little living heads hang over by the hour on the nursery floor.
+It is much more likely to be the thunderous landscapes of the old Dutch
+woodcuts in Great-grandmama's Bible, the queer, chaotic, symbolistic
+plates of the _Mother-Play_; the wonderful prints of Comenius' _Orbis
+Pictus_; the casualties of John Leech's hunting fields. True, they
+delight in the charming details of all Kate Greenaway's books; and
+Walter Crane's pictures so rich in color and beautiful detail give
+ceaseless joy; but one must confess that they are a bit inclined to
+"shy" at pictures they know to be intended for them. Every nursery that
+can compass it should have as many as possible of the books illustrated
+in color by Boutet de Monvel. The children should never see comic
+illustrations of their nursery rhymes and stories. They are all banal as
+wit and trashy as art, substituting an ugly and distorted image for the
+possibly beautiful one the child might have made for himself. After they
+have passed out of infancy, they do not need pictures in their stories.
+The black-and-white print is inadequate when color and movement should
+be a part of the image, and children should have the discipline of
+relying entirely on themselves in visualizing the images of the text.
+There should also be in the "little library," or accessible to the
+little readers in the big one, beside the illustrated Bible, the one
+big volume of Shakespeare with Gilbert's pictures--an inexhaustible mine
+of life and art; Engelmann and Anderson's _Atlas of the Homeric Poems_,
+a _Dictionary of Classical Antiquities_, and an encyclopedia that the
+older children can use, should have a place on these shelves.
+
+It is so often said as to amount to a mere convention that the best
+possible literary experience for a child is to be turned loose to browse
+(they always say "browse") in a grown-up library. One always finds a
+malicious pleasure in detecting in these people (and they are always to
+be found in great plenty) those baby impressions, still uncorrected that
+they got of many books in the course of their browsing. Of course, in a
+house where there are many books the children will experiment, will
+taste of many dishes, and possibly devour many things not intended for
+them. From some of these they will take no serious harm, while in many
+other cases they will get a permanent warp of judgment or of feeling. It
+would seem to me wise to guide the child in his explorations, giving him
+plenty of those grown-up things that you believe to be good for him, and
+heading him off as long as possible from the others. For all your
+caution, however, children will be found buried in _Tom Jones_, mousing
+about in Montaigne, chuckling over _Tristram Shandy_, and befuddling
+themselves with _Ghosts_ and _Anna Karenina_. In these cases we can only
+hope that nature has mercifully ordained that, not having the necessary
+apperception experience, they will not get at the real truth of these
+books, and that they will have the luck--rare, to be sure--to remove and
+correct their mistaken impressions in some subsequent reading.
+
+The ideal co-operation between home, school, Sunday school, and library
+is yet to be brought about; teacher and parents can do much to promote
+it. As a step toward this co-operation they should provide every child
+who reads in a library with a list of books. The imaginative books in
+the list given out by the public libraries are practically all
+juveniles, apparently chosen mainly for the purpose of amusing children
+who have no books in their homes. These things are undoubtedly amusing;
+they are superficially appetizing; and they have the same effect that
+the soda fountain at the corner drug-shop has upon the children's
+appetite for true nourishment--they take the edge off his hunger so that
+he has no relish for his bread and butter, though he has had nothing to
+eat but a hint of cheap flavor, a dash of formaldehyde, a spoonful of
+poor milk, and a glassful of effervescence. The lists given by parents
+and teachers may change all this, but only if they include good things,
+beautiful and interesting enough to make these wasteful juveniles seem
+unattractive.
+
+Every schoolroom in which the children are old enough to be interested,
+and every family should devise a method of digesting the news of the
+world every day or every week, so that the children may have some
+knowledge of current events. Of course, there are children who cannot be
+kept from reading the morning paper--crimes, sports, and all. Such a
+child's family should choose its newspaper with all possible care Every
+self-respecting family where there are children should be willing to
+submit to the very small sacrifice of foregoing the Sunday paper, to
+save the little people from the flood of commonplace, of triviality, and
+of ribaldry that overwhelms them from these monstrous productions.
+
+Perhaps no well-brought-up child would be quite well equipped if he has
+not had _The Youth's Companion_ and _St. Nicholas_ in his childhood; but
+it is a mistake to let them linger too long in these periodicals, whose
+contents are somewhat fragmentary as literature, and not quite large
+enough or full enough as to current events and interests. It is wise to
+turn the children as soon as possible to the mature and more thorough
+magazines, among which should be included a technical and scientific
+journal. By all means do not subject them to the temptation of the
+various story-magazines--those cheap and easy chronicles of the
+questionable affairs of undergraduates and chorus girls, of Nietzschean
+superhumanity gone to seed, of imitations of the imitated psychology of
+the wild, all rendered in the English of third-year college themes. If
+the adult members of the family must have these things, let them be
+kept, along with "the season's best sellers," out of easy reach of the
+children.
+
+It should not need to be said that there has been no attempt in the
+foregoing discussion to recommend every good thing, or to give an
+exhaustive list of such things in any one line; no more has there been
+an effort to give warning of all things undesirable, but merely, as in
+the whole book, to state the underlying principles of choice, with just
+enough specific examples to make clear their application.
+
+
+
+
+CHAPTER XVIII
+
+A COURSE IN LITERATURE FOR THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL
+
+
+The list of titles in literature given below must be taken as free
+suggestion, not at all as dogmatic requirement; least of all should it
+be regarded as an exhaustive and definitive programme. Throughout this
+little book there has been a deliberate effort to mention no more
+examples and specimens than would serve to support and illustrate the
+principles stated or the theories advanced, so as to keep out of it the
+wearing atmosphere of interminable lists, and to leave those who might
+accept the doctrines quite free to apply them in the selection of their
+own specimens. So now in the plan appended the titles have been
+carefully sifted and resolutely limited. It should not be necessary to
+say that it is not intended that all the specimens mentioned in any one
+year should be given within that year in every school--perhaps in any
+school; or that they should necessarily be given in the year to which
+they are here assigned. They are rather designed to indicate the kind of
+thing one would choose for the average classes in the average school,
+and to suggest things that go well together. I have even ventured to
+hope that those who read the book will also take the pains to read all
+the specimens mentioned in the programme, so as to catch their spirit
+and atmosphere, and after that choose quite freely for themselves these
+or other titles. The field of choice is especially wide among the
+folk-tales; all those mentioned are good, and suitable for the places in
+which they are put. But there are others good and suitable, which may,
+indeed, better satisfy the needs of some special teacher or class. In
+some schools, no doubt, it will be well to give a third year of
+folk-tales and simple lyrics before beginning the hero-tales. In that
+case the whole course would be pushed along a year, making for the last
+or eighth year a combination of bits taken from the seventh and eighth
+years suggested here. The course is planned for a school whose children
+go on into high school; though one can see little reason for a different
+course in literature for those children who stop with a grammar-school
+education. What we covet for such children is not knowledge of much
+literature, nor knowledge of any literature in particular, but a taste
+for wholesome books and some trustworthy habits of reading. These
+results are best secured when a few suitable and beautiful things have
+been lovingly taught and joyfully apprehended. Children thus provided
+will keep on reading; if they have been really fed on _Julius Caesar_ or
+_The Tempest_ they will hunger for more Shakespeare; if they have taken
+delight in _Treasure Island_ they will pursue Stevenson and find Scott
+and Cooper. The chances for implanting in them some living and abiding
+love of books are much better if we teach them in school the things they
+may easily master and completely contain, than if we try to supply them
+with what only an adult reader can expect to appropriate, which
+therefore takes on the character of a task, or remains in their minds a
+mere chaotic mass.
+
+The plan of the course is simple and obvious enough. Indeed, the main
+idea is first of all merely that of putting into each year such things
+as will delight and train a child of that age in literary ways. With
+this is joined the equally simple and reasonable purpose of giving in
+each year an acceptable variety looking toward the development of a
+generous taste--a story, a heroic poem, a musical lyric or two, a bit of
+fun, a group of fables. Throughout the programme there has been a
+conscious attempt to use things every teacher knows or may very easily
+find, and of associating things that harmonize in spirit.
+
+For the first two years the folk-tales form the core of the course. To
+the folk-tales is joined a group of simple lyrics, many of them the more
+formal and expressive of the traditionary rhymes. As a matter of course,
+in a school where these first- and second-year children have not already
+had in kindergarten or in the home nursery the simpler rhymes and
+jingles--"Little Boy Blue," "Jack Horner," "There Was a Man in Our
+Town"--they should be taught.
+
+In the third year _Robinson Crusoe_ constitutes the large core. As
+suggested in another chapter it is well to treat this story as if it
+were a cycle, taking it in episodes, and interweaving with it other bits
+of literature which harmonize with it, either reinforcing it or
+counteracting it. It may easily happen that a teacher would select a
+quite different group of poems for study along with _Robinson Crusoe_,
+according as he emphasized some other aspect of the story and according
+to the maturity of his children. This programme assumes a pretty mature
+third-year group. It may be in many schools well to transfer, as I have
+suggested, this whole arrangement to the fourth year.
+
+The fifth- and sixth-year work is arranged upon a similar plan--that of
+constituting a story or a story-cycle the center of the work, and
+associating with it shorter and supplementary bits. While the poems in
+both cases are such as harmonize in subject or idea with aspects of the
+two stories that will inevitably appear in the teaching, they have not
+been chosen solely from that point of view; they are also in every case
+beautiful as detached poems, and ideally, at least, suitable for the
+children. Every experienced teacher will have other verses and stories
+in mind which may be added to those given or substituted for them. Some
+of them will be useful, not as class studies necessarily, but as a part
+of that "reserve stock" that every teacher has, from which he draws from
+time to time something to read to his class which they are not
+expecting.
+
+In the programme for the sixth year an alternative is suggested. Many
+teachers will find enough in the _Arthur_ stories to form the core of
+the literature for the year. Others will find material for the whole
+year's stories in the Norwegian and Icelandic sagas. Many will not like
+the suggestion of giving the antidote of the chivalric romances--_Don
+Quixote_. Many will prefer to drop hero-tales and romances in favor of
+more modern stories. Such a group of stories is suggested introducing
+the stories that call for interpretation, and the apprehending of a
+secondary meaning. This paves the way for the stories of the seventh
+year which call for some genuine literary interpretation. In the seventh
+year programme the two dramatic bits of Yeats's are suggested, not only
+because they are charming in themselves, and are in charming artistic
+contrast, but because they can easily be staged and acted, and are full
+of suggestion of the kind of thing the children can do themselves. _The
+Pot of Broth_ is the dramatization of a well-known folk-droll, and _The
+Hour-Glass_ is a morality calling for no complexity of dialogue, of
+staging, or of dramatic motive--the kind of play the children can most
+easily produce both as literature and as acting.
+
+As suggested in a previous chapter, during this and the following year
+each child should be encouraged or required to learn a poem or a story
+of his own choosing, which he presents to the class. This will greatly
+enrich the class programme. Only one fable is suggested--one of
+Fontaine's, the interpretation or moral of which should now be given by
+the class; many other fables may be used in the same way, if this
+exercise seems to be profitable.
+
+As every observer of schools knows, it is the eighth-year children who
+need most accommodation and understanding. The programme offered is
+designed for the normal class in the average school--when the children
+are really passing into the secondary stage and should be preparing to
+go into high school without crossing a chasm. But it may need much
+modification for those eighth-year classes in which there are belated
+children and unevenly developed children. It is quite possible that
+_Julius Caesar_, _The Tempest_, and _Sohrab and Rustum_ may prove
+impracticable for such a class, and that something easier would have to
+be substituted. In no case can we hope to teach the two plays
+exhaustively, either as regards their form or their content. But both
+these plays are of that kind of great art that has many levels to which
+one may climb in turn, with his growing maturity. And the beauty of both
+these plays is that in case the class is precocious and does inquire
+deeply into them, there is nothing in the political philosophy of
+_Julius Caesar_ or in the spiritual and social philosophy of _The
+Tempest_ that may not be safely explained to them. This programme makes
+no mention, as may be seen, of the many minor lyrics and bits of drama
+and story that will be added from many sources and in many connections:
+from their home reading; from the teacher's reserve stock; from their
+reading lessons; from their work in other languages; from their
+preparation for festivals and celebrations; from suggestions of weather
+and season; from occasional current periodicals, and possibly from other
+sources.
+
+And when all is said, one must say again that there cannot be a strictly
+normalized and fixed curriculum in literature since in this subject more
+than in any other the personnel of the class must be considered; their
+typical inheritance, their tradition, their social grade, their
+community, their other interests, their passing preoccupation and almost
+their daily mood, are factors in the problem. The teacher who is
+sensitive to these matters in his class will soon emancipate himself
+from the fixed curriculum. Let him at the same time be sensitive to the
+emphasis and appeal of each bit of art he chooses for them, and he
+cannot fail. Whatever his results they will be good.
+
+After so long a preamble follows the list of specimens:
+
+
+FIRST YEAR
+
+Sagas: "How Arthur Drew the Sword from the Stone."
+       "How Arthur Got the Sword Excalibur."
+
+Maerchen: _Briar-Rose_, Grimm.
+       _Snow-white and Rose-red_, Grimm.
+       _The Elves and the Shoemaker_, Grimm.
+       _The Musicians of Bremen_, Grimm.
+
+Drolls: _Simple Simon._
+       _The Johnny-cake._
+
+Accumulative Tales: "The Old Woman Who Found the Sixpence."
+       _Henny-Penny_.
+       _The Little Red Hen_.
+
+Fables: "The Crow and the Pitcher."
+       "The Hare and the Tortoise."
+
+Verses: "I Saw a Ship a-Sailing."
+       "Sing a Song of Sixpence."
+       "There Was a Little Guinea-pig."
+       "Tom, Tom, the Piper's Son."
+       "Birdie, with the Yellow Bill," Stevenson.
+       "My Shadow."--Stevenson.
+
+
+SECOND YEAR
+
+Sagas: "Siegfried Gets the Sword from Mimi."
+       "Siegfried and the Dragon."
+       "Siegfried Rescues Brunhild."
+
+Maerchen: _Cinderella, or the Little Glass Slipper._--Perrault.
+       "Aladdin and the Wonderful Lamp," in _Arabian Nights_.
+       "The Fisherman and the Genie," in _Arabian Nights_.
+       _Beauty and the Beast._--Madame de Beaumont.
+       _The Poor Little Turkey Girl._--Cushing.
+
+Drolls: _Hans in Luck._--Grimm.
+       _Kluge Else._--Grimm.
+       Chapters from _The Peterkin Papers_.--Hale.
+       _Little Black Sambo._--Bannerman.
+       _The Gray Goose._--Pearson.
+
+Accumulative Tales: _The Three Billygoats_, Norwegian.
+       _Munachar and Manachar_, Irish.
+       _Titty-mouse and Tatty-mouse_.
+
+Fables: "The Town Mouse and the Field Mouse."
+       "The Stork and the Log."
+       "The Fox and the Crow."
+
+Verses: "Three Children Sliding on the Ice."
+       "Four Brothers Over the Sea."
+       "The Fairies," Allingham.
+       "Little Gustava," Celia Thaxter.
+       "Singing," Stevenson.
+       "Little Indian, Sioux or Crow," Stevenson.
+       "The Wind," Stevenson.
+       "My Ship," Stevenson.
+       "The Lamb," Blake.
+       "Piping Down the Valleys Wild," Blake.
+       "The Pied Piper of Hamelin," Browning.
+       "The Mountain and the Squirrel," Emerson.
+
+
+THIRD YEAR
+
+_Robinson Crusoe_.
+_Sinbad the Sailor._
+_Toomai of the Elephants._--Kipling.
+_Rikki-Tikki-Tavi._--Kipling.
+_Reynard the Fox._ (Selected stories.)
+"_Uncle Remus._" (Selected stories.)
+"The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers in New England," Mrs. Hemans.
+"Columbus," Joaquin Miller.
+The Twenty-third Psalm. Authorized Version.
+"The Idle Shepherd Boys," Wordsworth.
+"Spinning Song," Wordsworth.
+"The Village Blacksmith," Longfellow.
+"Tubal Cain," Mackay.
+"The Wreck of the Hesperus," Longfellow.
+"The Discoverer of the North Cape," Longfellow.
+"The Spider and the Fly," Mary Howitt.
+"The Palm Tree," Whittier.
+"Hiawatha Builds His Canoe," Longfellow.
+Dramatization of a story of some voyager or pioneer.
+
+
+FOURTH YEAR
+
+_Robin Hood_ (given partly from Howard Pyle's _Robin Hood_,
+  partly from the Ballads).
+"Under the Greenwood Tree," Shakespeare.
+"Blow, Blow, Thou Winter Wind," Shakespeare.
+"Waken, Lords and Ladies Gay," Scott.
+"Meg Merriles," Keats.
+"The Chough and the Crow," Baillie.
+"Song of Marion's Men," Bryant.
+"My Captain," Whitman.
+"Lochinvar," Scott.
+"The Shepherd of King Admetus," Lowell.
+"Abou Ben Ahdem," Hunt.
+"Yussouf," Lowell.
+"Sherwood," Alfred Noyes.
+"March," Wordsworth.
+"When Icicles Hang by the Wall," Shakespeare.
+"The Jabberwocky," _Alice in Wonderland_.
+
+
+FIFTH YEAR
+
+_The Odyssey._--George Herbert Palmer. (Translation.)
+_Gulliver's Travels_: "The Voyage to Lilliput."
+"The White Seal," Kipling.
+"The Coast-wise Lights," Kipling.
+"The Sea," Barry Cornwall.
+"Sir Patrick Spens," Folk Ballad.
+"The Inchcape Rock," Southey.
+"To a Waterfowl," Bryant.
+"Lead, Kindly Light," Newman.
+"The Chambered Nautilus," Holmes.
+"The Lake Isle of Innisfree," Yeats.
+"Breathes There a Man," Scott.
+"Uphill," Christina Rossetti.
+"The Long White Seam," Jean Ingelow.
+"The Exile of Erin," Campbell.
+
+
+SIXTH YEAR
+
+Heroic adventures from the chivalric cycles of King Arthur, of
+Siegfried, of Roland, and The Cid, and selected episodes from _Don
+Quixote_.
+
+or
+
+_The Drums of the Fore and Aft._--Kipling; _Rip Van Winkle._--Irving;
+_The Bee-Man of Orn._--Stockton; _Old Pipes and the Dryad._--Stockton;
+_The Man Born to Be King._--Morris.
+"The Lady of Shalott," Tennyson.
+"Hack and Hew," Bliss Carman.
+"The Song of the Chattahoochee," Lanier.
+"The Cloud," Shelly.
+"The Walrus and the Carpenter," from _Alice in Wonderland_.
+
+
+SEVENTH YEAR
+
+_The Great Stone Face._--Hawthorne.
+_The Snow Image._--Hawthorne.
+_The Gold Bug._--Poe.
+_The Pot of Broth._--Yeats.
+_The Hour-Glass._--Yeats.
+"A Dissertation on Roast Pig," Lamb.
+"The Vision of Mirza," Addison.
+"King Robert of Sicily," Longfellow.
+"Horatius at the Bridge," Macaulay.
+"The Ballad of East and West," Kipling.
+"Heroes," Edna Dean Proctor.
+"The Yarn of the Nancy Bell," Gilbert.
+"The Wolf and the Mastiff," Fontaine.
+
+
+EIGHTH YEAR
+
+_Julius Caesar._--Shakespeare.
+_The Tempest._--Shakespeare.
+_Sohrab and Rustum._--Arnold.
+_Treasure Island._--Stevenson.
+"Old China," Charles Lamb.
+_Wake Robin_ (selections).--John Burroughs.
+"My Garden Acquaintance," Warner.
+"The Goblin Market," Christina Rossetti.
+"Each and All," Emerson.
+"Hart-leap Well," Wordsworth.
+"I Wandered Lonely as a Cloud," Wordsworth.
+"The Splendor Falls," Tennyson.
+"The Revenge," Tennyson.
+"Etin the Forester," Folk Ballad.
+"Thomas Rymer," Folk Ballad.
+
+
+Anyone who has read these eighteen chapters should find himself provided
+with a set of maxims and injunctions among which will be the following:
+
+1. Choose the literature for the children under the guidance of those
+principles by which you test any literature.
+
+2. Remember that literature is art; it must be taught as art, and the
+result should be an artistic one.
+
+3. Never teach a thing you do not love and admire. But learn to suspect
+that when you do not love it the fault is in you, and is curable.
+
+4. According to the best light you have, choose those things that are
+fitted for the children--corresponding to their experience, or awakening
+in them experiences you would like them to have.
+
+5. Teach your chosen bit of literature according to its nature and
+genius. Study it so sympathetically that you can follow its hints, and
+make its emphases. Teach each piece for its characteristic effect, and
+do not try to teach everything in any one piece.
+
+6. Be contented to read with the children a limited number of things.
+You cannot read every delightful and helpful thing. You can only
+introduce them to literature and teach them to love it.
+
+7. When you have led your class, or half your class, into a vital and
+personal love of literature and set their feet on the long path of the
+reader's joy, you have done them the best service you can perform as a
+teacher of literature.
+
+
+FINIS
+
+
+
+
+
+End of the Project Gutenberg EBook of Literature in the Elementary School, by
+Porter Lander MacClintock
+
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