THE FABLES
No group of stories has a more assured place in the literature for children than the Æsop's "Fables." Some of the commonest have been expanded into little stories which are presented orally to children in the first school year, as "The Lion and the Mouse," "The Ants and the Grasshoppers," "The Dog and his Shadow," and others. They are so simple and direct that they are used alongside the fairy tales for the earliest instruction of children.
As soon as children have acquired the rudiments of reading the Æsop's "Fables" are commonly used in the second and third school year as a reading book, and all the early reading books are partly made up from this material.
If we inquire into the qualities of these stories which have given them such a universal acceptance, we shall find that they contain in a simple, transparent form a good share of the world's wisdom. More recent researches indicate that they originated in India, and reached Europe through Persia and Arabia, being ascribed to Æsop. This indicates that like most early literature of lasting worth, they are products of the folk-mind rather than of a single writer, and it is the opinion of Adler that they express the ripened wisdom of the people under the forms of Oriental despotism. The sad and hopeless submission to a stronger power expressed by some of the fables, it is claimed, unfits them for use in our freer life to-day.
There are certain points in which their attractiveness to children is clearly manifest. The actors in the stories are usually animals, and the ready interest and sympathy of children for talking animals are at once appealed to. In all the early myths and fairy tales, human life seems to merge into that of the animals, as in "Hiawatha," and the fables likewise are a marked expression of this childlike tendency.
Adler says: "The question may be asked why fables are so popular with boys. I should say because schoolboy society reproduces in miniature, to a certain extent, the social conditions which are reflected in the fables. Among unregenerate schoolboys there often exists a kind of despotism, not the less degrading because petty. The strong are pitted against the weak—witness the fagging system in English schools—and their mutual antagonism produces in both the characteristic vices which we have noted above." A literature which clearly pictures these relations so that they can be seen objectively by the children may be of the greatest social service in education.
Adler says further: "The psychological study of schoolboy society has been only begun, but even what lies on the surface will, I think, bear out this remark. Now it has become one of the commonplaces of educational literature that the individual of to-day must pass through the same stages of evolution as the human race as a whole. But it should not be forgotten that the advance of civilization depends on two conditions: first, that the course of evolution be accelerated, that the time allowed to the successive stages be shortened; and, secondly, that the unworthy and degrading elements which entered into the process of evolution in the past, and at the time were inseparable from it, be now eliminated. Thus the fairy tales which correspond to the myth-making epoch in human history must be purged of the dross of superstition which still adheres to them, and the fables which correspond to the age of primitive despotisms must be cleansed of the immoral elements they still embody."[3]
The peculiar form of moral teaching in the "Fables" suits them especially to children. A single trait of conduct, like greediness or selfishness, is sharply outlined in the story and its results made plain. "We have seen nothing finer in teaching than the building up of these little stories in conversational lessons—first to illustrate some mental or moral trait; then to detach the idea from its story picture, and find illustrations for it in some other act or incident. And nothing can be more gratifying as a result, than, through the transparency of childish hearts, to watch the growth of right conduct from the impulses derived from the teaching; and so laying the foundations of future rightness of character."[4]
The moral ideas inculcated by the fables are usually of a practical, worldly-wisdom sort, not high ideals of moral quality, not virtue for its own sake, but varied examples of the results of rashness and folly. This is, perhaps, one reason why they are so well suited to the immature moral judgments of children.
Adler says: "Often when a child has committed some fault, it is useful to refer by name to the fable that fits it. As, when a boy has made room in his seat for another, and the other crowds him out, the mere mention of the fable of the porcupine is a telling rebuke; or the fable of the hawk and the pigeons may be called to mind when a boy has been guilty of mean excuses. On the same principle that angry children are sometimes taken before a mirror to show them how ugly they look, the fable is a kind of mirror for the vices of the young." Again: "The peculiar value of the fables is that they are instantaneous photographs which reproduce, as it were, in a single flash of light, some one aspect of human nature, and which, excluding everything else, permit the attention to be entirely fixed on that one."
But the value of the fable reaches far beyond childhood. The frequency with which it is cited in nearly all the forms of literature, and its aptness to express the real meaning of many episodes in real life, in politics and social events, in peace and war, show the universality of the truth it embodies. A story which engraves a truth, as it were with a diamond point, upon a child's mind, a truth which will swiftly interpret many events in his later life, deserves to take a high place among educative influences.
FABLES AND NATURE MYTHS
Scudder's Fables and Folk Stories. Houghton, Mifflin, & Co.
Æsop's Fables (Stickney). Ginn & Co.
Book of Legends (Scudder). Houghton, Mifflin, & Co.
Stories for Children (Lane). The American Book Co.
A Child's Garden of Verses (Stevenson). Scribner's Sons.
Æsop's Fables. Educational Publishing Co.
The Book of Nature Myths (Holbrook). Houghton, Mifflin, & Co.
The Moral Instruction of Children (Adler), Chapters VII and VIII. D. Appleton & Co.