THE LEGENDARY AND THE MYTHOLOGICAL THE CHILD’S NATURAL FOOD.
Even to casual observation there is close correspondence between child nature and the characteristics of the early literature of the race. Children are wholly in the imaginative on mythical level of thought. They are immersed in the sensuous. They refuse to be bound by the hard matter of fact. They will away and claim the world as their own through which to roam on the unfettered wing of fancy. They claim freedom to construct their own world and to people it with creatures of their own fabrication, independent of the shackles of time and space.
The child also feels himself a part of nature, not as something standing over against it. The separation has not yet come. He ascribes an equal and like personality to animate and inanimate objects. He is at home among animals and plants. There is spontaneous interest in all phases of nature, and inborn love for her creatures; and as to the ethical element, the child is not without points of contact for it. He is born with social impulses. He is not only to be a social creature, but is one at all stages of development. He is nothing if not social. The fiction of original, independent individuality which must be thrown off, given up, or eradicated before becoming a social being, is fast giving way to the natural or organic theories of social origin and growth. The very impulses which are sometimes cited to show the natural depravity of childhood are the vigorous reaching out of his nature toward a participation in the social life.
Thus there can be little doubt as to the fitness of legendary and mythological material for the needs of the child. It is his natural food. It fits in with his forms of thought—is in obvious relation to them. It meets the needs of activities already functioning. It discloses a world in which he can be at home. It falls in with his interpretation of this world, while the simple social life therein depicted appeals to his interest.