Myths, properly, are slow-wrought beliefs which embody a people’s effort to understand their relations to the great unknown. They are essentially religious, symbolic, mystic, subtle, full of fears and propitiations, involved, often based on the forgotten,—altogether unlike in their approach to the ingenuous and confident child. They are full of the struggle of life. Hardly before the involved introspections and theories of adolescence can we expect the real beauty and poignancy of a genuine myth to be even dimly understood. And why offer the shell without the spirit? It is likely to remain a shell forever if we do. And indeed, such an empty thing to most of us is the great myth of Prometheus or of the Garden of Eden.
But sagas! Are they not of exactly the heroic stuff for little children? In essence the relationships with which they deal are human,—social. The story of Siegfried, of Achilles, of Abraham,—these are great sagas. Each is a tremendous picture of a human experience, the first two under heroic, enlarged conditions, the last under a human culture picturesquely different from our own. But even as straight tales of adventure they do not carry for little children. The environment is too remote, the world to be conquered too unknown to carry a convincing sense of heroism to small children. The same is true of the heroic tales of romance,—of Arthur and all the legends which cluster around his name. Magic, the children will get from these tales but little else. But if the tales should succeed in taking a child with them in their strange exploits into a strange land, they would surely fail to take him into the turgid human drama they picture. And as surely we should wish them to fail. The sagas, like most genuine folk-lore deal with the great elemental human facts, life and death, love, sexual passion and its consequences, marriage, motherhood, fatherhood. We grasp at them for our children, I believe, just because they deal with these fundamental things,—the very things we are afraid of unless they come to us concealed in strange clothing. But what kind of a foundation for interpreting these great elemental facts will the stories of Achilles and Briseus, of Jason and Medea, Pluto and Proserpina, of Guinevere and Launcelot make? What do we expect a child to get from these pictures of sexual passion on the part of the man,—even though a god,—and of social dependence of woman? Do Greek draperies make prostitution suitable for children? Does the glamour of chivalry explain illicit love? Most parents and schools who unhesitatingly hand over these social pictures to their children have never tried,—and neither care nor dare to try,—to face these elemental facts with their children. Can we really wish to avoid a frank statement of the positive in sex relations, of the facts of parenthood, of the institution of marriage, of the mutual companionship between man and woman, and give the negative, the unfulfilled, the distorted? This is preposterous and no one would uphold it. It must be the beauty of the tale, and not the significance we are after. But are these tales beautiful except as we endow them with the subtleties of a classical civilization, as we read into them piquant contrasts of a sensitive, expressive race still primitive in its social thinking and social habits,—that elusive thing which we mean by “Greek”? And can children get this without its background, particularly as they have yet no social background in their own world to hold it up against? And can children do any better with the perplexing ideals of the chivalrous knight swept by a human passion?
And in the same way can a child really get the beauty of Siegfried? What can he make out of the incestuous love of Siegmund and Sieglinda? And of Siegfried’s naïve passion on his first glimpse of a woman? What do we want him to make of it? Is that the way we wish to introduce him to sex? And as for the rest, the allegory of the ring itself, the sword, the dragon’s blood, what do little children get from this except the excitement of magic? What we get because of what we have to put into it, is a different matter and should never be confused with the straight question of what children get. Outgrown adult thinking in social matters is no more suitable to children than outgrown thinking on physical facts. We do not teach that the world is flat because grown-ups once believed it was. We are not afraid of a round earth so we tell the truth about it. But we come near to teaching “spontaneous generation” with our endless evasions. We are afraid of a reproducing world, and so we fall back on curious mixtures of sex fables,—on storks and fairy godmothers and leave the mysteries of sex to be interpreted by Achilles and Siegfried and Guinevere! To emasculate these tales is to insult them,—to strip them of their significance and individuality. Is it not wiser to wait until children will not be confused by all their straight vigor and beauty?
There is other folk-lore less gripping in its human intensity. Through this may not children safely gain their needed adventures? And here we come again to the real “Märchen,”—the fairy tales. They take us into a lovely world of unreality where magic and luck hold sway and where the child is safe from human problems and from scientific laws alike. I have already said in talking of the younger children that I feel it unsafe to loose a child in this unsubstantial world before he is fairly well grounded in a sense of reality. Once he has his bearings there is a good deal he will enjoy without confusion. The common defense that the mystery of fairy tales answers to a legitimate need in children, I believe holds good for children of six or seven, or even five, who have had opportunities for rational experiences. We all know how children revel in a secret. They like to live in a world of surprises. To give the children this sense of mystery I do not believe it is at all necessary to turn to vicious tales of giants, of ogres, and Bluebeards, or to the no less vicious pictures of the beautiful princess and the wicked stepmother. Even after rejecting the brutal and sentimental we have a good deal left,—a good deal that is intrinsically amusing as in “The Musicians of Bremen” or “Prudent Hans” or charming as in “Briar Rose.” Symbolic or primitive attempts to explain the physical world,—as in the Indian legend of “Tavwots” I have never found held great appeal for the modern six- or seven-year-old scientists. Also the burden of symbolic morality rests on a good many of the traditional tales which usually neither adds nor detracts for the child and satisfies an adult yearning. Allegories like Æsop’s “Fables” and “The Lion of Androcles” have a certain right to a hearing because of their historic prestige, apart from any reform they may accomplish in the way of character building. And in our own day many animals have achieved what I believe is a permanent place in child literature. “The Elephant’s Child,” the wild creatures of the “Jungle Book,” “Raggylug” and even the little mole in the “Wind in the Willows,”—these are animals to trust any child with. Yet even in these exquisitely drawn tales, I doubt if children enjoy what we adults wish them to enjoy either in content or in form. And I doubt if we should accept even some of Kipling’s matchless tales if the faultless form did not intrigue us and make us oblivious of the content.
It is just here that most of us fail to be discriminating. Most of the classical literature, most of the legends, or the folk tales that I have been discussing have a compelling charm through their form. But unfortunately that does not make their content suitable! Their place in the world’s thinking and feeling and their transcription into their present forms by really great artists give them a permanent place in the world’s literature. This I do not question. It is partly because I believe this so intensely that I wish them kept for fuller appreciation. It is as formative factors in a young child’s thinking that I am afraid of them. Neither am I afraid of all of them. There are some old conceptions of life and death and human relations which the race has not outgrown, perhaps never will outgrow. The mystery and pathos of the Pied Piper, the humor of Prudent Hans, the cleverness of the boy David, the heroism of the little Dutch boy stopping the hole in the dyke, the love of the Queer Little Baker, and the greed and grief of Midas are eternal. In spite of these and many more, I maintain that for the most part, myths, sagas, folk-lore depend for their significance and beauty alike upon a grasp of present social values which a young child cannot have and that our first attention should be to give him those values in terms intelligible to him. After we have done that he is safe. It matters little what we give him so long as it is good: for he will have standards by which to judge our offerings for himself.
Yet after all is said and done, we may be reduced to giving children some of the stories we think inappropriate, for lack of something better. But a recognition of the need may evoke a great writer for children. I maintain we have never had one of the first order. The best books that we have for children are throw-offs from artists primarily concerned with adults,—Kipling and Stevenson stand in this group,—or child versions of adult literature,—from Charles and Mary Lamb down. The world has yet to see a genuinely great creator whose real vision is for children. When children have their Psalmist, their Shakespeare, their Keats, they will not be offered diluted adult literature.
So after we have gathered what we can from the world’s store for children of this seven-to-eight-year old period I think we shall find many unfilled gaps. Most attempts at humor, for instance, are on the level of the comic sheet of the Sunday supplement or the circus. There is little except a few of the “drolls” which give the child pure fun unmixed with excitement or confusion. Even “Alice in Wonderland” when first read to a six-year-old who was used to rational thinking and talking was pronounced “Too funny!” This same boy, however, went back to Alice again and again. He always relished such bits as:
“Speak roughly to your little boy,
And beat him when he sneezes,
He only does it to annoy
Because he knows it teases.”
No child’s world is complete without humor. And children have a sense of the preposterous, the inappropriate all their own. Lewis Carroll and a few others have occasionally found it. Still, I think much remains to be done in the way of studying the things that children themselves find amusing. This is true for the younger ones as well. I give several younger children’s stories which appeared both to the tellers and their audiences to be convulsing. The humor is strangely physical and amazingly simple. And it is all fresh.