Now, apart from the folly of this story, we must condemn it on moral grounds. Could we imagine a lower standard of a Deity than that presented here to the child?
To-day the teacher would commend Jane for a laudable interest in botany, but might add a word of caution about choosing inclined planes as a hunting-ground for specimens and a popular, lucid explanation of the inexorable law of gravity.
Here we have an instance of applying a moral when we have finished our story, but there are many stories where nothing is left to chance in this matter, and where there is no means for the child to use ingenuity or imagination in making out the meaning for himself.
Henry Morley has condemned the use of this method as applied to Fairy Stories. He says: “Moralising in a Fairy Story is like the snoring of Bottom in Titania's lap.”
But I think this applies to all stories, and most especially to those by which we do wish to teach something.
John Burroughs says in his article,[22] “Thou shalt not preach”:
“Didactic fiction can never rank high. Thou shalt not preach or teach; though shalt pourtray and create, and have ends as universal as nature.... What Art demands is that the Artist's personal convictions and notions, his likes and dislikes, do not obtrude themselves at all; that good and evil stand judged in his work by the logic of events, as they do in nature, and not by any special pleading on his part. He does not hold a brief for either side; he exemplifies the working of the creative energy.... The great artist works in and through and from moral ideas; his works are indirectly a criticism of life. He is moral without having a moral. The moment a moral obtrudes itself, that moment he begins to fall from grace as an artist.... The great distinction of Art is that it aims to see life steadily and to see it whole.... It affords the one point of view whence the world appears harmonious and complete.”
It would seem, then, from this passage, that it is of moral importance to put things dramatically.
In Froebel's “Mother Play” he demonstrates the educational value of stories, emphasising that their highest use consists in their ability to enable the child, through suggestion, to form a pure and noble idea of what a man may be or do. The sensitiveness of a child's mind is offended if the moral is forced upon him, but if he absorbs it unconsciously, he has received its influence for all time.
To me the idea of pointing out the moral of the story has always seemed as futile as tying a flower on to a stalk instead of letting the flower grow out of the stalk, as Nature intended. In the first case, the flower, showy and bright for the moment, soon fades away. In the second instance, it develops slowly, coming to perfection in fulness of time because of the life within.