There are those who still believe that fairy-tales and fiction of all sorts are nothing but lies. Poor souls, with their faces against the stone wall of hard facts, they can never look up into the sky and see the winged and beautiful thoughts freely disporting there. They make no distinction between truth and fact, yet truth is of the spirit and fact of the flesh; and truth, because it is of the spirit, may appear under many forms, even under the form of play. All rightly told and rightly conceived fairy-tales are true just as a good picture is true. The painter uses oil, turpentine, and pigment to represent the wool of a sheep, the water of a pond, the green spears of grass. Some literal-minded person might say that he was lying because he pretented that his little square of canvas truthfully represented grazing sheep at the brook-side, but most of us recognize that he is really telling the truth only in another than an every day form. In the same way the writer of fairy-tales tells the truth, using the pigments of the imagination.
If children ask whether a given story is true or not, answer without hesitation, "yes." It is true, but it is a fairy kind of truth; it is inside truth. There is magic in it and a mystery. The child who is never allowed to read fairy tales, the man or the woman who prefers the newspaper to a good book of fiction, misses much in life. It is not only that the imagination—the divinest quality of man, because the quality that makes man in his degree a creator—does not receive culture, and that he misses the indescribable intellectual ecstasy that comes only with the setting free of the wings of the mind, but that also he is inevitably shorn of his sympathy and shut up to a narrow circle of interests.
Imagination and Sympathy
For sympathy, above all moral qualities, is dependent upon imagination. If you cannot imagine how you would feel under your neighbor's conditions, you cannot deeply sympathize with him. The person of unimaginative mind sympathizes only with those whose experience and habits are similar to his own. He never escapes from the narrow circle of his own personality. But the man whose imagination has been kept flexible and ready from earliest childhood has within him the power of sympathizing with whatever is human—yes! even with creatures and things below the human level. Without imagination, therefore, it is not possible for a man to be a great scientist, for science demands sympathy with processes and objects which are not yet human. It is not possible, obviously, for him to be a great artist of any kind, for all art is interpretation of the world by means of the imagination. It is not possible for him, even, to be a good man in any broad sense, for the man whose sympathies are narrow is often found to be guilty of injustice toward those who lie outside the pale of those sympathies.
By all means, then, encourage the love of reading in your children, and get them the best of story-books to read, and subscribe to the best magazines. Read with them. Let some reading enter into every day's life; talk over what has been read at the dinner-table, and so avoid harmful personalities and disagreeable criticisms.
Books
As to the books to choose, choose the best. Generally speaking, the best are those that have some dignity of age upon them. As in music you chose the folksongs, so in children's literature also choose the old fashioned fairy stories, such as those collected by the Brothers Grimm and by Andrew Lang. Hans Christian Andersen's Fairy Stories of course are classics. Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales give excellent suggestions as to the right use to be made of the old mythologies. Many of the supplementary readers now being so widely used in the public schools are good, simple versions of these old stories which helped to make the world what it should be. For the rest there are two standard children's magazines which help to form a good taste in literature and which are continually suggestive of the right sort of reading material. These are The Youth's Companion and St. Nicholas.