Williston, Teresa: Japanese Fairy Tales.
Wratislaw, A. H.: Slavonian Fairy Tales.
CHAPTER FOUR
The Story Interests of Childhood (Continued)
C. HEROIC PERIOD
When the child leaves the imaginative period, he enters another realm of realism. The fairy world is no longer a place of enchantment to him. He is now in a condition corresponding to that of primitive man when he was not satisfied to sit by the tribal fire and listen to stories about creatures who personified the elements, but fared forth on the path of adventure, eager to know what lay beyond the lodge place of his people, feverish with desire to conquer and remove whatever obstructed his way. The barbaric, fighting instinct manifests itself, and in many children a destructive curiosity is apparent. They long to repeat the experiences of their ancestors in this same period. They want to live through nights of danger and days of daring, and since the juvenile court and probation officers hover Argus-eyed about them, ready to swoop down upon every lad who would go pirating or pathfinding, the nearest approach to the experience consists in listening to and in reading tales of adventure. This age is usually from about eight to twelve, although there are no tightly drawn lines of demarcation. Individual cases differ, and some children of ten are still delighted by fairy tales, while other lads of seven are well into the heroic period. Broadly speaking, however, this period begins about the age of eight.
There is no time in the child life during which the story-teller has a finer opportunity of sowing seeds that shall come into splendid fruition by and by than in the heroic period, and because parents and teachers do not realize this fact clearly enough, boys read stories whose tendency is to brutalize and lead them into trouble. It does not follow, because they are drawn as steel to steel to such literature, that the boys are depraved. They crave action, danger, daring. It is a cry of nature that cannot be silenced, and because the hunger is not satisfied in a wholesome way, they go where they can find the food they must have, for numerous doors are open to them.
Dozens of writers are doing pernicious work for the youth of the country by pouring forth a flood of adventure stories, perhaps not with malicious intent, but with the little knowledge that often brings dire results. Knowing the demand for the heroic, they write yarns whose only claim to recognition is a clever, spectacular plot. These books embody no ideals, and the aspirations they arouse had better be left to slumber. Sometimes, as a result of such reading, boys run away from home to fight Indians or turn pirate, and many a lad has begun a career of lawlessness ending in crime, who with a little direction might have been an individual of value to the world. Such cases are so common that they have come under the notice of almost every child worker, and the pity of it is that literature is rich in tales that satisfy the adventure craving, yet arouse high ideals and inspire to worth-while deeds. Instead of originating in the brain of some modern craftsman who is actuated by a desire for money-making, they grew out of the life of the race and perpetuate the noblest traditions of the race.