It is well to study with the children occasionally a tragic tale, to give them that sort of artistic experience and to secure the exercise of the tender sides of sympathy and pity. But because they are not provided by their experience with reasons for expecting and accepting tragedy they should be prepared for the calamity and led to justify and accept it—not as a visitation of justice, for a true tragedy is never of that kind—but as a beautiful pathos or grief. To this end one would choose his tragic tale among those which have disaster inwoven from the beginning, so that the class may not have the shock of surprise and the feeling of resentment that come of an unexpected and avoidable catastrophe. Take for example, the folk-tale of Little Red Riding-Hood, a poor story for a class in any form, but poor as a tragedy because there is nothing in the events to warn them of the tragic end. To be sure there is the treacherous wolf, but he is stupid and should by rights be defeated and outwitted; it is simply preposterous, in the code of childhood, that he should triumph. This lack of the inevitable and necessary element in the disaster is doubtless what tempted the folk themselves to divert it by a dénouement, possibly reminiscent of certain mythical stories—the recovery of the maiden from the wolf's stomach, which by its improbability and grotesquerie tempts the skepticism of the class, however young. As an example of the other sort, consider the old ballad long ago adopted as a nursery tale—The Babes in the Wood, which carries in its very nature and in every incident the prophecy of tragedy; so that, however grievous the calamity may be, it does not come upon us with the additional shock of surprise and the additional injury of unreasonableness. This kind of story accomplishes the result of discharging the tender emotions without complicating them too deeply with anger and revenge.
But, on the whole, the stories taught the elementary class should be those that end conclusively and fortunately. This principle not only matches and satisfies the child's taste, but it is in entire consonance with the principles of his procedure in other things—it grows out of the method of affirmation and inclusion, regarding elimination and denial as useful in a much later period of his education.
As to the way in which the conclusion is brought to pass, there is to the child and to the childlike mind, in literature as in life, something eminently satisfying in poetic justice. Legal justice is cold and formal to them, except indeed in those frequent cases in which it is a vehicle of vengeance. Besides, it seems to produce an effect really alien to the cause; as in the penalties of the sufferers in the Inferno, the inevitableness of the effect is obscured by the many complex stages that intervene between it and the cause. Logical justice—the natural, uninterrupted working of the forces and motives to a conclusion, or to their absorption into a new combination—is both too slow and not striking enough. Besides, logical justice, working in its impersonal, undiscriminating way, is too likely to hurt someone in the piece whom we love, or to spare somebody we hate. In short, your elementary class demands poetic justice—demands it strong and desires it quick. Now, poetic justice is, on the whole, the way of art, until we come practically to the realistic art of our own generation. It tends to secure completeness and unity. As a matter of fact, in practically every short and completed story of the kind we choose for children the end is precipitated and adjusted by the operation of poetic justice.
One would be blind indeed who was unaware of the fact that precisely here lies one of the dangers of the training in literature. It is this that tends to give the mind that has had too large a diet of literature, or to which literature has been unwisely administered, a distorted view of life, obscuring its vision with sentimentality and unreality. To guard against these effects we should see to it that the children do not have an unduly large amount of literature; and we should select those stories in which the operation of poetic justice is as little misleading as possible. Poetic justice may be, and usually is, an ideal, an artistic distribution of rewards and punishments; but it need not be a haphazard and lawless distribution. There is an artistic flaw in a story in which the rewards go to a person who has not legitimately awakened our sympathies; it is not safe to say that the reward should go to him who has deserved it, for in some of the most acceptable children's stories sympathy sets aside deserving—The Musicians of Bremen, for example. We are satisfied with the success of the musicians, because, being innocent and persecuted, they have gained our sympathy, and are therefore in the line for reward. But the youngest child whom I have tested on this point disapproves the outcome of the folk-tale of "Lazy Jack" (Joseph Jacob's English Fairy Tales), in which a noodle whose stupidity has caused a king's daughter, previously dumb, to laugh, and so to gain her voice, is rewarded by being married to the restored princess. It is not difficult to avoid those stories in which poetic justice is perverted justice.
And then, in the long run, when we have studied many stories and fitted the literary stories in with history and the observation of life, we can counteract any effect of unreality we may suspect, by placing the rewards and punishments in their proper places and classes—translating them, as it were, into terms of experience. The fairy-tale may say in effect: "Be good and gentle and pretty, and you will marry a prince," or, "If you are mean and spiteful, you will be transformed into a toad;" but it is not so difficult to convert these propositions into terms that have a reality for the third grade, so that marrying a prince and being turned into a toad take their places as typical or symbolistic rewards and punishments.
CHAPTER V THE CHOICE OF STORIES
As a summary and by way of applying the facts, principles, and theories discussed in the foregoing chapter, let us try to decide what constitutes a good story to study with a class of children under thirteen years of age. Not to be aware of the critical pitfalls that yawn for one who would say what constitutes a good story for any purpose, would be entirely too naïve; and they beset the path of him who would choose a fairy-tale quite as thickly as that of the critic of mature masterpieces. But many of these pitfalls may be avoided if one narrows his path and walks circumspectly in it. In the present discussion the path is narrowed by two considerations.
First, we will leave out of the discussion matters of mere personal taste and instinctive feeling—that region in which impressionism and amateur criticism flourish, confining it as closely as may be to those matters that yield to judgment, and that are, as nearly as possible, matters of fact. There is about every bit of literature a sphere in which the individual taste is sole arbiter. One man's meat is here another man's poison. The merest lay reader here makes up his mind: "I like it," "I like it not;" and there is no appeal from these judgments, and no way of modifying them short of a complete training in criticism, or a complete remaking of the reader's experience. It is quite true that the region in which these differences lie may be greatly reduced by a knowledge of a few fundamental critical principles, and by a mere suppression of prejudices and sentimentalities. But in the last analysis there always remains a margin, a border of this every man's territory. If the bit of literature be a story, it is likely to be matters of character-growth, motives of conduct, interplay of personal influence, social, philosophical, and ethical interpretation and influence, that lie within this region and are subjects of disagreement and uncertainty. Here lies, too, that more or less elusive, but very real, thing that belongs to every bit of literature—what we call "charm." This may be a matter of structure, of style, even of vocabulary, of persons, of furniture, of architecture or other mere accessories—of geography, of the temperament of the reader, a combination of all these or of any number of them, or of other things too numerous or too elusive to be named. Every good story has it, or gets it as soon as a sincere and sympathetic reader learns how to read it. If one should ever find a story which after repeated readings develops nothing of this most essential and intangible quality of charm, let him not try to teach it. Either it is not a good story, or he has no temperament for art.