10. It is best, on the whole, that the stories given in class have a satisfying and conclusive ending of the romantic sort. It should, of course, be the ending for which the events have paved the way, and the ending which the children, in view of the direction in which their sympathies have been enlisted, will feel to be just. When a tragic ending is inevitable, it should, in the case of the younger children, be provided for and justified. All things considered, it is better, emotionally and artistically, for these younger children to consider in class those stories which have a fortunate ending, displaying the working of poetic justice, leaving for the older groups the tragedies, and the logical justice of a convinced realism.
CHAPTER VI FOLK-TALE AND FAIRY-STORY
Whatever may be our attitude toward the culture-epoch theory of a child's training and experience, or however much we may vary in our conscious or unconscious application of it, no observer of children will have failed to notice that in the three or four years lying about the seventh, they have their characteristic hour of social and psychic ripeness for fairy-tales. Upon this point the philosophical deductions of the technical pedagogues coincide perfectly with the intuitive wisdom of all the generations of mothers and nurses. The imaginative activity of the six- or seven-year-old person coming to school out of the environment of the average modern home is practically on the same level, and follows the same processes, as that of the folk who produced the golden core of folk-tales—not primitive savage fragments of legend, not developed artistic romance, but complete little tales, simple and sincere, molded into acceptable form by generations of use. The vision of the world physical and social that these tales present, and their interpretation of its activities, is that which is normal to the seven-year-old child, and constitutes therefore the natural basis on which his literary education begins, and affords his first effective contact with imaginative art.
But when we have agreed that the fairy-tales constitute precisely the right artistic material for these children; when we have fixed with satisfactory definiteness the hour of their ripeness for them; when we have indicated those elements in the tales that render them serviceable, we are still at the beginning of our task. For we find ourselves in the presence of a vast mass of material from which we must choose those things that are so typical as to accomplish for our children the characteristic service of folk-tales, and so beautiful as to perform the added service of good literature. And so wide is the range of subject-matter and form in the stories constituting the mass that it becomes evident at a glance that the educational and artistic efficacy of the fairy-tales depends upon the wisdom used in choosing the actual specimens. The most useful thing to be done, then, is to determine a set of trustworthy and practical principles of selection.
We should understand, to begin with, what we mean by fairy-tales. It is now impossible to limit this term to those stories that deal with the activities of an order of invented preter-human beings called fairies; or even to those that contain preternatural or supernatural elements. With the old fairy-tales in this narrow sense, have been incorporated folk-tales dealing with matter which involves only natural and human material—beast-tales and bits of comic adventure, for example. It is possible to treat them, however, in one category, because of the fact that in all those that are worth using for the children in class, whether there be fairies involved or not, the imaginative process is of the same kind, the vision of the world, its activities and its possibilities, is on the same level of imaginative combination and artistic interpretation; and this is the level of the children for whom we are choosing.
The traditionary stories, the real folk-tales, have been divided into four classes.
1. Sagas—stories told of heroes, of historical events, of physical phenomena, of the names or location of places, and intended to be believed. They are to be differentiated from myth by the fact that they have never assumed any religious or symbolic signification. They are, as a matter of fact, hero-tales in the making—of the same stuff in many cases as the great hero-tales, but having remained in the hands of the folk, have never received the enrichment and beauty of those hero-tales which the poets took up. Such folk-sagas are Whittington and His Cat and Lady Godiva. Most of these stories have preternatural or supernatural elements, and even such as have no such elements have still the atmosphere of wonder, and those fanciful or fantastic interpretations characteristic of the folk-imagination.
2. Märchen, or what we call "nursery tales"—those told for artistic pleasure, pure imaginative play, the creative exercise of the art-instinct. They may or may not exhibit the supernatural or preternatural elements; in some of them animals are among the actors. These constitute the large mass of popular and nursery tales; Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Puss in Boots, Briar-Rose, The Musicians of Bremen will do for examples.