Literature in the Elementary School

by Porter Lander MacClintock

We should distinguish myth from saga, from legend, from merely fanciful symbolistic tales, from tales of human heroes. The Homeric poems make much of the religious side of human nature, and the poet chose in order to give to his action and issue a superhuman dignity to set that action in the presence of the gods themselves. Yea, in the climaxes of the Titanic struggle the Powers themselves take a hand, so deeply does the poet feel that everything noblest and most passionate in human nature is involved; and, despairing, as it were, of conveying to us in merely human terms the implications of the strife between the two kinds of ideals, he sets Aphrodite over against Athene, not merely Trojan against Greek. But the Iliad is, for all that, not myth nor a collection of myths, but the story of the wrath of Achilles—a very human hero, who loved his friend. The story of Baldur is myth—explaining and interpreting, personifying and glorifying, a superhuman influence and effect beyond the reach of human experience; the story of Siegfried is a saga, a human experience, under whatever enlarged and idealized conditions, yet still a type-experience of the human being. The garden of Eden is myth-interpretation and explanation of many, some the grimmest, facts of man's nature, and his relation to a supernatural power; the story of Abraham is a saga—a typical history of human experience, a typical picture of human culture. The whole artistic purpose and effect of the hero-tale and the saga are different from those of myth; the center of interest is a human being; the emphasis is upon human life; the meaning is upon the surface. In true myth the purpose is not artistic, but religious; the emphasis is upon superhuman activities; the meaning is buried beneath symbols—the more beautiful the myth, the more difficult and complex the symbol.

So one has almost to smile at the statement, commonly made that myth, implying all myth, is childlike, and should therefore be given to little children as literature, especially while they themselves are in the mythopoeic age—presumably from four to seven. There are so many fallacies in this statement that one pauses embarrassed at his many opportunities of attack.

First as to the childlikeness of myth. There are, of course, undeveloped races that have a naïve and childish myth, but it is also so crude and unbeautiful that it would never commend itself to one seeking artistic material for children. The developed myths, those that have achieved the elaboration of beautiful episodes, are most unchildlike. They are far, far away from the crude guesses of the primitive mind. They have all been worked over, codified, filled with theological and symbolistic content by priests and poets. One can be very sure that no sensible teacher who has mastered the material, would attempt to teach the whole of any Hebrew or Greek or Scandinavian myth as myth within the elementary period. If he takes one of the especially romantic or beautiful episodes out of the myth, he is obliged to thin it out to the comprehension of the children, and to mutilate it so as to make of it a mere tale. When one reads Hawthorne's version of Pandora and Prometheus and realizes the mere babble, the flippant detail, under which he has covered up the grim Titanic story of the yearnings and strivings of the human soul for salvation here and hereafter, the very deepest problems of temptation and sin, of rebellion and expiation, he must see clearly what is most likely to happen when a complex and mature myth is converted into a child's tale. To make a real test, leave the alien Greek myth and try the same process with one that we have built into our own religious consciousness—the temptation and fall in the Garden of Eden; a story, which is, by the way, much more naïve in conception and detail than that of Prometheus. We must conclude that such myths are not childlike, and that to make such a version of them as will appeal to the little child's attention and feeling gives but a shallow and distorted view of them.

There should undoubtedly be a place in education for the study of myth as religion and as an influence in human culture; should it not be somewhere well within the adolescent period, when the symbols of the great myths attract and do not baffle the child, when their religious content finds a congenial lodging-place and a sympathetic interpretation in his own experiences? It would seem only fair to reserve the beautiful and reverential myths of the Greeks, Romans, and Scandinavians for this period, rather than to use them in the age when there is little more to appeal to than the tendency, so short-lived and shallow-rooted in the modern child, to see personal agencies behind appearances. For this, confused with a degree of grammatical uncertainty of speech, is practically all that we can find under close analysis, of the mythopoeic faculty in little children brought up under modern conditions.

There are still those, one discovers, who contend that myth should be given to children as literature, because later in life—when they come to read the Aeneid in High School, or Paradise Lost in college, or Prometheus Unbound or even Macaulay's essays—they will come upon references to Zeus, to the fall of Troy, to the Titans, to Isis and Osiris, and they ought to be able to call up from what they had as literature in the elementary school such information as would enable them to understand these allusions and fill out these references. Luckily, the number of people who hold the fundamental theory of education adumbrated in this view is becoming so rapidly smaller that this chapter will, let us hope, be too late to reach them. The multiplication table is a tool; the mechanics of reading and writing are partially mere tools; but mythology, especially mythology substituted for literature, can in no sense be regarded or treated as a tool.

Occasionally one meets the statement that myth, and mythical episodes, are more imaginative than stories of human life, and should therefore be given to little children as literature. So far as the persons who hold this view can be pushed to definite terms, they mean either that the conditions of ordinary human life are completely abrogated in mythical stories, and that therefore they are more imaginative than stories of mere human experience could be; or that the details given by the imagination are arranged in some more unusual way—that there is less of judgment and order in the arrangement than in stories of men and their affairs.

Of course, we realize that the human mind cannot invent ultimate details independent of experience. It is in the number and arrangement of these details that originality inheres—that the varying quality or quantity of imagination lies. Now, it is true that in mythical stories the images, the details, are likely to be more numerous, and to be arranged in a less orderly manner than in an art story; this is of the nature of myth.

Ruskin, in The Queen of the Air, makes so clear a statement of this principle that I shall borrow it for this chapter: