Robinson Crusoe is a treasure to many a grade teacher, because it really "correlates" beautifully with work that the children are doing, or might well be doing, in the third and fourth grades; whether in their history study, where they are devising food and shelter, or have advanced to the study of trades and crafts; or, under an entirely different scheme, have started on the study of voyagers and colonists. The art and the charm of Robinson Crusoe, and the secret of its literary value for the child, lie in the power of the sheer realism—a realism not so much of material as of method—to hold and convince us. A part of this realism is the richness and homeliness of detail; the painstaking record of failures and tentative achievements; the calm, judicial view of experiments; the colorless flow of long periods of time; the homely, and as it were domestic, worth of Crusoe's successes. Oh, it is a great and convincing book! How great and how convincing one may realize when he reads the only one of the innumerable "Robinsons," taking their inspiration from Defoe's book, that really survives—the Swiss Family Robinson, with its facile and too often fatuous ease of accomplishment, its total lack of reality, its stupid and blundering didacticism, its impossible jumble of detail, its commonplace romance; yet, we must reluctantly add, its unfailing charm for the children. That a book with all these faults keeps its hold upon the successive generations of children is testimony to the fact that its basis of interest, which is also for children the essential interest of Robinson Crusoe—the old foundation process of getting fire and roof and coat and bread—is the romance that is forever fresh and thrilling.
The exceedingly thoroughgoing realism of the method (notice, not the large frame-work, which is sufficiently romantic) of Robinson Crusoe would suggest at once that it might profitably be accompanied by some bits of literature that would throw a more romantic and idealistic coloring upon the primitive craftsman and his craft, and upon the experiences of voyager and colonist. Such would be Bret Harte's Columbus, Mrs. Hemans' The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers, Marvell's Bermudas (with a few difficult lines omitted). Longfellow's Jasper Becerra, the twenty-third Psalm, and several chapters from Treasure Island. Every teacher could add other titles.
The older children—those of the seventh and eighth grades—may profitably read in school, for the sake of the intellectual experience, a classic detective story or a story whose plot and evolution present an almost purely intellectual problem. It is true that the air of intellectual acumen that pervades most of these stories is specious, and that they are in reality, and as a rule, shallow and unlogical pieces of reasoning. But it takes an older and more expert person to see this for himself. The teacher should try to qualify his children for judging a good story of this kind, and save them, if possible, from the detective-story habit, which wastes much good time and fills a child's mind with very cheap problems. But if he choose a good story of this kind for reading with his class, he may help to set their minds going in that region where the imagination must ally itself with logic and with a reasoned and inevitable progress of events. Properly channeled, this is a most valuable experience, both from the purely mental and from the literary points of view. After all, the best detective story in English is Poe's The Gold Bug. There is, of course, that element in Treasure Island, but, being there so interwoven with the romantic and adventurous details of that delectable tale, it is not likely to yield for the children that peculiar bit of training which they might get from the more unmixed intellectuality and more obvious realism of The Gold Bug.
It is difficult to know what to say, and where to say it, concerning Don Quixote. That triumphant book is assuredly a masterpiece of the realistic method. It came as an antidote and tonic, helping to restore health and sanity to a romance-sick world, and it ought to have a place in the discipline of certain kinds of young people. But it cannot be said that this place is always within the elementary period, unless a certain grade or certain children have had a peculiar experience and can be said to need it. If the grade has had the King Arthur stories of Malory or Tennyson in large amounts with a very earnest teacher, they can very certainly be said to need Don Quixote—always, of course, shortened and expurgated, and in carefully chosen episodes; from which process—such is its essential greatness, and such the character of its unity—it suffers less than any other story in the world. We should be quite aware of the danger of giving the children any large amount of this peculiar kind of realism—that which constitutes itself a satire and a sort of parody on some over-serious bit of romance. Nothing is more deadening and more commonplace than this peculiar form of wit, when it becomes a habit or offers itself in a mass. But the peculiar vitality and richness of Don Quixote lifts it far above the level of parody, constituting it a magnificent original piece of art in itself. However, the whole question must be left open. It may be that not until he is far along in the secondary school or in college is the scholar suffering for Don Quixote, or capable of appreciating it.
Among the older children the note of realism and wit may be sounded in a wisely chosen essay. Of course, they are not ready for the indirect and allusive manner, nor for the lyric egoism, of the pure literary essay. But there are essays of Lamb's, a very few of Steele's, some of Sidney Smith's, some of the more literary of Burroughs' nature-studies, bits of Oliver Wendell Holmes and Charles Dudley Warner, that are ideal for them.
Shall we sum up by saying that, on the whole, we find the romantic and fanciful stories best suited in form and spirit to the elementary children; since realistic stories that are really good art, are, as a rule, too mature and too difficult for the children, and realistic stories of the juvenile type are not good enough either in form or in content to justify long class study? However, certain distinctive and desirable results may be expected from specimens interwoven here and there of that kind of story which represents real life, which uses events both possible and probable, and which handles its material by the method of realistic detail. In the earliest years these may be secured by the reading of well-chosen little stories of modern children—indeed, of any modern material, provided it be simple enough—and by the teaching of verses which reflect aspects of actual life—human life or nature. In the third or fourth grade Robinson Crusoe forms a desirable basis for the year's work. It should always be accompanied by shorter bits of a more romantic and heroic type. Later in the elementary period—say in the sixth or seventh grade—the reasonable and practical element may be introduced in the form of a story of the detective kind—a story whose plot presents an intellectual problem, whose atmosphere and method make the impression of actual fact. And in the seventh and eighth grade these same purposes—that of exhibiting to the children actual human life as art sees it, that of bringing them into educational contact with the realistic method, that of counteracting any possible mental danger from too much romance and adventure—may be served by essays chosen on principles already many times suggested.