The native stories of many of the North American Indian tribes have a charming way of presenting the animals. Unfortunately, most of our Indian folk-lore was collected and reduced to literary form in what one may call the blaue Blume period of folk-lore collecting, and is spoiled everywhere by the oversentimental strain of the period. We could well spare an occasional account of what one might infer to be a common habit of love-lorn Indian maidens—that of casting themselves headlong from inaccessible cliffs at sunset,—to make room for some of the humorous and fanciful tales of the animals that the Indians knew so well and to which they lived so near. The Zuñi folk-tales collected by Frank Cushing have much of this element in them, and it constitutes one of their many charms.
East Indian folk-lore is peculiarly rich in tales of animals—fables, bits of beast-wisdom and beast-adventure. It may be that this fact co-operated with his own gift to make Rudyard Kipling the greatest of all modern makers of animal-stories. The Jungle Books stand unique and imperishable as one of the perfect art-products of the nineteenth century. Like everything else that is true art, these stories never become stale. This gives them a peculiar value. For the children who have had them at home are always willing to hear them again with the class. We can read them to the third grade for the story, and with the sixth grade for the style, and the eighth grade is not above hearing Toomai of the Elephants at any time. The teacher himself will find unfailing satisfaction in them because, in addition to all their charms as interpretations of the beasts and presentation of human nature, they show all the marks of expert workmanship. This appears in the masterly structure of the story, the organization of the material, the economy of incident, the successful style which combines in a most unusual way, a reserve and finish that would become a literary essayist, with a power of vivid and striking phrase that characterizes the most successful journalist. So that teacher and children are both interested and disciplined by every reading of the Jungle Books.
Among all their verse literature, from the Mother Goose melodies to Wordsworth in the eighth grade, the children will find poems about animals. A catalogue of the nursery and fairy-book animals is a very instructive document—indeed, a catalogue of poetical beasts in general, is very illuminating. All the verses about animals that have come down to us in the traditionary jingles are good as art and on the whole, fair to the animals. "Baa, Black Sheep," "The Mouse Ran Up the Clock," "Johnny Shuter's Mare," and all the others, yield the fruits of literature, but only after much torturing, the fruits of science. Gradually to these we add such as Cowper's tame but touching pictures of his pets; Wordsworth's tender and far-seeing poems about the shepherds and their flocks, the doe and the hart, the pet lamb, the faithful dogs; Blake's wonderful pair of poems, "The Tiger" and "The Lamb;" Mary Lamb's exquisite picture of the boy and the snake; Emerson's "The Bumble Bee;" those splendid imaginative characterizations of the beasts from the thirty-eighth to the forty-first chapters of Job; "The Jackdaw of Rheims;" "How They Brought the Good News." Why extend the actual list? They are all things that place the animals which appear in them in their romantic or tender relations to human beings, or interpret in a dramatic and literary way the imaginary consciousness of the animal.
There is little danger of making poetry that is good enough to be given as poetry, do the work of information-teaching. It seems easy to see in the case of the poem, with its more imaginative method and its more artificial form, that you spoil it as art when you teach it as science. This fact is equally true of a good literary story.
CHAPTER XI SYMBOLISTIC STORIES, FABLES, AND OTHER APOLOGUES
It is not possible, in the plan adopted for this little book, to keep the topics always strictly apart. It is not possible, for example, to relegate to one section all one has to say about folk- and fairy-stories, and to another all about fables, because each type has so many aspects and radiations. Fables are stories; most of them are animal-stories; they are symbolistic or figurative or allegorical—so that one must approach them from many points of view, and take them into consideration in many connections. There need be, therefore, no apology for taking up in this new section topics partially discussed elsewhere.
It seems quite consonant with our best conclusions about younger children to say that, on the whole, in the earlier years of their school life their literature should be of that objective kind where no more is meant than meets the eye. They may have tales of adventure, of plain experience, of highly imaginative experience, of animal life, of fairyland; but as far as possible let them be such as contain no occult and secondary meanings. There are many things desirable for all children, and under certain school conditions compulsory or indispensable for some children, which do have this secondary meaning. Such, if one uses them, are the stories from the great myths; such are practically all of Andersen's Märchen; such are the legendary stories of the Hebrew patriarchs. Of course, the parent or teacher who presents these things to his children may say that the children never perceive or even suspect an inner meaning. And it is true that, with great care and skill, the objective upper surface may be kept before some children. But, on the whole, it is good morality and good pedagogy to give to the children nothing that you are not willing, even desirous, that they should probe to the bottom. It is always a misfortune when one must say to a child, "I can't explain that to you now;" "You can't understand that yet;" so much a misfortune that no teacher should ever invite it. If you have ever looked into the faces of the fifth grade when they were searching you with questions to get at the meaning of Andersen's pessimistic story of The Little White Hen; if you have seen the sixth grade grow melancholy, with a vague augury of trouble they could not fathom, when you have read to them the brilliant but tragic little apologue of Mr. Seguin's Goat; if you have been obliged to explain to some puzzled and suspicious eight-year-old the raison d'être of the clock-ticking alligator in Peter Pan, you have resolved hereafter to give them no symbolism, or to give them symbolism whose presence they could not possibly suspect (a most difficult thing to do in the case of that many-minded, hundred-eyed child, the class), or to give such symbolism as would invite them into paths where you would gladly have them walk, whose most ultimate implication you are at least willing to explain to them. Of course, this principle cannot be pushed to its logical extreme; merely logical extremes are always absurd. One does not go into the philosophical depths of the special historical epoch he chooses for his children, nor does he instruct them in the remote scientific principles behind their window-garden or their aquarium of polywogs and salamanders. But, if he is wise, he hopes to choose such work, and present such aspects of it, as contain no insoluble mystery, and do not tempt the children into paths for which their feet are not ready.
So, when one is choosing literature it is very easy to fill all the time the children have for it in the first four or five years of school with things that are largely objective, and that, so far as their large framework goes, mean just what they say. Indeed, will not most modern teachers concede that throughout the period and in all his subjects it is for the mental good of the child not to be called upon too frequently to formulate principles, or habitually to look below the surface of his facts for interpretations and secondary meanings? Of course, he must be led by the natural stages to see through figures of speech, and to understand and apply proverbs, and the proverbial manner of speech.