Proverbs, indeed, exemplify and epitomize the essentially literary type of thinking and speaking. They are concrete and picturesque rather than abstract, specific rather than general, though we are to understand by them also the abstract and the general; this is the fact that gives them their unique value as literary training. The teacher must call upon his wisdom in choosing proverbs suitable for the children. Many proverbs are pessimistic, even cynical: "It never rains but it pours;" many embody a merely commonplace or unmoral code: "Honesty is the best policy;" some are ambiguous: "There's honor among thieves;" some the modern world has outgrown; many are too mature, too occult, or too worldly for a child. But a great store remains—vivid, practical bits of experience and tested wisdom which will develop a child's mental quickness, will do something toward equipping him with the common wisdom of his race, and will accustom him to one of the most characteristic methods of literature. This is a good place to say that good results never seem to come of asking the children for an exposition of the proverb. Indeed, it is extremely difficult to get from children an exposition or definition of any kind. The better way of making sure that they have appropriated a proverb is to ask them to invent or re-call an incident or a situation to which the proverb will apply. Naturally this is not an exercise for the youngest children.
In the earlier years a great many of the simple old fables may be taught. One is tempted to say that the traditionary or given moral should never be told to the children; but that is a little too sweeping. As a rule, however, it is better to lead them to make their own interpretation or generalization, in those cases where such a thing is desired. For, as a matter of fact, many of the fables are so good as stories that they may often be left to stand merely as pleasant tales.
But as the children grow more penetrating, the fable is the best possible form of symbolistic literature to set them at first. These, with the minor exercise in the apprehension and interpretation of figures of speech, will be their share of the symbolistic kind of writing for several years. Then we may introduce more specimens, and more complex specimens, until in the sixth- and seventh-grade periods they may be able to interpret the universal and symbolic side of much that they read, and to handle with ease and delight such parables as The Great Stone Face or The Bee-Man of Orn. Their experience in literature will then harmonize with their experience in other directions; for they should then, or immediately afterward, be beginning to look for generalizations, to carry abstract symbols, and to substitute them at will for concrete matter. At the same time, then, they will study these fables as apologues, making in all cases their own moral and application.
Perhaps this is the place to insert a caution against the practice of extracting a "deeper meaning" out of a child when he does not easily see it, or of so instructing him that he comes to regard every story that he reads as a sort of picture puzzle in which he is to find a "concealed robber" in the shape of a moral or a general lesson. It is a trivial habit of mind, a pernicious critical obsession, of which many over-earnest adult readers are victims—that of wringing from every and any bit of writing an abstract or moralistic meaning. Another practical caution may be needed as to these interpretations: Do not leave the discussion until the class has worked out from the fable a moral or application that practically the whole class accepts and the teacher indorses. Do not accept numerous guesswork explanations and let them pass. Even the little children, if they are allowed to interpret at all, should be pushed on and guided to a sound and essential exegesis—to use a term more formidable than the thing it names. Do not let them linger even tentatively in that lamentable state of making their explanation rest upon some minor detail, some feature on the outskirts of the story. Help them always to go to the center, and to make the essential interpretation. Make a point of this whenever they have a story that calls for interpretation at all. To the end that they may be sincere and thorough, choose those things whose secondary meanings they may as children feel and understand. The sixth-grade children could, in most schools, interpret The Ugly Ducking. They may easily be led into the inner significance of The Bee-Man of Orn or Old Pipes and the Dryad. They may go on in seventh grade to certain of Hawthorne's—perhaps "The Great Stone Face" and others of the Twice Told Tales; though Hawthorne is so sombre and so moralistic that it is not good for some children to read his tales, still less to linger over them and interpret them. A mature and experienced eighth grade could study "The Snow Image"; but it is too delicate and remote for all eighth-grade classes. "The Minister's Black Veil" is an example of the peculiar Hawthornesque gloom, which the children would not understand or by ill luck would understand, and suffer the consequent dangerous depression. Addison's "The Vision of Mirza" is an example of a standard little allegory, simple and easy, and at the same time full of meaning and fruitful of reflection for the children. The parables of the gospels are quite unique in their beauty and ethical significance, and afford an opportunity for a most valuable kind of training in literary exegesis. Certain tales from the Gesta Romanorum might be read in these older grades, adding the interpretations of the ecclesiastics for the gaiety of the class, and as a terrible warning against wresting an allegory out of a story by sheer violence.
There are several reasons why the extended allegories do not yield good results with a class. In the first place, it takes too long to get through them, so that the process keeps the children too long in an atmosphere of allegorical and symbolistic meanings, which will confuse and baffle them. In the second place, all the extended literary allegories have each behind it a complex system of abstract theology or morals, or some other philosophy, which cannot be conveyed to children, but which cannot be hidden from the class. Then in any long allegory, such as The Pilgrim's Progress or The Fairie Queene, the multiplied detail all loaded with secondary significance is extremely misleading to all but expert readers. As Ruskin says of myth, we may say of all other allegory: the more it means, the more numerous and the more grotesque do the details become. And we would not choose in a child's literary training any large mass of material in which grotesqueness is a prevailing note. Nearly all children are interested in The Pilgrim's Progress, and will listen with eagerness to the romantic and adventurous side of Christian's experience, but not, of course, to the didactic and theological passages. And as a matter of fact, modern religious teaching and the new race-consciousness of our generation have taken all sense of reality out of Bunyan's theology and religious psychology; and of course, it can be read to the modern child only cursorily, as in the home—never in detail and with the privilege of questioning as in the class.
One would expect a really good eighth-grade child to be able to detect and express the lesson in Lowell's The Vision of Sir Launfal, or Tennyson's Sir Galahad, or Longfellow's King Robert of Sicily. It need hardly be said that the exercises in the symbolistic kinds of literature are to be inserted here and there among the other lessons. It would be a serious mistake to give any class a whole year—or a whole month, indeed—of this experience in reading.
CHAPTER XII POETRY
There are certain results in literary training that can be secured with children only by the teaching of poetry. In story we and they are intent upon subject-matter, and on the larger matters of the imaginative creation. And, while we older students know that the choice and arrangement of material involved in the making of a story are extremely important and most truly educative, we also know that they belong in the larger framework of the story and do not lend themselves to close inspection or detailed study when our scholars are elementary children.