At least one story will appear in each succeeding issue of the Magazine until the series is finished, and should space permit, possibly two stories will appear in some of the numbers.
The Immortal Stories
They were told long before anybody had learned how to write them out, though most of the fairy tales which the children feed on now are of the second crop, to be sure.
Dr. Greville MacDonald, writing in the Contemporary Review of “The Fairy Tale in Education,” insists as strongly as Ruskin did upon the vital importance of the fairy story in the right kind of ministering to children. He regrets the tendency among the science worshipers to regard the fairy tale as a weed of superstition, to be pulled up and cast out with all such worn out beliefs. And he goes on:
“The fairy tale is a wild flower. It is native to that pasture of aboriginal, uncultivated innocence wherein, among the roots of grass and flowers, the elemental passions dwell....
“Not the least important of these elemental passions is the individual sense of unity with the world beyond. It is dominant in all unspoiled peasant folk, and dormant when not dominant in all children. It takes concrete form in folk-lore, folk-song and folk-dance. It throve fearlessly in the thirteenth century painters, in the Gothic masons and glass stainers of the great cathedrals. It is, indeed, the elemental gift in whose atmosphere and inspiration the true art grows. Hence comes the child’s fellow feeling with all simple life—his clutching at the flower, his delight in kitten, bird or butterfly. These are fellow creatures all, allies in “effort and expectation and desire.”
Dr. MacDonald is not worried by the protest that fairy tales sometimes have “bad morals.” He finds much popular confusion between the words “meaning” and “moral” in such complaints. What we do actually and rightly dislike, he thinks, is a moral label.
This is why the short sighted, the unco guid, or those whose “heads are filled with science” (to paraphrase a great writer), stupidly object to the fairy tale; they always want to append a copy book moral. The bad figures in fairy tales often play tricks successfully upon the good ones, but the child is not thereby deceived. His unerring instinct, unwarped by any sophistry of man’s education, pierces all the shams, and he loves the good and turns away, just as surely, from the bad. The spiritual sense of what is deeply true is integral in the child’s imagination, and must be held sacred.—N. Y. Evening Sun.