LITERATURE IN THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

Agents

THE CAMBRIDGE UNIVERSITY PRESS
LONDON AND EDINBURGH

THE MARUZEN-KABUSHIKI-KAISHA
TOKYO, OSAKA, KYOTO

KARL W. HIERSEMANN
LEIPZIG

THE BAKER & TAYLOR COMPANY
NEW YORK

Literature in the
Elementary School
BY PORTER LANDER MacCLINTOCK, A.M.

THE UNIVERSITY OF CHICAGO PRESS
CHICAGO, ILLINOIS

Copyright 1907 By
The University of Chicago

All Rights Reserved

Published November 1907
Second Impression October 1908
Third Impression September 1909
Fourth Impression November 1910
Fifth Impression March 1912
Sixth Impression October 1913
Seventh Impression November 1914

Composed and Printed By
The University of Chicago Press
Chicago, Illinois, U.S.A.

to W. D. M.
to A. C. D.
AND
TO MY DEAR FRIENDS AND FELLOW-STUDENTS

Lander
Paul
Hilda
Elizabeth
Hermann
Josephine
Isabel
Beth
Albert
Irene
Henry
Ruth

THIS LITTLE BOOK, THE OUTCOME OF OUR COMMON STUDIES,
IS MOST LOYALLY AND LOVINGLY DEDICATED

PREFACE

This book had its origin in several years of experience and experiment in teaching classes in literature in the Laboratory School of the University of Chicago, when that fruitful venture in education was being conducted by Professor John Dewey; in many years of private reading with children; and in many years of lecturing to teachers of children. Indeed, all the material bears the unconcealable marks of its origin as lectures, it being extremely difficult to turn into decorous chapters in a book, stuff which first took shape as spontaneous and informal lectures.

The central matter of the book was published as a series of articles in the Elementary School Teacher of October, November, and December, 1902, and a synopsis of the whole book was printed and widely circulated in January, 1904. These facts may partially account for a certain familiarity that many readers will perceive. May I venture to hope that this sense of familiarity may also be partly accounted for by the fact that the views expressed are consonant with those arrived at independently by many recent students of literature and of children?

Were it not a matter of mere justice, this would be scarcely the place to mention my debt of many kinds to Professor W. D. MacClintock of the University of Chicago; the incalculable value of Professor Dewey's influence and sympathy; and the unforgettable stimulation of Mrs. Dewey's criticism. Neither is it more than justice to express my gratitude for the patience of my publishers, which has endured both much and long.

P. L. M.

University of Chicago
June, 1907

TABLE OF CONTENTS

CHAPTER I LITERATURE IN THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

According to the naïvely formal method of division of the old-fashioned homiletics, the title itself offers a quite inevitable outline for the discussion in this chapter—an outline that takes this form: (1) literature; (2) literature in the school; (3) literature in the elementary school; and while we may smile at the pat formality of the little syllabus, we cannot resist its logic. Perhaps we can retain the logic while we disguise the formality.

When one proposes to enter for any purpose or from any point of view, a large field, especially a field that has already been much explored, he feels that he must hasten to define his bounds, to stake out his particular claim. But he makes a mistake if, in his haste to do this, he fails to make clear his understanding of the location of the large field and his conception of its nature. Any new discussion of literature must justify itself at the beginning by declaring from what point of view it will proceed and in what direction it will move. This seems a good place, then, to declare that this whole discussion will concern itself with literature as a part of the training of children. Yet this discussion must constantly proceed in the light of certain fundamental conclusions concerning literature in general, and in its essential nature, and it will help us to stand upon common ground to state these conclusions.

Literature, like every other subject that would claim a place as a discipline in school, is called upon in our day of re-examination and readjustment of the curriculum to make good its claim by showing that it has in its nature something distinctive by virtue of which it performs in the child's education some distinctive service. It is true, that no subject of human interest is a quite detached island; pursued far enough, its edges blur and mingle with the edges of neighboring interests, so that there are regions where the two are indistinguishable. But every body of material has a characteristic center where it declares itself unmistakably. However widely it radiates from this center, however many or however distant areas it touches and mingles with upon its borders, in this center it is itself and nothing else. This becomes clear when we consider some of the larger subjects of educational discipline. There is, for example, a well-defined subject, geography, though if one pursues it far, he comes in one direction upon geology; in other directions, upon history or economics or sociology or politics. Or to take another group of subjects, there is a region in which you are dealing with anatomy, though on the edges of it you pass imperceptibly into physiology or general biology.

For several reasons it is especially difficult to fix the bounds of literature. It touches the margins of every other human interest; it may reach into any of the areas about it for subject-matter; it shares with all other subjects its means of expression; it lends to all other subjects certain of its methods and devices, when these other subjects must be presented effectively; its very name is applied loosely and half figuratively to writing upon any subject, and for whatever purpose produced. But for all this, literature, too, has its distinctive center, where it can be differentiated from everything else.

We begin to make this differentiation when we say that literature is art—that it is one of the fine arts. We set it apart from the other arts by the fact that it uses language as its medium, and we set it apart from other writing by the fact that it uses language in the way art must use it—not for technical purposes, not as a medium for teaching facts or doctrines, not to give information, but to produce artistic pleasure; not to conserve use, but to exhibit aesthetic beauty.

When one's mind is clear on this point, he will not be confused by the fact that literature handles matter from other provinces—history for example—or by the fact that other kinds of writing borrow the devices of literature to beautify or otherwise make effective their own material. When Scott takes from history the figure of Richard Cœur de Lion, it is not for the purpose of teaching historical fact, but for the sake of putting into his picture a striking person and an effective motive. When Macaulay employs many figures of speech, when he rounds out his periods and balances them carefully, when he uses picturesque concrete and particular persons and objects rather than abstractions and generalizations, all to make clear and vivid the information he is giving, he is still writing history and not literature, since he is aiming first at fact and not first at beauty.

This recognition of literature as art, and the differentiation of it from the other kinds of writing, so far from being a mere bit of aesthetic theory remote from the teacher and his child, is the fundamental and essential step in the teacher's procedure, because it constitutes at once a clue to lead him in his choice of material, a guide to direct him in the method of using it, and a standard to indicate the nature of the result he may reasonably hope for. When the teacher knows that he is to choose his literature as art he is freed from the obligation of selecting such things as will contain technical information, historical facts, desirable moral lessons, or other utilitarian matter. This is far from saying that in choosing he will be indifferent to the actual material details or to the moral atmosphere of his bit of literature. The fitness or unfitness, the beauty or ugliness of these will often be the ground of his adoption or rejection. It does mean, however, that technical and professional details of fact and teaching, matters which are always subsidiary and secondary in literature as literature, cannot dictate his choice when he is choosing from the point of view of art.

The habit of regarding literature as art clarifies immediately the teacher's conception of his method of handling it. To teach literature as literature is not to teach it as an adjunct to some other discipline; it is not to teach it as reading-lessons, or spelling-lessons, nor as grammar—though incidentally the lessons in literature will have great value in all these directions; it is not to teach it as botany, as history, as mythology, as politics, as naval or military tactics, or as ethics—though again, by way of teaching it as literature, interesting by-products in any of these subjects may accrue.

It is equally true that a clear understanding of the fact that the results aimed at and legitimately hoped for are to be of the literary, artistic kind, and not of the utilitarian or scientific kind, will lighten and irradiate the teacher's problem and through him the children's task, doing away with the sense of burden and substituting for a vague and shifting end, a definite and delightful purpose.

To take a specific instance—it is very little to the purpose of literature to have taught a class that Longfellow was an American poet who lived in Cambridge, Massachusetts; and that, though the myth and legend of Hiawatha properly belong to the Iroquois, Longfellow transferred it to the Objibways. So far as the distinctively literary result goes, these facts are neither here nor there. But the enjoyment of the music of the verse, the loving appropriation and appreciation of some of the beautiful images and pictures, some grasp of the large meaning, the noble trend, of the whole poem, a general tuning-up of the class to something like unison with its emotion, a better taste in the whole class, and in a few members of it some improvement in their own powers of expression—these are the kind of result at which the teacher aims when he teaches literature as art.

The question of literature in the school has taken on a new aspect in this our current day, and especially in American schools, owing to the decidedly diminished place left for it in the modern curriculum. This has come about most naturally in the vast enrichment of the course on the side of scientific and occupational material. And naturally, too, in the process of turning from a purely book-education, we have tended to turn also from literature—a field which for many generations has seemed to be inextricably shut up in books. But it is also true that, in a large part, this turning-away from literature has been from literature wrongfully apprehended and mistakenly taught. Whatever be the explanation of the smaller place given to literature, no thoughtful student of modern education, no matter how firmly he believes in the function of literature, can regret that it should take in the curriculum its due and proportionate place. Such a student knows best the follies and absurdities achieved by untrained and inartistic teachers, in whose hands literature is made the center to which they attach any and all other matters of training; he best knows the fact that literature leaves many of the child's powers and capacities untouched; he best knows the danger of over-stimulating those powers and capacities that literature does develop and strengthen, and that it is a misfortune for a child or a class to live prevailingly in an atmosphere distinctively literary; and he knows that a few specimens chosen aright and taught aright produce the essentially literary result more surely and more safely than such a programme as could once be seen in school—a programme that seemed to reflect the teacher's desire to give the children within the grammar school all the reading that they ought reasonably to be expected to have up to maturity.

The choosing of literature for use in school creates immediately several important conditions. The bit chosen is elevated at once into the dignity and isolation of a discipline, and is set apart from matter to be read once and casually, for recreation or amusement, at home or in hours of intellectual play, to the single child or a small group of homogeneous children. In view of the fact that the specimen is being chosen for use in class, it must be broad and typical, appealing, as it were, to the universal child. It must not be merely fanciful, freakish, satirical, or witty, because, while there is pretty sure to be some child in every class who would appreciate its flavor, the others would not, and could not be brought to such appreciation. It should not be too imaginative, since it must make its appeal to a group whose experience has been of many kinds and degrees, and it cannot count upon any uniform body of apperception material that has paved the way into a very delicate or very pervasive imaginative atmosphere. It must not be too emotional, because the teacher must be aware of the hysterical children in every class, and because it is next to impossible to tune up any social group as large and as mixed as the class to anything like a high emotional unison or complete artistic like-mindedness. What the class, that composite child, needs are such things as display the broader, simpler aspects of life and art, such as call out in them the simpler and more direct responses.

If one is giving a story or a poem a single reading, and reading it merely for recreation, he may pass so lightly over the details, and may so handle its structure, that its weaknesses and faults may not appear, or may easily be lost sight of in the emphasis laid upon the pleasant and successful aspects. But a bit of literature selected for the class must be worth while in every particular; it is to be lingered over, digested, assimilated; it must be fitted to stand out in the light of searching criticism—and the assembled class soon comes to be a very acute and exacting critic; it is to stand the test of individual question and community judgment. If, therefore, it is to become, as one must hope, a part of the children's experience, a contribution to their artistic and moral well-being; if it is to be a bit of real education, it must be sound in structure, trustworthy in detail, satisfactory in issue. No matter how simple it is, it should be good art, and chosen upon the same critical principles that one would apply in choosing good literature of any degree of complexity.

While it is a great mistake to suppose that literature for children is a bit of garden ground to be considered apart from the general landscape, it is true that there are certain characteristics of children within the elementary period, and certain accepted conclusions concerning the nature and spirit of their other work, that must be taken as guides in the matter of their literature. It is not sufficient—though it cannot be too often said that it is necessary—that the literature be good; that, no matter how simple it be or how complex, it must satisfy the demands of good criticism—however important it be that it be good, it is equally important that it be fit.

One who reads the courses of study and lists of reading prepared for the elementary grades, and examines the manuals for their teachers, comes near concluding that the larger number of mistakes, and the mistakes most disastrous, lie here—in losing sight of the principle of fitness. For in these formal lists, and suggested in the manuals, one may find, first and last, heaped up all that various teachers have themselves happened to like; all that critics have praised; all whose titles sound as if they ought to be good; all that is concerned more or less remotely with other things the children are studying; all that a generation of mistaken educational logic has suggested; all that a mature reader ought to have read in a life-time; all that a blind interpretation, both of childhood and of literature, has called suitable—historical works, American literature, Shakespeare's comedies, the Idylls of the King, sentimental and bloodthirsty juveniles—a chaotic and accidental jumble. Out of some such haphazard impulse and some such failure to apply the law of fitness come such mistakes as the introduction of fifth-grade children into the mazes of a satiric social comedy like A Midsummer-Night's Dream, or the placing of first-year secondary children amid the bitter jests and baffling irony of The Vicar of Wakefield. Such pedagogical misfits arise out of sheer ignorance of the child's nature and its needs, and of the plainest principles of literary interpretation. They persist year after year because of the blind following of supposed authority, nowhere so blind as in matters of literary opinion.

The preparation that should be made by the teacher who is to choose and teach this literature is, after all, not so very formidable. We will leave out of the discussion that mystic thing called the teacher's gift. Undoubtedly there is such a thing; but it descendeth upon whom it listeth, enabling him to choose by intuition and to teach by inspiration the special bits of literature that prove to be best for the children. But such a person is not safe, unless he supplement his gift with knowledge; his choice is purely personal and esoteric, his principles accidental and incommunicable.

What is the nature of the supplement such a teacher must make to his gift? What is the training with which the teacher without the gift must fortify himself? It is little more than one would like to have for his personal culture, and little other than he is obliged to have for his contact with the children in other directions. By dint of much reading of literature and some reading in good criticism he must bring himself to a sane view of the whole subject, realizing what literature is and what it is not; what it can be expected to accomplish in human culture, and what we cannot reasonably ask of it. He must know something of its laws, that he may know how to judge it and when he has judged it aright. This process will inevitably have refined and deepened his taste and broadened his artistic experience in every direction. Of course, he will not talk to his children about literature as an art, about critical problems, structural principles, and all that; no more will he, when he is guiding his class in evolving for themselves food and shelter by way of beginning the study of history, talk to them about primitive culture and social evolution. But he is an ill-equipped and untrustworthy guide if he does not have in his own consciousness these large explaining points of view. It is precisely so with the large fundamental principles of literature. One gathers certainty and power for the choice and teaching of the merest folk-tale, if he is able to see in it the working of the great and simple laws of all art. And more specifically he must imbue himself with the spirit of the childlike literature. He must know and love the wonderful old folk and fairy tales, not regarding them as matter for the nursery and the kindergarten, merely, but learning to love them as great but simple art. He must read the hero tales and romances till he knows them as a treasure house out of which he may draw at his need. Many, many children's stories and poems he must read to be able to judge them and he must read all those artists, Carroll, Stevenson, Pater, Hauptman, who in Alice, The Child's Garden, The Child in the House, Hannele, have done so much to interpret for us in the artist's way the consciousness of the child.

In teaching literature, as in all that he does for the children, he will have use for all the knowledge he can get of childhood and children; for all that he can learn of the trend of conclusion in psychology and educational philosophy; for all knowledge he can acquire as to the meaning and import of all the other subjects of elementary instruction. Only then can he choose and teach literature that is fit in both the necessary senses—adapted to the children and harmonious in spirit with the other interests they are pursuing. Out of such knowledge of his material and his children there should grow a reasonably clear and consistent vision of the result he hopes to reach and the steps he must take to reach it. Out of all these elements should come the courage to examine fearlessly the traditional material. Better still, out of this combination will come that faith, enthusiasm, and respect for his material, that confidence in its usefulness, that hopefulness as to its results, which are desirable in a teacher of any subject, but which are absolutely essential in the equipment of a teacher of literature; because he must above all things radiate both light and warmth; he must diffuse about his material and his children the breath of life and the glow of art.

CHAPTER II THE SERVICES WE MAY EXPECT LITERATURE TO RENDER IN THE EDUCATION OF CHILDREN

It would seem to be no part of the present discussion to go into the fundamental processes of determining and defining a child's needs and tastes. In this matter we may assume and build upon the larger conclusions of psychology and educational philosophy. And it is only the larger and more general conclusions that we need, both because there is no doubt concerning them, as there may be concerning those more detailed and remote, and because when we are dealing with children in school, and in class, we are dealing with the type-child—with a composite child, as it were, to whom we can apply only the larger conclusions.

Everyone who helps to train a child must realize as a practical fact that he has both needs and tastes. The emphasis wisely placed in our day upon enlisting a child's interests and tastes has tended to mislead the unwary and undo the unobservant, so as to produce a blindness or an indifference as to his needs. Though, as a matter of mere justice, one must add that the blindness and indifference have had their existence chiefly in the indictments of those who opposed the movement when it was new.

Few parents or teachers may now be found so benighted as to deny the delight and profit of letting the child grow in all the joy and freedom possible, following his instinctive interests, expressing his original primitive impulses. But we must grant, however sadly, that the modern child is not to be a member of a primitive society; that he is living and to live in a complex, advanced community, to whose standards he must be, on the whole, adjusted and adapted. Therefore, his interests and activities must be channeled and guided; new interests must be awakened; he must be in a certain sense put, while he is still a child, into possession of what his race has acquired only after many generations.

In literature then, as in the other subjects, we must try to do three things: (1) allow and meet appropriately the child's native and instinctive interests and tastes; (2) cultivate and direct these; (3) awaken in him new and missing interests and tastes. What is there in literature serviceable for any or all of these purposes, and is there in literature anything that is distinctively and uniquely useful in the whole process? It seems only reasonable to look for the answers to these questions among the distinctive features of literature.

The most conspicuous and distinguishing fact about literature is, of course, its relation to the imagination. Now, when the student of literature or any other art talks about the imagination, he must be allowed to begin, as one may say, where the psychologist leaves off, because, while the psychologist as a scientist likes to limit his attention to the mind acting as imagination, the literary critic must consider, not only this activity of the mind, but its product—a product that presents itself as an elaborate phenomenon. This is the reason why the natural process of the literary critic seems to the student of psychology a beginning at the wrong end; because it is a beginning with an objective product, and with the larger and more salient features of that product.

Literature finds its material in nature, and in human nature and life. It has no source of supply other than that of every other kind of human thought. But before this material becomes literature, the imagination has lifted it from its place in the actual world and elevated it to the plane of art. Working upon this plane with this material, the imagination modifies, transforms, rearranges it, making new combinations, discovering unsuspected relations, bringing to light hidden qualities, revealing new likenesses and unlikenesses; and at last returns to us a product that is a new creation. Working in its larger creative capacity, the imagination constructs out of material which may be scattered or chaotic when gathered by observation, unified and organic wholes.

Indeed this large whole, this completed edifice that the art-product presents is itself an image, a vision present from the beginning of the process of creating. As the architect sees before he begins to build, the plan of his house as a whole and measurably complete thing, so the literary artist has from the beginning this large image, this plan presenting the main features of the thing he is to produce. This allows for the fact that new details are added as he goes on, the plan modified or transformed. But the artist's final result starts as an image.

This is not mere aesthetic prosing. We must set it down as vitally important in the point of view of the teacher of literature, that he must look at his material as the product of the imagination in these four ways: first, the imagination presents the large image or plan; second, it chooses the material; third, it decorates, purifies, or otherwise modifies it; fourth, it organizes or recombines it. This recombination into a new whole, no matter how simple it is, will, if it be art at all, display in some degree the large qualities common to all art-form—unity, variety, symmetry, proportion, harmony. It is the fact that in literature you have a large but manageable whole got together under laws producing these qualities and making for completeness and beauty—it is this fact that gives to literature a large share of its power in cultivating the child's imagination.

Now, there is a very common misapprehension of this phrase "cultivation of the imagination," many people taking it for granted that it invariably and exclusively means increasing the amount of a child's fancy, or the number of his fancies. Undoubtedly this is one of the effects of literature, and undoubtedly it is sometimes a desirable thing. There are children born without imagination, or so early crushed down by the commonplaceness of the adult world that they seem never to have a fancy—to be entirely without an inner life or a spiritual playground. But the average child has abundant imagination, and an abundance of imaginations; while children of the artistic or emotional temperament may often be found, especially in the period gathering about the seventh year, living in a world of their own creating, moving in a maze of fantastic notions and combinations of notions, unable to see actual things, and unable to report the facts of an observation or an experience, because of the throng of purely fanciful and invented details that fills their consciousness. To increase the amount of such a child's imaginative material would be a mistake; to throttle or ignore his imaginative activities would be a mistake still more serious.

We all know the two paths, one of which is likely to be followed by such a child. Either he drifts on, indulging his dreams, inventing unguided fancies, following new vagaries, and later reading those loose, wild, and sentimental things into which his own taste guides him, till all his mental processes become untrustworthy; or he is taken in hand, given fact-studies exclusively, becomes ashamed of his fancies, or loses interest in them because they bear no relation to anything in the actual world as he is learning to know it, and finally loses completely his artistic imaginative power.

As an aid toward averting either of these disasters, the imaginative child—who is the average child—as well as the over-fanciful one, needs to have developed in him some ability to select among his fancies, so as to cling to the beautiful and useful, and discard the idle ones. To do this, he must get the ability to put them together in some plan or system that satisfies both his taste and his judgment. They are permanently serviceable either for work or for play only when they attach one to another and cohere into a somewhat orderly whole. One is tempted to think that to put the children into possession of such a faculty or such an accomplishment is the most important step in elementary training, because, as a matter of course, it at once radiates from the handling of their invented or fanciful material into the ordering of that which they gather from deliberate observation; and, as most often happens, the artistic imagination lends a helping hand to the scientific imagination. Undoubtedly the pleasantest way and the way that lies most readily open in helping the children to acquire and develop this faculty, is the way of literature. Here it is that they see most easily and learn to know most thoroughly those complete and orderly wholes made up from beautiful or significant details, with nothing left fragmentary or unattached. Of course the teacher must choose his bit of literature with a view to this effect—a lyric, a ballad, a story, that actually does show economy of material, reasonable and effective arrangement of details, and a satisfying issue. Not all the literature available for children does display these qualities. Compare, for example, Perrault's Cinderella with Grimm's version of the same tale. The former, whatever the faults of style in the English version we all know, is so far as structure goes, a little classic, having plenty of fancy, to be sure, but exhibiting also perfect economy of incident, certainty and delicacy in the selection and arrangement of details, restraint and truthfulness in the outcome; while the Grimm story shows the chaotic, unguided, wasteful choice and arrangement of the mind which remains the victim of its own fancies. The one is mere art-stuff, the other is art.

Now, one would hasten to add that there are children in every class, and it may be in every family—unimaginative, matter-of-fact, commonplace children—who need to have given them, and to learn to enjoy, if possible, the mere vagaries and haphazard inventions; and it would be a pity to deprive any child of them in his hours of intellectual play. But it is from his contact, frequent and deep, with the more artistic and ordered bits of literature that we may expect the child to find that special cultivation of the imagination, the power of seeing an organized imaginative whole; and out of this experience should grow the further power, so important in this stage of his education—that of grasping, and constructing out of his own material, such complete and ordered wholes.

Another way in which the imagination works in literature is of peculiar importance, for the children. This, too, is precisely one of those characteristics that distinguish literature from everything else. It lies in the fact that, unlike other kinds of writing, literature proceeds by the presentation of concrete, specific details, the actual image, or images, combined into a definite picture, elevated from the world of actuality to the plane of art, or created on that plane out of details gathered from any source. In proportion as we find in literature abstract thinking, statement of general truth or plain fact, facsimile description or mere sentimentalizing, in that proportion do we find it dull and inartistic. "The orange is a reddish-yellow semi-tropical fruit," is a statement of fact plain and scientific. It would be so inartistic as to be absurd in a line of poetry. "Among the dark boughs the golden orange glows," lifts the object into the world of art, sets it in a picture, even gives it to us in the round, makes it moving and vital. "The foxglove blooms centripetally," one may say as dry fact, but when the poet says

The fox-gloves drop from throat to top

A daily lesser bell,

while he conveys the same fact, he does it in the terms of a definite single image, a specific individual process, that gives reality and distinction. It is by virtue of this method of presenting its material that literature performs another valuable and definite service for the child. This lies in increasing and supplementing in many directions his store of images. Of course, even the ordinary child has many images, since he has eyes and ears always open and fingers always active. But the sights and sounds he sees are not widely varied, and are rarely beautiful. It is the extraordinary, the occasional child who sees in his home many beautiful objects, who often hears good music, who sees in his street noble buildings, who is taken to the woods, the mountains, the sea, where he may store up many beautiful and distinguished images to serve him later for inner joy and as material for thinking. The other child whose experience is bounded by the streets, the shops, or the farm, will find his store of images increased and enriched by contributions from literature. And the fact that the images and pictures in literature are given with concreteness, with vividness, with vitality in them, not as abstractions nor as technical description, gives them place in the consciousness side by side with those registered by the memory from actual experience, and they serve the same purposes.

Indeed, the mere raising of a detail to the plane of art, the fitting of an image or a picture into a poem or a story, gives it new distinction and increases its value. Says Fra Lippo:

. . . we're made so that we love

First when we see them painted things we have passed

Perhaps a hundred times nor cared to see.

So the child, when the details he knows or may know in real life are set in literature, sees them surrounded with a halo of new beauty and value. This halo, this well-known radiance of art, spreads itself over the objects that he sees about him, and they, too, take on a new beauty, and so pass into his storehouse of images with their meaning and usefulness increased.

Whatever else may be the function of the imagination in literature it has these two—that of seeing and creating organic wholes, and that of presenting concrete images and pictures; these two would entitle it to a distinctive place in the training of a child's imagination.

As an accompaniment, perhaps as a consequence, of the tendency of the imagination to unify and harmonize its material by seeking always a deeper basis and a larger category, and the other tendency to use in literature the specific detail rather than the generalization, we have the fact of figurative thinking and speaking as a characteristic of this art. A figure involves the discovery of a striking or essential contrast or contradiction between objects, or the recognition of a likeness or affinity ranging in closeness from mere similarity to complete identification. Whichever be the process, the result is the universal and typical meanings of literature, its pleasing indirection of statement, its enlarged outlook upon many other spheres, the vista of suggestion and association opening in every direction, the surprised, the shocked or delighted recognitions, that await us on every page. We will pass by as mystical and not demonstrable the inviting theory that a contact with these contrasts and resemblances may put into the hands of the child a clue to the better arrangement of the fragments that compose his world, and may help on in him that process of unification and identification which is the paramount human task; we must leave out of sight here, as too speculative and unpractical, the enlargement and definition of his categories that would come to the child as it comes to everyone, with even the most elementary recognition of the fundamental separations and unions involved in figures; these we may leave aside, while we take the simple and quite obvious aspect of the matter—that the study and understanding of even the commoner figures quicken the child's intelligence, and help to develop mental alertness and certainty. Not even a sense of humor is so useful in his intellectual experience as the ability to understand and use figures of speech. What makes so pathetic or so appalling a spectacle as the person who never catches the transferred and ironic turns of expression of which even ordinary conversation is full? The poor belated mind stands helpless amidst the play of allusion that flashes all about him, and not even fear of thunder, which is the most alert sensation Emerson can attribute to him, can put him into touch with his kind. The best place to train a child toward quickness, the mental ease and adroitness that come of a ready understanding and use of figure is in literature, one of whose signal characteristics is the use of figure. The appreciation of remote and delicate figures will, of course, come later in a student's experience than the elementary years, after he has had more contact with life and the world and a much widened experience in literature. But the child who has been taught to understand and to use any of the simpler figures has been helped a long way on the road of art and philosophy.

Literature differs from other kinds of writing in its use of language, since it constantly aims at beautiful and striking expression. Since it often seeks beautiful and delicate effects, it is more often closely accurate than other kinds of writing; and since it sometimes seeks strong, noble effects, it is sometimes more vigorous than other writing. For the same and kindred reasons it seeks variety of expression, and so displays a larger choice of words, including new and rare words. These facts have an immediate and beneficial effect upon the style and vocabulary of the children. The fact is plainly obvious to anyone who has observed the superiority as to vocabulary and form of those children who have had much reading or who come from a literary family, and has seen the improvement of all the children in these matters as they add to their experience in literature. This enrichment and refinement of language must be reckoned among the distinctive services of literature.

Literature, in common with the other arts, but unlike other kinds of writing, aims at beauty—cares first of all for beauty. One must understand the term, of course, as artistic or aesthetic beauty, as it has been interpreted for us from Plato down, as quite other than mere prettiness or superficial attractiveness. First, in the selection of its subject-matter it is the strikingly beautiful in nature, in character, in action, and in experience that it seeks out for presentation. When it uses ugly or horrible material, it is for one of these purposes: by way of bringing into stronger relief beauty actually presented beside it; by way of implying beauty not actually presented; by way of producing the grotesque as a form of beauty; by way of awakening fear or terror, which are elements in one kind of beauty; or by way of accomplishing some exploitation or reform conceived by the artist as his duty or his opportunity; so that the artist's use of ugly material produces in every case some effect of beauty. Now the problem of the child's contact with beauty as the material or subject-matter of literature is the problem of his contact with it anywhere else. We cannot too often remind ourselves that the material in literature is that of life and the actual world chosen out, often freed from accidental and temporary qualities, and put into suitable setting in art. It therefore makes an appeal not different in kind, and in many cases not different in intensity, from the appeal of objects perceived by the actual senses. Accepting once for all the conditions of the imagination, we must conclude that the effect upon the child's taste is the same as in his contact with beautiful and noble objects under conditions of outer space. And as, when we adopt the psychology and pedagogy of Whitman's "There was a child went forth," believing that all that the little traveler encounters becomes really and truly a part of him, we are eager to have him encounter the most beautiful sights and sounds of the physical world, so we earnestly desire for him contact with the noble and beautiful objects and persons of the other-world of literature.

In the second place, literature, whether it be handling beautiful material or for any reason dealing with ugly material, is always seeking beauty of form. There are the larger matters of art-form, such as unity, harmony, completeness, balance—those large beneficent elements of beauty which should be in the child's literature as in all his other art, constituting the genial atmosphere which he breathes in without knowing it. Of course, one does not talk to him about them, but there they are in his story, his picture, his song, bringing their gift of certainty and repose. Then there are the more concrete and obvious details of formal beauty that belong distinctively to the literary art, and are partly matters of craftsmanship—the musical effect of the spoken word, prose or verse, the choice word or phase, the beautiful arrangement of clause or sentence. Certain of these elements may be deliberately brought to the child's attention, others may not. But in either case they help to form the whole atmosphere of beauty and distinction that surrounds a bit of good literature. And we cannot fail to believe in the refining and stimulating influence upon the child's taste of his contact with formal beauty in this as in the other arts.

As distinctive of literature, setting it apart from other kinds of writing, one must note that it always has in it the warmth, the fervor, of emotion, "Dowered with the scorn of scorn, the love of love, the hate of hate," is the poet, and always the glow of feeling lights up his line. "The foxglove blooms centripetally," is cold and colorless, however interesting it may be as technical fact,

The fox-gloves drop from throat to top,

A daily lesser bell

quivers with emotional associations. "I come to bury Caesar not to praise him"—the caesura of that line is Mark Antony's sob, and the sympathetic throb of the elementary class.

The king sits in Dumfermline toun

Drinking the blude-red wine.

What strange thrill is this that goes down the eight-year-old's spine at the sound of these words?

It was an ancient mariner

And he stoppeth one of three.

The mere lines submerge us at once in a new atmosphere tingling with charmed excitement.

One would like to say with some new meaning and emphasis that it is precisely this emotion, permeating, warming, and coloring literature, that gives it its reality, that establishes its hold, that gives it its relation to the world—on the one side reflecting life on the other producing life.

But it is about this matter of emotion that the teacher's dangers and misgivings lie. There are those who fix upon its emotional nature as grounds for suspicion, if not of condemnation, of literature as a means of discipline. And we must all hasten to confess that this atmosphere of emotion is the snare of the weak teacher and the curse of weak literature. Emotion displayed or aroused unworthily, or attached to inadequate or ignoble stimuli, is either mere sentimentality or undue enthusiasm. It should be reckoned nothing short of a crime to stimulate unduly a child's emotion, and to awaken in him feelings for which his nature is not ripe. But the policy or theory of ignoring his emotions, of suppressing them, or of keeping them subdued in school within the bounds of his mild pleasure in scientific observation or mathematical achievement, is surely short-sighted. If the day has not already come, it is fast approaching when we shall see that education means also the calling out and exercising of the feelings—when we shall realize the dessicating influence of American school training upon the emotional nature of children. It should not be difficult for any teacher who has studied the problems of childhood, and who has learned something about judging literature, to choose such literary things as reflect and invite the kind and degree of feeling suitable for a child, as give him legitimate occasion for legitimate emotion, as exercise and cultivate this side of his nature, effecting in him that purifying discharge of emotion which Aristotle regarded as one of the helpful offices of literature. It is a matter for rejoicing that in the atmosphere of feeling which surrounds literature and music we may counteract and balance in the child the hardening influence of his fact-studies and his general school discipline.

The mere pragmatism of the teaching often turned against literature as a discipline, that every emotional state should eventuate in activity, is met by the contention that the admiration or contempt called out by the record of the courageous or cowardly deed, the apprehension and enjoyment of the musical line or the beautiful image, contain their own issue and event. They register at once a higher moral standard or a quickened and deepened taste.

It has already been said, and it must be said again, that it is by virtue of this emotional grip coupled with the powerful and ever-to-be-reckoned-with instinct for imitation, that literature takes hold upon us, passes into our lives, affecting our judgment, our ideals, our conduct.

We live by admiration, hope, and love,

And even as these are well and wisely placed,

In dignity of being we ascend.

says Wordsworth; and literature affords many opportunities of placing well and wisely these living and life-giving emotions.

This brings us at once to the vision of another service rendered the child by literature. Here he is as if he looked upon life. He sees events worked out to the issue; he sees people expressing themselves in deeds and words, transforming themselves and others for good or bad, calling upon him for approval or condemnation, or for sympathy. He finds here his heroes, his ideals, his models. He learns manners without tears and morals without a sermon. In some sense he sees life steadily, and sees it whole, so that he widens his social horizon to take in these many groups of all sorts of men; mentally and morally he must enlarge to contain the persons and events he learns to know. It is impossible to overestimate the importance in a child's moral life, whether we interpret this as a social or an individual matter, of the contribution made by literature to his vision, his pattern, of society and of character. This ability of literature to influence the child's inner life and his conduct is so real that it has as many dangers as advantages. There must be no mistakes in selecting for him, if he is to ascend in dignity of being by the steps of literature. It must contain those pictures of life and conduct that are fit and suitable for the child to witness, and possible for him to comprehend. They must be sound to the core, arousing and permanently engaging his genuine interest and his best feelings.

And after all, the best thing we can do for a child in teaching him literature is to give him a permanent and innocent joy. We all have our moods in which we are ready to say that the first unconscious, unpremeditated pleasure that comes of a bit of literature is the only result worth having. And we who are professing teachers of literature have times of abnormal sensitiveness to the scorn of the dilettante critics who call us academical and pedagogical. And though we know that pleasure in literature has its elements and its causes, both easily observable, and that taste may be fostered and grown by well-known processes, it is always a wholesome hour for us when we are thrust back upon the fact that, though we may have disciplined his imagination, and may have quickened his fancy; we may have awakened and strengthened his sense of beauty; we may have exercised and cultivated his emotions; we may have enlarged his outlook upon life, and have provided him with social and personal ideals; it is nevertheless, better than all these because it includes most of them, if we have opened up for our scholar this permanent avenue of noble enjoyment.

Now, not all these results will appear in all the children. Some of them the teacher will not see in any child of certain classes. They are not easily ponderable and measurable—even less so than those of other disciplines. It is easy to know when a child can multiply and divide. It is not easy to know when he is in a hopeful stage of literary experience. But it is only in the direction of the results we have been discussing that the teacher of literature can always hopefully work.

CHAPTER III THE KINDS OF LITERATURE AND THE ELEMENTS OF LITERATURE SERVICEABLE IN THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL

In modern literary study we have been placing much emphasis upon the kinds or species of literary production. In the light of the aesthetics of our day and the newer psychology of art we have been learning much concerning the nature, the function, and one might say the habits of these species. These studies have coincided in time, most opportunely for the teacher of literature, with those that have aimed at the establishing of the needs and tastes of the elementary and adolescent ages. There is a real satisfaction born of the confidence one feels in approaching his problem of choosing literature for children from these two largest points of view—that of the species or fundamental kinds of literature on the one hand, that of the child's actual needs and tastes on the other. This method of approach seems to put the whole field adequately before his view, and to give authority and certainty to his final choice.

As a matter of fact there are certain characteristics invariable and inevitable in each of the five species of literature—epic, drama, lyric, fiction, essay—that tell us at once something of its fitness for our purpose. The essay, for example in its typical form is by its essential nature inappropriate. The literary essay, as it is actually constituted, is in subject-matter too abstract and remote, in mood too complex and intricate, and in style too allusive and evasive. Its invitation is to a region for which a child has neither chart nor map. The essay rests upon old, old presuppositions; these very presuppositions it is that must be slowly and through many experiences built into the mental life of the child. To be sure, there are a few bits called essays—such as certain of Lamb's more anecdotal papers, some of the narrative numbers of The Spectator, nature-studies with marked literary qualities like some of those of John Burroughs—that the grades can understand and enjoy. But these are not typical essays, and they have not the true essay spirit. This spirit, which creates for itself an atmosphere hard to describe, compounded as it is of universal knowingness, ironic indirection, delicately intellectual emotion, and faintly emotional intellectuality—this spirit is quite alien to childhood.

And as it is actually constituted, the literary drama, too, represents a life and presents an art-form so complex and so mature as to be beyond a child's grasp. Not until this period is closing—and with many children not even then—comes the hour of ripeness for the drama. This question of the child and dramatic literature has so many conditions and modifications that it must be discussed at length in another chapter. But it is evident to every sympathetic student of childhood that this is not the period to present the complex situations, the difficult problems, the over-ripe experiences, that prevailingly constitute the material of literary drama.

The literature we do give the children should correspond to the stage of their development in matching as nearly as may be, in tone and spirit their own activities and interests, or should be calculated to arouse in them those interests and activities they ought legitimately to have. It should be of that kind that gives a large free sweep of activity; that reveals character and conduct in their simpler, open aspects; that exhibits literary art phenomena in their plainer, more striking varieties. These qualities are to be found in chosen specimens of the three other species of literature—epic, fiction, lyric. Of course one must select from each of the three those specimens that do exhibit the qualities he seeks. He could not offer to children a developed epic in its entirety; but there are many things of the epic kind—ballads, hero-tales, fairy-sagas, certain detachable sections of the great epics themselves—precisely suited to them. We would not introduce them into a mature novel, but there are Märchen for them, tales of conquest and adventure, stories of other children's doings. They would be lost and bored in the presence of the elegy or the sonnet; but we may find jingles and songs, and later on odes, fit and right for them.

In the epic kind of literature we include not only the epic, but all those other poetic compositions whose principles of organization is narrative—ballad, pastoral, idyll, etc. The presupposition in favor of them as good for the children (and it is borne out by the demonstration) lies in these two facts: they are concerned with events and achievements, and are therefore likely to be active and objective; they proceed by the method of story—the easiest and most helpful for the child to follow and to grasp. It seems necessary to say again that the members of the epic group must be scanned as narrowly with reference to their fitness in subject-matter and suitability in form as those of any other group. There is a fallacy in the assumption that epic is a childlike thing, the product of the childhood of the race. This is akin to the amusing opinion that myth—Greek myth, for example—is a childlike accumulation of childish inventions. Nay, epic poetry, even those epics that seem most nearly folk-poetry—the Béowulf, for example—are built upon hoary civilizations, each of them having behind it an art-tradition already old. And if there is an unwarranted assumption in the theory that epic is childlike, there is an unwarrantable presumption in the theory that the mature person outgrows it—that its appeal is only to a primitive and undeveloped taste. The value to the child of the epic is in its objectivity and activity, its large horizons and big spaces. The taste for these things should survive and grow stronger, as should every good taste planted and fostered in childhood. The mature person but adds to his enjoyment of these things a deeper enjoyment as he grows to appreciate the finer details and subtler meanings hidden from the child. The merest primary child can love and enjoy the heroic or amusing adventures of Odysseus; he should enjoy them equally when he is forty; but by that time he will have added the ability to appreciate also the wealth of artistic detail, the profound knowledge of human nature, the large mental and religious atmosphere of the poem. For most of this added enjoyment the child has and should have no intellectual welcome, no space yet ready.

Therefore, in giving the great epics, the teacher must know what aspects, details, and episodes to pass by or to pass lightly over. And he must look carefully to the fitness of any piece of this kind he may consider. It is not sufficient that it have a story. For example Sohrab and Rustum is a little epic which fits perfectly certain seventh or eighth grades, because, in addition to a sufficiently good story, it has an atmosphere of vast spaces and large movements, a wealth of broad, noble details; and above all, it handles and evokes a simple, primitive emotion, a sorrow which is as impersonal as the sorrows of Odysseus—a true epic sorrow. In contrast, Enoch Arden, another piece of the epic kind, is not adapted to children of any age, because it displays a complex domestic and psychic situation which no child ought to be called upon to realize, while the emotion called for is both in kind and amount the sentimentality of adults. Even among the folk-ballads the same discrimination must guide us. Sir Patrick Spens is the boy's own; while the poignant pathos of Young Waters, true and piercing as it is, is not for the boy to feel.

So, as will be said many times, but always with meaning, we choose, when we are sane, not the novel, complex in plot, involved in motive, overcharged in emotional atmosphere, but the simple, direct-moving romance, the hero-tale, whose subject-matter and method are so broad and universal as to fit even the child. We can welcome, for example, the hearty boyishness of Quentin Durward or Kidnapped, where we could not pilot our elementary class safe through the social and ethical sophistications of The Heart of Midlothian, nor steer them intelligently through the involved structure and difficult narrative medium of The Master of Ballantrae.

So with the lyric form. If one's choice of a lyric lay between "The splendor falls on castle walls" and "Tears, idle tears," he would renounce the complex mature moods, the figures and allusions for which the child's experience has given him no preparation, the pervading tone of rich melancholy of the one, in favor of the buoyant objectivity and more obvious emotional mood of the other.

Through all the earlier years of the elementary school with some classes, and in some communities throughout the period, the literary experience of the children may best be made up from specimens of these three species. It may be, however, that certain seventh or eighth grades (merely to name the older children) will be found mature enough to profit by the study of certain of the more heroic literary dramas. The same tests of objectivity and simplicity must be applied in selecting these. We should choose, for example, the obvious, and boisterous fun of The Comedy of Errors, rather than the half-hidden satire of A Midsummer-Night's Dream; Julius Caesar, since it may fitly be taught as a heroic tragedy; Macbeth, which, however violent in motive and method, is still direct and simple enough to be within the child's imaginative realization.

In most schools also, we may count upon finding in these oldest children in the elementary grades some power of meditation, some interest in abstract questions, some appreciation of humor and wit, much love of eloquence; so that in this last year they may profitably read in class some essays. To be sure, we will choose, not Montaigne, but Bacon; not Pater, but John Burroughs; not Dream Children, but A Dissertation on Roast Pig. In short, we will avoid the critical and the mystical in essays, and give them objective out-of-door essays like Wake-Robin, humorous anecdotal essays like Old China, eloquent oratorical essays like Gladstone's Kin Beyond Sea.

Indeed, during this seventh and eighth grade period begins the child's hour of ripeness for eloquence and oratory. And it is wise and easy to meet and supply his interest with essays of the address variety, which do for him the characteristic services performed by the literary essay, at the same time that they satisfy his awakening hunger for the rolling music of the oratorical form, answer to his dawning interest in the big world and great questions, and help to build a bridge for him into the public speaking and dramatic aspects of his literary work that he will find, or ought to find, in the secondary school.

For want of a good term, I have used, in the title to this chapter, the word "elements" to designate all the details that go to make up the literary work of art. Into this term we cover, for mere convenience, and to avoid cumbering ourselves with a tiresome and profitless bit of syllabus-making, these and such matters: structure, story, plot, incident, character, verse, image, figure, epithet, and many other details used to produce the total effect of a bit of literature. It becomes necessary to inquire which among these elements we shall expect to find serviceable for our purpose. Of course, they are all valuable even for a child in the sense that they all contribute to the general effect upon his consciousness; but certain of them may profitably be brought into high light and deliberately impressed upon the class; others would best be left lying by for his adult appreciation.

Take for example, the matter of structure, by which we mean the larger plan or composition by virtue of which the bit of art—poem or story—has a beginning a middle and an end; by virtue of which it starts somewhere, proceeds in an orderly manner, and reaches a destination; as, for example, in our ever admirable The Old Woman Who Found the Sixpence, where you have the sixpence found, the pig bought, the obstacles on the road home, the acquiescence of the cat, the unraveling of the difficulties, the safe return home—a most orderly interdependence and sequence of incidents; or, as an example of a different kind of structure, Stevenson's Foreign Lands: the child climbing the cherry tree sees his own garden at his feet, his neighbor's garden over the wall, follows the white road to its disappearance, traces the river to its vanishment, follows it in his mind's eye to its fall into the far-away sea, and then strays on and on into the other-world of his own fancy—a perfect vanishing perspective; or examine with this matter of structure in mind Tennyson's Bugle-Song, where you will find a balanced, orderly composition—the horn, the actual echo, the spiritual echo.

Nothing in literature has a higher educational value than this element of orderly structure, of good "composition." It should be unobtrusively present in practically everything the class learns, and should be deliberately brought to notice, and should be provided for in everything the children produce. It stands to reason that the story is the form which will most constantly and most easily present this element of structure, and that in their study of stories the children can best be impressed with a sense of their bit of art as a whole made up of parts. This aspect of story, as well as the consideration of plot, incident, and character, will receive a more extended treatment than can be given here, in the special chapter on story.

As to the smaller elements of literature, it is rather contrary to the best educational thinking of our day to expect the elementary child to show much appreciation of them. It would be a mistake to place any emphasis in teaching him upon delicate or obscure phases of these elements; though there will be, naturally, within the period a growing fineness of appreciation and quickness of perception in these matters. Among the youngest children the elements to be emphasized are chiefly those concerned with the musical effects of speech. The teacher will do everything possible to develop and cultivate in the child a love of rhythm—the musical flow of language, whether of verse or prose. In the verse he will try to awaken an enjoyment of rhyme and of meter, of any specially musical collocation of words, of instances of tone-color or other poetic harmony. This cultivation of the child's ear for literature should go on through his whole school life. It should be one of the considerations that weigh in choosing the material for his literary training even throughout his college experience, in order that his ear for musical speech may grow ever more subtle, more responsive to the delicate and noble cadences of poetry and of beautiful prose. Beautiful and musical speech is the crowning quality of literature, and the final note of distinction in style, and no amount of originality in image or figure, no degree of delicate fitness in word or phrase, no perfection of skill in logical coherence and arrangement, should persuade us to forgo it.

In a class of the younger children the teacher may hope to get attention to an occasional image or larger picture; he may even occasionally secure some deliberate consideration of a figure. And he may be sure, whether their interest in these minor matters be steady and deliberate or not, that he is at least helping them all the while to new and useful words, and to a constantly improved sentence-form.

As they grow older, and capable of more attention and patience, they grow rapidly more able to give conscious consideration to literary details. The children of fifth and sixth-grade age will linger over especially beautiful and appropriate words, will stop to realize in detail the pictures, and will consider figures long enough to appropriate them artistically. The normal child has an interesting history with regard to figures of speech. Personification he accepts at once. Indeed, it is perhaps not a figure to him, but a reality, though he seems to get out of it a conscious artistic joy. Such personification as "the daffodil unties her yellow bonnet" he can see and appreciate as figure. Metaphor is his native speech, and, so long as it involves no material beyond his power of realization, he has no trouble with it—in appreciating it or in producing it. Simile is more baffling; it is easier to go immediately and intuitively to the meaning of a metaphor than to carry in the mind the two expressed sides of the simile. The younger children are puzzled and confused by the details of a Homeric simile. But children old enough to read Sohrab and Rustum, if they have been taught how to hold their minds on an artistic detail, are willing to stop and appreciate the two groups of details in each of Arnold's similes. But no elementary child will make a Homeric, or indeed any simile, except as a tour de force. Antithesis as a striking and obvious figure is easy and illuminating to children, and seems to come to them quite spontaneously in their own composing. The more subtle figures they will neither appreciate nor use within our period. The fable as allegory and the more extended allegories, even those complex enough to be called symbolistic stories, the seventh and eighth grades in the average school will read and interpret acceptably. On the whole, we may expect to give most of the children some knowledge of the literary nature and function of simple figures, and to awaken in them an ability to enjoy and understand the figurative and allusive atmosphere characteristic of literature.

This seems to be the appropriate place to speak of irony, which, while not, of course, a figure of speech, but rather a way of thinking, does frequently help to produce the allusive and indirect tone in literature. It must be the art-playfulness of irony that tempts most people, when they write for children or talk with them, to adopt some form of this method of speaking. But this method of communing with little people is full of dangers; while a pervading and abiding atmosphere of irony is most unfair to them. Slow children are baffled and stupefied by it; quick children all too soon catch and adopt the element of insincerity underlying it. Nevertheless, passages of ironic intent, together with occasional brief bits in the ironic manner, are educative, quickening the children artistically and intellectually. A little girl of five beamed with intellectual delight and artistic triumph when she said to her mother: "Now I can almost always tell when grown people are speaking irons."

Concerning the whole matter of wit and humor in literature the same thing may be said that is said of irony. Children are quickened and stimulated intellectually by frequent calls to understand and appreciate passages of witty and humorous writing, or by an occasional and short piece whose whole atmosphere is of this kind. But from the point of view of their literary training and general appreciation of art, it is better to awaken in them and maintain a serious appreciation of greatness and beauty. Besides, the child's out-of-school experience may, in many communities, be relied upon to give him sufficient contact with the ironic and humorous forms of art, literary and otherwise.

To sum up, then, may we say that it is safe to conclude that within the elementary period we will rely for the children's literary experience upon specimens of the three species—epic, lyric, fiction—introducing, in the older classes, when the conditions seem to justify it, a few simple and heroic dramas, and perhaps a few essays, choosing them from those that exhibit the more direct kind of humor, that are objective in character, or that serve as an introduction to oratory and eloquence?

We may feel contented if we have succeeded in cultivating an appreciation of the musical side of speech—among the younger children an enjoyment of the obvious things of meter and rhyme, reaching in the older children enjoyment of the rhythm of prose, and many of the more subtle harmonies of arrangement and tone-color. We may hopefully labor to impress upon them a sense of structure, an appreciation of "composition." We may refine and build upon their instinctive love of story, until we see it taking on within this period the certainty of a cultivated taste. We may develop in them some power to linger over epithet and image and figure, thus beginning to build up in them a sense of craftsmanship, and love of beautiful detail, both of which must enter into one's appreciation of any art before his judgment is safe and his appreciation satisfying. And the teacher who knows how may hope to do all these things joyously and unobtrusively, so that literature may remain what it should always be—a charming and refined variety of play.

CHAPTER IV STORY

Story is, in general, the narrative of a succession of incidents or events. It is a large, general form or device, useful, indeed inevitable, in all subjects. Like language itself, story is a universal medium, conveying the facts of history, of science, of life. Whenever we have the steps of any experience arranged according to any of the laws of subsequence or consequence, we have story; such as the story of the dandelion seed, the story of the life of Mary Stuart, the story of the invention of the steam engine, the story of a day in the city. Now, the narration of the events in mere chronological sequence is story. As soon as they are arranged in the order of cause and effect—or in any other chosen order; as soon as the narrative leads up to an end or a signal event; as soon as it shows that there has been for any purpose a selection and ordered arrangement of the steps or incidents, we have a story. The literary story—the story which is art—differs from other stories in the fact that in it the principle of selection and arrangement operates more thoroughly than in the others. A narrative detailing for technical purposes the steps of an occurrence in nature or in history must follow closely either the sequence of time or the order of cause and effect; and such a report cannot choose among the steps or incidents, but must as a matter of mere fairness, suppress nothing and heighten nothing. It is otherwise with the literary story. Here the incidents may be selected at the discretion of the author and arranged in whatever order may best serve to produce his effect; insignificant steps may be eliminated, certain steps may be elaborated and brought into higher light. The will of the artist and his artistic effect constitute a force which may abrogate the laws of cause and effect, or of precedence and subsequence in time.

The interest in story is instinctive and universal; the merest string of incidents will attract and hold attention. Interest and attention naturally increase and deepen with the greater organization of the material. It is this principle of organization that gives to literary stories some of their unique and distinctive values in education. No method of organization but that of story keeps the younger child's attention long enough and closely enough to carry him undistracted through a large whole. He cannot follow, as can his elders, the flow of emotion which constitutes the thread of continuity in a lyric; he cannot follow a train of thinking through an essay; but he can follow the run of a narrative through even a long story. This fact enables us to put him satisfactorily and pleasantly into the presence of a large organized bit of material, in which he can discriminate the parts, yet which he can grasp as a whole; which he can see as an entity beginning somewhere, proceeding in order, reaching an end.

The temptation to amplify the statement of the influence in the child's whole mental experience of this fostering and disciplining of his powers of attention is difficult to resist. But we will leave it with these few words in order to speak of the specifically artistic and literary results of this matter of structure in the story. It is a thing hard to insist upon as a matter of general theory, because written down in cold black and white it seems to convey the impression that emphasis is placed upon mere colorless organization; as if one obliged his children to make an analytical syllabus of their pleasant tale before he regarded it as taught. But it is no such dull thing. Beauty and economy of structure lie upon the very surface of the best bits of literature, and need but the most unobtrusive reinforcement from the teacher to work their effect of pleasure and discipline. This pleasure is an artistic product which should expand and develop with the child's reading, until, when he is a mature student, the formal structure of poem or story gives him the same aesthetic and moral satisfaction that he gets from a picture well composed, a monument well balanced. It is not a fancy or a mere pretty theory that a good story, taught as a structure, becomes a norm, a model, a clue to the child in the preservation of his own material, and in the arrangement of it economically and effectively. His attention is trained, his patience is rewarded, his taste refined, his judgment exercised and steadied, his imagination guided and channeled by his contact with a complete, beautiful, and logical creation, whose elements he can see and handle as he can those of the story.

From the point of view of the larger structure of the story its elements are the incidents. This term is employed in this chapter rather arbitrarily to designate those smallest separable units of progress by which a story goes forward. It does not necessarily designate a section of the story which records a happening; the introductory and explanatory paragraph we call an incident; a paragraph of description is an incident; the separable sections of the story as it moves are its incidents. A new incident begins when a certain aspect of the action closes, when a new day opens, a new person enters, a change of scene occurs, or even a shift from dialogue to narration; any of these and many other things may cause or signalize a new incident. Study for example, Grimm's Briar-Rose, which divides naturally and inevitably into ten separable incidents, and which exhibits a beautiful and artistic organization.

A teacher should master this aspect of every story he proposes to teach. He should know it intimately as a series of incidents; for these are the things he can manipulate as he uses the story—in case he must shorten it or dramatize it, or otherwise modify it to suit his needs. If he knows how to handle incidents, he may often by a little editing eliminate superfluous matter and convert a loose, overburdened, or merely long story into a usable bit of art.

Practically every story that has the length and dignity to justify its use for a class, gathers its incidents into movements that correspond to the three or five acts of a drama. There is something almost biologically necessary in at least three parts or movements in every organized narrative—Aristotle's obvious beginning, middle, and end. In a story it is but natural that we should have (1) a section presenting the people and their surroundings, the circumstances which call for or dictate the action; (2) the central event, the essential adventure; (3) the dénouement, conclusion, reconciliation, adjustment, or what not. These three movements are beautifully distinct in the Briar-Rose. It helps to impress upon the children the structure of the story if in the study of it these movements are brought to notice—quietly and unobtrusively, perhaps indicated by a mere pause in the telling, or on occasion, more deliberately by some other means. The story should not be so handled as to make the impression that there are abrupt gaps between the movements; rather these movements should be treated as essential parts of a larger composition. In the stories of the dramas the children may study, and in all such stories as they themselves dramatize, they will inevitably see that these stages or movements are essential and vital, dictating the organization of the material into acts.

Within the arrangement of the story as incidents and movements lies a deeper kind of organization which exhibits many kinds and degrees of complexity. A story may be a run of incidents that report mere activity. So deep and eager is the hunger for story, so unfailing is the primitive epic interest, that almost anybody's attention may be held for a long while by the recital of the merely juxtaposed incidents that constitute this story of activity. But there is no art in this; it is mere story-stuff, not a story. Under the manipulation of the literary artist, the tale-teller, it takes shape, shifts its incidents about, arranges its stages and emerges a created and organic thing, telling now of action, not of activity. It may be a long narrative, or it may be a mere anecdote. But it has a purpose and a plan, and it reaches an end. This straightforward, single-minded tale does not, however, give complete and final satisfaction. In the first place, it does not represent life, which never proceeds far by single, uninterrupted threads; events are interlinked and complicated, modified and diverted in many directions. In the second place, it does not satisfy the instinct of workmanship in the artist. Even the most primitive artist, the very folk itself, has this instinct of craftsmanship which expresses itself in the elaboration and enrichment of its product. In story this instinct displays itself in the more skilful arrangement of the incidents, looking ever to the heightening and deepening of effect, in the enrichment of the presentation by weaving together more than one action into a more and more complex whole. Such increased elaboration, and more conscious organization either in the arrangement of the incidents of a single action, or in the interweaving of two or more actions, gives the story a plot.

It is from the use of stories elaborate enough and developed enough to have a plot that genuine disciplinary value may be expected. The merely chaotic or haphazard run of incidents may amuse and interest the children, but it yields nothing of artistic training. Two very simple specimens (useful for so many purposes) will illustrate the point. Take the story adumbrated in The House That Jack Built. This is a series of incidents linked together in the accumulative fashion, but proceeding in a straight line and stopping short off without issue or event. Compare it with the equally primitive accumulative tale of The Old Woman Who Found the Sixpence, from which invaluable tale one can exemplify all the main devices of successful plot-making; the incidents are arranged in a charming pattern, so that the action rises to a summit, descends to an end, and produces an effect; there is the proper proportion of involution (save the mark!), of the making of difficulties, stating the problem, awakening our sympathies; this is followed by the due process of resolution, unraveling the difficulties, with the final restoration of the action to the normal level with the purpose of the story achieved. It is this kind of story that adds to interest and amusement that additional charm of artistic structure which distinguishes literature from mere writing.

Now, while it is true that a symmetrical plot constitutes in part the educational value of a story, it is quite obvious to those who know both children and stories that intricate and elaborate plots should not be given to folks in the elementary classes. A story in which the threads of the plot are many or disparate, or one in which the actions must be often, or for any long while, kept separate, confuses rather than trains the young children. Better for them are those stories whose plots are open and simple, where the actions of the interlinked threads coincide as much as possible. Certain traditional plot devices are out of place in a story chosen for these children; suspense and mystification, for example, those devices so dear in their myriad forms to the cheap and sensational novelist, and so indispensable to the interest of the uncultivated reader, are not desirable in the children's class. Their interest needs no such stimulus; their attention should not be subjected to the strain, nor their nerves to the shock, of a sustained suspense with its consequent surprise. Rather, their story should move openly and directly, depending for its power upon the skilful interrelation of its interests, yielding the pleasure of recognition and sympathy, so much more artistic and disciplinary than the pleasure of surprise. For this reason plots of the type of Shakespeare's great plots, of the type of Perrault's Cinderella, in which the reader is in the confidence of the author from the beginning, are to be desired for the little people. If for any reason it seems well to tell to the younger children a long story built upon suspense and surprise, it is generally well to let them know very soon the issue of affairs—the ultimate disaster or reconciliation—so that they may be free from anxiety and able to attend to the more real matter of the story as it proceeds. This teaching applies to the younger children; as they grow older, they become able to get desirable intellectual experience out of a good detective story, or one with a fairly deep mystification in it, like Treasure Island. The older children, too, may profitably handle a more intricate plot—Ivanhoe with its four threads of interest and activity, The Merchant of Venice with the action shifting about from scene to scene among its various groups.

By handling a plot as a matter of literary study we mean, examining it from these points of view.

1. What are the difficulties set up?

2. By what devices are the difficulties constituted—conspiracy, intrigue, disguise, quarrel blood-feud, race-hatred, etc., etc.?

3. How are the difficulties removed?

4. How many threads of interest has the plot?

5. How are they linked together or interwoven?

6. How logical and how fair is the outcome?

Other questions to be considered in studying the plot will arise in the study of an actual story with an actual class.

Of fundamental interest in the story are the persons or characters, and it is of prime importance that teachers—be they mothers or masters—should know how to educate the children in this matter.

From one point of view—that of the activities of the story, in which the younger children are mainly interested—there are two kinds of persons: those who do things; those who receive things, or for whose sake, or merely in whose presence, things are done. The former are the agents—the pushing, active adventurous persons, who, good or ill, make things happen; the latter are often mere figures, important and perhaps beautiful, put into the story to represent institutions or ideas—like the father of Cinderella, who is merely an institutional father; or they are devices for getting on with the plot, like the fairy godmother; or they are the rewards of endeavor, like the King's daughter given in marriage in many a folk-tale. From another point of view, which regards the actors in the story, not as persons, but as characters, they may be divided into two types; those who are fixed, static, from the beginning—who come into the story fully equipped, and do not change at all within its limits; those who change or develop under the influence of others and of their experiences.

In the study of characters more than in any other aspect of story, we must allow for the growth of the children within the elementary period. The youngest children are prepared to appreciate the activities of people, and are interested in the active persons, and by transfer of sympathy, in the persons for whose sake the deeds are done. Their typical readiness in reading character does not fail them when the character has been transferred to literature. They are quick to discriminate the main lines and the distinguishing traits of personality. They need only a few facts and signs. The merest nursery child will be found to have settled views of the general character of Little Boy Blue and Jack Horner, built upon the slender but significant data of the rhymes. But the children I have known have not, up to the sixth grade, followed with much interest or profit any but the slightest and simplest character progression or modification. They are satisfied that the wicked should become more and more wicked, to their final undoing; that the stupid become stupider, to their ultimate extinction; but any evolution of character other than this cumulative one, any transformation more subtle than the conversion of Cinderella's sisters, or more delicate than the degeneration of Struwelpeter, finds them languid.

From these facts the wise teacher takes his hints and builds his plans. He will give these younger children very little of what is known in mature classes as character-study—which so easily in these same older classes, degenerates into gossip and the merely idle or pernicious attributing of motives. He will help the child, on the whole, to judge from his deeds whether a man is good or bad, helpful or hindering. But no deed is all mere activity; back of it lie motives and passions, and beyond it lie moral and social results. There is a name for Little Boy Blue's failure in duty, and for Jack Horner's self-approval; and these qualities have manifestations in forms and circumstances other than those of these two heroes. To these simple deed-inspiring motives and passions, and to their effects on the persons themselves, the teacher must see that the children's attention is directed; so that, as he builds up stroke by stroke the image of his hero and model, the features that he gets from literature at least may be supported by his judgment.

Of course, as they advance the children awaken, or should be awakened, to some of the more delicate discriminations of motive and action—to the conception of a man who is mixed good and bad; and to a realization of a character changed under our eyes by some experience or by the influence of another person; to some estimate of the farther-reaching consequences of the deeds we witness in our story. And before they have finally passed out of the elementary grades, we may expect them to be able to consider the problems and contradictions that lie, for example, in the character of Shylock; they could see his fundamental passions—race-hatred, avarice; they could estimate his motives—personal dislike of the merchant, revenge of his own wrongs and loneliness; they could try to estimate the effect of his character and conduct on the fortunes and characters of the whole group, and finally upon his own fortunes. They might, in the same general and simple way, follow the spiritual struggles of Brutus: his great underlying passions—patriotism and love of friend; his immediate motives to save his country; the effect of his deed; the telling contrasts between him and Cassius, him and Mark Antony.

The study of character in these broader lines—the fundamental qualities or passions, the motives that bring about the action, the obvious results in personal and social ways of these actions—constitutes the utmost we should try to do in this direction, leaving for a later period, when the children's social interests are broadened, and when they have developed from within a deeper sense of moral experience, the more delicate and difficult matters of the evolution and interplay of character.

Of equal importance in a story with the run of events or plot, and with the persons or characters, is this third thing—the outcome or issue. It is surely wise to follow, for the younger children, the hint given by their own tastes and by the primitive story-tellers, to the extent of giving them prevailingly such stories as have a distinct and signal outcome, leaving the uncertainties and inconclusions of a thoroughgoing realism for a much later period. It is best, on the whole, that the children see the issues of their story settled, the actions passing on to accomplishment—this for the artistic as well as for the moral effect of the tale. It enables them to regard it as a finished whole, having unity and completeness; and it throws light on all the events and persons in the story, to see how things come out in the end.

The outcome or issue can be looked at from one or the other, sometimes from both, of two points of view; as a dénouement or round-up of the particular story in hand; or as a solution of a human problem, a universal situation. The entirely satisfying dénouement of The Old Woman Who Found the Sixpence, the removal of her many difficulties, goes no farther than getting her home that night; though, of course, a mature mind of mystic tendencies may see in it a triumph of social co-operation. It will be enough for the third grade to feel a certain luxurious physical well-being, arising from the final safe arrival of the old woman and the pig that night. But in the exquisite little novella of Beauty and the Beast the outcome of the story is not only a settlement of the affairs of the persons in whom we are interested, but it is also a comment on life of universal application—that in a world where things go as they should, good, gentle, and pretty persons are rewarded with their hearts' desire, while rude, haughty, and cruel persons are either punished or left entirely out in the award of good things.

This sort of ending, conclusive and fortunate, the children and the primitive story-makers always prefer; any other kind of ending must be prepared for and defended. The younger children will not accept tragedies; the older ones accept them with difficulty. Death and failure are not realizable to them. It may be true, as Wordsworth undoubtedly meant us to see in his little cottage-girl in "We Are Seven," that this refusal to believe in death is due to some supernal truth of vision which we, their elders, seeing only by the light of common day, have lost.

But we all know that tragedy is sometimes the way of life, and often the way of art, being ineradicably written in the events of many of the world's great stories. It would be an ethical and artistic folly to substitute a fortunate ending in these stories—quite as unpardonable in the tragic folk tale as in King Lear or in one of the Greek tragedies.

It is well to study with the children occasionally a tragic tale, to give them that sort of artistic experience and to secure the exercise of the tender sides of sympathy and pity. But because they are not provided by their experience with reasons for expecting and accepting tragedy they should be prepared for the calamity and led to justify and accept it—not as a visitation of justice, for a true tragedy is never of that kind—but as a beautiful pathos or grief. To this end one would choose his tragic tale among those which have disaster inwoven from the beginning, so that the class may not have the shock of surprise and the feeling of resentment that come of an unexpected and avoidable catastrophe. Take for example, the folk-tale of Little Red Riding-Hood, a poor story for a class in any form, but poor as a tragedy because there is nothing in the events to warn them of the tragic end. To be sure there is the treacherous wolf, but he is stupid and should by rights be defeated and outwitted; it is simply preposterous, in the code of childhood, that he should triumph. This lack of the inevitable and necessary element in the disaster is doubtless what tempted the folk themselves to divert it by a dénouement, possibly reminiscent of certain mythical stories—the recovery of the maiden from the wolf's stomach, which by its improbability and grotesquerie tempts the skepticism of the class, however young. As an example of the other sort, consider the old ballad long ago adopted as a nursery tale—The Babes in the Wood, which carries in its very nature and in every incident the prophecy of tragedy; so that, however grievous the calamity may be, it does not come upon us with the additional shock of surprise and the additional injury of unreasonableness. This kind of story accomplishes the result of discharging the tender emotions without complicating them too deeply with anger and revenge.

But, on the whole, the stories taught the elementary class should be those that end conclusively and fortunately. This principle not only matches and satisfies the child's taste, but it is in entire consonance with the principles of his procedure in other things—it grows out of the method of affirmation and inclusion, regarding elimination and denial as useful in a much later period of his education.

As to the way in which the conclusion is brought to pass, there is to the child and to the childlike mind, in literature as in life, something eminently satisfying in poetic justice. Legal justice is cold and formal to them, except indeed in those frequent cases in which it is a vehicle of vengeance. Besides, it seems to produce an effect really alien to the cause; as in the penalties of the sufferers in the Inferno, the inevitableness of the effect is obscured by the many complex stages that intervene between it and the cause. Logical justice—the natural, uninterrupted working of the forces and motives to a conclusion, or to their absorption into a new combination—is both too slow and not striking enough. Besides, logical justice, working in its impersonal, undiscriminating way, is too likely to hurt someone in the piece whom we love, or to spare somebody we hate. In short, your elementary class demands poetic justice—demands it strong and desires it quick. Now, poetic justice is, on the whole, the way of art, until we come practically to the realistic art of our own generation. It tends to secure completeness and unity. As a matter of fact, in practically every short and completed story of the kind we choose for children the end is precipitated and adjusted by the operation of poetic justice.

One would be blind indeed who was unaware of the fact that precisely here lies one of the dangers of the training in literature. It is this that tends to give the mind that has had too large a diet of literature, or to which literature has been unwisely administered, a distorted view of life, obscuring its vision with sentimentality and unreality. To guard against these effects we should see to it that the children do not have an unduly large amount of literature; and we should select those stories in which the operation of poetic justice is as little misleading as possible. Poetic justice may be, and usually is, an ideal, an artistic distribution of rewards and punishments; but it need not be a haphazard and lawless distribution. There is an artistic flaw in a story in which the rewards go to a person who has not legitimately awakened our sympathies; it is not safe to say that the reward should go to him who has deserved it, for in some of the most acceptable children's stories sympathy sets aside deserving—The Musicians of Bremen, for example. We are satisfied with the success of the musicians, because, being innocent and persecuted, they have gained our sympathy, and are therefore in the line for reward. But the youngest child whom I have tested on this point disapproves the outcome of the folk-tale of "Lazy Jack" (Joseph Jacob's English Fairy Tales), in which a noodle whose stupidity has caused a king's daughter, previously dumb, to laugh, and so to gain her voice, is rewarded by being married to the restored princess. It is not difficult to avoid those stories in which poetic justice is perverted justice.

And then, in the long run, when we have studied many stories and fitted the literary stories in with history and the observation of life, we can counteract any effect of unreality we may suspect, by placing the rewards and punishments in their proper places and classes—translating them, as it were, into terms of experience. The fairy-tale may say in effect: "Be good and gentle and pretty, and you will marry a prince," or, "If you are mean and spiteful, you will be transformed into a toad;" but it is not so difficult to convert these propositions into terms that have a reality for the third grade, so that marrying a prince and being turned into a toad take their places as typical or symbolistic rewards and punishments.

CHAPTER V THE CHOICE OF STORIES

As a summary and by way of applying the facts, principles, and theories discussed in the foregoing chapter, let us try to decide what constitutes a good story to study with a class of children under thirteen years of age. Not to be aware of the critical pitfalls that yawn for one who would say what constitutes a good story for any purpose, would be entirely too naïve; and they beset the path of him who would choose a fairy-tale quite as thickly as that of the critic of mature masterpieces. But many of these pitfalls may be avoided if one narrows his path and walks circumspectly in it. In the present discussion the path is narrowed by two considerations.

First, we will leave out of the discussion matters of mere personal taste and instinctive feeling—that region in which impressionism and amateur criticism flourish, confining it as closely as may be to those matters that yield to judgment, and that are, as nearly as possible, matters of fact. There is about every bit of literature a sphere in which the individual taste is sole arbiter. One man's meat is here another man's poison. The merest lay reader here makes up his mind: "I like it," "I like it not;" and there is no appeal from these judgments, and no way of modifying them short of a complete training in criticism, or a complete remaking of the reader's experience. It is quite true that the region in which these differences lie may be greatly reduced by a knowledge of a few fundamental critical principles, and by a mere suppression of prejudices and sentimentalities. But in the last analysis there always remains a margin, a border of this every man's territory. If the bit of literature be a story, it is likely to be matters of character-growth, motives of conduct, interplay of personal influence, social, philosophical, and ethical interpretation and influence, that lie within this region and are subjects of disagreement and uncertainty. Here lies, too, that more or less elusive, but very real, thing that belongs to every bit of literature—what we call "charm." This may be a matter of structure, of style, even of vocabulary, of persons, of furniture, of architecture or other mere accessories—of geography, of the temperament of the reader, a combination of all these or of any number of them, or of other things too numerous or too elusive to be named. Every good story has it, or gets it as soon as a sincere and sympathetic reader learns how to read it. If one should ever find a story which after repeated readings develops nothing of this most essential and intangible quality of charm, let him not try to teach it. Either it is not a good story, or he has no temperament for art.

But, however interesting these matters may be to readers of the gentle guild, and to the impressionist critic, they do not carry us far upon our practical educational choice. This must be guided by a study of those aspects and elements of story which yield to plain observation; which, however artistic, are yet amenable to judgment, and may therefore be impersonally and unemotionally discussed—such as the structure of the story, its use of incident, its movement, its plot, its outcome, the fitness of the whole for the training and best amusement of the children.

In the second place, we limit and define our discussion, if another reminder of this important fact may be allowed, by the determination to discuss, not the art of literature, not all or any literature, not all literature for children, but such literature as it may be found expedient and desirable to give to a class of children.

1. In order to get it into the summary, it having been sufficiently amplified in a previous chapter, and being indeed, self-evident, we will say again that a story, good to teach in class should be one whose material corresponds to the needs and tastes of the children. The experiences portrayed should be, not necessarily those that they have had, but such as they can conceive and imaginatively appropriate, or such as they might safely experience. And since children of this age are living, or ought to be encouraged to live, active, achieving lives, and are not, or ought not to be, introspective or too meditative; since they know little or nothing of intricate social complications or psychic experience, and we do not desire that they should, we will choose their literature with these things in mind. We may safely say that there should be nothing reflected in his story which the inquisitive child may not probe to the very bottom without coming upon knowledge too mature for him. This must be reconciled with the fact that one of the valuable services of literature is to forestall experience and to supplement it. The reconciliation is not difficult to make when once the teacher has grasped the principle of fitness and really walks in the light of what he may easily know about the nature of children.

2. The larger number of their stories should be of things happening, of achievement, of epic, objective activity. Single children should often have a quiet, idyllic story to read. The class should occasionally have such a story or poem to consider and should be carefully guided to the enjoyment of it. But for the class in the larger amount of its work we will choose stories of action, as corresponding most nearly to the experience and interest of the children, as harmonizing most completely with the character of their other disciplines, as serving best to create an atmosphere of artistic rapport in any group large enough to compose a class, while they serve equally well with other stories to effect those other aspects of literary training which we desire.

However, all persons who choose and write stories for children should suspect themselves in regard to this matter of activity. When we say that these stories should contain much activity and should move forward chiefly by the method of adventure, we do not mean that there should be unlimited or superfluous activity. The two marks of the sensational story are too much activity, or merely miscellaneous activity, and activities unnecessarily and unnaturally heightened and spiced. It is not difficult to test our stories on either of these points. A good story has a central action to be accomplished; toward this many minor activities co-operate; there should be enough of these to accomplish the result, but there should be economy of invention and skill in arrangement, so that one does not feel that there has been a waste of material nor a bid for overstimulated interest. The danger to the child's culture, artistic, intellectual, and moral, of the ordinary juveniles lies just here, the heaping-up of sensations, the effort to provide a thrill for every page, throws the story out of balance, strains the child's nerves, and helps to produce a depraved taste.

3. To bear the strain of class use the story should present a sound and beautiful organization. This plea for a good and trustworthy structure should not be mistaken for a plea for a formal and artificial use of a story. It is rather an appeal for the use of the logical and rational side of literature—an urgency that we bring into the training of the children the plain and fundamental matters of art-form that the story exhibits, at the same time that we get out of it the intellectual value it has for the class. If it be a short story, it should go to its climax by a direct and logical path, and close when its effect is produced. If it be a longer story, it should have that arrangement of details and parts that corresponds to the movements of the action, and that serves to get the material before us in the most effective and economical way.

Stories that are elaborate enough to have a genuine plot are desirable for all classes except perhaps the very youngest. It is not necessary to say again, except by way of an item in the summary, that the plot should be simple and easy to see through, containing very little of the element of suspense, and only a legitimate amount of the element of surprise. Some more elaborate plots, with more mystification in them, are intellectually stimulating to the oldest grades, and create an interest of curiosity. But all teachers should learn to regard this stimulus as a mere by-product of literary study, and this curiosity as a merely adventitious ally.

4. Clearly connected with the matter of good and sufficient structure is that of economy of incident. A story which displays a profusion of details may be interesting, and under certain circumstances valuable, to a child. But for the class that is a better story which uses just those incidents essential to the production of its effect. Compare our old friend, Perrault's Cinderella, in this matter with Grimm's. It needs but two nights at the ball—one when the maiden remembers the godmother's injunction, and one when she forgets it. Grimm's version gives us three nights, and fills the story with all manner of irrelevant details, which indicate, indeed, the prodigal wealth of the folk-mind and the unbounded interest of the folk-audience; but they show no superintendence of the folk-artist.

Of course, when one is judging a story from this point of view, he must take into account the effect to be produced before he pronounces as to the sufficiency or superfluity of the incidents. There must always be enough to be convincing, to give to the story the atmosphere of verisimilitude, and to justify and reward our interest in the affairs of the persons. In Andersen's The Ugly Duckling he needs to produce the effect of lapse of time, the experience of many vicissitudes, and the repeated refusals of the world to receive his genius; every incident then, though it may to some extent reproduce a previous one, is valuable as contributing to the effect.

5. As a part of the artistic economy of the story, it should have a close unity—closer than we would demand of a story read to our children at home, and closer than we should demand for an adult novel. The threads of the action should be so closely related and interlinked that they are practically all in action all the time. This is particularly true for the younger children. It may not be too great a tax upon the patience and attention of the older children to leave the hero in imminent danger on his desert island, while we return for several chapters to the heroine in the crypts of the wicked duke's castle; but the little ones should not be asked to endure it.

The action should be all rounded up within the one design and stop at the artistic stopping-place. To appreciate this aspect of unity, read Grimm's Briar-Rose—that wonderful little masterpiece of structure—in comparison with Perrault's The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood, which trails after it the ugly and inorganic episode of the ogre mother-in-law. Even in the cycles of stories the separate episodes should display these qualities of unity.

6. When we choose our standard class-story, we will have in mind other aspects of the principle of economy, or of due artistic measure. In such a story there should not be an undue appeal to any one emotion. Too much horror or disgust will undo the very effect one desires to produce. Such a story as The Dog of Flanders, for example, affords a sort of emotional spree of pity and pathos through which the steadier members of a class refuse to go, and which the more emotional members do not need. Especially should there not be any unnecessary profusion of magic, of supernatural agencies, of daring and danger. This brings us to the difficult point of the degree or kind of unlikelihood one may risk in such a story. When one is reading to the single child, or to a few children, or if one is a real dramatic genius, this unlikelihood is not so important a matter, because it is not difficult under either of those conditions to create an atmosphere of artistic faith in which any story "goes." But in a big class, with the ordinary teacher it is difficult; some inquisitive or skeptical minds will call for proof or detailed statement, and quite destroy the rapport demanded for the perfect appreciation of the story. In a class I once knew such a skeptic, who was indeed a mere scientific realist, brought the otherwise enraptured class violently to earth during the reading of the passage of Odysseus between the whirlpool and the cliff, by the sardonic suggestion that Scylla must have had a "rubber-neck." When it can be avoided, do not tempt your skeptic or your cynic by the kind or degree of unlikelihood liable to excite his protest.

7. The story should be serious. This does not preclude humorous and comic stuff. But the funny things should be sincerely funny, as contra-distinguished from those things that are ostentatiously childlike, elaborately accommodated to the infant mind, ironical, or sentimental, and the teacher must so know his story, and so honor it and his children, that he can render it to them whether it be an improbable adventure of Odysseus, or the merest horse-play of a folk-droll, sincerely and cordially.

8. In the earlier typical years of the elementary school, through the sixth grade (twelve-year-old children) at least, the persons of the story should be those who do things rather than those who become something else. They should display the striking, permanent qualities rather than the elusive, evolving qualities; they should act from simple and strong motives, not from obscure and complex ones. Only in the latest years, if at all within the period, should the class be asked to consider more intricate types, more subjective qualities, and more mixed motives. No mistake is likely to be made in this matter, if the stories and plays are well chosen from the point of view of fitness in other respects. Every teacher who is conscientious and informed, will realize that these persons in the stories contribute their quota—and a very large one—to that "copy," that ideal self, that broods over every child's inner life, inviting him on, giving him courage and hope, reproof and praise, leading him to whatever he attains of social and personal morality. And every such teacher can help the children to build into their ideals the permanent and valuable qualities of these persons of their story.

9. The story should be ethically sound. On this point one would like to make discriminating statements. One does not teach literature in order to teach morals and he cannot ask that his fairy-tale should turn out a sermon, or that his hero-tale deliberately inculcate this or that virtue. Indeed, literature may be completely unmoral, and still safely serve the purposes of amusement and of distinctively literary training—as witness the nursery rhymes, the Garden of Verses, Alice in Wonderland. But if it be immoral, it is also artistically unsound, and does not yield satisfactory literary results. No teacher is in danger of teaching a story which depicts the attractions of vice or glorifies some roguish hero. But let him beware also of those less obvious immoralities, where the success of a story turns upon some piece of unjustifiable trickery or disobedience, or irreverence, or some more serious immorality, which thus has placed upon it the weight of approval. In the chapbook tale of Jack and the Bean-Stalk, to take a chance example, the hero's successful adventures hinge upon a piece of folly and disobedience; the kindergartenized version of The Three Bears excuses an unpardonable breach of manners. The pivotal issue, the central spring of a story must be ethically strong, so as to bear the closest inspection and to justify itself in the fierce light of class discussion.

Of course, one should be cautious here, so as not to seem merely puritanical or Pecksniffian. Subtlety is the savage virtue; along with horse-play it is the child's substitute for both wit and humor. The wiles and devices of Odysseus only endear him the more to his sympathetic child-followers, as they did to Pallas Athene herself. We cannot give to the classes the things best for them in other ways, and exclude all tales in which wiliness or subtlety constitutes the method, if not the motive. But we can do this: we can see to it that the trick tends to the securing of final justice, and we can discriminate between mere deceitful trickiness and that subtlety which is, as in the case of Odysseus, quickness of wit or steady intellectual dominance. And we must make many allowances, setting ourselves free in the child's moral world as it really is to him, by constant imaginative sympathy. According to the nursery code there is no harm in playing a trick upon a giant; by very virtue of being a giant, with the advantage of size on his side, and more than likely stupid besides, he is fair game for any nimble-witted hero. The children and their heroes use the deliciously frank and entirely satisfying argument of the fisherman who freed the monstrous Afreet from the bottle: "This is an Afreet, and I am a man, and Allah has given me sound reason. Therefore I will now plot his destruction." The butcher and the hen-wife, hereditary villains of the folk-tales, are such unpitied victims. The misfortunes of Kluge Else, of Hans in Luck, and of the countless other noodles, are but the proper fruit of their folly. Every child will instinctively—and indeed ultimately—justify the legal quibble by which Portia defeats Shylock, as but the just visitation upon his cunningly devised cruelty. Let it be a clear case of the biter bitten, and of the injustice or stupidity of the original biter, and one need not fear the result—certainly not the artistic result—upon the sensible child or upon the average class—the average class being, in the end, always a sensible child.

At the same time one hastens to say that to use a large number of such stories would place the children in an atmosphere of trickery and petty scheming which would be most undesirable. I have read with a group of children where the presence of one incurably slippery member so poisoned the air that it would have been unwise to study even one story in which success was achieved by the use of a trick or a bit of subtlety.

Let your stories be ethically sound, even the stratagems and wiles making for justice, and the right sort of mercy.

10. It is best, on the whole, that the stories given in class have a satisfying and conclusive ending of the romantic sort. It should, of course, be the ending for which the events have paved the way, and the ending which the children, in view of the direction in which their sympathies have been enlisted, will feel to be just. When a tragic ending is inevitable, it should, in the case of the younger children, be provided for and justified. All things considered, it is better, emotionally and artistically, for these younger children to consider in class those stories which have a fortunate ending, displaying the working of poetic justice, leaving for the older groups the tragedies, and the logical justice of a convinced realism.

CHAPTER VI FOLK-TALE AND FAIRY-STORY

Whatever may be our attitude toward the culture-epoch theory of a child's training and experience, or however much we may vary in our conscious or unconscious application of it, no observer of children will have failed to notice that in the three or four years lying about the seventh, they have their characteristic hour of social and psychic ripeness for fairy-tales. Upon this point the philosophical deductions of the technical pedagogues coincide perfectly with the intuitive wisdom of all the generations of mothers and nurses. The imaginative activity of the six- or seven-year-old person coming to school out of the environment of the average modern home is practically on the same level, and follows the same processes, as that of the folk who produced the golden core of folk-tales—not primitive savage fragments of legend, not developed artistic romance, but complete little tales, simple and sincere, molded into acceptable form by generations of use. The vision of the world physical and social that these tales present, and their interpretation of its activities, is that which is normal to the seven-year-old child, and constitutes therefore the natural basis on which his literary education begins, and affords his first effective contact with imaginative art.

But when we have agreed that the fairy-tales constitute precisely the right artistic material for these children; when we have fixed with satisfactory definiteness the hour of their ripeness for them; when we have indicated those elements in the tales that render them serviceable, we are still at the beginning of our task. For we find ourselves in the presence of a vast mass of material from which we must choose those things that are so typical as to accomplish for our children the characteristic service of folk-tales, and so beautiful as to perform the added service of good literature. And so wide is the range of subject-matter and form in the stories constituting the mass that it becomes evident at a glance that the educational and artistic efficacy of the fairy-tales depends upon the wisdom used in choosing the actual specimens. The most useful thing to be done, then, is to determine a set of trustworthy and practical principles of selection.

We should understand, to begin with, what we mean by fairy-tales. It is now impossible to limit this term to those stories that deal with the activities of an order of invented preter-human beings called fairies; or even to those that contain preternatural or supernatural elements. With the old fairy-tales in this narrow sense, have been incorporated folk-tales dealing with matter which involves only natural and human material—beast-tales and bits of comic adventure, for example. It is possible to treat them, however, in one category, because of the fact that in all those that are worth using for the children in class, whether there be fairies involved or not, the imaginative process is of the same kind, the vision of the world, its activities and its possibilities, is on the same level of imaginative combination and artistic interpretation; and this is the level of the children for whom we are choosing.

The traditionary stories, the real folk-tales, have been divided into four classes.

1. Sagas—stories told of heroes, of historical events, of physical phenomena, of the names or location of places, and intended to be believed. They are to be differentiated from myth by the fact that they have never assumed any religious or symbolic signification. They are, as a matter of fact, hero-tales in the making—of the same stuff in many cases as the great hero-tales, but having remained in the hands of the folk, have never received the enrichment and beauty of those hero-tales which the poets took up. Such folk-sagas are Whittington and His Cat and Lady Godiva. Most of these stories have preternatural or supernatural elements, and even such as have no such elements have still the atmosphere of wonder, and those fanciful or fantastic interpretations characteristic of the folk-imagination.

2. Märchen, or what we call "nursery tales"—those told for artistic pleasure, pure imaginative play, the creative exercise of the art-instinct. They may or may not exhibit the supernatural or preternatural elements; in some of them animals are among the actors. These constitute the large mass of popular and nursery tales; Cinderella, Beauty and the Beast, Puss in Boots, Briar-Rose, The Musicians of Bremen will do for examples.

3. Drolls—comic or domestic tales which may or may not make use of the impossible, the marvelous, or the preternatural. Generally they are tales of funny misadventures, cunning horse-play, tricks, the misfortunes or undeserved good luck of "noodles." Such, chosen from many examples, are Kluge Else, Lazy Jack, Mr. Vinegar, Hans in Luck.

4. Cumulative tales—those in which incident is inter-linked with incident by some more or less artificial principle of association, constituting in some cases a mere string of associated happenings, in others a fairly rounded out story. Such, in its simplest form, are The House That Jack Built and Titty-mouse and Tatty-mouse, Henny-penny and the old swapping ballads.

The modern stories corresponding to these are of three kinds: those written in imitation of the folk-sagas and Märchen; those which introduce preter-human elements as symbols; those which personify the phenomena and forces of nature.

It is not mere convention that leads one to choose for the children in class the traditionary or folk-tales in preference to the modern fairy-story. Many new so-called fairy-tales are doubtless harmless and amusing enough, and may serve a purpose in hours of mere recreation. But they lack those abiding qualities one seeks in a story he gives as discipline and to a class. Failing to possess the very fundamental characteristics of the folk-tale, they fail to perform the typical and desirable service of the folk-tale. First of all, modern fairy-tales are neither convinced nor convincing; they are imitations, which cannot fail to miss the soul of the original. There can be no new fairy-tales written, because there is no longer a possibility of belief in fairies, and no longer among adults a possibility of looking at the world as the folk and the child look at it. The substitution of the pert fairies and dapper elves of literature and the theater for the serious preterhuman agents of the folk-tale creates at once in the new stories an atmosphere of dilettantism, of insincerity. Titania and Oberon, flower-fairies, dew-fairies, gauzy wings and spangled skirts, were not in the mind of the people who told these tales of the sometimes grim and schauderhaft and always serious beings—fairies, elves, goblins, or what not. Wicked little brown men disappearing into a green hillock with the human child, in exchange for whom they have left in the cottage cradle a brown imp of their own; the godmother with the fairy-gift who brings justice and joy to the wronged maiden; the slighted wise woman foretelling death and doom over the cradle of the little princess; the kind and gentle Beast whom love disenchants and restores to his own noble form—all these were to those who made them serious art, as they should be to the child. If one could make the old distinction without dreading to be misunderstood in these days of opposition to "faculty" criticism, he would say that the folk-tales exhibit the working of the deep human imagination, using all the powers of the mind, and reorganizing the world; the modern fairy-tale exhibits the exercise of the fancy, disporting itself in a very small corner of the world of art.

It is, first of all, as one cannot say too often, the imaginative level of the folk-tales that fits them for the child's use. They are the creative reconstruction of the world by those who were rich in images and sense-material, unhampered in the use of it by any system of logic or body of organized knowledge, simple, sincere and full of faith—as our own well-born children are at six-seven-eight. It is this simplicity, sincerity, and earnestness that gives them their childlikeness—all qualities that one fails to find in the modern fairy-tale written by a grown person for children. Nothing is so alien to the consciousness of the child as the consciousness of the grown-up educated man. It is by nothing short of a miracle that he can keep his own sophistications out of what he writes for children. His fairy-tale, failing in simplicity, will betake itself to babbling inanity; failing in earnestness, it gives itself over to sentimentality; failing in belief, it is likely to be filled with cynicism and cheap satire under the guise of playfulness. These faults may be found, all too plentiful, even in the best work of Hans Christian Andersen, while they poison practically everything done for children by Kingsley and Hawthorne. The immense advantage of the traditionary tales is that they were not made for children. The Märchen of our day was the novel or romance of the people among whom it had its earlier history. It therefore escapes entirely the "little dears" appeal and method. The obviously amateur heat-fairies, snow-fairies, flower-fairies, and all the others which figure in the merely fanciful and always misleading myth-making of the belated kindergarten and the holiday book of commerce, serve chiefly to bewilder the child's judgment, to confuse his imagination, and to cheapen the supernatural in his art, which should be sparing and serious, as it should be in all art. Besides, the natural phenomena with which these fancies are connected are much more beautiful, more appealing to the imagination, and ultimately more serviceable to art, if they are rightly presented as plain nature.

There are certain modern symbolistic stories containing elements of the fantastic and supernatural kind that are good and beautiful enough to make a genuinely desirable contribution to the child's experience. It is advisable to reserve these, however, until the children are old enough and experienced enough to understand them as symbols. Such stories are Stockton's The Bee-Man of Orn, slightly edited; The Water Babies, always expurgated of Kingsley's ponderous fooling; The Snow Image, The Ugly Duckling.

It is not only that the world of imaginary beings and marvelous forces in the folk-tale enchant the child and further his artistic development in the most natural way; the human world of these tales is a delightful and wholesome one for him to know. It is a naïve and simple world, where he may come close to the actual processes of life and see them as picturesque and interesting. Where else in our modern world can a child encounter the shoemaker, the tailor, the miller, the hen-wife, the weaver, the spinner, in their primitive dignity and importance? There are kings, to be sure, and princes, but except in certain of the stories that took permanent literary shape in the seventeenth century, they are, like the kings and princes in the Odyssey, plain and democratic monarchs, on terms of beautiful equality with the noble swineherd and the charming tailor. King Arthur in the nursery ballad stole a peck of barley meal to make a bag-pudding, in the homeliest and most democratic way, and the picture of the queen frying the cold pudding for breakfast seems only natural to the little democrats of six and seven in our own day. This world of genuine people and honest occupations is charming and educative in itself, and constitutes the most effective and convincing background for the supernatural and the marvelous when that element is present.

When we have said that it is the folk or traditionary tales that we should choose, we do not mean that we should consider the whole realm of folk-lore material, primitive and savage tales—African, Indian, Igorrote; though, as a matter of fact, every teacher of children should be something of a scientific student of folk-stories. It increases his respect and sympathy for the specimens he actually chooses to know where they stand in the large whole—their history and human value. Besides, the experienced teacher will often find in the outlying regions of folk-tales the germ of a story precisely suited to his needs, and he can have the very real pleasure of endowing it with an acceptable form and putting it into educational circulation.

But on the whole, the teacher must be very expert, and must have extraordinary needs, to feel justified in going outside the established canon of fairy-tales for his material. For there is a canon more or less fixed, into which have entered those stories that have from long and perpetual use taken on a more or less acceptable form; stories from those nations whose culture has blended to produce the modern occidental tradition. The canon includes Grimm's tales, Perrault's Mother Goose tales, a few of Madame d'Aulnoy's, a few Danish and Norwegian stories, some from Italian sources and through Italian media, some from the Arabian Nights, some unhesitatingly admitted lately from collections of English folk-tales made in our own day, two or three chapbook stories, a few interlopers like The Three Bears, Goody Two Shoes, and some of Andersen's—not popular tales at all, but having in them some mysterious charm that opened the door to them. One cannot attempt to fix the limits more narrowly, for he has no sooner closed the list than he realizes that every teacher who has used them, every mother who has read them to her little people, every boy or girl who loves them, will have some other tale to insert, some perfect thing not provided for in this tentative catalogue. Besides, from time to time there does appear a new claimant with every title to admission, such as some of the Irish tales told by Seumas McManus or Douglas Hyde, or certain of the Zuñi folk-tales collected by Cushing. But on the whole, may we not agree that the list indicated constitutes the authentic accepted canon of fairy-tales established and approved by the teachers and children of occidental tradition and rearing?

Still, there are choices to be made among these folk-tales of the accepted list. No child should be told all of them. Practically all children do have too many fairy-tales told them, and suffer in this, as in most of the things supplied them, from the discouraging and confusing "too much." For a whole year in which the main stories are taken from the folk-tales, a half-dozen stories will be enough.

It is not among the folk-sagas that one will find the best stories of this kind for his children. These, indeed, are scarcely to be called literature. Most of them are tales explaining by a legend some natural feature, the name of a place or a person, or attaching to some historic person a stock adventure, wonderful or preternatural. Some of them are, as has been said, germs of hero-tales that never obtained popular artistic favor, or they are far-away echoes of hero-tales, or they are stories of the pourquoi kind—semi-mythical in import, and consequently lacking the universal appeal and fitness of literature. Any teacher may find one of the stories of this group adapted to his purpose, but he will not find most of his folk-material here. In the cycles of hero tales, King Arthur and Siegfried for example, we can find many of these minor sagas imbedded in the larger cycle, but still detachable and often easily adaptable for the younger children.

It is among the Märchen that we find our supply of stories. This is not the place to discuss the science of nursery-tales, their origin, genesis, dissemination, or any of the other scholar's aspects, inviting though all these topics be. One is quite aware that even in the most social Märchen there may be found detritus of myth; one should be equally aware that in certain other Märchen he finds the original germ which finally evolved into a myth-story. But let not the teacher and lover of folk-tales as art allow himself to become ensnared in myth interpretations of his tales; that way literary and pedagogic madness lies. Countless generations ago those which perchance had a mythical significance lost it and became art, completely humanized in life and experience.

The drolls, when one chooses well among them, are precisely adapted to add the element of fun that should never be long absent from the children's literature. There are, of course, numberless comic folk-tales too coarse and too brutal to be used in our day, except by the scientific student of culture. The fun of the drolls is, as a matter of fact, not on a high level—practical jokes, perfectly obvious contretemps, the adventures and achievements of noodles, are their typical material. But this is the comic level of the average child for whom we choose them. It is the first step above physical fun, and from this step we can undertake to start him on his delightful journey up the ever-refining path of literary comedy. From tricks and horse-play he may pass rapidly to humor and nonsense. But at six-seven, having had the Little Guinea Pig and Simple Simon as an undergraduate kinder, he is ready for Hans in Luck and Mr. Miacca. Like the Olympians themselves, he will roar at Hephaestus' limp, and with the council of Homeric heroes he will laugh at the physical chastisement of Thersites, and enjoy the none-too-penetrating trick that Odysseus played upon the blundering Polyphemus. There is no danger that the children will not outgrow this stage of comic appreciation—the danger is that they will outgrow it instead of adding to it all the other stages. There is something wrong with the artistic culture of the man who cannot at forty smile at the follies of the Peterkin family, at the same time that he completely savors the comedy of The Egoist.

The accumulative tales have their service to render. Perhaps their characteristic moment comes a little earlier than even the first year of school. Before he is six the little citizen of the world will have been building up his vision of the interdependence and interaction of men and things. To this vision the accumulative tales bring the contribution of art. Many of them, being the simplest adjustment of incident to incident, such as The Old Woman Who Found the Sixpence and The Little Red Hen, are ideal for the nursery and kindergarten child. Others still, built upon the accumulative principle, but more complex or more artistic in form, will charm and instruct the first-year scholars—Henny-Penny, for example, and Hans in Luck, and The Three Billy Goats Gruff. From the point of view of composition, they may well be studied by the older children, because they permit the examination of the separate incidents, and exhibit in most cases the very simplest principles of structure.

But coming still closer to the choosing of the actual specimens for the classes, it would be only fatuous to ignore the fact that when we come to the matter of the final choice, we are upon difficult ground, educationally and critically. But we can save ourselves from presumption and dogmatism by discussing a few practical, but general, grounds of choice, reminding ourselves that in the specific school and with the specific class many modifying minor principles will arise.

The teacher will be much comforted and steadied if he remember that he is teaching literature, and is therefore freed from any obligation to the stories as myth, or as scientific folk-lore, as sociology or as nature-study; let nothing tempt him to the study of the first member of the company of musicians of Bremen, as "a type of the solid-hoofed animals," of Red Riding-Hood as a "dawn-myth," or of The Three Bears as "parenthood in the wild."

The teacher will select those tales that have somewhere in their history acquired an artistic organization, rejecting in favor of them those which remain chaotic and disorganized. Compare, for example, in this matter, the perfect little plot of Madame Villeneuve's Beauty and the Beast with Grimm's The Golden Bird—a string of loosely connected, partly irrelevant incidents. He will prefer those that display economy of incident—in which each incident helps along the action, or contributes something essential to the situation. Of course, it is rather characteristic of the folk-mind, as of the child-mind, to heap up incidents à propos de bottes; but as this is one of the characteristics to be corrected in the child by his training in literature, so it is one of the faults which should exclude a fairy-tale from his curriculum. To make the difference among the stories in this regard quite clear, compare the neat, orderly, and essential flow of incident in The Musicians of Bremen with the baffling multiplicity and confusion displayed by Madame d'Aulnoy's The Wonderful Sheep. Other things being equal, he will prefer for discipline those fairy-stories which use the fairy and other preternatural elements in artistic moderation, to those that fill every incident with marvels and introduce supernatural machinery apparently out of mere exuberance. This element is much more impressive when used in art with reticence and economy. Even a little child grows too familiar with marvels when these crowd one another on every page, and ceases either to shiver or to thrill. In the fairy-tale, as in art for mature people, the supernatural should appear only at the ultimate moment, or for the ultimate purpose, and then in amount and potency only sufficient to accomplish the result. Perrault was very cautious upon this point; in all his tales he seems to have reduced the element of the marvelous to the smallest amount and to have called upon it only at the pivotal points. Compare in his Cinderella the sufficiency of his single proviso, "Now, this godmother was a fairy," with the tedious superfluity of irrelevant marvels in Grimm's version of the same tale. Is this bringing the fascinating abundance of the Teutonic folk fancy to a disadvantageous comparison with the neat and orderly, but more common-place, Gallic mind? By no means. One has many occasions to regret, when he reads Perrault's version of the wonderful tales he found, that he was a precisian in style and a courtier in manners; and we may find in the most apparently artless tales told by Grimm or by Asbjörnsen the most perfect organization and economy; as, for example in Briar-Rose or in The Three Billy Goats Gruff.

Besides, one hastens to add that every child should hear and should later on have a chance to read some of the free, wandering, fantastic things which his teacher cannot feel justified in giving to the class.

One is obliged to take some attitude in mediating the folk-tales to the modern child, toward the fact that we often find them reflecting a moral standard quite different from that which the average well-bred child is brought up by; and this situation is complicated by the fact that the children are too young to understand dramatically another moral standard. This aspect of the stories has been pretty well covered by the general discussion in the previous chapter. But, luckily, it is quite possible to reject all those folk-tales of questionable morals and objectionable taste and still have plenty to choose from. Be slow to reject a folk-tale unless the bit of immorality—a lie, an act of disloyalty, or irreverence—or the bit of coarseness really forms the pivot of the story. Only then is the story unsafe or incurable.

One must take an attitude, not only toward the morals of the folk-tale, but toward its manners as well. There is some violence in many of the most attractive nursery tales; many of them reflect a rather rough-and-tumble state of social communion; many exhibit a superfluity of bloodshed or other grisly physical horrors. We quickly grant that it is not wise to read enough of these, or to linger long enough over the forbidding details, to create a deep or an abiding atmosphere of terror. But it is certainly true that the modern child of six or seven has so little apperception material for physical horrors that they do not take any deep hold upon him. Indeed, the safety of modern life, and the absence of visible violence, have taken the emotional appeal out of many grim lessons of Spenser's and of Dante's. Murder in the Märchen is to the modern child actually a bit of fine art—merely a neat and convincing way of disposing of iniquitous elder brothers and hostile magicians. The fact that the child's experience and information enable him to make no image of the physiological sequelae of the cutting-off of heads, for instance, makes it easy for the teacher to carry him harmless past details that would seem brutal to his nervous and squeamish elders. And these details are never the point of emphasis in any good story. And on the whole, those persons whom the children like and are likely to incorporate into their "pattern," have manners either just or gentle even in the folk-tales.

It might be well to introduce among the folk-tales an occasional short story of contemporary life, recording the activities of persons such as the children actually know. This is not so important in this stage of their experience as it will be later; first because the folk-tales do not seem antiquated nor, if they are wisely selected, unduly fantastic to them, since they find themselves imaginatively so much at home with material and the method; and, in the second place, because in every well-regulated school their fact studies and occupation work are at this time concrete and charming, and keep them rightly and sufficiently in touch with the world of actuality.

Of course we must accompany and supplement the folk-tales by verses, since even at this age we may impress upon the children the music of speech, and some of the minor literary beauties. They will probably be delighted to repeat (in many classes many of the children will be learning them for the first time) the lovely hereditary jingles and ballads from Mother Goose—"The Crooked Man," "I Saw a Ship a-Sailing," "Sing a Song of Sixpence," the rhymes for games and for counting-out. There are a very few of Stevenson's simple enough for this period; and there may be a further choice among things found here and there, simple, objective, and perfectly musical. It is not so much the content and meaning of poetry that we can hope to impress upon little people under eight, as the music and motion of the verse. There will be, however, many members of every class who will be interested in the meaning, the images, and the persons, if there be persons. We will take all pains, therefore, to see that these be not unsuitable.

These—folk-tales and simple singing lyrics—with a fable or two told as anecdotes, and repeated until even the little children begin to see that there is something more than meets the eye—all graded and modified in the light of the personnel and experience of the actual class, may constitute the literature of the first two years of school.

CHAPTER VII MYTH AS LITERATURE

The presupposition that myth is par excellence the literary material for young children doubtless grew out of a misinterpretation of the so-called mythopoeic age in the children, and some fundamental misconception of the nature of myth and its relation to other folk and traditionary material. There is no place in this little book even to suggest the problems that surround the nature and genesis of myth. But it does seem desirable to make in a simple way a few distinctions that may serve to set us on the right road.

First of all, myth is religion, and not art. It is not a thing of mere imagination. It is the explanation or interpretation of some physical fact, some historical occurrence, some social custom, some racial characteristic, some established ritual or worship. It is the religious or emotional response to some influence or activity in the world so impressive or so efficacious as to seem to call for explanation in terms of supernatural agencies.

This explanatory or interpretative stage or aspect of myth may be first historically, or it may not be. It is probably first in most myths in a simple and crude form, which in all developed myths has been enriched and modified by influences from the other stages and aspects. The second stage—or shall we call it merely another aspect—is the assigning of distinct personality and individuality to the agencies assumed to account for events and appearances. Then follows rapidly the interrelations and interactions of these persons, the surrounding of them with friends and subordinates, the building-up of a whole intricate society of divinities after the model of human society—all at first symbolistic and of religious significance. A third stage or aspect is that of the cult, the worship, the establishment of a priesthood delivering authoritative messages, mediating influences to the people, and adding constantly to the body of explanations and interpretations surrounding each divinity. The fourth stage or aspect is that in which it becomes, or becomes identified with, a body of moral doctrines or ethical principles; where the personal divinities, with their qualities, insignia, and associations, are taken as symbols of inner human forces, of moral and social achievement, as expressions of spiritual influences operant in human nature and life.

Let it be understood that in naming these stages or aspects there has been no attempt to place them either in chronological or in logical order, and no intention of saying that they stand apart from one another in an easily recognized distinctness. But, however interlinked and mutually modified they may be, we must in any discussion of myth, be aware of these four sides or steps.

Take, for example, the Greek myth of Apollo. As an explanation of physical phenomena he is light or fire, sometimes specialized as the spirit of the sun. But he is embodied and endowed with a personality; he has social conditions and subsidiary functions assigned to him. As a person he is the son of Zeus and Leto, twin brother of Artemis, leader of the nine Muses, guardian of pastured flocks and herds, as Artemis of the wild creatures who feed or frolic by night. As his worship spread and deepened, there gathered about him many other functions—he was the god of healing, of music, of law, of atonement; and many tributary and subordinate divinities were associated with him in all these activities. There gathered into his myth also an enormous and complex body of stories, romantic and mystical, explanatory and prophetic—stories of adventure, of contact with the other gods, of sojourns with men, of pilgrimages to unknown regions; some of them merely romantic, some of them symbolistic, many of them profoundly significant of his powers and offices.

And the myth of Apollo is remarkable for its ancient and elaborate worship. Already when the Homeric poems were made, the shrine of Apollo at Delphos was the scene of an old and complicated ritual. There was even then a temple rich with the accumulated treasure of the votive offerings of generations of worshipers. Priests and prophets, the mystic offices of the Pythia, poets and musicians, stately processions of kings and warriors seeking oracles, combined to maintain the dignity and sanctity of this most impressive worship.

From the very earliest times of which we have record of this myth, Apollo was known to be a spiritual and ethical force at work in man's soul. He was named when men tried to speak of those experiences which wrought expiation and purification. He stood for milder law, for beneficent and benevolent social order, for art, for the songs of the sacred bard, the dirge of grief, the paean of victory, the games—all the gentler things of social culture and personal experience.

In these and in many other ways did the myth of Apollo express the human soul and act upon it. It was a religion—as every developed myth is—to be handled reverently. We might have chosen other examples quite as elaborate and as full of mystic significance—the myth of Dionysus, or the more widespread and deeply devotional myth of Demeter.

Art, too, concerned as it is with everything that promotes or reflects man's spirit, has uses for the elements of myth, and has its own way of handling them. On two of the four steps of myth art, especially literature, finds acceptable material. On the stage named second—the stage in which the influence or power becomes personified, takes on relations to other personified influences, and calls into being other divine persons, his children, his helpers and subordinates, takes his place in a society of divinities, and exercises his more or less specialized function in this society, and also in human life and activity—have the poets and romancers found many opportunities. Adventures and romantic experiences of all sorts easily attached themselves to the person of some divinity, especially as the character of the personal divinities became more and more humanized by the accretion of such tales. And while we find echoes of myth in Märchen and romance, we quite as constantly find apotheosis of merely human romance and adventure in myth. Among the literary peoples, poets and dramatists found it often desirable to use the foundation of this group of divine personalities as the starting-point for a performance purely artistic; it gave them the immense advantage of starting without explanation and preparation, since their audiences could be counted upon to know the divine personages and circumstances; and the further advantage of adding dignity and size to their inventions by accrediting them to superhuman agents. These literary additions, these variations upon the religious meanings, invented for artistic purposes, often gradually incorporated themselves into the myth, and by modern students are not carefully distinguished from the other, the religious and devotional elements. A comic adventure told of Hermes may not have in it any more of myth than a similar story told of Autolycus.

Literature finds much use for material of the mythical kind on what we have called the fourth step. To express and render concrete, impulses, influences, and powers that sway and dignify human conduct, and that form and ennoble human character, the literary artist gladly employs the persons of the great myths. All human experience has elements and influences coming into it from an apparently mystic sphere, that must either be described in abstract terms or embodied in concrete persons and symbols. The latter is ever the method of art. So we find everywhere in literature the use of the great symbols already constituted in myth, or the invention of new symbols for the purpose. Homer would convey to us the sense of the presence that guided and guarded the wise and resourceful Odysseus; so the stately Athene, ages long the goddess "who giveth skill in fair works, and noble minds," comes and goes through the poem. Hauptmann would convey to us in The Sunken Bell, some impression of the magic and the charm of that beauty which lies in the free soul and wild nature, so he invents Rautendelein. But neither Homer nor Hauptmann is priest or devotee interpreting facts or conserving worship. They are artists picturing human life and introducing, each in its place, the various elements of human experience.

It is in regard to this literary use of myth that there exists much confusion, and that most mistakes are made as to the educational use of myth. Many persons who contend that "myths" can be given to children as literature call the Iliad and the Odyssey "myths;" indeed, they are likely to call all legendary stories in which the supernatural element is large "myths;" and they call all romantic stories that have become attached to any divinity "myths."

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:

A myth in its simplest definition is a story with a meaning attached to it other than it seems to have at first; and the fact that it has such a meaning is generally marked by some of its circumstances being extraordinary, or, in the common use of the word, unnatural. Thus, if I tell you that Hercules killed a water serpent in the lake of Lerna, and if I mean, and you understand, nothing more than that fact, the story, whether true or false, is not a myth. But if, by telling you this, I mean that Hercules purified the stagnation of many streams from deadly miasmata, my story, however simple, is a true myth, only, as, if I left it in that simplicity, you would probably look for nothing beyond, it will be wise in me to surprise your attention by adding some singular circumstance; for instance, that the water-snake had several heads, which revived as fast as they were killed, and which poisoned even the foot that trod upon them as they slept. And in proportion to the fulness of intended meaning I shall probably multiply and refine upon these improbabilities; or, suppose if, instead of desiring only to tell you that Hercules purified a marsh, I wished you to understand [that he contended with envy and evil ambition], I might tell you that this serpent was formed by the goddess whose pride was in the trial of Hercules; that its place of abode was by a palm tree; that for every head of it that was cut off, ten rose up with renewed life; and that the hero found at last he could not kill the creature at all by cutting its heads off or crushing them, but only by burning them down; and that the midmost of them could not be killed even in that way, but had to be buried alive. Only in proportion as I mean more I shall appear more absurd in my statement.

Is it fair to conclude that, if there is any ground for the statement that myth is more imaginative than literature, it is either that it is extremely symbolistic, constantly substituting one thing for another, or that, not being art, it heaps up details profusely, unregulated by the ordering and constructive side of the imagination? In the one case, it would have small disciplinary value for the class; in the other, it would be hopelessly beyond their comprehension; and in either case it would not perform the characteristic service of literature.

There is much more to be said by those who feel that they find in the mythic stories a large and vague atmosphere, a sort of cosmic stage where things bulk large and sound simple, a great resounding room where the children feel unconsciously the movement of large things. But this is a religious mood. It is precisely the response we should like to have when we tell our children the Hebrew myth of the creation—an emotional reaction, vague but deep, to the dim and sublime images of the Days—a response that constitutes itself forevermore a part of his religious experience. If we are willing that he should have a similar reaction upon the story of Zeus and the Titans, if we are willing that he should lay this down, too, among the foundations of his religious life, by all means tell it. But we can not quite fairly tell one to awaken a religious response, and the other an artistic one.

This is all quite consistent with an utter repudiation of a hard and fast "faculty" education. There are, of course, borders where myth and literature inextricably intermingle, as there are certain effects of the teaching of mythical episodes which are not to be distinguished from those of the teaching of purely literary material. But the teacher should clear up his mind upon this point; telling a romantic adventure of a god is not teaching myth; telling a story of a hero in which the gods take a share is not teaching myth, any more than the telling of the story of the Holy Grail is teaching Christianity; symbolistic stories whose setting happens to be Greek or Roman or Scandinavian are not myth. It should not be difficult to handle for the children such stories as contain a large amount of religious element. To have them get out of the Odyssey the characteristic and desirable effect, it is necessary to give only a few words as to the offices of Athene and Poseidon in the action, and then put the emphasis where Homer puts it—upon Odysseus, his character and his experiences. It is no more necessary in reading the Odyssey to go into the myth of the divinities concerned, than it would be in teaching Hamlet to make an exhaustive excursus into the pneumatology of the Ghost.

Now, there are a great many folk-tales that out of convention have taken on as a sort of afterthought, as it were, an explanatory character. This can be noticed in the charming Zuñi folk-tales collected by Cushing. Often the pourquoi idea is appended in the final paragraph, a belated bit of piety not at all inherent in the tale. Then there are, of course, a great many fanciful pourquoi tales, both folk and modern, whose purpose was never more than playful. These cannot be seriously regarded as myth, and must be estimated on their merits as stories.

It is hard to be so tolerant with the modern imitations of mythical tales designed to render palatable and pretty facts in the life of the world about us. One cannot believe much in the dew-fairies and frost-fairies and flower-angels, speaking plants and conversing worms, whose mission in life is really a gentle species of university-extension lectures. Such stories are not literature; neither are they good technical knowledge. Is it not true, as we shall elsewhere have occasion to show, that, with our modern facilities for teaching the facts of nature, we can make them attractive and impressive rather by showing them as they are, than by attributing to them merely fanciful and often petty personalities and genii?

Of course, in very advanced scientific theory we are driven again to myth-making. One cannot speak of radio-activity except in terms of personality, nor of the final processes of biology without using terms implying purpose and choice. So does the wheel come full circle and all our lives we are mythopoeists. But myth is not literature.

As has been intimated previously, it would seem that the time to teach myth as myth is much later—perhaps within the secondary period, when it can be examined as religion, or when the children have gained enough experience, and developed enough dramatic imagination, to take hold of it as a vital element in another culture. The place for the study of the great symbolistic stories, whose background happens to be another people's myth, such as King Midas, or Prometheus, or Apollo with Admetus, should be, in any event, as late as the seventh grade, by which time the children are able to look below the surface and begin to understand the types and symbols of art.

CHAPTER VIII HERO-TALES AND ROMANCES

In the days before books, when a tale was a tale, they knew how to conserve interest and economize material. When a hero had gained some popular favor, had established his character, had drawn about him a circle of friends, and had just proved himself worthy of our love, he was not lightly cast aside for a new and unknown hero. He was given new conquests, new sorrows were heaped upon him, new minstrels arose to sing his fame, until there gathered about him and his group of friends many, many songs and tales. Luckily, in many cases there came a great artist, bard or romancer, who gathered these scattered songs and tales together, gave them a greater or less coherence and something of unity, and so preserved them. Some of these cycles of hero-tales are adapted for the delight and discipline of the elementary children. From the cosy and homely atmosphere of the Märchen—the mother-and nurse-stories—they would pass naturally to the wider and bolder world of the epic tales. The spirit of these tales harmonizes easily with the general tone of their work. They are simple and bold in spirit, full of action, generous and noble in plan and idea; they conserve interest and attention by centering about a single person or a group; they are made up of separable adventures or incidents, which take shape, or with a little editing from the teacher may be made to take shape, as manageable and artistic wholes; it is easy to associate other bits of literature with them, because, in the first place, the tales themselves reflect aspects of life and nature that have appealed to artists in all ages, and because they have themselves inspired many more modern artists. It is therefore easy to constitute one of these cycles the center of the work in literature for some long period—in some cases for a whole year—joining to it such harmonious or contrasted bits of literature as the class may seem to need.

Some consideration of the best known and most available of the hero-tales may help in the matter of choosing.

The Iliad is not available without a great deal of editing and rearranging for such use in class. There are several reasons for this, the first being its want of an easily grasped unity. Doubtless the mature and experienced reader finds the essential unity of the Iliad more satisfying and artistic than that which comes of a more compact and complete plot. But the children cannot easily see that the history of Achilles' wrath and love is a complete thing. To them the action seems to be suspended, the events left without issue, the poem unprovided with a legitimate ending. The organization and the organizing principle are obscure to children, since Achilles' emotional history cannot easily be made clear or interesting to them. Homer's splendid art in glorifying Hector and dignifying the Trojan cause as a means of reinforcing Achilles' triumph, and deepening the sense of the Greek victory, is likely to be lost on the children, while it leaves them with a hopelessly divided sympathy. Helen, to a mature mind so full of interest ethical and artistic, is beyond the comprehension of the children as anything more than a lay figure. The vast enrichment of epic detail that has gathered into the Iliad, constituting it for the grown-up lover of all the arts an inexhaustible mine of archaic, artistic, and psychic wealth, has, except in a few picturesque details, which the teacher must make special effort to bring before them, no charm for the children, seeming to them to cumber and delay the action. So the Iliad as it stands is not serviceable for the grades in literature.

But, as we all know, the poems that form the Iliad were songs out of a much larger cycle. If one desires to use sections of the Iliad, then, it is comparatively easy to collect out of all the material a complete and unified form of the legend of the siege and downfall of Troy—using the Homeric episodes when it is possible. From sources other than the Iliad must be gathered the causes of the war, the education of Achilles, the summons of Odysseus, the sacrifice of Iphegenia, the death of Achilles, the building of the wooden horse, and the fall of Troy. Into this can be inserted in their places the parts selected from the Iliad—perhaps the quarrel in the assembly from the second book; the deeds of Diomedes, from the fifth and sixth; the visit of Hector within the city and his farewell to Andromache, from the sixth; the Trojan triumph, in the seventh; the vengeance upon Dolon, in the tenth; the main incidents of the battle among the ships; the deeds and death of Patroclus; Achilles' arming and his appearance in the fight; the main incidents of the funeral of Patroclus; the visit of Priam to Achilles. These should be arranged in a sort of "say and sing" narrative, the events previous to the action of the Iliad, and those subsequent to it, to be told in prose narrative; those taken from the Iliad itself to be read or recited in some poetical form, linked together, of course, by a running and rapid narrative. Only a verse translation—or, if a prose translation, one much more picturesque and eloquent than any we have yet had—will at all represent the nobility of the Iliad. Bryant's translation is the best we now have, and it is too formal and difficult to be understood by the children to whom one desires to give the hero-tales.

One can easily see that an arrangement of the Iliad made under all these conditions would not finally convey to the children many of the best things we want to give them in their literature.

The case is quite different with the Odyssey. It is the child's own cycle, full of the interests and elements that delight him while they cultivate him. The adventures are linked together by the central hero, and by the design of getting him home; the cycle, therefore, presents a clear unity, and a unity of the kind that takes hold upon the children. The adventures themselves organize easily into smaller separable wholes. They are always interesting, offering us the varieties of the grotesque, the humorous, the sensational, the horrible, the beautiful, the sublime; and they are practically all on the imaginative level of the children in the classes to which they are otherwise adapted. The details are charming and adapted to interest the children, with very little effort on the part of the teacher. It is quite unnecessary to point out how the occupations and employments, the beautiful buildings and objects—plates, cups, clasps—the raft, the palace and garden of Alcinoous, the loom of Penelope, the lustrous woven robes, the cottage of the good Eumaeus, the noble swineherd, build up a world full of charm, not only for the grown-up reader, but for children if they are being properly taught. There is throughout the poem what Pater called the atmosphere of refined craftsmanship, and all the occupations and tasks of men here appear surrounded by the entrancing halo of art. Odysseus combines in himself all those characteristics that endear a hero to the child and the childlike mind. He is active and ever-ready; strong, too, beyond the measure of any ordinary man; quick in the battle; good at a game, resourceful and handy in any emergency; subtle and quickwitted; full of tricks and riddles; equipped at every point for the effective undoing of his foes. Inevitably in any class of modern children as old as the nine-ten-year grade the delicate problem of Odysseus' moral character will come up for discussion. It is not likely that children younger than this will open the matter themselves, or take any vital interest in the discussion. For, as I have said elsewhere, subtlety is a child's virtue, and any device by which their hero, who is in the main just, outwits or removes hostile forces, is acceptable. For the older children, who are somewhat "instructed," and who on the average will have acquired sufficient dramatic sympathy to apprehend an alien standard, a few words as to the Greek notions of truthfulness, together with a few explanations as to the privileges allowed to an adventurer hard beset by trickery and stupidity, will generally clear the ground; these explanations should take the emphasis from this aspect of Odysseus' character and leave the children free to place it where it belongs. If the Odyssey were used with children older than ten, their questions as to Odysseus' truthfulness might afford a good occasion for warning them to expect some human imperfections in a hero with whom in most respects they are in complete sympathy. This point of view, acquired somewhat early, saves one many shocks and misconceptions in later reading. It should not be necessary to say that the discussion of Odysseus should not amount to "character-study," and should not drift anywhere near hair-splitting moral discriminations.

All teachers will agree that it is better to start the Odyssey with the fifth book—the experience of Odysseus himself—leaving the Telemachiad unread, or to be read later. Into his few introductory stories the teacher should fit some account of the iniquities of the suitors and the fact of the journey of Telemachus—this to pave the way for the delightful story of his return. For our generation—and, one is tempted to believe, for several generations to come—Professor Palmer's prose translation of the Odyssey is the ideal reading version. For the sake of the slight heightening of style, the class might occasionally hear recited a passage in Bryant's verse translation. But the poetical, musical, faintly archaic prose of Professor Palmer has caught perfectly the gentle spiritual tone of the Odyssey.

I have known a class of nine-ten-year children conducted through the Odyssey making a side interest of the Realien, the pottery and weaving, and metal working. Such hand-work was a part of their school tasks, and there were collections of pottery and fabrics which they could be taken to see. The experience seemed to co-operate with their own hand-work to develop in them some of that artistic love of beautiful things—things costly, but not expensive—that pervades the Iliad and the Odyssey; and they were distinctly helped on toward that attitude we desire for every child, that of "reverence for the life of man upon the earth." The Odyssey will be used, however, in schools where there is no handwork and no chance of seeing collections of suitable objects. Pictures are of some service in getting the image of objects—colored prints of Greek pottery and costume. Engelmann and Anderson's Atlas of the Homeric Poems seems to help and interest the children, though there is constant danger that the archaic forms will seem merely ludicrous to many of them. The teacher may correct this by explaining them as decoration and as traditional figures. But we should not depend much upon black-and-white print to help young children to visualize objects and scenes in which color and motion are all-important.

Now, what follows must be taken as suggestive, and not as a pat formula: You can enrich your central bit of literature by other literature in one of two ways—by reinforcing the impression derived from the main story, or counteracting it And every long story or cycle of stories, particularly the heroic cycles, has its characteristic atmosphere that needs both to be reinforced and to be counteracted. It is true, too, that practically all the stories we use for the elementary children are translations or derived versions of some sort, and do not therefore exhibit the smaller beauties of literary form. It is therefore well to join with them poems or other bits of literature which emphasize the matter of inevitableness of form.

By way of enlarging and varying the atmosphere of the Odyssey, we should not add other Greek things, because we are not trying to teach our class about Greek civilization, nor to initiate them into the Greek spirit, still less to give them instruction in Greek legend and mythology. We should rather read them ballads and lyrics which harmonize with the human spirit of the Odyssey, or which supply something which the Odyssey fails to give. For example, since there is so much of the sea in the story, it would be a good moment to teach the children some of the fine things in English verse about the water. They will certainly notice the characteristic Greek dread and terror of the sea—"the unvintaged, unpastured, homeless brine." It would be well to balance this in their minds by some of those verses which reflect the English mastery of the sea and the romance of modern sea-going—some of Kipling's sea-ballads, for example, or such simple things as Barry Cornwall's "The sea, the sea, the open sea."

We should not fail to build upon another dominant note in the Odyssey much that we should like the children to have—the note of home and home-coming, the hearth-stone, and the sheltering roof. Of the exciting adventure and the joy of physical contest they will get enough from the stories themselves. It is not necessary to say again that the judgments given here as to the actual practical choice, are always to be taken as suggestions, not as hard and fast directions. Every teacher may have, and should have, his own idea, both as to how his central bit of literature should be supplemented, and as to whether or not it needs supplementing. Later I shall give the titles of certain of these minor things—still by way of suggestion; ballads and lyrics that have been found to harmonize with the Odyssey either as enforcement or addition.

Most elementary schools have found now the value of the Robin Hood legend. The bluff, open qualities, the effective activities, the wholesome objectivity of these activities, the breezy atmosphere with which the stories surround themselves, make them acceptable in many aspects. Teachers are saved most of the labor of making their own digest of the Robin Hood material by Howard Pyle's Robin Hood. In this he has drawn together the whole legend, using not only the English ballads, but Scott and Peacock, and whatever scattered hints and details he could gather from what must have been a pretty exhaustive reading of English romantic literature. Everywhere there are charming reminiscences of Chaucer, of Spenser, of Shakespeare; echoes of ballad and song and romance; making, on the whole, a notable introduction to literature and the literary method. One quickly finds that it is much too literary in places for younger children and has to be simplified; here and there are long idyllic descriptions that the fifth grade, eager for the story, will not brook; occasionally a page of false sentimentality that the teacher with a true ear will infallibly detect and skip. But these minor things can be forgiven in view of the sheer energy, the marvelous objectivity, the epic colorlessness, of the book as a whole. Readings from the ballads themselves should be interspersed, read by the teacher to the class. These readings should again be arranged in the cont-fable fashion, turning into suitable form the less interesting passages, and then reading in their original verse form the dramatic and picturesque parts. It need not be said that much better poems may be found than those which Pyle has composed for his Robin Hood.

Timid parents and teachers who have never used these stories have some misgivings as to the effect of the strenuous, not to say lawless, atmosphere. They say that the burden of approval is placed upon an outlaw, who constantly and successfully flouts the officers and processes of the law; that the merry-men are, after all, the gang; that the multiplicity of quarrels and cracked crowns accustoms the children to blood and violence; in short, that the legitimate outcome of a genuine dramatic sympathy with the story is general Hooliganism. The good teachers who have used the stories never say these things because they never see these results. It needs but a word to transfer the emphasis from Robin Hood's outlawry to the cruel and unjust laws against which he stood; to keep to the front his generosity to his men, his tenderness toward those in trouble, his sense of personal honor, his readiness to accept and acknowledge a fair defeat, the loyalty of his men. It is the transfiguration of the gang; and as a social matter it is the transfiguration rather than the destruction of the gang which we desire to accomplish. One hastens to acknowledge, however, that the rough-and-tumble atmosphere of the stories calls for some antidote, which we may find partly in the literature we choose to accompany this cycle. Very naturally one thinks of the greenwood, and at once finds many bits that fit into the scenic background of the story and introduce the gentler aspects of the woods and woodland things.

With the Odyssey we should choose some things to reinforce the love of home and the longing for the hearth-fire, and we must use some of the same things to provide an element otherwise lacking in the Robin Hood, and to modify the fascination of the wildwood life and the unattached condition. Some of the ideas on the surface of the stories may be enlarged and enriched—as loyalty and devotion to a leader. There is a fine opportunity to launch into the children's experience upon the wave of their enthusiasm for Robin Hood, other and nobler ideals of the leader and the hero; though we must never expect the child, glowing with the satisfaction of deeds done, to give any appreciation worth considering to the suffering hero or to the heroism of peace. This properly belongs to a much later period—to what it is not mere jargon to call the lyric age, when some more effective appeal can be made to those powers that come of introspection.

The cycles of stories of King Arthur unquestionably contain much that should contribute to the pleasure and wholesome culture of the elementary child. Epic activity, bold and generous deeds tempered by gentleness and reverence—this is the atmosphere of the best of the Arthur stories, and it is precisely the atmosphere into which one longs to lead the older children of the elementary school. But these good and suitable Arthur stories are so tied up with others entirely unsuitable that the choosing and arranging of them becomes the task of the expert psychologist and critic. When one chooses stories out of this legend, he must do with his material—his Malory, his Chrétien, his Mabinogion, his Tennyson—as these collectors and artists did with theirs: regard it as the stuff of human nature and life, a storehouse of treasures out of which he may draw according to his pleasure or his need. In this case it is the safe pleasure and the artistic needs of his children that will dictate his choice. And he must know thoroughly well his stories and his children; for the pitfalls are many—quite as many in Chrétien de Troyes and Malory as in Tennyson.

The first of the pitfalls to be avoided is that fantastic feudal gallantry which Chrétien and Malory substituted for the forthright chivalric business and earnestness of the older legendary stories. In the Song of Roland one fights for reasons of patriotism or religion; in the Arthur romances, and others of their type, one fights for his lady's sake. In the elementary grades the children are still undifferentiated human beings, and should be kept so. To thrust upon them suggestions of "ladies" to be "won" and to be "served" is to usher them into an unknown world, an undemocratic and unbrotherly world from which we should like to keep them, especially the girls, as long as possible. While it is not easy to leave out this element in choosing material from these cycles, it is possible to treat it lightly, since there is in the same material a sufficiency of lions to be hunted, giants to be overcome, and hostile Paynims to be exterminated.

Everyone who has ever read much with children knows that to normal children before their thirteenth year the psychology and modus operandi of love and love-making, innocent or guilty, are so alien as to pass harmlessly by them as a mere bit of the machinery of a story, when these notions do constitute such a bit of machinery in a story otherwise suitable. But it is a mistake to choose matter which obliges us to linger with the little people over these experiences or to emphasize them. He who would retell the Arthur stories must be wary here, so difficult is it to put together any series of the adventures that will at all represent the material, and constitute a whole, without using the scarlet thread of guilty passion, or substituting for it something "nice" but wishy-washy. We have only to compare the grim justice of Malory's Modred with Tennyson's sentimental and unconvincing handling of his character and function.

When Malory wove into the Arthur cycle the legend of the Holy Grail, he introduced an element very hard to handle for children—that religious mysticism, not to say fanaticism, which Tennyson chose to set as the pivotal motive of the downfall of the Table Round. Tennyson, writing for mature modern readers a deeply symbolistic poem, and presenting a whole cycle, could, stroke by stroke, build up the impression of this burning zeal, this hypnotic trance of enthusiasm, that led men away after wandering fires, forgetting labor and duty. But simplified to fit the comprehension of the wholesome twelve-year-old it is likely to appear a vague and mistaken piety, producing a practical effect quite out of proportion to its importance.

To the modern teacher, with the witchery of the Tennysonian music in his blood, it is all but impossible to keep out of prominence that symbolism which lay obvious upon the surface, even in the Morte d'Arthur, but which Tennyson heightened into an almost oppressive system of sophisticated and parochial doctrine. An occasional symbolistic nut to crack is not a bad thing for the older children of the grades. But would it not be a mistake to immerse them in a great system of symbolism? To the younger children the sacred outside appearance, the entrancing Schein, of things is best, and symbolistic art only baffles them or unduly forces their powers.

The spirit of dilettante adventure which pervades the mediaeval romances gives them a tone entirely different from that of the epics. In these latter the activities attach themselves to deeds that have to be done, to misfortunes that the hero would willingly have avoided. Some of these sought-out adventures have crept insidiously into Howard Pyle's Robin Hood; but they are entirely foreign to the spirit of the original epos. The idea of "worshipfully winning worship," of seeking adventure for mere adventure's sake, or for the mere display of one's own powers, or for the sake of getting trained, is a corrupting one in our society, and should not be implanted in our children's consciousness. Like the old epic heroes, what we have to do we will do—often boldly; but, like the old epic heroes, we will do it because it needs to be done.

We can get together a series of stories from the Arthur romance that will touch but lightly the exaggerated, false devotion to ladies; that will leave out of sight the guilty passion which lies at the center of Malory's poem and of most of the other literary versions; that will put into a minor place the mystical religious element that lingers about the Holy Grail side of the romance; that will make little of the symbolism, ignore the dilettante and merely amateur adventure, handling the heroic rather than the romantic deeds—that will do all these things and still be a romance of King Arthur. He who would make such a version must choose out from Malory or The Mabinogion, material that belongs in such a series. Or he may find his material more sifted for him in Lanier's The Boy's King Arthur, and Knightly Legends of Wales. Let him make much of Arthur, simple of nature, guileless and strong, looking to conquest and the good of his people rather than to his own "worship" or to his own love-affairs; let him by no means neglect Merlin, the most permanently interesting figure; he is Odysseus among the Greeks, the sacred bard among the warriors, Tusitala in Samoa, the subtle one, always so appealing and so satisfying to a child's imagination—the embodiment of that intellectual dominance which, be it wisdom or magic, always stands beside epic achievement in the child's estimation. And having got it together, he may reassure himself, as regards his epos of King Arthur, that there is no one Arthur; that the whole legend is a mine out of which every student may draw a treasure; or, to change the figure, a great, beautiful field in which many people may gather grain according to their need and their taste.

Much later when, as growing youth, they are waking up to certain mature social problems, the children will be ready for the style and matter of Tennyson's Idylls. But they will not get the characteristic value of the legend till, as mature and experienced readers of books and livers of life, they come back to Malory and Chrétien de Troyes.

Many wise teachers will dissent wholly from this view of the Arthur stories, and in many schools they are presented in some form in the fourth or fifth grade, and read in the Idylls of the King in the seventh and eighth. Suggestions for literature to accompany them will be found in a later chapter.

Anybody who has read thus far can easily foretell what will be said about the Siegfried legend. In the huge accumulation of sagas, romances, and operas that now go to make up the legend, there are all sorts of material—much of it totally unsuited for children. So far as I have been able to find, there has not yet been made—certainly not in English—a collection of the stories good in itself and good for children. The teacher must do his own sifting and arranging, if it seems well to study the Siegfried stories within the grades. The collection of the stories that makes up the Niebelungen Lied is particularly poor in fitting material, being sordid and coarse in the domestic parts, and tediously bloody in the heroic parts. Among the mass of stories given by Morris and Magnussen in the Völsunga Saga, and in Morris' Sigurd the Volsung, one may find material for making his own epos of Siegfried, simple, heroic, triumphant—the Siegfried who killed Fafnir, escaped the snares of Regin, got the Nibelung treasure, rode through the magic fire and freed Brunhild. You may be sure some old saga-singer closed the story here and so may we. This leaves for a much later day in the child's life the tragic Siegfried, whose domestic experience, with its sordid motives, its bitter quarrels and ugly subterfuges, is surely not beautiful or fitting for the children; and whose treacherous taking-off is followed by a vengeance too grim and too merely fatalistic to be planted in a child's consciousness.

As we find a sort of canon of fairy-tales, so we find a somewhat accredited list of hero-tales, and the five we have discussed comprise it. Occasionally a teacher may enrich his material by an episode from The Cid, from the Song of Roland, from the heroic sagas of Iceland, from some other mediaeval romance; but they will not detain him long, nor will any one of them constitute a really good center for a prolonged study.

In the later years of this period certain classes and certain schools may find it well to read some of the literary stories of adventure, such as Ivanhoe, or Treasure Island, or The Last of the Mohicans. In the really great stories of adventure we find many of the things we know to be good for the children—the "large room," the open atmosphere, forest, sea, prairie, all the most disastrous chances of war and of travel, noble deeds and generous character. Every parent and teacher recognizes the danger which lies in the child's having too much even of good story of adventure. And this sort of story is the peculiar field of the cheap story-teller, in whose work the weaknesses and dangers of the species especially abound. Since the "out-put" of such stories is enormous, and since the children's access to them, in communities where they can buy books, or have the use of a public library, is practically unlimited, all teachers and parents should know the marks of the undesirable story of adventure, and be able to guard against it. The weakness and dangers of such a story are these:

1. The details are exaggerated until the event is too striking and too highly flavored, so as to corrupt the taste and create an appetite that continues to demand gross satisfaction.

2. There are likely to be too many sensations. The inartistic story of adventure does not work up its incidents with an accumulation of details and an effect of the passage of time that gives it verisimilitude, but rushes forward with a crude and ill-digested happening on every five pages. It is hard to believe that any artistic impression is made upon children whose minds are excited and jaded by such books. They are a mere indulgence.