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 cla.s.s 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 t.i.tle 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 c.u.mbering 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 cla.s.s; 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 un.o.btrusively present in practically everything the cla.s.s 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 n.o.ble 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 cla.s.s 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_. Ant.i.thesis 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, pa.s.sages 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 pa.s.sages 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 cla.s.ses, 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 un.o.btrusively, 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 const.i.tute 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 const.i.tutes 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 ent.i.ty 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 a.n.a.lytical 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 un.o.btrusive 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 cla.s.s, 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 circ.u.mstances which call for or dictate the action; (2) the central event, the essential adventure; (3) the denouement, 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 un.o.btrusively, 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 const.i.tute 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 ill.u.s.trate the point. Take the story adumbrated in _The House That Jack Built_. This is a series of incidents linked together in the acc.u.mulative fashion, but proceeding in a straight line and stopping short off without issue or event. Compare it with the equally primitive acc.u.mulative 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 amus.e.m.e.nt that additional charm of artistic structure which distinguishes literature from mere writing.
Now, while it is true that a symmetrical plot const.i.tutes 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 cla.s.ses. 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 cla.s.s. 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 const.i.tuted--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 cla.s.s.
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 inst.i.tutions or ideas--like the father of Cinderella, who is merely an inst.i.tutional father; or they are devices for getting on with the plot, like the fairy G.o.dmother; 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 c.u.mulative 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 cla.s.ses as _character-study_--which so easily in these same older cla.s.ses, 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 pa.s.sions, 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 circ.u.mstances other than those of these two heroes. To these simple deed-inspiring motives and pa.s.sions, 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 pa.s.sed 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 pa.s.sions--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 pa.s.sions--patriotism and love of friend; his immediate motives to save his country; the effect of his deed; the telling contrasts between him and Ca.s.sius, him and Mark Antony.
The study of character in these broader lines--the fundamental qualities or pa.s.sions, the motives that bring about the action, the obvious results in personal and social ways of these actions--const.i.tutes 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 pa.s.sing 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 denouement or round-up of the particular story in hand; or as a solution of a human problem, a universal situation. The entirely satisfying denouement 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 subst.i.tute 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 cla.s.s 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 cla.s.s 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 denouement, 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 cla.s.s, 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 cla.s.s 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.