But we are more interested, naturally, in the positive services performed by the stories of real life; or to be more explicit, those stories told with the effect of actuality, and with the atmosphere of verisimilitude. Of course, we should require of these stories good form and good writing, so that we may expect from them on that side what we expect from any good literature. In addition, we may expect them to perform for the children and for all of us certain distinctive artistic services. First, they operate to throw back upon actual life the glow of art. Those stories which use people and circ.u.mstances that we can match in our own actual surroundings and experiences impress upon us most vividly the fact, so important for our real culture both in art and in life, that literature is in a very real sense a presentation of life; that these charming people and things are but images taken up from the real world, chosen and raised to this level, by which very process they are invested with a halo of beauty and distinction. This nimbus of art casts back upon life some of its own radiance, dignifying and enriching it, and to many minds revealing for the first time beauty and meaning which they would otherwise never have seen; so that we truly see and rightly interpret many of the people and things in our own lives only after we have seen the mates of them in a story or a poem. A group of children who had been helped to make a verse about rosy radishes, and had then done a water-color picture of a plate of the same vegetable, found for many days new and artistic joy in a grocer"s window. The same children, having learned Lowell"s phrase of the dandelion"s "dusty gold," were not satisfied till they had made a beautiful phrase to render the burnished gold of the b.u.t.ter-cups. The same cla.s.s on a picnic labored with ardor to make a beautiful verse about Uneeda biscuits and ginger-ale, to match the Persian"s "A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread."
They were much baffled when they finally concluded that it would not go--that these modern and specific articles refused to wear a halo.
The obverse and counterpart of this glow caught by the actual world from art is the vital interest that surrounds a person, or an object, or a sentiment which we come upon in a poem or a story, and which we recognize as corresponding to something in our own experience--a recognition all the more satisfying if the correspondence be that of actual ident.i.ty. Every teacher of younger children recalls at once the tingling interest they feel in practically every story they are told, as some incident or detail parallels or suggests something they have known--"My father has seen a bear;" "Once I found an eagle"s feather;"
"There are daffodils in my grandmother"s garden." A little girl of ten had been given a very simple arrangement of a melody from Beethoven"s _Fifth Symphony_ to play on the piano. Soon after she had learned it, she was taken to hear the symphony. When her melody came dropping in from the flutes and violins--birds and brooks and whispering leaves--she threw up at her friend a flash of radiant surprise and delight. Her whole soul stirred to see here--in this stately place, with the great orchestra, in the n.o.ble a.s.semblage of glorious concords--her friend, her little song. For days she played it over many times every day, with the greatest tenderness of expression.
The wise teacher sees in this eager recognition and identification one of the most desirable results of literary experience, and utilizes it as the most precious of educational opportunities, since this mood of delighted recognition is with the younger children also the mood of creation, and with the older children the most useful and practical clue to the finding of their own literary material.
It is in this kind of story--those that reflect the events of actual life and are concerned with ordinary people--that we are able to introduce our children in art to their contemporaries and coevals. It means much for a child"s consciousness that he should develop a quick and dramatic sympathy with lives other than his own, and yet like his own--with the experiences and characters of other children, other folks"
ways of living. This sympathy is among the literary products, since it is best developed and fostered by literature; this because it is literature only, that handles its material in that concrete and emotional way which produces the impression of actual reality and serves as a subst.i.tute for it. Teach the little children Stevenson"s
Little Indian, Sioux or Crow, Little frosty Eskimo, Little Turk or j.a.panese,
and teach it with the natural implications that will occur to any teacher of expedients, and you will have taught them a certain att.i.tude of confidential understanding toward their brown brothers (in spite of the decidedly chauvinistic character of this masterpiece) that they would not have got out of a year of social history.
The difficulties of choosing stories of modern child-life for teaching in school are serious. They are most likely to be thin in material, flimsy in structure, trivial in style, sentimental in atmosphere, so that they fall to pieces under the test of study in a cla.s.s of acute and questioning children. It is best not to choose any long book of this sort. For the younger children use the shorter bits of story, such as may be found in Laura Richards" _Five Minute Stories_, or such as any teacher may collect for herself from many sources; occasionally one may find a perfect specimen in one of the children"s periodicals, and there is now a wealth of such things in verse. We must be wary of those books about children, interpretative of children, of which our own day has produced so many charming specimens, whose appeal is entirely to adults. Such are Pater"s _The Child in the House_, and Kenneth Graham"s _The Golden Age_. Part of _A Child"s Garden of Verses_ is of this kind.
Of this sort, too, is the pretty little _Emmy Lou_, an interpretation of a child"s consciousness, not a children"s story.
The general question of the reading of juveniles will be left for a chapter of miscellanies farther on. It is not possible to make any long book about children the center of a cla.s.s"s work. Such material is best used as a sort of reserve, a recreation from time to time, and is best given in short stories that can be read at intervals; or if it be a long story, one that can be distributed among the other reading. It is true of this kind of story too, that the best results come of using material not made especially for children, but which appeals to children, however, because it appeals to universal and elemental human nature.
Among the folk-tales are many of the realistic type that are most serviceable. Like the folk fairy-tales they have that mysteriously but truly universal appeal, which makes them childlike, though originally they were not made for children. They are those comic and realistic tales which may originally have been coa.r.s.e, but which have been refined by years and winnowed by use until they have taken on a form and value like those of some piece of ancient peasant hand-work--they are simple, genuine, homely art. Such are _Kluge Else_, _Hans in Luck_, _Great Claus and Little Claus_, _The Three Sillies_ and all the delightful company of noodles, and the great family of plain folks with their homely affairs.
Of course, the great cla.s.sic of the realistic method suited for children is _Robinson Crusoe_. From the days of Rousseau who designated it as the one book to be given to his ideally educated child, teachers have appreciated its value. Indeed, a very curious, but not unnatural, thing has happened, in the fact that this book has been so long and closely a.s.sociated with children that it has come to be considered a sort of nursery cla.s.sic, a wonder-tale composed for infants, by hosts of people who have no idea that it is in reality a masterly realistic novel and a profoundly philosophical culture-doc.u.ment--an epoch-making piece of art.
Fortunately, it is easy to prepare it for the children; it is largely a matter of leaving out the reflective pa.s.sages, and of translating into modern English the very few phrases and turns of expression now obsolete. One would deplore the reduction of the story for any purpose to mere babble--to words of one syllable, or any other form that destroys the flavor of Defoe"s convincing style. It is easy to arrange the experiences so that the story serves the purposes of a cycle--a single experience const.i.tuting a portion which may be treated as a complete thing; for example, the making of the baskets, the construction of the pots, the saving of the seed.
_Robinson Crusoe_ is a treasure to many a grade teacher, because it really "correlates" beautifully with work that the children are doing, or might well be doing, in the third and fourth grades; whether in their history study, where they are devising food and shelter, or have advanced to the study of trades and crafts; or, under an entirely different scheme, have started on the study of voyagers and colonists.
The art and the charm of _Robinson Crusoe_, and the secret of its literary value for the child, lie in the power of the sheer realism--a realism not so much of material as of method--to hold and convince us. A part of this realism is the richness and homeliness of detail; the painstaking record of failures and tentative achievements; the calm, judicial view of experiments; the colorless flow of long periods of time; the homely, and as it were domestic, worth of Crusoe"s successes.
Oh, it is a great and convincing book! How great and how convincing one may realize when he reads the only one of the innumerable "Robinsons,"
taking their inspiration from Defoe"s book, that really survives--the _Swiss Family Robinson_, with its facile and too often fatuous ease of accomplishment, its total lack of reality, its stupid and blundering didacticism, its impossible jumble of detail, its commonplace romance; yet, we must reluctantly add, its unfailing charm for the children. That a book with all these faults keeps its hold upon the successive generations of children is testimony to the fact that its basis of interest, which is also for children the essential interest of _Robinson Crusoe_--the old foundation process of getting fire and roof and coat and bread--is the romance that is forever fresh and thrilling.
The exceedingly thoroughgoing realism of the method (notice, not the large frame-work, which is sufficiently romantic) of _Robinson Crusoe_ would suggest at once that it might profitably be accompanied by some bits of literature that would throw a more romantic and idealistic coloring upon the primitive craftsman and his craft, and upon the experiences of voyager and colonist. Such would be Bret Harte"s _Columbus_, Mrs. Hemans" _The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers_, Marvell"s _Bermudas_ (with a few difficult lines omitted). Longfellow"s _Jasper Becerra_, the twenty-third Psalm, and several chapters from _Treasure Island_. Every teacher could add other t.i.tles.
The older children--those of the seventh and eighth grades--may profitably read in school, for the sake of the intellectual experience, a cla.s.sic detective story or a story whose plot and evolution present an almost purely intellectual problem. It is true that the air of intellectual ac.u.men that pervades most of these stories is specious, and that they are in reality, and as a rule, shallow and unlogical pieces of reasoning. But it takes an older and more expert person to see this for himself. The teacher should try to qualify his children for judging a good story of this kind, and save them, if possible, from the detective-story habit, which wastes much good time and fills a child"s mind with very cheap problems. But if he choose a good story of this kind for reading with his cla.s.s, he may help to set their minds going in that region where the imagination must ally itself with logic and with a reasoned and inevitable progress of events. Properly channeled, this is a most valuable experience, both from the purely mental and from the literary points of view. After all, the best detective story in English is Poe"s _The Gold Bug_. There is, of course, that element in _Treasure Island_, but, being there so interwoven with the romantic and adventurous details of that delectable tale, it is not likely to yield for the children that peculiar bit of training which they might get from the more unmixed intellectuality and more obvious realism of _The Gold Bug_.
It is difficult to know what to say, and where to say it, concerning _Don Quixote_. That triumphant book is a.s.suredly a masterpiece of the realistic method. It came as an antidote and tonic, helping to restore health and sanity to a romance-sick world, and it ought to have a place in the discipline of certain kinds of young people. But it cannot be said that this place is always within the elementary period, unless a certain grade or certain children have had a peculiar experience and can be said to need it. If the grade has had the King Arthur stories of Malory or Tennyson in large amounts with a very earnest teacher, they can very certainly be said to need _Don Quixote_--always, of course, shortened and expurgated, and in carefully chosen episodes; from which process--such is its essential greatness, and such the character of its unity--it suffers less than any other story in the world. We should be quite aware of the danger of giving the children any large amount of this peculiar kind of realism--that which const.i.tutes itself a satire and a sort of parody on some over-serious bit of romance. Nothing is more deadening and more commonplace than this peculiar form of wit, when it becomes a habit or offers itself in a ma.s.s. But the peculiar vitality and richness of _Don Quixote_ lifts it far above the level of parody, const.i.tuting it a magnificent original piece of art in itself.
However, the whole question must be left open. It may be that not until he is far along in the secondary school or in college is the scholar suffering for _Don Quixote_, or capable of appreciating it.
Among the older children the note of realism and wit may be sounded in a wisely chosen essay. Of course, they are not ready for the indirect and allusive manner, nor for the lyric egoism, of the pure literary essay.
But there are essays of Lamb"s, a very few of Steele"s, some of Sidney Smith"s, some of the more literary of Burroughs" nature-studies, bits of Oliver Wendell Holmes and Charles Dudley Warner, that are ideal for them.
Shall we sum up by saying that, on the whole, we find the romantic and fanciful stories best suited in form and spirit to the elementary children; since realistic stories that are really good art, are, as a rule, too mature and too difficult for the children, and realistic stories of the juvenile type are not good enough either in form or in content to justify long cla.s.s study? However, certain distinctive and desirable results may be expected from specimens interwoven here and there of that kind of story which represents real life, which uses events both possible and probable, and which handles its material by the method of realistic detail. In the earliest years these may be secured by the reading of well-chosen little stories of modern children--indeed, of any modern material, provided it be simple enough--and by the teaching of verses which reflect aspects of actual life--human life or nature. In the third or fourth grade _Robinson Crusoe_ forms a desirable basis for the year"s work. It should always be accompanied by shorter bits of a more romantic and heroic type. Later in the elementary period--say in the sixth or seventh grade--the reasonable and practical element may be introduced in the form of a story of the detective kind--a story whose plot presents an intellectual problem, whose atmosphere and method make the impression of actual fact. And in the seventh and eighth grade these same purposes--that of exhibiting to the children actual human life as art sees it, that of bringing them into educational contact with the realistic method, that of counteracting any possible mental danger from too much romance and adventure--may be served by essays chosen on principles already many times suggested.
CHAPTER X
NATURE AND ANIMAL STORIES
In a discussion of these stories we should again take to ourselves the warning that we must guard constantly and carefully against too narrow a view of literature. The reckless lack of knowledge and experience that sweeps into the category of literature everything expressed in words is so irritating to a careful student that he is always in danger of allowing his irritation to help carry him to the other extreme--that of an uncatholic exclusiveness. We must, however, be aware of the fact that other kinds of writing, entirely technical and special in their simpler varieties, are constantly approaching the borders of literature, as they become more and more humanized, draw about them more and more of emotional a.s.sociation, and take on more of the graces of the arts of writing. We must be aware of this, and we must be, as it were, constantly on the lookout for a possible new arrival among the kinds of literature, and be prepared to give it hospitality; and we must acknowledge that some of the results which we desire to accomplish through genuine literature are accomplished through those things that have only some of the characteristics of literature. But still, for the sake of the good pedagogical and critical conscience, and for the sake of keeping the fundamental distinctions as clear as possible, the teacher needs to know precisely what he is doing when he is using this material. He must decide, in the very earliest years of a child"s education, whether he is teaching facts and theories, or presenting art, in his story.
The custom of using animals and plants to represent human beings and to express human meanings is as old as folk-art itself. Quite as old, too, is the revelation that the creatures have individualities and personalities of their own to be dramatically and sympathetically set forth in terms of human psychology, in default of a truer one. The mind of man goeth not back to the time when the fox, the c.o.c.k, and the a.s.s--Reynard, Chanticleer, and Brunel--the rabbit, the eagle, the oak, and the vine, were not well-defined characters, well provided with affairs. But this early folk treatment of the creatures was distinctly art, occasionally morals, but not science. It did not aim to teach the facts as to the structure and habits of the creatures as life-forms. It interpreted human life through them or them by means of human terms.
Precisely here we must begin our discrimination between real literature and "nature-stories." The longing to pa.s.s down to the infant mind the results of scientific discovery has produced in our generation (perhaps it was really produced in the generation preceding ours) an enormous crop of most anomalous growths in this field of nature-stories. A favorite method of teaching a child the facts about any object or process in nature has been to translate it into a story of human affairs, or draw it up as a picture of a human situation, involving naturally and inevitably, a mult.i.tude of extraneous or misleading details. For example, we would teach a child about the distribution of the dandelion plant. So we construct the "Story of the Dandelion Seed."
Now, there undoubtedly is a _story_ of the dandelion seed. Incident follows incident, stage follows stage, from bloom to bloom again--every step beautiful and interesting in itself, and to be completely trusted to make its own appeal, just displayed for itself. But some people doubt this. They have lost, or have never acquired, that faith in nature and her processes which trusts to this appeal; and then they long--and this is quite natural--to enlist in aid of their fact-studies the charm and the emotion that lies in literature. So they endow the Dandelion Seed with a papa and a mama--a jovial suburbanite of a papa, and a fussy, sentimentalizing mama--with a cradle, with a vocabulary, with a system of morals (there are even "naughty" Dandelion Seeds), and with many feelings. They tell about his "home," his infancy, his training, his departure, his settling in a new home--all the while with the intention of teaching their infants the facts, but all the while covering them up under a trivial and unnecessary myth. In the end the product is scorned by science for its overlay of misleading detail, and rejected by art for the obnoxious intrusion of work-a-day and professional fact. Now, let who will believe that such stories and verses are a legitimate way of conveying or of illuminating scientific fact; but let him not suppose that they are literature. The case is different when the teacher of fact happens to find in art, in real literature, some picture or detail with which to emotionalize and beautify his fact. It does sometimes happen that the poem, the folk-tale, the fable, has set in some charming human light certain aspects of the object which the children are studying.
They are ent.i.tled to these to help them to see their object or event in the round.
It is true, of course, that no piece of literature that handles for its purposes natural objects can afford to be flagrantly inaccurate. We all know how neatly John Burroughs punctured Longfellow"s bit of pathos, "There are no birds in last year"s nests," by proving that many species of birds devote themselves to securing and occupying last year"s nests.
But in the main it is truth rather than fact that literature gives us--truth, or fact colored and interpreted by personal a.s.sociation and emotion; we must not ask colorless fact of her, and it is the most unprofitable quibbling to demand of her scientific exactness, which is always prosaic. On the other hand, there is no place in nature-study for the imagination of invention, nor for any of those striking and dramatic effects arranged and calculated, secured by manipulation and choice of material--effects which are the very native method of literature.
But writing about animals and objects in nature may become literature when, losing sight of the need of teaching fact, of giving professional instruction, it presents them as personalities, when it humanizes them, either by attributing to them human qualities and feelings, or by surrounding them with an atmosphere of human emotion and experience; it may become good literature when it does these things well; the chances are all against its becoming great literature at all.
If the nature-story making use of literary devices, but designed to teach scientific fact, is anomalous, the case is no better, artistically or educationally, when the story of an animal is made the propaganda of the Humane Society, or of the anti-vivisectionists, or of any other believers, no matter how just and important may be their belief or doctrine. I have known a child whose outlook was prejudiced, and whose mental repose most seriously disturbed, by an over-earnest and over-colored story of the sufferings of a deserving and phenomenally sensitive cab-horse; and this morbid sense of suffering was the result of reading a book whose style was commonplace, whose structure was chaotic, whose sentiment was melodramatic, and whose psychology was guesswork--which did not yield, in a word, a single one of the desirable fruits of literature. We must devise some way to preserve and to deepen in our little people that humorous, loving sympathy with our furry and hairy brothers, more wholesome and natural than stories of suicidal ponies, revolutionary stallions, persecuted partridges, and heart-broken mastiffs. Better than any library of books about them is the friendship of one dog or horse, or the care of any, the humblest, pet. And at least we may remind ourselves that we do not have to accomplish the awakening of that or any other sympathy at the cost of teaching as literature stories undesirable and inartistic.
The oldest of beast-tales available for occidental children is the story of Reynard the Fox. We all know how there grew up about the original core of the story a vast accretion of material, which became ever more and more satirical and abstract, until finally the original folk-cycle was buried under it. Of course, in the later forms the tales are most unchildlike. But it is not so difficult to extract from the cycle the original simpler one--or at least to get together a cycle which has the simplicity, the sincerity, and the objectivity of genuine folk-art. The children love the tales, and get so much out of them that it is a pity for any child to miss them completely; though I should never advise that many of the tales be read to them continuously. To do this would be to immerse them in an atmosphere of trickery. It is better to keep the story lying by, and to read them an episode now and then in the intervals of something more serious. Many people will question the moral effect of stories in which the rascal uniformly triumphs, as in _Reynard_. But I have observed, among the children with whom I have read it, that they are never in sympathy with Reynard, and are never pleased with his triumphs. This is in striking, and in some respects puzzling, contrast with the fact that the triumphs and successes of Bre"r Rabbit in _Uncle Remus_ always delight the children. The tales that Joel Chandler Harris has a.s.sembled in this collection const.i.tute a most charming and usable beast-epic. The universal sympathy with this hero may be encouraged and enjoyed without misgiving, because Bre"r Rabbit succeeds by subtlety, where Reynard succeeds by knavery. Bre"r Rabbit"s triumphs are those of sheer intellect, as truly as are those of Odysseus, while Reynard"s are those of low and cruel cunning. It is impossible to exaggerate the access of charm and interest that invest the _Uncle Remus_ stories because of Uncle Remus himself. He is the genuine folk story-teller, full of faith and sincerity, yet steeped in humor, and gifted with the sense of essential reality; add to this that he is a gentle soul, a devoted lover of childhood, with a never-failing sense of the reverence due the child. While to those who know the negro dialect the stories lose much by translation, still they are good enough to bear even this test, and such translation is necessary for some groups of children. Like the Reynard tales, those of Bre"r Rabbit are best inserted here and there throughout the year and not read in a ma.s.s.
The fables--all those oriental and cla.s.sic ones that are called Aesop"s, as well as many of La Fontaine"s--are, from the literary point of view the best of the animal stories. Leave quite out of view their moralistic and figurative meanings, and most of them are sympathetic and dramatic presentations of the animals themselves, with those wider human implications that make an anecdote about an animal literature rather than science. The family or the schoolroom that can possess a copy of Boutet de Monvel"s _La Fontaine_ has in the pictures the most charming and penetrating criticism and interpretation of the fables themselves, of the animals who appear in them, and of the motives and experiences that lie behind them.
Scattered throughout the folk-tales and among the fairy-stories that we know best are some fascinating animal stories. The folk-mind is always impressed in an imaginative way with the relation between man and the animals--not always a loving or sympathetic relation. They feel, what the modern writing humanitarian seems to have determined to ignore, that deep, psychic, inscrutable animosity, be it instinct or race-memory or whatever it may be, that has always existed between man and the beasts; though there are among practically all the folk whose tales we have collected, stories of "grateful beasts," of friendly and serviceable animals. Then there are such cla.s.sics as _The Little Red Hen_, _Henny-Penny_, _The Three Billy-Goats_, and _The Musicians of Bremen_, whose perfection of art as stories and as presentations of life is beyond criticism.
The native stories of many of the North American Indian tribes have a charming way of presenting the animals. Unfortunately, most of our Indian folk-lore was collected and reduced to literary form in what one may call the _blaue Blume_ period of folk-lore collecting, and is spoiled everywhere by the oversentimental strain of the period. We could well spare an occasional account of what one might infer to be a common habit of love-lorn Indian maidens--that of casting themselves headlong from inaccessible cliffs at sunset,--to make room for some of the humorous and fanciful tales of the animals that the Indians knew so well and to which they lived so near. The Zuni folk-tales collected by Frank Cushing have much of this element in them, and it const.i.tutes one of their many charms.
East Indian folk-lore is peculiarly rich in tales of animals--fables, bits of beast-wisdom and beast-adventure. It may be that this fact co-operated with his own gift to make Rudyard Kipling the greatest of all modern makers of animal-stories. The _Jungle Books_ stand unique and imperishable as one of the perfect art-products of the nineteenth century. Like everything else that is true art, these stories never become stale. This gives them a peculiar value. For the children who have had them at home are always willing to hear them again with the cla.s.s. We can read them _to_ the third grade for the story, and _with_ the sixth grade for the style, and the eighth grade is not above hearing _Toomai of the Elephants_ at any time. The teacher himself will find unfailing satisfaction in them because, in addition to all their charms as interpretations of the beasts and presentation of human nature, they show all the marks of expert workmanship. This appears in the masterly structure of the story, the organization of the material, the economy of incident, the successful style which combines in a most unusual way, a reserve and finish that would become a literary essayist, with a power of vivid and striking phrase that characterizes the most successful journalist. So that teacher and children are both interested and disciplined by every reading of the _Jungle Books_.
Among all their verse literature, from the Mother Goose melodies to Wordsworth in the eighth grade, the children will find poems about animals. A catalogue of the nursery and fairy-book animals is a very instructive doc.u.ment--indeed, a catalogue of poetical beasts in general, is very illuminating. All the verses about animals that have come down to us in the traditionary jingles are good as art and on the whole, fair to the animals. "Baa, Black Sheep," "The Mouse Ran Up the Clock,"
"Johnny Shuter"s Mare," and all the others, yield the fruits of literature, but only after much torturing, the fruits of science.
Gradually to these we add such as Cowper"s tame but touching pictures of his pets; Wordsworth"s tender and far-seeing poems about the shepherds and their flocks, the doe and the hart, the pet lamb, the faithful dogs; Blake"s wonderful pair of poems, "The Tiger" and "The Lamb;" Mary Lamb"s exquisite picture of the boy and the snake; Emerson"s "The b.u.mble Bee;"
those splendid imaginative characterizations of the beasts from the thirty-eighth to the forty-first chapters of Job; "The Jackdaw of Rheims;" "How They Brought the Good News." Why extend the actual list?
They are all things that place the animals which appear in them in their romantic or tender relations to human beings, or interpret in a dramatic and literary way the imaginary consciousness of the animal.
There is little danger of making poetry that is good enough to be given as poetry, do the work of information-teaching. It seems easy to see in the case of the poem, with its more imaginative method and its more artificial form, that you spoil it as art when you teach it as science.
This fact is equally true of a good literary story.
CHAPTER XI
SYMBOLISTIC STORIES, FABLES, AND OTHER APOLOGUES
It is not possible, in the plan adopted for this little book, to keep the topics always strictly apart. It is not possible, for example, to relegate to one section all one has to say about folk- and fairy-stories, and to another all about fables, because each type has so many aspects and radiations. Fables are stories; most of them are animal-stories; they are symbolistic or figurative or allegorical--so that one must approach them from many points of view, and take them into consideration in many connections. There need be, therefore, no apology for taking up in this new section topics partially discussed elsewhere.
It seems quite consonant with our best conclusions about younger children to say that, on the whole, in the earlier years of their school life their literature should be of that objective kind where no more is meant than meets the eye. They may have tales of adventure, of plain experience, of highly imaginative experience, of animal life, of fairyland; but as far as possible let them be such as contain no occult and secondary meanings. There are many things desirable for all children, and under certain school conditions compulsory or indispensable for some children, which do have this secondary meaning.
Such, if one uses them, are the stories from the great myths; such are practically all of Andersen"s _Marchen_; such are the legendary stories of the Hebrew patriarchs. Of course, the parent or teacher who presents these things to his children may say that the children never perceive or even suspect an inner meaning. And it is true that, with great care and skill, the objective upper surface may be kept before some children.
But, on the whole, it is good morality and good pedagogy to give to the children nothing that you are not willing, even desirous, that they should probe to the bottom. It is always a misfortune when one must say to a child, "I can"t explain that to you now;" "You can"t understand that yet;" so much a misfortune that no teacher should ever invite it.
If you have ever looked into the faces of the fifth grade when they were searching you with questions to get at the meaning of Andersen"s pessimistic story of _The Little White Hen_; if you have seen the sixth grade grow melancholy, with a vague augury of trouble they could not fathom, when you have read to them the brilliant but tragic little apologue of _Mr. Seguin"s Goat_; if you have been obliged to explain to some puzzled and suspicious eight-year-old the _raison d"etre_ of the clock-ticking alligator in _Peter Pan_, you have resolved hereafter to give them no symbolism, or to give them symbolism whose presence they could not possibly suspect (a most difficult thing to do in the case of that many-minded, hundred-eyed child, the cla.s.s), or to give such symbolism as would invite them into paths where you would gladly have them walk, whose most ultimate implication you are at least _willing_ to explain to them. Of course, this principle cannot be pushed to its logical extreme; merely logical extremes are always absurd. One does not go into the philosophical depths of the special historical epoch he chooses for his children, nor does he instruct them in the remote scientific principles behind their window-garden or their aquarium of polywogs and salamanders. But, if he is wise, he hopes to choose such work, and present such aspects of it, as contain no insoluble mystery, and do not tempt the children into paths for which their feet are not ready.