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