THE CHOICE OF STORIES
As a summary and by way of applying the facts, principles, and theories
discussed in the foregoing chapter, let us try to decide what
constitutes a good story to study with a class of children under
thirteen years of age. Not to be aware of the critical pitfalls that
yawn for one who would say what constitutes a good story for any
purpose, would be entirely too naive; and they beset the path of him who
would choose a fairy-tale quite as thickly as that of the critic of
mature masterpieces. But many of these pitfalls may be avoided if one
narrows his path and walks circumspectly in it. In the present
discussion the path is narrowed by two considerations.
First, we will leave out of the discussion matters of mere personal
taste and instinctive feeling--that region in which impressionism and
amateur criticism flourish, confining it as closely as may be to those
matters that yield to judgment, and that are, as nearly as possible,
matters of fact. There is about every bit of literature a sphere in
which the individual taste is sole arbiter. One man's meat is here
another man's poison. The merest lay reader here makes up his mind: "I
like it," "I like it not;" and there is no appeal from these judgments,
and no way of modifying them short of a complete training in criticism,
or a complete remaking of the reader's experience. It is quite true that
the region in which these differences lie may be greatly reduced by a
knowledge of a few fundamental critical principles, and by a mere
suppression of prejudices and sentimentalities. But in the last analysis
there always remains a margin, a border of this every man's territory.
If the bit of literature be a story, it is likely to be matters of
character-growth, motives of conduct, interplay of personal influence,
social, philosophical, and ethical interpretation and influence, that
lie within this region and are subjects of disagreement and uncertainty.
Here lies, too, that more or less elusive, but very real, thing that
belongs to every bit of literature--what we call "charm." This may be a
matter of structure, of style, even of vocabulary, of persons, of
furniture, of architecture or other mere accessories--of geography, of
the temperament of the reader, a combination of all these or of any
number of them, or of other things too numerous or too elusive to be
named. Every good story has it, or gets it as soon as a sincere and
sympathetic reader learns how to read it. If one should ever find a
story which after repeated readings develops nothing of this most
essential and intangible quality of charm, let him not try to teach it.
Either it is not a good story, or he has no temperament for art.
But, however interesting these matters may be to readers of the gentle
guild, and to the impressionist critic, they do not carry us far upon
our practical educational choice. This must be guided by a study of
those aspects and elements of story which yield to plain observation;
which, however artistic, are yet amenable to judgment, and may therefore
be impersonally and unemotionally discussed--such as the structure of
the story, its use of incident, its movement, its plot, its outcome, the
fitness of the whole for the training and best amusement of the
children.
In the second place, we limit and define our discussion, if another
reminder of this important fact may be allowed, by the determination to
discuss, not the art of literature, not all or any literature, not all
literature for children, but such literature as it may be found
expedient and desirable to give to a class of children.
1. In order to get it into the summary, it having been sufficiently
amplified in a previous chapter, and being indeed, self-evident, we will
say again that a story, good to teach in class should be one whose
material corresponds to the needs and tastes of the children. The
experiences portrayed should be, not necessarily those that they have
had, but such as they can conceive and imaginatively appropriate, or
such as they might safely experience. And since children of this age are
living, or ought to be encouraged to live, active, achieving lives, and
are not, or ought not to be, introspective or too meditative; since they
know little or nothing of intricate social complications or psychic
experience, and we do not desire that they should, we will choose their
literature with these things in mind. We may safely say that there
should be nothing reflected in his story which the inquisitive child may
not probe to the very bottom without coming upon knowledge too mature
for him. This must be reconciled with the fact that one of the valuable
services of literature is to forestall experience and to supplement it.
The reconciliation is not difficult to make when once the teacher has
grasped the principle of fitness and really walks in the light of what
he may easily know about the nature of children.
2. The larger number of their stories should be of things happening, of
achievement, of epic, objective activity. Single children should often
have a quiet, idyllic story to read. The class should occasionally have
such a story or poem to consider and should be carefully guided to the
enjoyment of it. But for the class in the larger amount of its work we
will choose stories of action, as corresponding most nearly to the
experience and interest of the children, as harmonizing most completely
with the character of their other disciplines, as serving best to create
an atmosphere of artistic _rapport_ in any group large enough to compose
a class, while they serve equally well with other stories to effect
those other aspects of literary training which we desire.
However, all persons who choose and write stories for children should
suspect themselves in regard to this matter of activity. When we say
that these stories should contain much activity and should move forward
chiefly by the method of adventure, we do not mean that there should be
unlimited or superfluous activity. The two marks of the sensational
story are too much activity, or merely miscellaneous activity, and
activities unnecessarily and unnaturally heightened and spiced. It is
not difficult to test our stories on either of these points. A good
story has a central action to be accomplished; toward this many minor
activities co-operate; there should be enough of these to accomplish
the result, but there should be economy of invention and skill in
arrangement, so that one does not feel that there has been a waste of
material nor a bid for overstimulated interest. The danger to the
child's culture, artistic, intellectual, and moral, of the ordinary
juveniles lies just here, the heaping-up of sensations, the effort to
provide a thrill for every page, throws the story out of balance,
strains the child's nerves, and helps to produce a depraved taste.
3. To bear the strain of class use the story should present a sound and
beautiful organization. This plea for a good and trustworthy structure
should not be mistaken for a plea for a formal and artificial use of a
story. It is rather an appeal for the use of the logical and rational
side of literature--an urgency that we bring into the training of the
children the plain and fundamental matters of art-form that the story
exhibits, at the same time that we get out of it the intellectual value
it has for the class. If it be a short story, it should go to its climax
by a direct and logical path, and close when its effect is produced. If
it be a longer story, it should have that arrangement of details and
parts that corresponds to the movements of the action, and that serves
to get the material before us in the most effective and economical way.
Stories that are elaborate enough to have a genuine plot are desirable
for all classes except perhaps the very youngest. It is not necessary to
say again, except by way of an item in the summary, that the plot should
be simple and easy to see through, containing very little of the element
of suspense, and only a legitimate amount of the element of surprise.
Some more elaborate plots, with more mystification in them, are
intellectually stimulating to the oldest grades, and create an interest
of curiosity. But all teachers should learn to regard this stimulus as a
mere by-product of literary study, and this curiosity as a merely
adventitious ally.
4. Clearly connected with the matter of good and sufficient structure is
that of economy of incident. A story which displays a profusion of
details may be interesting, and under certain circumstances valuable, to
a child. But for the class that is a better story which uses just those
incidents essential to the production of its effect. Compare our old
friend, Perrault's _Cinderella_, in this matter with Grimm's. It needs
but two nights at the ball--one when the maiden remembers the
godmother's injunction, and one when she forgets it. Grimm's version
gives us three nights, and fills the story with all manner of irrelevant
details, which indicate, indeed, the prodigal wealth of the folk-mind
and the unbounded interest of the folk-audience; but they show no
superintendence of the folk-artist.
Of course, when one is judging a story from this point of view, he must
take into account the effect to be produced before he pronounces as to
the sufficiency or superfluity of the incidents. There must always be
enough to be convincing, to give to the story the atmosphere of
verisimilitude, and to justify and reward our interest in the affairs of
the persons. In Andersen's _The Ugly Duckling_ he needs to produce the
effect of lapse of time, the experience of many vicissitudes, and the
repeated refusals of the world to receive his genius; every incident
then, though it may to some extent reproduce a previous one, is valuable
as contributing to the effect.
5. As a part of the artistic economy of the story, it should have a
close unity--closer than we would demand of a story read to our children
at home, and closer than we should demand for an adult novel. The
threads of the action should be so closely related and interlinked that
they are practically all in action all the time. This is particularly
true for the younger children. It may not be too great a tax upon the
patience and attention of the older children to leave the hero in
imminent danger on his desert island, while we return for several
chapters to the heroine in the crypts of the wicked duke's castle; but
the little ones should not be asked to endure it.
The action should be all rounded up within the one design and stop at
the artistic stopping-place. To appreciate this aspect of unity, read
Grimm's _Briar-Rose_--that wonderful little masterpiece of structure--in
comparison with Perrault's _The Sleeping Beauty in the Wood_, which
trails after it the ugly and inorganic episode of the ogre
mother-in-law. Even in the cycles of stories the separate episodes
should display these qualities of unity.
6. When we choose our standard class-story, we will have in mind other
aspects of the principle of economy, or of due artistic measure. In such
a story there should not be an undue appeal to any one emotion. Too much
horror or disgust will undo the very effect one desires to produce. Such
a story as _The Dog of Flanders_, for example, affords a sort of
emotional spree of pity and pathos through which the steadier members of
a class refuse to go, and which the more emotional members do not need.
Especially should there not be any unnecessary profusion of magic, of
supernatural agencies, of daring and danger. This brings us to the
difficult point of the degree or kind of unlikelihood one may risk in
such a story. When one is reading to the single child, or to a few
children, or if one is a real dramatic genius, this unlikelihood is not
so important a matter, because it is not difficult under either of those
conditions to create an atmosphere of artistic faith in which any story
"goes." But in a big class, with the ordinary teacher it is difficult;
some inquisitive or skeptical minds will call for proof or detailed
statement, and quite destroy the _rapport_ demanded for the perfect
appreciation of the story. In a class I once knew such a skeptic, who
was indeed a mere scientific realist, brought the otherwise enraptured
class violently to earth during the reading of the passage of Odysseus
between the whirlpool and the cliff, by the sardonic suggestion that
Scylla must have had a "rubber-neck." When it can be avoided, do not
tempt your skeptic or your cynic by the kind or degree of unlikelihood
liable to excite his protest.
7. The story should be serious. This does not preclude humorous and
comic stuff. But the funny things should be sincerely funny, as
contra-distinguished from those things that are ostentatiously
childlike, elaborately accommodated to the infant mind, ironical, or
sentimental, and the teacher must so know his story, and so honor it
and his children, that he can render it to them whether it be an
improbable adventure of Odysseus, or the merest horse-play of a
folk-droll, sincerely and cordially.
8. In the earlier typical years of the elementary school, through the
sixth grade (twelve-year-old children) at least, the persons of the
story should be those who do things rather than those who become
something else. They should display the striking, permanent qualities
rather than the elusive, evolving qualities; they should act from simple
and strong motives, not from obscure and complex ones. Only in the
latest years, if at all within the period, should the class be asked to
consider more intricate types, more subjective qualities, and more mixed
motives. No mistake is likely to be made in this matter, if the stories
and plays are well chosen from the point of view of fitness in other
respects. Every teacher who is conscientious and informed, will realize
that these persons in the stories contribute their quota--and a very
large one--to that "copy," that ideal self, that broods over every
child's inner life, inviting him on, giving him courage and hope,
reproof and praise, leading him to whatever he attains of social and
personal morality. And every such teacher can help the children to build
into their ideals the permanent and valuable qualities of these persons
of their story.
9. The story should be ethically sound. On this point one would like to
make discriminating statements. One does not teach literature in order
to teach morals and he cannot ask that his fairy-tale should turn out a
sermon, or that his hero-tale deliberately inculcate this or that
virtue. Indeed, literature may be completely unmoral, and still safely
serve the purposes of amusement and of distinctively literary
training--as witness the nursery rhymes, the _Garden of Verses_, _Alice
in Wonderland_. But if it be immoral, it is also artistically unsound,
and does not yield satisfactory literary results. No teacher is in
danger of teaching a story which depicts the attractions of vice or
glorifies some roguish hero. But let him beware also of those less
obvious immoralities, where the success of a story turns upon some piece
of unjustifiable trickery or disobedience, or irreverence, or some more
serious immorality, which thus has placed upon it the weight of
approval. In the chapbook tale of _Jack and the Bean-Stalk_, to take a
chance example, the hero's successful adventures hinge upon a piece of
folly and disobedience; the kindergartenized version of _The Three
Bears_ excuses an unpardonable breach of manners. The pivotal issue,
the central spring of a story must be ethically strong, so as to bear
the closest inspection and to justify itself in the fierce light of
class discussion.
Of course, one should be cautious here, so as not to seem merely
puritanical or Pecksniffian. Subtlety is the savage virtue; along with
horse-play it is the child's substitute for both wit and humor. The
wiles and devices of Odysseus only endear him the more to his
sympathetic child-followers, as they did to Pallas Athene herself. We
cannot give to the classes the things best for them in other ways, and
exclude all tales in which wiliness or subtlety constitutes the method,
if not the motive. But we can do this: we can see to it that the trick
tends to the securing of final justice, and we can discriminate between
mere deceitful trickiness and that subtlety which is, as in the case of
Odysseus, quickness of wit or steady intellectual dominance. And we must
make many allowances, setting ourselves free in the child's moral world
as it really is to him, by constant imaginative sympathy. According to
the nursery code there is no harm in playing a trick upon a giant; by
very virtue of being a giant, with the advantage of size on his side,
and more than likely stupid besides, he is fair game for any
nimble-witted hero. The children and their heroes use the deliciously
frank and entirely satisfying argument of the fisherman who freed the
monstrous Afreet from the bottle: "This is an Afreet, and I am a man,
and Allah has given me sound reason. Therefore I will now plot his
destruction." The butcher and the hen-wife, hereditary villains of the
folk-tales, are such unpitied victims. The misfortunes of Kluge Else, of
Hans in Luck, and of the countless other noodles, are but the proper
fruit of their folly. Every child will instinctively--and indeed
ultimately--justify the legal quibble by which Portia defeats Shylock,
as but the just visitation upon his cunningly devised cruelty. Let it be
a clear case of the biter bitten, and of the injustice or stupidity of
the original biter, and one need not fear the result--certainly not the
artistic result--upon the sensible child or upon the average class--the
average class being, in the end, always a sensible child.
At the same time one hastens to say that to use a large number of such
stories would place the children in an atmosphere of trickery and petty
scheming which would be most undesirable. I have read with a group of
children where the presence of one incurably slippery member so poisoned
the air that it would have been unwise to study even one story in which
success was achieved by the use of a trick or a bit of subtlety.
Let your stories be ethically sound, even the stratagems and wiles
making for justice, and the right sort of mercy.
10. It is best, on the whole, that the stories given in class have a
satisfying and conclusive ending of the romantic sort. It should, of
course, be the ending for which the events have paved the way, and the
ending which the children, in view of the direction in which their
sympathies have been enlisted, will feel to be just. When a tragic
ending is inevitable, it should, in the case of the younger children, be
provided for and justified. All things considered, it is better,
emotionally and artistically, for these younger children to consider in
class those stories which have a fortunate ending, displaying the
working of poetic justice, leaving for the older groups the tragedies,
and the logical justice of a convinced realism.