FOLK-TALE AND FAIRY-STORY
Whatever may be our attitude toward the culture-epoch theory of a
child's training and experience, or however much we may vary in our
conscious or unconscious application of it, no observer of children will
have failed to notice that in the three or four years lying about the
seventh, they have their characteristic hour of social and psychic
ripeness for fairy-tales. Upon this point the philosophical deductions
of the technical pedagogues coincide perfectly with the intuitive wisdom
of all the generations of mothers and nurses. The imaginative activity
of the six- or seven-year-old person coming to school out of the
environment of the average modern home is practically on the same level,
and follows the same processes, as that of the folk who produced the
golden core of folk-tales--not primitive savage fragments of legend, not
developed artistic romance, but complete little tales, simple and
sincere, molded into acceptable form by generations of use. The vision
of the world physical and social that these tales present, and their
interpretation of its activities, is that which is normal to the
seven-year-old child, and constitutes therefore the natural basis on
which his literary education begins, and affords his first effective
contact with imaginative art.
But when we have agreed that the fairy-tales constitute precisely the
right artistic material for these children; when we have fixed with
satisfactory definiteness the hour of their ripeness for them; when we
have indicated those elements in the tales that render them serviceable,
we are still at the beginning of our task. For we find ourselves in the
presence of a vast mass of material from which we must choose those
things that are so typical as to accomplish for our children the
characteristic service of folk-tales, and so beautiful as to perform the
added service of good literature. And so wide is the range of
subject-matter and form in the stories constituting the mass that it
becomes evident at a glance that the educational and artistic efficacy
of the fairy-tales depends upon the wisdom used in choosing the actual
specimens. The most useful thing to be done, then, is to determine a set
of trustworthy and practical principles of selection.
We should understand, to begin with, what we mean by fairy-tales. It is
now impossible to limit this term to those stories that deal with the
activities of an order of invented preter-human beings called fairies;
or even to those that contain preternatural or supernatural elements.
With the old fairy-tales in this narrow sense, have been incorporated
folk-tales dealing with matter which involves only natural and human
material--beast-tales and bits of comic adventure, for example. It is
possible to treat them, however, in one category, because of the fact
that in all those that are worth using for the children in class,
whether there be fairies involved or not, the imaginative process is of
the same kind, the vision of the world, its activities and its
possibilities, is on the same level of imaginative combination and
artistic interpretation; and this is the level of the children for whom
we are choosing.
The traditionary stories, the real folk-tales, have been divided into
four classes.
1. Sagas--stories told of heroes, of historical events, of physical
phenomena, of the names or location of places, and intended to be
believed. They are to be differentiated from myth by the fact that they
have never assumed any religious or symbolic signification. They are, as
a matter of fact, hero-tales in the making--of the same stuff in many
cases as the great hero-tales, but having remained in the hands of the
folk, have never received the enrichment and beauty of those hero-tales
which the poets took up. Such folk-sagas are _Whittington and His Cat_
and _Lady Godiva_. Most of these stories have preternatural or
supernatural elements, and even such as have no such elements have still
the atmosphere of wonder, and those fanciful or fantastic
interpretations characteristic of the folk-imagination.
2. _Maerchen_, or what we call "nursery tales"--those told for artistic
pleasure, pure imaginative play, the creative exercise of the
art-instinct. They may or may not exhibit the supernatural or
preternatural elements; in some of them animals are among the actors.
These constitute the large mass of popular and nursery tales;
_Cinderella_, _Beauty and the Beast_, _Puss in Boots_, _Briar-Rose_,
_The Musicians of Bremen_ will do for examples.
3. Drolls--comic or domestic tales which may or may not make use of the
impossible, the marvelous, or the preternatural. Generally they are
tales of funny misadventures, cunning horse-play, tricks, the
misfortunes or undeserved good luck of "noodles." Such, chosen from many
examples, are _Kluge Else_, _Lazy Jack_, _Mr. Vinegar_, _Hans in Luck_.
4. Cumulative tales--those in which incident is inter-linked with
incident by some more or less artificial principle of association,
constituting in some cases a mere string of associated happenings, in
others a fairly rounded out story. Such, in its simplest form, are _The
House That Jack Built_ and _Titty-mouse and Tatty-mouse_, _Henny-penny_
and the old swapping ballads.
The modern stories corresponding to these are of three kinds: those
written in imitation of the folk-sagas and _Maerchen_; those which
introduce preter-human elements as symbols; those which personify the
phenomena and forces of nature.
It is not mere convention that leads one to choose for the children in
class the traditionary or folk-tales in preference to the modern
fairy-story. Many new so-called fairy-tales are doubtless harmless and
amusing enough, and may serve a purpose in hours of mere recreation. But
they lack those abiding qualities one seeks in a story he gives as
discipline and to a class. Failing to possess the very fundamental
characteristics of the folk-tale, they fail to perform the typical and
desirable service of the folk-tale. First of all, modern fairy-tales are
neither convinced nor convincing; they are imitations, which cannot fail
to miss the soul of the original. There can be no new fairy-tales
written, because there is no longer a possibility of belief in fairies,
and no longer among adults a possibility of looking at the world as the
folk and the child look at it. The substitution of the pert fairies and
dapper elves of literature and the theater for the serious preterhuman
agents of the folk-tale creates at once in the new stories an atmosphere
of dilettantism, of insincerity. Titania and Oberon, flower-fairies,
dew-fairies, gauzy wings and spangled skirts, were not in the mind of
the people who told these tales of the sometimes grim and _schauderhaft_
and always serious beings--fairies, elves, goblins, or what not. Wicked
little brown men disappearing into a green hillock with the human child,
in exchange for whom they have left in the cottage cradle a brown imp of
their own; the godmother with the fairy-gift who brings justice and joy
to the wronged maiden; the slighted wise woman foretelling death and
doom over the cradle of the little princess; the kind and gentle Beast
whom love disenchants and restores to his own noble form--all these were
to those who made them serious art, as they should be to the child. If
one could make the old distinction without dreading to be misunderstood
in these days of opposition to "faculty" criticism, he would say that
the folk-tales exhibit the working of the deep human _imagination_,
using all the powers of the mind, and reorganizing the world; the modern
fairy-tale exhibits the exercise of the _fancy_, disporting itself in a
very small corner of the world of art.
It is, first of all, as one cannot say too often, the imaginative level
of the folk-tales that fits them for the child's use. They are the
creative reconstruction of the world by those who were rich in images
and sense-material, unhampered in the use of it by any system of logic
or body of organized knowledge, simple, sincere and full of faith--as
our own well-born children are at six-seven-eight. It is this
simplicity, sincerity, and earnestness that gives them their
childlikeness--all qualities that one fails to find in the modern
fairy-tale written by a grown person for children. Nothing is so alien
to the consciousness of the child as the consciousness of the grown-up
educated man. It is by nothing short of a miracle that he can keep his
own sophistications out of what he writes for children. His fairy-tale,
failing in simplicity, will betake itself to babbling inanity; failing
in earnestness, it gives itself over to sentimentality; failing in
belief, it is likely to be filled with cynicism and cheap satire under
the guise of playfulness. These faults may be found, all too plentiful,
even in the best work of Hans Christian Andersen, while they poison
practically everything done for children by Kingsley and Hawthorne. The
immense advantage of the traditionary tales is that they were not made
for children. The _Maerchen_ of our day was the novel or romance of the
people among whom it had its earlier history. It therefore escapes
entirely the "little dears" appeal and method. The obviously amateur
heat-fairies, snow-fairies, flower-fairies, and all the others which
figure in the merely fanciful and always misleading myth-making of the
belated kindergarten and the holiday book of commerce, serve chiefly to
bewilder the child's judgment, to confuse his imagination, and to
cheapen the supernatural in his art, which should be sparing and
serious, as it should be in all art. Besides, the natural phenomena with
which these fancies are connected are much more beautiful, more
appealing to the imagination, and ultimately more serviceable to art, if
they are rightly presented as plain nature.
There are certain modern symbolistic stories containing elements of the
fantastic and supernatural kind that are good and beautiful enough to
make a genuinely desirable contribution to the child's experience. It is
advisable to reserve these, however, until the children are old enough
and experienced enough to understand them as symbols. Such stories are
Stockton's _The Bee-Man of Orn_, slightly edited; _The Water Babies_,
always expurgated of Kingsley's ponderous fooling; _The Snow Image_,
_The Ugly Duckling_.
It is not only that the world of imaginary beings and marvelous forces
in the folk-tale enchant the child and further his artistic development
in the most natural way; the human world of these tales is a delightful
and wholesome one for him to know. It is a naive and simple world, where
he may come close to the actual processes of life and see them as
picturesque and interesting. Where else in our modern world can a child
encounter the shoemaker, the tailor, the miller, the hen-wife, the
weaver, the spinner, in their primitive dignity and importance? There
are kings, to be sure, and princes, but except in certain of the stories
that took permanent literary shape in the seventeenth century, they are,
like the kings and princes in the _Odyssey_, plain and democratic
monarchs, on terms of beautiful equality with the noble swineherd and
the charming tailor. King Arthur in the nursery ballad stole a peck of
barley meal to make a bag-pudding, in the homeliest and most democratic
way, and the picture of the queen frying the cold pudding for breakfast
seems only natural to the little democrats of six and seven in our own
day. This world of genuine people and honest occupations is charming and
educative in itself, and constitutes the most effective and convincing
background for the supernatural and the marvelous when that element is
present.
When we have said that it is the folk or traditionary tales that we
should choose, we do not mean that we should consider the whole realm of
folk-lore material, primitive and savage tales--African, Indian,
Igorrote; though, as a matter of fact, every teacher of children should
be something of a scientific student of folk-stories. It increases his
respect and sympathy for the specimens he actually chooses to know where
they stand in the large whole--their history and human value. Besides,
the experienced teacher will often find in the outlying regions of
folk-tales the germ of a story precisely suited to his needs, and he can
have the very real pleasure of endowing it with an acceptable form and
putting it into educational circulation.
But on the whole, the teacher must be very expert, and must have
extraordinary needs, to feel justified in going outside the established
canon of fairy-tales for his material. For there is a canon more or less
fixed, into which have entered those stories that have from long and
perpetual use taken on a more or less acceptable form; stories from
those nations whose culture has blended to produce the modern occidental
tradition. The canon includes Grimm's tales, Perrault's _Mother Goose_
tales, a few of Madame d'Aulnoy's, a few Danish and Norwegian stories,
some from Italian sources and through Italian media, some from the
_Arabian Nights_, some unhesitatingly admitted lately from collections
of English folk-tales made in our own day, two or three chapbook
stories, a few interlopers like _The Three Bears_, _Goody Two Shoes_,
and some of Andersen's--not popular tales at all, but having in them
some mysterious charm that opened the door to them. One cannot attempt
to fix the limits more narrowly, for he has no sooner closed the list
than he realizes that every teacher who has used them, every mother who
has read them to her little people, every boy or girl who loves them,
will have some other tale to insert, some perfect thing not provided for
in this tentative catalogue. Besides, from time to time there does
appear a new claimant with every title to admission, such as some of the
Irish tales told by Seumas McManus or Douglas Hyde, or certain of the
Zuni folk-tales collected by Cushing. But on the whole, may we not agree
that the list indicated constitutes the authentic accepted canon of
fairy-tales established and approved by the teachers and children of
occidental tradition and rearing?
Still, there are choices to be made among these folk-tales of the
accepted list. No child should be told all of them. Practically all
children do have too many fairy-tales told them, and suffer in this, as
in most of the things supplied them, from the discouraging and confusing
"too much." For a whole year in which the main stories are taken from
the folk-tales, a half-dozen stories will be enough.
It is not among the folk-sagas that one will find the best stories of
this kind for his children. These, indeed, are scarcely to be called
literature. Most of them are tales explaining by a legend some natural
feature, the name of a place or a person, or attaching to some historic
person a stock adventure, wonderful or preternatural. Some of them are,
as has been said, germs of hero-tales that never obtained popular
artistic favor, or they are far-away echoes of hero-tales, or they are
stories of the _pourquoi_ kind--semi-mythical in import, and
consequently lacking the universal appeal and fitness of literature. Any
teacher may find one of the stories of this group adapted to his
purpose, but he will not find most of his folk-material here. In the
cycles of hero tales, _King Arthur_ and _Siegfried_ for example, we can
find many of these minor sagas imbedded in the larger cycle, but still
detachable and often easily adaptable for the younger children.
It is among the _Maerchen_ that we find our supply of stories. This is
not the place to discuss the science of nursery-tales, their origin,
genesis, dissemination, or any of the other scholar's aspects, inviting
though all these topics be. One is quite aware that even in the most
social _Maerchen_ there may be found detritus of myth; one should be
equally aware that in certain other _Maerchen_ he finds the original germ
which finally evolved into a myth-story. But let not the teacher and
lover of folk-tales as art allow himself to become ensnared in myth
interpretations of his tales; that way literary and pedagogic madness
lies. Countless generations ago those which perchance had a mythical
significance lost it and became art, completely humanized in life and
experience.
The drolls, when one chooses well among them, are precisely adapted to
add the element of fun that should never be long absent from the
children's literature. There are, of course, numberless comic folk-tales
too coarse and too brutal to be used in our day, except by the
scientific student of culture. The fun of the drolls is, as a matter of
fact, not on a high level--practical jokes, perfectly obvious
_contretemps_, the adventures and achievements of noodles, are their
typical material. But this is the comic level of the average child for
whom we choose them. It is the first step above physical fun, and from
this step we can undertake to start him on his delightful journey up the
ever-refining path of literary comedy. From tricks and horse-play he may
pass rapidly to humor and nonsense. But at six-seven, having had the
_Little Guinea Pig_ and _Simple Simon_ as an undergraduate kinder, he is
ready for _Hans in Luck_ and _Mr. Miacca_. Like the Olympians
themselves, he will roar at Hephaestus' limp, and with the council of
Homeric heroes he will laugh at the physical chastisement of Thersites,
and enjoy the none-too-penetrating trick that Odysseus played upon the
blundering Polyphemus. There is no danger that the children will not
outgrow this stage of comic appreciation--the danger is that they will
outgrow it instead of adding to it all the other stages. There is
something wrong with the artistic culture of the man who cannot at forty
smile at the follies of the Peterkin family, at the same time that he
completely savors the comedy of _The Egoist_.
The accumulative tales have their service to render. Perhaps their
characteristic moment comes a little earlier than even the first year of
school. Before he is six the little citizen of the world will have been
building up his vision of the interdependence and interaction of men
and things. To this vision the accumulative tales bring the
contribution of art. Many of them, being the simplest adjustment of
incident to incident, such as _The Old Woman Who Found the Sixpence_ and
_The Little Red Hen_, are ideal for the nursery and kindergarten child.
Others still, built upon the accumulative principle, but more complex or
more artistic in form, will charm and instruct the first-year
scholars--_Henny-Penny_, for example, and _Hans in Luck_, and _The Three
Billy Goats Gruff_. From the point of view of composition, they may well
be studied by the older children, because they permit the examination of
the separate incidents, and exhibit in most cases the very simplest
principles of structure.
But coming still closer to the choosing of the actual specimens for the
classes, it would be only fatuous to ignore the fact that when we come
to the matter of the final choice, we are upon difficult ground,
educationally and critically. But we can save ourselves from presumption
and dogmatism by discussing a few practical, but general, grounds of
choice, reminding ourselves that in the specific school and with the
specific class many modifying minor principles will arise.
The teacher will be much comforted and steadied if he remember that he
is teaching _literature_, and is therefore freed from any obligation to
the stories as myth, or as scientific folk-lore, as sociology or as
nature-study; let nothing tempt him to the study of the first member of
the company of musicians of Bremen, as "a type of the solid-hoofed
animals," of _Red Riding-Hood_ as a "dawn-myth," or of _The Three Bears_
as "parenthood in the wild."
The teacher will select those tales that have somewhere in their history
acquired an artistic organization, rejecting in favor of them those
which remain chaotic and disorganized. Compare, for example, in this
matter, the perfect little plot of Madame Villeneuve's _Beauty and the
Beast_ with Grimm's _The Golden Bird_--a string of loosely connected,
partly irrelevant incidents. He will prefer those that display economy
of incident--in which each incident helps along the action, or
contributes something essential to the situation. Of course, it is
rather characteristic of the folk-mind, as of the child-mind, to heap up
incidents _a propos de bottes_; but as this is one of the
characteristics to be corrected in the child by his training in
literature, so it is one of the faults which should exclude a fairy-tale
from his curriculum. To make the difference among the stories in this
regard quite clear, compare the neat, orderly, and essential flow of
incident in _The Musicians of Bremen_ with the baffling multiplicity
and confusion displayed by Madame d'Aulnoy's _The Wonderful Sheep_.
Other things being equal, he will prefer for discipline those
fairy-stories which use the fairy and other preternatural elements in
artistic moderation, to those that fill every incident with marvels and
introduce supernatural machinery apparently out of mere exuberance. This
element is much more impressive when used in art with reticence and
economy. Even a little child grows too familiar with marvels when these
crowd one another on every page, and ceases either to shiver or to
thrill. In the fairy-tale, as in art for mature people, the supernatural
should appear only at the ultimate moment, or for the ultimate purpose,
and then in amount and potency only sufficient to accomplish the result.
Perrault was very cautious upon this point; in all his tales he seems to
have reduced the element of the marvelous to the smallest amount and to
have called upon it only at the pivotal points. Compare in his
_Cinderella_ the sufficiency of his single proviso, "Now, this godmother
was a fairy," with the tedious superfluity of irrelevant marvels in
Grimm's version of the same tale. Is this bringing the fascinating
abundance of the Teutonic folk fancy to a disadvantageous comparison
with the neat and orderly, but more common-place, Gallic mind? By no
means. One has many occasions to regret, when he reads Perrault's
version of the wonderful tales he found, that he was a precisian in
style and a courtier in manners; and we may find in the most apparently
artless tales told by Grimm or by Asbjoernsen the most perfect
organization and economy; as, for example in _Briar-Rose_ or in _The
Three Billy Goats Gruff_.
Besides, one hastens to add that every child should hear and should
later on have a chance to read some of the free, wandering, fantastic
things which his teacher cannot feel justified in giving to the class.
One is obliged to take some attitude in mediating the folk-tales to the
modern child, toward the fact that we often find them reflecting a moral
standard quite different from that which the average well-bred child is
brought up by; and this situation is complicated by the fact that the
children are too young to understand dramatically another moral
standard. This aspect of the stories has been pretty well covered by the
general discussion in the previous chapter. But, luckily, it is quite
possible to reject all those folk-tales of questionable morals and
objectionable taste and still have plenty to choose from. Be slow to
reject a folk-tale unless the bit of immorality--a lie, an act of
disloyalty, or irreverence--or the bit of coarseness really forms the
pivot of the story. Only then is the story unsafe or incurable.
One must take an attitude, not only toward the morals of the folk-tale,
but toward its manners as well. There is some violence in many of the
most attractive nursery tales; many of them reflect a rather
rough-and-tumble state of social communion; many exhibit a superfluity
of bloodshed or other grisly physical horrors. We quickly grant that it
is not wise to read enough of these, or to linger long enough over the
forbidding details, to create a deep or an abiding atmosphere of terror.
But it is certainly true that the modern child of six or seven has so
little apperception material for physical horrors that they do not take
any deep hold upon him. Indeed, the safety of modern life, and the
absence of visible violence, have taken the emotional appeal out of many
grim lessons of Spenser's and of Dante's. Murder in the _Maerchen_ is to
the modern child actually a bit of fine art--merely a neat and
convincing way of disposing of iniquitous elder brothers and hostile
magicians. The fact that the child's experience and information enable
him to make no image of the physiological sequelae of the cutting-off of
heads, for instance, makes it easy for the teacher to carry him
harmless past details that would seem brutal to his nervous and
squeamish elders. And these details are never the point of emphasis in
any good story. And on the whole, those persons whom the children like
and are likely to incorporate into their "pattern," have manners either
just or gentle even in the folk-tales.
It might be well to introduce among the folk-tales an occasional short
story of contemporary life, recording the activities of persons such as
the children actually know. This is not so important in this stage of
their experience as it will be later; first because the folk-tales do
not seem antiquated nor, if they are wisely selected, unduly fantastic
to them, since they find themselves imaginatively so much at home with
material and the method; and, in the second place, because in every
well-regulated school their fact studies and occupation work are at this
time concrete and charming, and keep them rightly and sufficiently in
touch with the world of actuality.
Of course we must accompany and supplement the folk-tales by verses,
since even at this age we may impress upon the children the music of
speech, and some of the minor literary beauties. They will probably be
delighted to repeat (in many classes many of the children will be
learning them for the first time) the lovely hereditary jingles and
ballads from Mother Goose--"The Crooked Man," "I Saw a Ship a-Sailing,"
"Sing a Song of Sixpence," the rhymes for games and for counting-out.
There are a very few of Stevenson's simple enough for this period; and
there may be a further choice among things found here and there, simple,
objective, and perfectly musical. It is not so much the content and
meaning of poetry that we can hope to impress upon little people under
eight, as the music and motion of the verse. There will be, however,
many members of every class who will be interested in the meaning, the
images, and the persons, if there be persons. We will take all pains,
therefore, to see that these be not unsuitable.
These--folk-tales and simple singing lyrics--with a fable or two told as
anecdotes, and repeated until even the little children begin to see that
there is something more than meets the eye--all graded and modified in
the light of the personnel and experience of the actual class, may
constitute the literature of the first two years of school.