REALISTIC STORIES
In the material we use for children, while it is not profitable to draw
any close distinctions between romantic and realistic stories, we can
not fail to distinguish in general between the hero-tale or the folk
_Maerchen_, where we must expect preternatural powers and marvelous
events, and the story which purports to deal with real people, and with
experiences which, however rare, are still possible or probable. And
these stories of real people and actual experiences have their value for
the children--their own value, first of all, as making a distinct
contribution to the child's education, and another value as tending to
counteract and balance the effects of the thoroughgoing romances. No one
questions the fact that there are ill effects from too much romance and
too many marvels. A child's vision of the world does become distorted if
it is too often or too long organized upon a plan dominated by the
wonderful or the fantastic; his sense of fact dulled, if his imagination
is called upon to appreciate and to produce prevailingly the unusual
combinations; his taste vitiated, if he is supplied too abundantly with
those striking and super-emotional incidents which fill the romances.
All these dangers are counteracted in part by the child's fact-studies,
and by his experiences in actual life. But this is not sufficient; it is
artistically due him that the antidote should have the same kind of
charm as the original poison. It is well, too, to bear in mind that even
the small children should be appealed to on several sides, and that
their taste should be made as catholic as possible. One is sorry to find
a child of eight or ten who likes only fairy-tales, or war-stories, or
detective stories; he should like all stories.
But we are more interested, naturally, in the positive services
performed by the stories of real life; or to be more explicit, those
stories told with the effect of actuality, and with the atmosphere of
verisimilitude. Of course, we should require of these stories good form
and good writing, so that we may expect from them on that side what we
expect from any good literature. In addition, we may expect them to
perform for the children and for all of us certain distinctive artistic
services. First, they operate to throw back upon actual life the glow of
art. Those stories which use people and circumstances that we can match
in our own actual surroundings and experiences impress upon us most
vividly the fact, so important for our real culture both in art and in
life, that literature is in a very real sense a presentation of life;
that these charming people and things are but images taken up from the
real world, chosen and raised to this level, by which very process they
are invested with a halo of beauty and distinction. This nimbus of art
casts back upon life some of its own radiance, dignifying and enriching
it, and to many minds revealing for the first time beauty and meaning
which they would otherwise never have seen; so that we truly see and
rightly interpret many of the people and things in our own lives only
after we have seen the mates of them in a story or a poem. A group of
children who had been helped to make a verse about rosy radishes, and
had then done a water-color picture of a plate of the same vegetable,
found for many days new and artistic joy in a grocer's window. The same
children, having learned Lowell's phrase of the dandelion's "dusty
gold," were not satisfied till they had made a beautiful phrase to
render the burnished gold of the butter-cups. The same class on a picnic
labored with ardor to make a beautiful verse about Uneeda biscuits and
ginger-ale, to match the Persian's "A Jug of Wine, a Loaf of Bread."
They were much baffled when they finally concluded that it would not
go--that these modern and specific articles refused to wear a halo.
The obverse and counterpart of this glow caught by the actual world from
art is the vital interest that surrounds a person, or an object, or a
sentiment which we come upon in a poem or a story, and which we
recognize as corresponding to something in our own experience--a
recognition all the more satisfying if the correspondence be that of
actual identity. Every teacher of younger children recalls at once the
tingling interest they feel in practically every story they are told, as
some incident or detail parallels or suggests something they have
known--"My father has seen a bear;" "Once I found an eagle's feather;"
"There are daffodils in my grandmother's garden." A little girl of ten
had been given a very simple arrangement of a melody from Beethoven's
_Fifth Symphony_ to play on the piano. Soon after she had learned it,
she was taken to hear the symphony. When her melody came dropping in
from the flutes and violins--birds and brooks and whispering leaves--she
threw up at her friend a flash of radiant surprise and delight. Her
whole soul stirred to see here--in this stately place, with the great
orchestra, in the noble assemblage of glorious concords--her friend,
her little song. For days she played it over many times every day, with
the greatest tenderness of expression.
The wise teacher sees in this eager recognition and identification one
of the most desirable results of literary experience, and utilizes it as
the most precious of educational opportunities, since this mood of
delighted recognition is with the younger children also the mood of
creation, and with the older children the most useful and practical clue
to the finding of their own literary material.
It is in this kind of story--those that reflect the events of actual
life and are concerned with ordinary people--that we are able to
introduce our children in art to their contemporaries and coevals. It
means much for a child's consciousness that he should develop a quick
and dramatic sympathy with lives other than his own, and yet like his
own--with the experiences and characters of other children, other folks'
ways of living. This sympathy is among the literary products, since it
is best developed and fostered by literature; this because it is
literature only, that handles its material in that concrete and
emotional way which produces the impression of actual reality and serves
as a substitute for it. Teach the little children Stevenson's
Little Indian, Sioux or Crow,
Little frosty Eskimo,
Little Turk or Japanese,
and teach it with the natural implications that will occur to any
teacher of expedients, and you will have taught them a certain attitude
of confidential understanding toward their brown brothers (in spite of
the decidedly chauvinistic character of this masterpiece) that they
would not have got out of a year of social history.
The difficulties of choosing stories of modern child-life for teaching
in school are serious. They are most likely to be thin in material,
flimsy in structure, trivial in style, sentimental in atmosphere, so
that they fall to pieces under the test of study in a class of acute and
questioning children. It is best not to choose any long book of this
sort. For the younger children use the shorter bits of story, such as
may be found in Laura Richards' _Five Minute Stories_, or such as any
teacher may collect for herself from many sources; occasionally one may
find a perfect specimen in one of the children's periodicals, and there
is now a wealth of such things in verse. We must be wary of those books
about children, interpretative of children, of which our own day has
produced so many charming specimens, whose appeal is entirely to
adults. Such are Pater's _The Child in the House_, and Kenneth Graham's
_The Golden Age_. Part of _A Child's Garden of Verses_ is of this kind.
Of this sort, too, is the pretty little _Emmy Lou_, an interpretation of
a child's consciousness, not a children's story.
The general question of the reading of juveniles will be left for a
chapter of miscellanies farther on. It is not possible to make any long
book about children the center of a class's work. Such material is best
used as a sort of reserve, a recreation from time to time, and is best
given in short stories that can be read at intervals; or if it be a long
story, one that can be distributed among the other reading. It is true
of this kind of story too, that the best results come of using material
not made especially for children, but which appeals to children,
however, because it appeals to universal and elemental human nature.
Among the folk-tales are many of the realistic type that are most
serviceable. Like the folk fairy-tales they have that mysteriously but
truly universal appeal, which makes them childlike, though originally
they were not made for children. They are those comic and realistic
tales which may originally have been coarse, but which have been refined
by years and winnowed by use until they have taken on a form and value
like those of some piece of ancient peasant hand-work--they are simple,
genuine, homely art. Such are _Kluge Else_, _Hans in Luck_, _Great Claus
and Little Claus_, _The Three Sillies_ and all the delightful company of
noodles, and the great family of plain folks with their homely affairs.
Of course, the great classic of the realistic method suited for children
is _Robinson Crusoe_. From the days of Rousseau who designated it as the
one book to be given to his ideally educated child, teachers have
appreciated its value. Indeed, a very curious, but not unnatural, thing
has happened, in the fact that this book has been so long and closely
associated with children that it has come to be considered a sort of
nursery classic, a wonder-tale composed for infants, by hosts of people
who have no idea that it is in reality a masterly realistic novel and a
profoundly philosophical culture-document--an epoch-making piece of art.
Fortunately, it is easy to prepare it for the children; it is largely a
matter of leaving out the reflective passages, and of translating into
modern English the very few phrases and turns of expression now
obsolete. One would deplore the reduction of the story for any purpose
to mere babble--to words of one syllable, or any other form that
destroys the flavor of Defoe's convincing style. It is easy to arrange
the experiences so that the story serves the purposes of a cycle--a
single experience constituting a portion which may be treated as a
complete thing; for example, the making of the baskets, the construction
of the pots, the saving of the seed.
_Robinson Crusoe_ is a treasure to many a grade teacher, because it
really "correlates" beautifully with work that the children are doing,
or might well be doing, in the third and fourth grades; whether in their
history study, where they are devising food and shelter, or have
advanced to the study of trades and crafts; or, under an entirely
different scheme, have started on the study of voyagers and colonists.
The art and the charm of _Robinson Crusoe_, and the secret of its
literary value for the child, lie in the power of the sheer realism--a
realism not so much of material as of method--to hold and convince us. A
part of this realism is the richness and homeliness of detail; the
painstaking record of failures and tentative achievements; the calm,
judicial view of experiments; the colorless flow of long periods of
time; the homely, and as it were domestic, worth of Crusoe's successes.
Oh, it is a great and convincing book! How great and how convincing one
may realize when he reads the only one of the innumerable "Robinsons,"
taking their inspiration from Defoe's book, that really survives--the
_Swiss Family Robinson_, with its facile and too often fatuous ease of
accomplishment, its total lack of reality, its stupid and blundering
didacticism, its impossible jumble of detail, its commonplace romance;
yet, we must reluctantly add, its unfailing charm for the children. That
a book with all these faults keeps its hold upon the successive
generations of children is testimony to the fact that its basis of
interest, which is also for children the essential interest of _Robinson
Crusoe_--the old foundation process of getting fire and roof and coat
and bread--is the romance that is forever fresh and thrilling.
The exceedingly thoroughgoing realism of the method (notice, not the
large frame-work, which is sufficiently romantic) of _Robinson Crusoe_
would suggest at once that it might profitably be accompanied by some
bits of literature that would throw a more romantic and idealistic
coloring upon the primitive craftsman and his craft, and upon the
experiences of voyager and colonist. Such would be Bret Harte's
_Columbus_, Mrs. Hemans' _The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers_, Marvell's
_Bermudas_ (with a few difficult lines omitted). Longfellow's _Jasper
Becerra_, the twenty-third Psalm, and several chapters from _Treasure
Island_. Every teacher could add other titles.
The older children--those of the seventh and eighth grades--may
profitably read in school, for the sake of the intellectual experience,
a classic detective story or a story whose plot and evolution present an
almost purely intellectual problem. It is true that the air of
intellectual acumen that pervades most of these stories is specious, and
that they are in reality, and as a rule, shallow and unlogical pieces of
reasoning. But it takes an older and more expert person to see this for
himself. The teacher should try to qualify his children for judging a
good story of this kind, and save them, if possible, from the
detective-story habit, which wastes much good time and fills a child's
mind with very cheap problems. But if he choose a good story of this
kind for reading with his class, he may help to set their minds going in
that region where the imagination must ally itself with logic and with a
reasoned and inevitable progress of events. Properly channeled, this is
a most valuable experience, both from the purely mental and from the
literary points of view. After all, the best detective story in English
is Poe's _The Gold Bug_. There is, of course, that element in _Treasure
Island_, but, being there so interwoven with the romantic and
adventurous details of that delectable tale, it is not likely to yield
for the children that peculiar bit of training which they might get
from the more unmixed intellectuality and more obvious realism of _The
Gold Bug_.
It is difficult to know what to say, and where to say it, concerning
_Don Quixote_. That triumphant book is assuredly a masterpiece of the
realistic method. It came as an antidote and tonic, helping to restore
health and sanity to a romance-sick world, and it ought to have a place
in the discipline of certain kinds of young people. But it cannot be
said that this place is always within the elementary period, unless a
certain grade or certain children have had a peculiar experience and can
be said to need it. If the grade has had the King Arthur stories of
Malory or Tennyson in large amounts with a very earnest teacher, they
can very certainly be said to need _Don Quixote_--always, of course,
shortened and expurgated, and in carefully chosen episodes; from which
process--such is its essential greatness, and such the character of its
unity--it suffers less than any other story in the world. We should be
quite aware of the danger of giving the children any large amount of
this peculiar kind of realism--that which constitutes itself a satire
and a sort of parody on some over-serious bit of romance. Nothing is
more deadening and more commonplace than this peculiar form of wit,
when it becomes a habit or offers itself in a mass. But the peculiar
vitality and richness of _Don Quixote_ lifts it far above the level of
parody, constituting it a magnificent original piece of art in itself.
However, the whole question must be left open. It may be that not until
he is far along in the secondary school or in college is the scholar
suffering for _Don Quixote_, or capable of appreciating it.
Among the older children the note of realism and wit may be sounded in a
wisely chosen essay. Of course, they are not ready for the indirect and
allusive manner, nor for the lyric egoism, of the pure literary essay.
But there are essays of Lamb's, a very few of Steele's, some of Sidney
Smith's, some of the more literary of Burroughs' nature-studies, bits of
Oliver Wendell Holmes and Charles Dudley Warner, that are ideal for
them.
Shall we sum up by saying that, on the whole, we find the romantic and
fanciful stories best suited in form and spirit to the elementary
children; since realistic stories that are really good art, are, as a
rule, too mature and too difficult for the children, and realistic
stories of the juvenile type are not good enough either in form or in
content to justify long class study? However, certain distinctive and
desirable results may be expected from specimens interwoven here and
there of that kind of story which represents real life, which uses
events both possible and probable, and which handles its material by the
method of realistic detail. In the earliest years these may be secured
by the reading of well-chosen little stories of modern children--indeed,
of any modern material, provided it be simple enough--and by the
teaching of verses which reflect aspects of actual life--human life or
nature. In the third or fourth grade _Robinson Crusoe_ forms a desirable
basis for the year's work. It should always be accompanied by shorter
bits of a more romantic and heroic type. Later in the elementary
period--say in the sixth or seventh grade--the reasonable and practical
element may be introduced in the form of a story of the detective
kind--a story whose plot presents an intellectual problem, whose
atmosphere and method make the impression of actual fact. And in the
seventh and eighth grade these same purposes--that of exhibiting to the
children actual human life as art sees it, that of bringing them into
educational contact with the realistic method, that of counteracting any
possible mental danger from too much romance and adventure--may be
served by essays chosen on principles already many times suggested.