NATURE AND ANIMAL STORIES
In a discussion of these stories we should again take to ourselves the
warning that we must guard constantly and carefully against too narrow a
view of literature. The reckless lack of knowledge and experience that
sweeps into the category of literature everything expressed in words is
so irritating to a careful student that he is always in danger of
allowing his irritation to help carry him to the other extreme--that of
an uncatholic exclusiveness. We must, however, be aware of the fact that
other kinds of writing, entirely technical and special in their simpler
varieties, are constantly approaching the borders of literature, as they
become more and more humanized, draw about them more and more of
emotional association, and take on more of the graces of the arts of
writing. We must be aware of this, and we must be, as it were,
constantly on the lookout for a possible new arrival among the kinds of
literature, and be prepared to give it hospitality; and we must
acknowledge that some of the results which we desire to accomplish
through genuine literature are accomplished through those things that
have only some of the characteristics of literature. But still, for the
sake of the good pedagogical and critical conscience, and for the sake
of keeping the fundamental distinctions as clear as possible, the
teacher needs to know precisely what he is doing when he is using this
material. He must decide, in the very earliest years of a child's
education, whether he is teaching facts and theories, or presenting art,
in his story.
The custom of using animals and plants to represent human beings and to
express human meanings is as old as folk-art itself. Quite as old, too,
is the revelation that the creatures have individualities and
personalities of their own to be dramatically and sympathetically set
forth in terms of human psychology, in default of a truer one. The mind
of man goeth not back to the time when the fox, the cock, and the
ass--Reynard, Chanticleer, and Brunel--the rabbit, the eagle, the oak,
and the vine, were not well-defined characters, well provided with
affairs. But this early folk treatment of the creatures was distinctly
art, occasionally morals, but not science. It did not aim to teach the
facts as to the structure and habits of the creatures as life-forms. It
interpreted human life through them or them by means of human terms.
Precisely here we must begin our discrimination between real literature
and "nature-stories." The longing to pass down to the infant mind the
results of scientific discovery has produced in our generation (perhaps
it was really produced in the generation preceding ours) an enormous
crop of most anomalous growths in this field of nature-stories. A
favorite method of teaching a child the facts about any object or
process in nature has been to translate it into a story of human
affairs, or draw it up as a picture of a human situation, involving
naturally and inevitably, a multitude of extraneous or misleading
details. For example, we would teach a child about the distribution of
the dandelion plant. So we construct the "Story of the Dandelion Seed."
Now, there undoubtedly is a _story_ of the dandelion seed. Incident
follows incident, stage follows stage, from bloom to bloom again--every
step beautiful and interesting in itself, and to be completely trusted
to make its own appeal, just displayed for itself. But some people doubt
this. They have lost, or have never acquired, that faith in nature and
her processes which trusts to this appeal; and then they long--and this
is quite natural--to enlist in aid of their fact-studies the charm and
the emotion that lies in literature. So they endow the Dandelion Seed
with a papa and a mama--a jovial suburbanite of a papa, and a fussy,
sentimentalizing mama--with a cradle, with a vocabulary, with a system
of morals (there are even "naughty" Dandelion Seeds), and with many
feelings. They tell about his "home," his infancy, his training, his
departure, his settling in a new home--all the while with the intention
of teaching their infants the facts, but all the while covering them up
under a trivial and unnecessary myth. In the end the product is scorned
by science for its overlay of misleading detail, and rejected by art for
the obnoxious intrusion of work-a-day and professional fact. Now, let
who will believe that such stories and verses are a legitimate way of
conveying or of illuminating scientific fact; but let him not suppose
that they are literature. The case is different when the teacher of fact
happens to find in art, in real literature, some picture or detail with
which to emotionalize and beautify his fact. It does sometimes happen
that the poem, the folk-tale, the fable, has set in some charming human
light certain aspects of the object which the children are studying.
They are entitled to these to help them to see their object or event in
the round.
It is true, of course, that no piece of literature that handles for its
purposes natural objects can afford to be flagrantly inaccurate. We all
know how neatly John Burroughs punctured Longfellow's bit of pathos,
"There are no birds in last year's nests," by proving that many species
of birds devote themselves to securing and occupying last year's nests.
But in the main it is truth rather than fact that literature gives
us--truth, or fact colored and interpreted by personal association and
emotion; we must not ask colorless fact of her, and it is the most
unprofitable quibbling to demand of her scientific exactness, which is
always prosaic. On the other hand, there is no place in nature-study for
the imagination of invention, nor for any of those striking and dramatic
effects arranged and calculated, secured by manipulation and choice of
material--effects which are the very native method of literature.
But writing about animals and objects in nature may become literature
when, losing sight of the need of teaching fact, of giving professional
instruction, it presents them as personalities, when it humanizes them,
either by attributing to them human qualities and feelings, or by
surrounding them with an atmosphere of human emotion and experience; it
may become good literature when it does these things well; the chances
are all against its becoming great literature at all.
If the nature-story making use of literary devices, but designed to
teach scientific fact, is anomalous, the case is no better, artistically
or educationally, when the story of an animal is made the propaganda of
the Humane Society, or of the anti-vivisectionists, or of any other
believers, no matter how just and important may be their belief or
doctrine. I have known a child whose outlook was prejudiced, and whose
mental repose most seriously disturbed, by an over-earnest and
over-colored story of the sufferings of a deserving and phenomenally
sensitive cab-horse; and this morbid sense of suffering was the result
of reading a book whose style was commonplace, whose structure was
chaotic, whose sentiment was melodramatic, and whose psychology was
guesswork--which did not yield, in a word, a single one of the desirable
fruits of literature. We must devise some way to preserve and to deepen
in our little people that humorous, loving sympathy with our furry and
hairy brothers, more wholesome and natural than stories of suicidal
ponies, revolutionary stallions, persecuted partridges, and heart-broken
mastiffs. Better than any library of books about them is the friendship
of one dog or horse, or the care of any, the humblest, pet. And at least
we may remind ourselves that we do not have to accomplish the awakening
of that or any other sympathy at the cost of teaching as literature
stories undesirable and inartistic.
The oldest of beast-tales available for occidental children is the story
of Reynard the Fox. We all know how there grew up about the original
core of the story a vast accretion of material, which became ever more
and more satirical and abstract, until finally the original folk-cycle
was buried under it. Of course, in the later forms the tales are most
unchildlike. But it is not so difficult to extract from the cycle the
original simpler one--or at least to get together a cycle which has the
simplicity, the sincerity, and the objectivity of genuine folk-art. The
children love the tales, and get so much out of them that it is a pity
for any child to miss them completely; though I should never advise that
many of the tales be read to them continuously. To do this would be to
immerse them in an atmosphere of trickery. It is better to keep the
story lying by, and to read them an episode now and then in the
intervals of something more serious. Many people will question the moral
effect of stories in which the rascal uniformly triumphs, as in
_Reynard_. But I have observed, among the children with whom I have read
it, that they are never in sympathy with Reynard, and are never pleased
with his triumphs. This is in striking, and in some respects puzzling,
contrast with the fact that the triumphs and successes of Bre'r Rabbit
in _Uncle Remus_ always delight the children. The tales that Joel
Chandler Harris has assembled in this collection constitute a most
charming and usable beast-epic. The universal sympathy with this hero
may be encouraged and enjoyed without misgiving, because Bre'r Rabbit
succeeds by subtlety, where Reynard succeeds by knavery. Bre'r Rabbit's
triumphs are those of sheer intellect, as truly as are those of
Odysseus, while Reynard's are those of low and cruel cunning. It is
impossible to exaggerate the access of charm and interest that invest
the _Uncle Remus_ stories because of Uncle Remus himself. He is the
genuine folk story-teller, full of faith and sincerity, yet steeped in
humor, and gifted with the sense of essential reality; add to this that
he is a gentle soul, a devoted lover of childhood, with a never-failing
sense of the reverence due the child. While to those who know the negro
dialect the stories lose much by translation, still they are good enough
to bear even this test, and such translation is necessary for some
groups of children. Like the Reynard tales, those of Bre'r Rabbit are
best inserted here and there throughout the year and not read in a mass.
The fables--all those oriental and classic ones that are called
Aesop's, as well as many of La Fontaine's--are, from the literary point
of view the best of the animal stories. Leave quite out of view their
moralistic and figurative meanings, and most of them are sympathetic and
dramatic presentations of the animals themselves, with those wider human
implications that make an anecdote about an animal literature rather
than science. The family or the schoolroom that can possess a copy of
Boutet de Monvel's _La Fontaine_ has in the pictures the most charming
and penetrating criticism and interpretation of the fables themselves,
of the animals who appear in them, and of the motives and experiences
that lie behind them.
Scattered throughout the folk-tales and among the fairy-stories that we
know best are some fascinating animal stories. The folk-mind is always
impressed in an imaginative way with the relation between man and the
animals--not always a loving or sympathetic relation. They feel, what
the modern writing humanitarian seems to have determined to ignore, that
deep, psychic, inscrutable animosity, be it instinct or race-memory or
whatever it may be, that has always existed between man and the beasts;
though there are among practically all the folk whose tales we have
collected, stories of "grateful beasts," of friendly and serviceable
animals. Then there are such classics as _The Little Red Hen_,
_Henny-Penny_, _The Three Billy-Goats_, and _The Musicians of Bremen_,
whose perfection of art as stories and as presentations of life is
beyond criticism.
The native stories of many of the North American Indian tribes have a
charming way of presenting the animals. Unfortunately, most of our
Indian folk-lore was collected and reduced to literary form in what one
may call the _blaue Blume_ period of folk-lore collecting, and is
spoiled everywhere by the oversentimental strain of the period. We could
well spare an occasional account of what one might infer to be a common
habit of love-lorn Indian maidens--that of casting themselves headlong
from inaccessible cliffs at sunset,--to make room for some of the
humorous and fanciful tales of the animals that the Indians knew so well
and to which they lived so near. The Zuni folk-tales collected by Frank
Cushing have much of this element in them, and it constitutes one of
their many charms.
East Indian folk-lore is peculiarly rich in tales of animals--fables,
bits of beast-wisdom and beast-adventure. It may be that this fact
co-operated with his own gift to make Rudyard Kipling the greatest of
all modern makers of animal-stories. The _Jungle Books_ stand unique
and imperishable as one of the perfect art-products of the nineteenth
century. Like everything else that is true art, these stories never
become stale. This gives them a peculiar value. For the children who
have had them at home are always willing to hear them again with the
class. We can read them _to_ the third grade for the story, and _with_
the sixth grade for the style, and the eighth grade is not above hearing
_Toomai of the Elephants_ at any time. The teacher himself will find
unfailing satisfaction in them because, in addition to all their charms
as interpretations of the beasts and presentation of human nature, they
show all the marks of expert workmanship. This appears in the masterly
structure of the story, the organization of the material, the economy of
incident, the successful style which combines in a most unusual way, a
reserve and finish that would become a literary essayist, with a power
of vivid and striking phrase that characterizes the most successful
journalist. So that teacher and children are both interested and
disciplined by every reading of the _Jungle Books_.
Among all their verse literature, from the Mother Goose melodies to
Wordsworth in the eighth grade, the children will find poems about
animals. A catalogue of the nursery and fairy-book animals is a very
instructive document--indeed, a catalogue of poetical beasts in general,
is very illuminating. All the verses about animals that have come down
to us in the traditionary jingles are good as art and on the whole, fair
to the animals. "Baa, Black Sheep," "The Mouse Ran Up the Clock,"
"Johnny Shuter's Mare," and all the others, yield the fruits of
literature, but only after much torturing, the fruits of science.
Gradually to these we add such as Cowper's tame but touching pictures of
his pets; Wordsworth's tender and far-seeing poems about the shepherds
and their flocks, the doe and the hart, the pet lamb, the faithful dogs;
Blake's wonderful pair of poems, "The Tiger" and "The Lamb;" Mary Lamb's
exquisite picture of the boy and the snake; Emerson's "The Bumble Bee;"
those splendid imaginative characterizations of the beasts from the
thirty-eighth to the forty-first chapters of Job; "The Jackdaw of
Rheims;" "How They Brought the Good News." Why extend the actual list?
They are all things that place the animals which appear in them in their
romantic or tender relations to human beings, or interpret in a dramatic
and literary way the imaginary consciousness of the animal.
There is little danger of making poetry that is good enough to be given
as poetry, do the work of information-teaching. It seems easy to see in
the case of the poem, with its more imaginative method and its more
artificial form, that you spoil it as art when you teach it as science.
This fact is equally true of a good literary story.