makes it suitable for telling to children, as in “Hansel and Gretel.”
The ending Humperdinck uses in his opera, wherein the old witch turns to
gingerbread instead of being baked in the oven by the orphans, is far
better ethically than the original one, yet the elemental part of the
story is left unspoiled. Narrators cannot be too careful in this respect;
for the function of story-telling is to refine rather than to brutalize,
to give pleasure and not to shock, and there is no excuse for using tales
that corrupt or injure in any way when there are enough lovely ones to
satisfy every normal desire of the child. Let the test of selection
be the question, Does this story contain an element or picture that
will shock a sensitive child or whet the cruel tendencies of a rough,
revengeful one? If it does, do not use it even though the list of fairy
tales may be reduced to a very limited one, but choose the other material
for this period from the lore of science that will feed the fancy and
not warp the soul or distort the character. (See Part II, Chapter XVI,
“Story-Telling to Intensify Interest in Nature Study.”)
BIBLIOGRAPHY OF FAIRY TALES
ANDERSEN, HANS CHRISTIAN: _Wonder Stories Told to Children_.
ASBJØRNSEN, PETER CHRISTEN: _Fairy Tales from the Far North_.
BALLARD, SUSAN: _Fairy Tales from Far Japan_.
BLUMENTHAL, VERRA X. K. DE: _Folk Tales from the Russian_.
BUNCE, JOHN THACKERAY: _Fairy Tales: Their Origin and Meaning_.
CHODZKO, ALEXANDER E. B.: _Fairy Tales of the Slav Peasants and
Herdsmen_.
CROKER, THOMAS CROFTON: _Legends and Fairy Tales of Ireland_.
CURTIN, JEREMIAH: _Myths and Folk Tales of the Russians,
Western Slavs, and Magyars_.
DUMAS, ALEXANDRE: _Black Diamonds_; _The Golden Fairy Book_.
EDWARDS, CHARLES LINCOLN: _Bahama Songs and Stories_.
FORTIER, ALCÉE: _Louisiana Folk Tales_.
GRAVES, ALFRED PERCEVAL: _The Irish Fairy Book_.
GRIMM, JACOB: _German Household Tales_.
HAIGHT, RACHEL WEBB: _Index of Fairy Tales_.
HARTLAND, E. SIDNEY: _The Science of Fairy Tales_.
JACOBS, JOSEPH: _Europa’s Fairy Book_; _English Fairy Tales_;
_Celtic Fairy Tales_.
KEIGHTLEY, THOMAS: _Fairy Mythology_.
KENNEDY, HOWARD ANGUS: _The New World Fairy Book_.
LABOULAYE, EDOUARD RENÉ: _The Fairy Book_; _Last Fairy Tales_.
LANG, ANDREW: _The Blue Fairy Book_; _The Orange Fairy Book_;
_The Lilac Fairy Book_; _The Green Fairy Book_; _The Yellow
Fairy Book_; _The Red Fairy Book_.
MACDONNELL, ANNE: _The Italian Fairy Book_.
MACMANUS, SEUMAS: _Donegal Fairy Stories_.
MITFORD, FREEMAN: _Tales of Old Japan_.
OZAKI, YEI THEODORA: _Japanese Fairy Tales_.
PERRAULT, CHARLES: _Tales for Children from Many Lands_.
PYLE, HOWARD: _The Wonder Clock_.
RAMASWAMI RAJU: _Indian Fables_.
SCUDDER, HORACE E.: _The Children’s Book_.
SHARMAN, LYON: _Bamboo: Tales of the Orient-born_.
SKEAT, WALTER W.: _Fables and Folk Tales from an Eastern
Forest_.
STANLEY, HENRY M.: _My Dark Companions and Their Strange
Stories_.
STEELE, FLORA A.: _Tales from the Punjab_.
TAPPAN, EVA MARCH: _The Golden Goose_.
WILLISTON, TERESA: _Japanese Fairy Tales_.
WRATISLAW, A. H.: _Slavonian Fairy Tales_.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE STORY INTERESTS OF CHILDHOOD (_Continued_)
C. HEROIC PERIOD
When the child leaves the imaginative period, he enters another realm
of realism. The fairy world is no longer a place of enchantment to him.
He is now in a condition corresponding to that of primitive man when he
was not satisfied to sit by the tribal fire and listen to stories about
creatures who personified the elements, but fared forth on the path of
adventure, eager to know what lay beyond the lodge place of his people,
feverish with desire to conquer and remove whatever obstructed his way.
The barbaric, fighting instinct manifests itself, and in many children a
destructive curiosity is apparent. They long to repeat the experiences
of their ancestors in this same period. They want to live through nights
of danger and days of daring, and since the juvenile court and probation
officers hover Argus-eyed about them, ready to swoop down upon every
lad who would go pirating or pathfinding, the nearest approach to the
experience consists in listening to and in reading tales of adventure.
This age is usually from about eight to twelve, although there are no
tightly drawn lines of demarcation. Individual cases differ, and some
children of ten are still delighted by fairy tales, while other lads of
seven are well into the heroic period. Broadly speaking, however, this
period begins about the age of eight.
There is no time in the child life during which the story-teller has a
finer opportunity of sowing seeds that shall come into splendid fruition
by and by than in the heroic period, and because parents and teachers do
not realize this fact clearly enough, boys read stories whose tendency
is to brutalize and lead them into trouble. It does not follow, because
they are drawn as steel to steel to such literature, that the boys are
depraved. They crave action, danger, daring. It is a cry of nature
that cannot be silenced, and because the hunger is not satisfied in a
wholesome way, they go where they can find the food they must have, for
numerous doors are open to them.
Dozens of writers are doing pernicious work for the youth of the country
by pouring forth a flood of adventure stories, perhaps not with malicious
intent, but with the little knowledge that often brings dire results.
Knowing the demand for the heroic, they write yarns whose only claim to
recognition is a clever, spectacular plot. These books embody no ideals,
and the aspirations they arouse had better be left to slumber. Sometimes,
as a result of such reading, boys run away from home to fight Indians
or turn pirate, and many a lad has begun a career of lawlessness ending
in crime, who with a little direction might have been an individual
of value to the world. Such cases are so common that they have come
under the notice of almost every child worker, and the pity of it is
that literature is rich in tales that satisfy the adventure craving,
yet arouse high ideals and inspire to worth-while deeds. Instead of
originating in the brain of some modern craftsman who is actuated by
a desire for money-making, they grew out of the life of the race and
perpetuate the noblest traditions of the race.
Human nature is much the same in all climes and in all ages. Until
man reaches a very high state of enlightenment he is more thrilled by
manifestations of physical bravery than by mental and moral courage, and
he who possesses muscular strength is the hero in his eyes. A Hercules
or Samson is mightier to him than a Savonarola facing persecution with
sublime tenacity of purpose and dying steadfast to his ideal, because
he can understand the brute strength of the one, while the spiritual
fortitude of the other is beyond his comprehension. He is thrilled by
action, physical action, and he craves and will have literature every
page of which is colored by feats of prowess.
It is useless to try to substitute something else for children in this
period. When we hunger for bread and meat, after-dinner mints will not
satisfy, even though they be very delectable confections. This ravenous
appetite of boys and girls must be satisfied, and if they are to grow
into well-balanced men and women we must feed it with wholesome food
instead of allowing them to roam unguided and eat of that which poisons.
There is no finer adventure tale in any literature than that of Robin
Hood, none more satisfying to children in the early heroic period. This
statement often brings a cry of remonstrance, and the objection is made
that there is danger in portraying an outlaw as a hero, or in picturing
the allurement of a brigandish career. But Robin Hood an outlaw? He lived
in an age of injustice when might made right. The man of the people was
but the chattel of a king, with no rights his lord was bound to respect.
Bold Robin, in the depths of Sherwood Forest, devoted his life to
redressing wrongs. He took from the oppressor and gave to the oppressed.
He strove to stamp out injustice and tyranny, and his spirit is the
foundation of the democracy that underlies every just government today.
He was an outlaw, not because he was a criminal, but because he rebelled
against the monstrous injustice of his age and strove to ameliorate the
condition of the poor and downtrodden. In the time of Henry the Second he
was hunted like a deer, but in the twentieth century he would be honored
as a great reformer.
Robin’s sense of justice appeals to boys and girls, and his fearlessness
and kindliness awaken their admiration. They respond sympathetically
to the story from the opening chapter, when he enters the forest and
Little John joins his band, through the closing one where the hero of the
greenwood goes to his final rest. If the tale is told with emphasis upon
the true spirit of Robin Hood instead of with a half apology, it will
prove wholesome food for the children and will help to make them juster,
kinder, and more democratic men and women.
The national epics are splendid sources of story material for children
in the heroic period, especially those originating in Teutonic lands and
those formalized among nations not yet in a high state of civilization.
Their characters are elemental, and their incidents appeal to boys and
girls. Some of the stories of King Arthur and his knights, of Beowulf, of
Sigurd the Volsung, of Frithjof, of Pwyll, hero of the Welsh Mabinogion,
as well as many from the Nibelungenlied, the Iliad, and the Odyssey,
can also be used with excellent results. Naturally the tales of an
elemental type should be chosen first rather than those that are more
highly refined and poetic. It has been my experience that the Mabinogion
is enjoyed before the Arthuriad. Boys, especially, delight in hearing
of Pwyll, lord of the Seven Countries of Dyved, and the adventures that
befell him as he hunted in the forests of his dominions. These stories
are of very ancient origin and are simple, strong, and dramatic. They
were sung by harpers (mabinogs) in the castle halls of Wales, and finally
were gathered into the Mabinogion, which was done into English by Lady
Charlotte Gest. The story-teller will find _The Boy’s Mabinogion_, by
Sidney Lanier, an excellent handbook for this period, as it embodies the
most desirable of this ancient Gaelic material, and is put into modern
form by an artist.
Follow the Mabinogion with the less poetic of the King Arthur stories.
The account of how Arthur won his sword and became king, of Percival
and the Red Knight, and of Arthur fighting the giant mean more to the
ten-year-old than does Sir Galahad and the Holy Grail. The Greek myths
too should be drawn from during this period—not the highly poetic,
finished tales of the Hellenes, but the elemental ones whose heroes
are rugged characters that awaken child admiration. Hercules, Perseus,
Achilles, and several other demigods vie for honors with King Arthur and
Beowulf in the mind of the fourth-grade boy, and the story-teller should
not fail to draw from the rich field of southern literature as well
as from that of the north. But let her exercise care in selection and
keep to the realm of heroism instead of entering that of romance. Such
stories as “Cupid and Psyche,” “Pygmalion and Galatea,” and “Apollo and
Daphne” mean little to boys and girls of ten, yet teachers and librarians
often use them and wonder why their audiences respond with so little
enthusiasm. There are those who contend that all the epical stories
should be given in simplified form during this period, but why spoil the
romantic, poetic ones which are so much more enjoyed a little later and
so much better understood, when there are hundreds that can be given
without pruning them to the heart? Certain investigations and statistics
show that the telling of the highly refined Greek myths to boys and girls
in the early heroic period gives an erroneous idea of Greek standards,
and dulls an interest in mythology later on. The story-teller should
bear this fact in mind, and remember that literature rich in symbolism
and formulated among people refined to a degree of æstheticism is not
the literature to give to adventure-craving children, no matter to what
simple language it may be reduced.
Splendidly dramatic is the tale of Roland and Oliver, which every boy
loves, of Ogier the Dane, and of some of the other heroes of the time
of Charlemagne. Children listen spellbound to the account of the first
meeting and disagreement of the two lads whose friendship makes such a
sweet and colorful story, and of Charles the Great in council with his
peers and knights, and delight in the swinging lines of the old ballad:
The emperor sits in an orchard wide,
Roland and Oliver by his side:
With them many a gallant lance,
Full fifteen thousand of gentle France.
Upon a throne of beaten gold
The lord of ample France behold:
White his hair and beard were seen,
Fair of body and proud of mien.
The story of Bayard is an admirable one for this period, as well as that
of the Spanish hero, the Cid; and “St. George and the Dragon” is always a
favorite.
I plead, too, that more of the narrator’s time be devoted to the telling
of our own American epic of _Hiawatha_. The answer comes, “That is read
in school.” To be sure it is, and one reason why it is read so badly and
appreciated so little is that it was not given in story form first. The
German child uses the Nibelungenlied as a classroom text, but before
he studies the epic he knows its tales. Gunther, Hagen, Siegfried, and
Dankwart are familiar characters to him, and consequently he enjoys the
poem.
The same principle applies to _Hiawatha_. If boys and girls are
acquainted with Hiawatha himself, if they know Nokomis and Chibiabos
and Kwasind and Iagoo before they are given the poem to study, it means
something to them that it cannot mean otherwise. Perhaps one reason why
Longfellow’s masterpiece has been so little used by story-tellers is
that the work of putting it into story form is a task with which the
non-professional is unable to cope. Now, however, an excellent retold
work is on the market—Winston’s _Story of Hiawatha_—which makes it
possible for every narrator to have her children know the American epic
as well as German young people know the Nibelungenlied.
In considering stories for the heroic period of childhood, let us not
forget the biographical and historical narratives that fulfill every
requirement of hero tales. Boys and girls love the epical stories because
they are true in spirit, but they love also those that are true in fact.
It is a mistake to think that biography is dull and uninteresting to
them, because stories of the boyhood of great men, great rulers, great
discoverers and path-finders, great lawgivers, painters, musicians, and
writers, are hero tales of the highest type. Many of them have been told
admirably for young people, and the narrator does no more valuable work
than when he uses them freely. Sir Walter Raleigh, De Soto, Coronado,
Frederick the Great, Napoleon, Garibaldi, Solyman the Magnificent, Robert
the Bruce, Kosciusko, William Wallace, William Tell, and dozens of others
are as fascinating as Beowulf or Hercules and have an influence even more
powerful, because children know that these heroes have actually lived.
Never mind what some authorities say about the man of Switzerland being
a mythical personage. Let American young people know him as those of the
Alpine land know him, as the defender of his ancient rights and native
mountains, the embodiment of the spirit of Helvetia. They will be finer
men and women because of it, and that, more than anything else, concerns
the story-teller.
Then, too, there are history tales, hundreds of them, from every age
and every land. There are brave deeds done by children that every child
should know. The little girl on the St. Lawrence, holding the blockhouse
of Vercheres against the Iroquois, the boy whose courage and presence of
mind saved Lucerne, the event through which William of Orange came to
be known as William the Silent, and many other similar narratives are
intensely interesting to boys and girls. Some of the Old Testament tales
belong in this period; for a detailed account of them see Chapter Twelve,
on “Bible Stories.”
At this age, when the adventure spirit runs high, when pathfinding and
Indian fighting are desired above all other things, how are we to keep
boys and girls from running away to lead such lives themselves? One way
is by letting them live the lives of the heroes who thrill them—in other
words, by dramatizing. It is the hunger for experience that causes boys
to turn vagabond, and juvenile-court records show that many of the ten-
and twelve-year-olds who are lured by the call of adventure come from
homes that offer nothing to feed the adventure craving, whereas those who
have some of the desired experiences at home are less likely to start out
seeking them. It is a wise mother who encourages her boys to make pirate
caves in their own back yards, to be youthful Crusoes, Kit Carsons,
Daniel Boones, and Robin Hoods for a Saturday morning, and the school
or public playground that provides for much out-of-door acting is doing
something that will prevent many evils. In some children this desire is
so strong that it is almost a fever, and if not satisfied in a wholesome
manner is likely to lead to lamentable ends. I remember how much it meant
to me in my own childhood, when I burned to lead the lives of some of the
heroes of whom I had read or heard, to be permitted to participate in the
Indian warfare of the neighborhood boys and be the maiden who was carried
away into captivity. It was such a blissful experience that I joyfully
contributed my small allowance to buy red ink for war paint and to help
costume the braves, and when a Sioux band came to town, I ecstatically
trudged after the wagon and lived for a day in a realm far removed from
my accustomed one. The boys had feeling to even a greater degree, and
who knows but that without this Indian play some of them might have gone
forth in search of adventure and become criminals, whereas every one is
now a law-abiding, useful citizen.
SOURCES OF STORY MATERIAL FOR THE HEROIC PERIOD
ANDERSON, RASMUS BJÖRN: _The Younger Edda_.
BALDWIN, JAMES: _The Story of Roland_; _American Book of Golden
Deeds_.
BOLTON, SARAH K.: _Poor Boys Who Became Famous_.
BRADISH, SARAH P.: _Old Norse Stories_.
BROOKS, ELBRIDGE S.: _Historic Girls_.
CHURCH, ALFRED J.: _Stories from the Iliad_; _Stories from the
Odyssey_.
COE, FANNIE E.: _Heroes of Everyday Life_.
FARMER, FLORENCE V.: _Boy and Girl Heroes_.
FOA, MADAME EUGÉNIE: _Boy Life of Napoleon_.
GRIERSON, E. W.: _Tales from Scottish Ballads_.
KINGSLEY, CHARLES: _Greek Heroes_.
LANG, JEANIE: _The Story of Robert the Bruce_; _The Story of
General Gordon_.
LANIER, SIDNEY: _The Boy’s Mabinogion_.
LANSING, M. F.: _Page, Esquire, and Knight_.
MABIE, H. W.: _Norse Stories from the Eddas_.
MARSHALL, H. E.: _The Story of William Tell_; _The Story of
Roland_.
MATTHEWS, AGNES R.: _Seven Champions of Christendom_ (St.
George and the Dragon).
MORRIS, WILLIAM: _Sigurd the Volsung_.
NEPOS, C.: _Tales of Great Generals_.
NIEBUHR, B. G.: _Greek Heroes_.
PYLE, HOWARD: _Some Merry Adventures of Robin Hood_; _Stories
of King Arthur and His Knights_.
RAGOZIN, Z. A.: _Siegfried and Beowulf_.
TAPPAN, EVA M.: _In the Days of Alfred the Great_; _In the Days
of William the Conqueror_.
WARREN, MAUDE RADFORD: _Robin Hood and His Merry Men_.
CHAPTER FIVE
THE STORY INTERESTS OF CHILDHOOD (_Continued_)
D. ROMANTIC PERIOD
At about the age of twelve or thirteen the child’s rougher instincts
begin to soften. Romance and sentiment develop. He becomes particular
about his appearance. It is less of a task than formerly to get the boy
to wash his face and hands, and he has not the antipathy toward civilized
attire that he had in the days when Robinson Crusoe was the hero.
Instead, he manifests a liking for being dressed according to prevailing
modes, sometimes changing so suddenly from a dirty cave dweller into a
dandy that it is like the metamorphosis from grub to butterfly. He craves
socks and ties of bright colors and clothes that attract attention. If
fashion prescribes peg-topped or straight, spare trousers, he wants them
extremely wide or extremely narrow, and is willing to have his chin
sawed unmercifully if high collars are the vogue, not because of a fit
of hysteria, but because he has entered the period when sex awakens. He
is becoming interested in the girls and wishes to be dressed in a manner
that will cause them to be interested in him; and very often his taste
for literature changes as completely as his personal habits. He desires
stories of a higher type of heroism than those he craved in an earlier
period, stories of romance and chivalry, and now is the time to give him
the epic in its entirety, because of the deep racial emotions therein
expressed.
He has had many of the adventure tales from the epics during the earlier
period. Now he is ready for those tinged with romance, those pervaded
by a spirit of fiery idealism in which knights risk limb and life in
loyalty to principle, for fealty to king, or in defense of some fair
lady. Percival seeking the Grail is a finer hero to him than Percival
battling with the Red Knight, and the vow of the men of the Round Table
means something because he can understand it. In a vague, indefinite way
romance is touching his own life, and his noblest emotions are awakened
by the noble words:
To reverence the king, as if he were
Their conscience, and their conscience as their king,
To break the heathen and uphold the Christ,
To ride abroad redressing human wrongs,
To speak no slander, no, nor listen to it,
To honor his own word as if his God’s,
To lead sweet lives in purest chastity,
To love one maiden only, cleave to her,
And worship her by years of noble deeds.
Boys and girls in the heroic period enjoyed only the Arthurian stories
that glorify physical bravery, those of jousting and conflict into which
women do not enter. But now they delight in such tales as those of
Geraint and Enid, of Launcelot and Elaine, and some of the adventures of
Tristram.
Here a word of caution is necessary. Like the Old Testament stories,
these romantic tales will arouse the noblest emotions and highest ideals
if given with wisdom, but if told thoughtlessly may create an almost
morbid desire for the vulgar. Therefore the non-professional narrator
should use for his work some retold version of the King Arthur tales
instead of adapting from _Le Morte d’Arthur_, because there is much in
the original that should be eliminated in presenting it to those in the
adolescent period. The Pyle or Radford editions are excellent, likewise
_The Boy’s King Arthur_, by Sidney Lanier, each of which keeps the spirit
of the poem, but omits everything objectionable.
The story of King Arthur, embracing as it does the Grail legend, should
be followed by the German tale of “Parsifal,”—not the Wagner opera
version, but the original medieval legend, “The Knightly Song of Songs”
of Wolfram von Eschenbach. This has been retold beautifully by Anna Alice
Chapin in _The Story of Parsifal_, a book with which every child in the
romantic period should be familiar. Miss Guerber, in her _Legends of the
Middle Ages_, relates the tale of Titurel and the Holy Grail, which will
be helpful to the narrator because of the light it throws on the origin
of the legend. But for a telling version there is none equal to that of
Miss Chapin, none in which the lofty chivalric spirit of the medieval
poem is portrayed so faithfully.
The romantic portion of all the national epics, as well as that of _Le
Morte d’Arthur_, is excellent material for the story-teller in the early
adolescent period. The Nibelungenlied, the Iliad, the Odyssey, and parts
of _Jerusalem Delivered_ feed boys and girls in the early teens as pure
adventure stories fed them a year or two before. And if the narrator
would have his young listeners enjoy the epical tales to the uttermost,
let him quote freely from the epic itself as he tells them. During this
age, when romance and sentiment run high and life is beheld through
a rainbow-hued glamour, poetry is a serious and beautiful thing. The
frequent interpolation of it into a story heightens the pleasure in that
story, and young people listen with the gleaming eyes of intense feeling
to words like these of Siegfried:
“Ever,” said he, “your brethren I’ll serve as best I may,
Nor once while I have being, will head on pillow lay,
Till I have done to please them whate’er they bid me do;
And this, my Lady Kriemhild, is all for love of you.”