In the days before books, when a tale was a tale, they knew how to conserve interest and economize material. When a hero had gained some popular favor, had established his character, had drawn about him a circle of friends, and had just proved himself worthy of our love, he was not lightly cast aside for a new and unknown hero. He was given new conquests, new sorrows were heaped upon him, new minstrels arose to sing his fame, until there gathered about him and his group of friends many, many songs and tales. Luckily, in many cases there came a great artist, bard or romancer, who gathered these scattered songs and tales together, gave them a greater or less coherence and something of unity, and so preserved them. Some of these cycles of hero-tales are adapted for the delight and discipline of the elementary children. From the cosy and homely atmosphere of the MÄrchen—the mother-and nurse-stories—they would pass naturally to the wider and bolder world of the epic tales. The spirit of these tales harmonizes easily with the general tone of their work. They are simple and bold in spirit, full of action, generous and noble in plan and idea; they conserve interest and attention by centering about a single person or a group; they are made up of separable adventures or incidents, which take shape, or with a little editing from the teacher may be made to take shape, as manageable and artistic wholes; it is easy to associate other bits of literature with them, because, in the first place, the tales themselves reflect aspects of life and nature that have appealed to artists in all ages, and because they have themselves inspired many more modern artists. It is therefore easy to constitute one of these cycles the center of the work in literature for some long period—in some cases for a whole year—joining to it such harmonious or contrasted bits of literature as the class may seem to need.
Some consideration of the best known and most available of the hero-tales may help in the matter of choosing.
The Iliad is not available without a great deal of editing and rearranging for such use in class. There are several reasons for this, the first being its want of an easily grasped unity. Doubtless the mature and experienced reader finds the essential unity of the Iliad more satisfying and artistic than that which comes of a more compact and complete plot. But the children cannot easily see that the history of Achilles' wrath and love is a complete thing. To them the action seems to be suspended, the events left without issue, the poem unprovided with a legitimate ending. The organization and the organizing principle are obscure to children, since Achilles' emotional history cannot easily be made clear or interesting to them. Homer's splendid art in glorifying Hector and dignifying the Trojan cause as a means of reinforcing Achilles' triumph, and deepening the sense of the Greek victory, is likely to be lost on the children, while it leaves them with a hopelessly divided sympathy. Helen, to a mature mind so full of interest ethical and artistic, is beyond the comprehension of the children as anything more than a lay figure. The vast enrichment of epic detail that has gathered into the Iliad, constituting it for the grown-up lover of all the arts an inexhaustible mine of archaic, artistic, and psychic wealth, has, except in a few picturesque details, which the teacher must make special effort to bring before them, no charm for the children, seeming to them to cumber and delay the action. So the Iliad as it stands is not serviceable for the grades in literature.
But, as we all know, the poems that form the Iliad were songs out of a much larger cycle. If one desires to use sections of the Iliad, then, it is comparatively easy to collect out of all the material a complete and unified form of the legend of the siege and downfall of Troy—using the Homeric episodes when it is possible. From sources other than the Iliad must be gathered the causes of the war, the education of Achilles, the summons of Odysseus, the sacrifice of Iphegenia, the death of Achilles, the building of the wooden horse, and the fall of Troy. Into this can be inserted in their places the parts selected from the Iliad—perhaps the quarrel in the assembly from the second book; the deeds of Diomedes, from the fifth and sixth; the visit of Hector within the city and his farewell to Andromache, from the sixth; the Trojan triumph, in the seventh; the vengeance upon Dolon, in the tenth; the main incidents of the battle among the ships; the deeds and death of Patroclus; Achilles' arming and his appearance in the fight; the main incidents of the funeral of Patroclus; the visit of Priam to Achilles. These should be arranged in a sort of "say and sing" narrative, the events previous to the action of the Iliad, and those subsequent to it, to be told in prose narrative; those taken from the Iliad itself to be read or recited in some poetical form, linked together, of course, by a running and rapid narrative. Only a verse translation—or, if a prose translation, one much more picturesque and eloquent than any we have yet had—will at all represent the nobility of the Iliad. Bryant's translation is the best we now have, and it is too formal and difficult to be understood by the children to whom one desires to give the hero-tales.
One can easily see that an arrangement of the Iliad made under all these conditions would not finally convey to the children many of the best things we want to give them in their literature.
The case is quite different with the Odyssey. It is the child's own cycle, full of the interests and elements that delight him while they cultivate him. The adventures are linked together by the central hero, and by the design of getting him home; the cycle, therefore, presents a clear unity, and a unity of the kind that takes hold upon the children. The adventures themselves organize easily into smaller separable wholes. They are always interesting, offering us the varieties of the grotesque, the humorous, the sensational, the horrible, the beautiful, the sublime; and they are practically all on the imaginative level of the children in the classes to which they are otherwise adapted. The details are charming and adapted to interest the children, with very little effort on the part of the teacher. It is quite unnecessary to point out how the occupations and employments, the beautiful buildings and objects—plates, cups, clasps—the raft, the palace and garden of Alcinoous, the loom of Penelope, the lustrous woven robes, the cottage of the good Eumaeus, the noble swineherd, build up a world full of charm, not only for the grown-up reader, but for children if they are being properly taught. There is throughout the poem what Pater called the atmosphere of refined craftsmanship, and all the occupations and tasks of men here appear surrounded by the entrancing halo of art. Odysseus combines in himself all those characteristics that endear a hero to the child and the childlike mind. He is active and ever-ready; strong, too, beyond the measure of any ordinary man; quick in the battle; good at a game, resourceful and handy in any emergency; subtle and quickwitted; full of tricks and riddles; equipped at every point for the effective undoing of his foes. Inevitably in any class of modern children as old as the nine-ten-year grade the delicate problem of Odysseus' moral character will come up for discussion. It is not likely that children younger than this will open the matter themselves, or take any vital interest in the discussion. For, as I have said elsewhere, subtlety is a child's virtue, and any device by which their hero, who is in the main just, outwits or removes hostile forces, is acceptable. For the older children, who are somewhat "instructed," and who on the average will have acquired sufficient dramatic sympathy to apprehend an alien standard, a few words as to the Greek notions of truthfulness, together with a few explanations as to the privileges allowed to an adventurer hard beset by trickery and stupidity, will generally clear the ground; these explanations should take the emphasis from this aspect of Odysseus' character and leave the children free to place it where it belongs. If the Odyssey were used with children older than ten, their questions as to Odysseus' truthfulness might afford a good occasion for warning them to expect some human imperfections in a hero with whom in most respects they are in complete sympathy. This point of view, acquired somewhat early, saves one many shocks and misconceptions in later reading. It should not be necessary to say that the discussion of Odysseus should not amount to "character-study," and should not drift anywhere near hair-splitting moral discriminations.
All teachers will agree that it is better to start the Odyssey with the fifth book—the experience of Odysseus himself—leaving the Telemachiad unread, or to be read later. Into his few introductory stories the teacher should fit some account of the iniquities of the suitors and the fact of the journey of Telemachus—this to pave the way for the delightful story of his return. For our generation—and, one is tempted to believe, for several generations to come—Professor Palmer's prose translation of the Odyssey is the ideal reading version. For the sake of the slight heightening of style, the class might occasionally hear recited a passage in Bryant's verse translation. But the poetical, musical, faintly archaic prose of Professor Palmer has caught perfectly the gentle spiritual tone of the Odyssey.
I have known a class of nine-ten-year children conducted through the Odyssey making a side interest of the Realien, the pottery and weaving, and metal working. Such hand-work was a part of their school tasks, and there were collections of pottery and fabrics which they could be taken to see. The experience seemed to co-operate with their own hand-work to develop in them some of that artistic love of beautiful things—things costly, but not expensive—that pervades the Iliad and the Odyssey; and they were distinctly helped on toward that attitude we desire for every child, that of "reverence for the life of man upon the earth." The Odyssey will be used, however, in schools where there is no handwork and no chance of seeing collections of suitable objects. Pictures are of some service in getting the image of objects—colored prints of Greek pottery and costume. Engelmann and Anderson's Atlas of the Homeric Poems seems to help and interest the children, though there is constant danger that the archaic forms will seem merely ludicrous to many of them. The teacher may correct this by explaining them as decoration and as traditional figures. But we should not depend much upon black-and-white print to help young children to visualize objects and scenes in which color and motion are all-important.
Now, what follows must be taken as suggestive, and not as a pat formula: You can enrich your central bit of literature by other literature in one of two ways—by reinforcing the impression derived from the main story, or counteracting it And every long story or cycle of stories, particularly the heroic cycles, has its characteristic atmosphere that needs both to be reinforced and to be counteracted. It is true, too, that practically all the stories we use for the elementary children are translations or derived versions of some sort, and do not therefore exhibit the smaller beauties of literary form. It is therefore well to join with them poems or other bits of literature which emphasize the matter of inevitableness of form.
By way of enlarging and varying the atmosphere of the Odyssey, we should not add other Greek things, because we are not trying to teach our class about Greek civilization, nor to initiate them into the Greek spirit, still less to give them instruction in Greek legend and mythology. We should rather read them ballads and lyrics which harmonize with the human spirit of the Odyssey, or which supply something which the Odyssey fails to give. For example, since there is so much of the sea in the story, it would be a good moment to teach the children some of the fine things in English verse about the water. They will certainly notice the characteristic Greek dread and terror of the sea—"the unvintaged, unpastured, homeless brine." It would be well to balance this in their minds by some of those verses which reflect the English mastery of the sea and the romance of modern sea-going—some of Kipling's sea-ballads, for example, or such simple things as Barry Cornwall's "The sea, the sea, the open sea."
We should not fail to build upon another dominant note in the Odyssey much that we should like the children to have—the note of home and home-coming, the hearth-stone, and the sheltering roof. Of the exciting adventure and the joy of physical contest they will get enough from the stories themselves. It is not necessary to say again that the judgments given here as to the actual practical choice, are always to be taken as suggestions, not as hard and fast directions. Every teacher may have, and should have, his own idea, both as to how his central bit of literature should be supplemented, and as to whether or not it needs supplementing. Later I shall give the titles of certain of these minor things—still by way of suggestion; ballads and lyrics that have been found to harmonize with the Odyssey either as enforcement or addition.
Most elementary schools have found now the value of the Robin Hood legend. The bluff, open qualities, the effective activities, the wholesome objectivity of these activities, the breezy atmosphere with which the stories surround themselves, make them acceptable in many aspects. Teachers are saved most of the labor of making their own digest of the Robin Hood material by Howard Pyle's Robin Hood. In this he has drawn together the whole legend, using not only the English ballads, but Scott and Peacock, and whatever scattered hints and details he could gather from what must have been a pretty exhaustive reading of English romantic literature. Everywhere there are charming reminiscences of Chaucer, of Spenser, of Shakespeare; echoes of ballad and song and romance; making, on the whole, a notable introduction to literature and the literary method. One quickly finds that it is much too literary in places for younger children and has to be simplified; here and there are long idyllic descriptions that the fifth grade, eager for the story, will not brook; occasionally a page of false sentimentality that the teacher with a true ear will infallibly detect and skip. But these minor things can be forgiven in view of the sheer energy, the marvelous objectivity, the epic colorlessness, of the book as a whole. Readings from the ballads themselves should be interspersed, read by the teacher to the class. These readings should again be arranged in the cont-fable fashion, turning into suitable form the less interesting passages, and then reading in their original verse form the dramatic and picturesque parts. It need not be said that much better poems may be found than those which Pyle has composed for his Robin Hood.
Timid parents and teachers who have never used these stories have some misgivings as to the effect of the strenuous, not to say lawless, atmosphere. They say that the burden of approval is placed upon an outlaw, who constantly and successfully flouts the officers and processes of the law; that the merry-men are, after all, the gang; that the multiplicity of quarrels and cracked crowns accustoms the children to blood and violence; in short, that the legitimate outcome of a genuine dramatic sympathy with the story is general Hooliganism. The good teachers who have used the stories never say these things because they never see these results. It needs but a word to transfer the emphasis from Robin Hood's outlawry to the cruel and unjust laws against which he stood; to keep to the front his generosity to his men, his tenderness toward those in trouble, his sense of personal honor, his readiness to accept and acknowledge a fair defeat, the loyalty of his men. It is the transfiguration of the gang; and as a social matter it is the transfiguration rather than the destruction of the gang which we desire to accomplish. One hastens to acknowledge, however, that the rough-and-tumble atmosphere of the stories calls for some antidote, which we may find partly in the literature we choose to accompany this cycle. Very naturally one thinks of the greenwood, and at once finds many bits that fit into the scenic background of the story and introduce the gentler aspects of the woods and woodland things.
With the Odyssey we should choose some things to reinforce the love of home and the longing for the hearth-fire, and we must use some of the same things to provide an element otherwise lacking in the Robin Hood, and to modify the fascination of the wildwood life and the unattached condition. Some of the ideas on the surface of the stories may be enlarged and enriched—as loyalty and devotion to a leader. There is a fine opportunity to launch into the children's experience upon the wave of their enthusiasm for Robin Hood, other and nobler ideals of the leader and the hero; though we must never expect the child, glowing with the satisfaction of deeds done, to give any appreciation worth considering to the suffering hero or to the heroism of peace. This properly belongs to a much later period—to what it is not mere jargon to call the lyric age, when some more effective appeal can be made to those powers that come of introspection.
The cycles of stories of King Arthur unquestionably contain much that should contribute to the pleasure and wholesome culture of the elementary child. Epic activity, bold and generous deeds tempered by gentleness and reverence—this is the atmosphere of the best of the Arthur stories, and it is precisely the atmosphere into which one longs to lead the older children of the elementary school. But these good and suitable Arthur stories are so tied up with others entirely unsuitable that the choosing and arranging of them becomes the task of the expert psychologist and critic. When one chooses stories out of this legend, he must do with his material—his Malory, his ChrÉtien, his Mabinogion, his Tennyson—as these collectors and artists did with theirs: regard it as the stuff of human nature and life, a storehouse of treasures out of which he may draw according to his pleasure or his need. In this case it is the safe pleasure and the artistic needs of his children that will dictate his choice. And he must know thoroughly well his stories and his children; for the pitfalls are many—quite as many in ChrÉtien de Troyes and Malory as in Tennyson.
The first of the pitfalls to be avoided is that fantastic feudal gallantry which ChrÉtien and Malory substituted for the forthright chivalric business and earnestness of the older legendary stories. In the Song of Roland one fights for reasons of patriotism or religion; in the Arthur romances, and others of their type, one fights for his lady's sake. In the elementary grades the children are still undifferentiated human beings, and should be kept so. To thrust upon them suggestions of "ladies" to be "won" and to be "served" is to usher them into an unknown world, an undemocratic and unbrotherly world from which we should like to keep them, especially the girls, as long as possible. While it is not easy to leave out this element in choosing material from these cycles, it is possible to treat it lightly, since there is in the same material a sufficiency of lions to be hunted, giants to be overcome, and hostile Paynims to be exterminated.
Everyone who has ever read much with children knows that to normal children before their thirteenth year the psychology and modus operandi of love and love-making, innocent or guilty, are so alien as to pass harmlessly by them as a mere bit of the machinery of a story, when these notions do constitute such a bit of machinery in a story otherwise suitable. But it is a mistake to choose matter which obliges us to linger with the little people over these experiences or to emphasize them. He who would retell the Arthur stories must be wary here, so difficult is it to put together any series of the adventures that will at all represent the material, and constitute a whole, without using the scarlet thread of guilty passion, or substituting for it something "nice" but wishy-washy. We have only to compare the grim justice of Malory's Modred with Tennyson's sentimental and unconvincing handling of his character and function.
When Malory wove into the Arthur cycle the legend of the Holy Grail, he introduced an element very hard to handle for children—that religious mysticism, not to say fanaticism, which Tennyson chose to set as the pivotal motive of the downfall of the Table Round. Tennyson, writing for mature modern readers a deeply symbolistic poem, and presenting a whole cycle, could, stroke by stroke, build up the impression of this burning zeal, this hypnotic trance of enthusiasm, that led men away after wandering fires, forgetting labor and duty. But simplified to fit the comprehension of the wholesome twelve-year-old it is likely to appear a vague and mistaken piety, producing a practical effect quite out of proportion to its importance.
To the modern teacher, with the witchery of the Tennysonian music in his blood, it is all but impossible to keep out of prominence that symbolism which lay obvious upon the surface, even in the Morte d'Arthur, but which Tennyson heightened into an almost oppressive system of sophisticated and parochial doctrine. An occasional symbolistic nut to crack is not a bad thing for the older children of the grades. But would it not be a mistake to immerse them in a great system of symbolism? To the younger children the sacred outside appearance, the entrancing Schein, of things is best, and symbolistic art only baffles them or unduly forces their powers.
The spirit of dilettante adventure which pervades the mediaeval romances gives them a tone entirely different from that of the epics. In these latter the activities attach themselves to deeds that have to be done, to misfortunes that the hero would willingly have avoided. Some of these sought-out adventures have crept insidiously into Howard Pyle's Robin Hood; but they are entirely foreign to the spirit of the original epos. The idea of "worshipfully winning worship," of seeking adventure for mere adventure's sake, or for the mere display of one's own powers, or for the sake of getting trained, is a corrupting one in our society, and should not be implanted in our children's consciousness. Like the old epic heroes, what we have to do we will do—often boldly; but, like the old epic heroes, we will do it because it needs to be done.
We can get together a series of stories from the Arthur romance that will touch but lightly the exaggerated, false devotion to ladies; that will leave out of sight the guilty passion which lies at the center of Malory's poem and of most of the other literary versions; that will put into a minor place the mystical religious element that lingers about the Holy Grail side of the romance; that will make little of the symbolism, ignore the dilettante and merely amateur adventure, handling the heroic rather than the romantic deeds—that will do all these things and still be a romance of King Arthur. He who would make such a version must choose out from Malory or The Mabinogion, material that belongs in such a series. Or he may find his material more sifted for him in Lanier's The Boy's King Arthur, and Knightly Legends of Wales. Let him make much of Arthur, simple of nature, guileless and strong, looking to conquest and the good of his people rather than to his own "worship" or to his own love-affairs; let him by no means neglect Merlin, the most permanently interesting figure; he is Odysseus among the Greeks, the sacred bard among the warriors, Tusitala in Samoa, the subtle one, always so appealing and so satisfying to a child's imagination—the embodiment of that intellectual dominance which, be it wisdom or magic, always stands beside epic achievement in the child's estimation. And having got it together, he may reassure himself, as regards his epos of King Arthur, that there is no one Arthur; that the whole legend is a mine out of which every student may draw a treasure; or, to change the figure, a great, beautiful field in which many people may gather grain according to their need and their taste.
Much later when, as growing youth, they are waking up to certain mature social problems, the children will be ready for the style and matter of Tennyson's Idylls. But they will not get the characteristic value of the legend till, as mature and experienced readers of books and livers of life, they come back to Malory and ChrÉtien de Troyes.
Many wise teachers will dissent wholly from this view of the Arthur stories, and in many schools they are presented in some form in the fourth or fifth grade, and read in the Idylls of the King in the seventh and eighth. Suggestions for literature to accompany them will be found in a later chapter.
Anybody who has read thus far can easily foretell what will be said about the Siegfried legend. In the huge accumulation of sagas, romances, and operas that now go to make up the legend, there are all sorts of material—much of it totally unsuited for children. So far as I have been able to find, there has not yet been made—certainly not in English—a collection of the stories good in itself and good for children. The teacher must do his own sifting and arranging, if it seems well to study the Siegfried stories within the grades. The collection of the stories that makes up the Niebelungen Lied is particularly poor in fitting material, being sordid and coarse in the domestic parts, and tediously bloody in the heroic parts. Among the mass of stories given by Morris and Magnussen in the VÖlsunga Saga, and in Morris' Sigurd the Volsung, one may find material for making his own epos of Siegfried, simple, heroic, triumphant—the Siegfried who killed Fafnir, escaped the snares of Regin, got the Nibelung treasure, rode through the magic fire and freed Brunhild. You may be sure some old saga-singer closed the story here and so may we. This leaves for a much later day in the child's life the tragic Siegfried, whose domestic experience, with its sordid motives, its bitter quarrels and ugly subterfuges, is surely not beautiful or fitting for the children; and whose treacherous taking-off is followed by a vengeance too grim and too merely fatalistic to be planted in a child's consciousness.
As we find a sort of canon of fairy-tales, so we find a somewhat accredited list of hero-tales, and the five we have discussed comprise it. Occasionally a teacher may enrich his material by an episode from The Cid, from the Song of Roland, from the heroic sagas of Iceland, from some other mediaeval romance; but they will not detain him long, nor will any one of them constitute a really good center for a prolonged study.
In the later years of this period certain classes and certain schools may find it well to read some of the literary stories of adventure, such as Ivanhoe, or Treasure Island, or The Last of the Mohicans. In the really great stories of adventure we find many of the things we know to be good for the children—the "large room," the open atmosphere, forest, sea, prairie, all the most disastrous chances of war and of travel, noble deeds and generous character. Every parent and teacher recognizes the danger which lies in the child's having too much even of good story of adventure. And this sort of story is the peculiar field of the cheap story-teller, in whose work the weaknesses and dangers of the species especially abound. Since the "out-put" of such stories is enormous, and since the children's access to them, in communities where they can buy books, or have the use of a public library, is practically unlimited, all teachers and parents should know the marks of the undesirable story of adventure, and be able to guard against it. The weakness and dangers of such a story are these:
1. The details are exaggerated until the event is too striking and too highly flavored, so as to corrupt the taste and create an appetite that continues to demand gross satisfaction.
2. There are likely to be too many sensations. The inartistic story of adventure does not work up its incidents with an accumulation of details and an effect of the passage of time that gives it verisimilitude, but rushes forward with a crude and ill-digested happening on every five pages. It is hard to believe that any artistic impression is made upon children whose minds are excited and jaded by such books. They are a mere indulgence.
3. In all but the best adventure the strain of suspense and surprise is more than the children should be asked to endure. Too many experiences of long tension and final hair-breadth escape weaken a child's credence and harden his emotions so as to ruin his power of responding to such appeals. The devices of suspense and surprise are employed, to be sure, by the masters, but generally in due amount; while they are invariably overworked by the cheap writer of adventure.
4. The facts of life and history are distorted and discolored. This is the condemnation of such books as the Henty books. They profess to attach themselves to historical events or periods, while as a matter of fact, they have nothing of the event or the period in them, except a few names and reflections of the most obvious aspects of the mere surface facts. As reflection of a period, or as illumination of an event in it, they are worse than useless—they are absurdly misleading. Only a genius, or a student who has immersed himself in the matter, can produce a story whose psychology, sociology, and archaeology will throw real light upon a bygone age or event. There are such stories, but they are not for elementary children; or, if they are, only as adventure, not as history. No one who chooses books for children should be misled by these cheap manufactured stories which claim as their reason for being that they have a historical background. After all, it is Scott who has given us the best big stories of adventure. Ivanhoe, Quentin Durward, Anne of Geierstein, Guy Mannering, with the proper condensations and adaptations, are of the best. Cooper, in certain of the Leatherstocking novels, creates the atmosphere of really great adventure. Stevenson knew the art of writing a "rattling good story," which yet keeps that balance of judgment and sense of proportion, that faithfulness to the truth (not the fact) of experience, which prevent its ever degenerating into sensationalism. Quiller-Couch and Joseph Conrad are two more modern writers who have achieved in many cases the level of great stories of adventure.
It is not probable that children who are given the older epics and romances in school will have time for these more modern romances of adventure in the class. But whoever guides their out-of-school reading, be it parent or teacher, should have in mind these few simple grounds of choice.
