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 ZuÑi 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.