A Study of Fairy Tales Part 22

Mitch.e.l.l, Donald G.: _About Old Story-Tellers_. Scribners. 1877.

Moses, Montrose: _Children's Books and Reading_. Kennerley.

Mulock, Miss: _Fairy Book_. Preface. Crowell.

Pearson, Edwin. _Banbury Chap-Books and Nursery Toy-Book Literature_ (18th and early 19th centuries). London. A.

Reader, 1890.

Perrault, Charles: _Popular Tales_. Edited by A. Lang.

Introduction. Oxford, 1888.

Ritson, J.: _Fairy Tales_. Pearson, London, 1831.

Scott, Sir Walter: _Minstrelsy of Scottish Border_. Preface to Tamlane, "Dissertation on Fairies," p. 108.

Skinner, H.M.: _Readings in Folk-Lore_. American Book Co.

Steel, Flora A.: _Tales of the Punjab_. Introduction and Appendix. Macmillan.

Tabart, Benj.: _Fairy Tales, or the Lilliputian Cabinet_. London, 1818. Review: _The Quarterly Review_, 1819, No. 41, pp. 91-112.

Tappan, Eva M.: _The Children's Hour_. Introduction to "Folk-Stories and Fables." Houghton.

Taylor, Edgar: _German Popular Stories_. Introduction by Ruskin.

Chatto & Windus.

Tylor, E.B.: _Primitive Culture_. Holt, 1889.

Warner: _Fairy Tales. Library of the World's Best Literature_, vol. 30.

Welsh, Charles: _Fairy Tales Children Love_. Introduction. Dodge.

_Ibid.:_ "The Early History of Children's Books in New England." _New England Magazine_, n.s. 20: 147-60 (April, 1899).

_Ibid.: A Chap-Book_. Facsimile Edition. 1915. World Book Co.

_Ibid.: Mother Goose_. Facsimile Edition. 1915. World Book Co.

White, Gleeson: "Children's Books and Their Ill.u.s.trators."

_International Studio_, Special Winter Number, 1897-98.

CHAPTER V

CLa.s.sES OF FAIRY TALES

But the fact that after having been repeated for two thousand years, a story still possesses a perfectly fresh attraction for a child of to-day, does indeed prove that there is in it something of imperishable worth.--Felix Adler.

Whatever has, at any time, appealed to the best emotions and moved the heart of a people, must have for their children's children, political, historical, and cultural value. This is especially true of folk-tales and folk-songs.--P.P. Claxton, _United States Commissioner of Education_.

I. AVAILABLE TYPES OF TALES

From all this wealth of acc.u.mulated folk-material which has come down to us through the ages, we must select, for we cannot crowd the child with all the folk-stuff that folk-lore scientists are striving to preserve for scientific purposes. Moreover, naturally much of it contains the crudities, the coa.r.s.eness, and the cruelties of primitive civilization; and it is not necessary that the child be burdened with this natural history of a past society. We must select from the past.

In this selection of what shall be presented to the child we must be guided by two standards: First, we owe it to the child to hand on to him his literary heritage; and secondly, we must help him to make of himself the ideal man of the future. Therefore the tales we offer must contribute to these two standards. The tales selected will be those which the ages have found interesting; for the fact that they have lived proves their fitness, they have lived because there was something in them that appealed to the universal heart. And because of this fact they will be those which in the frequent re-tellings of ages have acquired a cla.s.sic form and therefore have within themselves the possibility of taking upon them a perfect literary form. The tales selected will be those tales which, as we have pointed out, contain the interests of children; for only through his interests does the child rise to higher interests and finally develop to the ideal man.

They will be those tales which stand also the test of a cla.s.sic, the test of literature, the test of the short-story, and the test of narration and of description. The child would be handicapped in life to be ignorant of these tales.

Tales suitable for the little child may be viewed under these seven cla.s.ses of available types: (1) the acc.u.mulative, or clock story; (2) the animal tale; (3) the humorous tale; (4) the realistic tale; (5) the romantic tale; (6) the old tale; and (7) the modern tale.

I. The Acc.u.mulative Tale.

The acc.u.mulative tale is the simplest form of the tale. It may be:--

(1) A tale of simple repet.i.tion.

(2) A tale of repet.i.tion with an addition, incremental iteration.

(3) A tale of repet.i.tion, with variation.

Repet.i.tion and rhythm have grown out of communal conditions. The old stories are measured utterances. At first there was the spontaneous expression of a little community, with its gesture, action, sound, and dance, and the word, the shout, to help out. There was the group which repeated, which acted as a chorus, and the leader who added his individual variation. From these developed the folk-tale with the dialogue in place of the chorus.

Of the acc.u.mulative tales, _The House that Jack Built_ ill.u.s.trates the first cla.s.s of tales of simple repet.i.tion. This tale takes on a new interest as a remarkable study of phonics. If any one were so happy as to discover the phonic law which governs the euphony produced by the succession of vowels in the lines of Milton's poetry, he would enjoy the same law worked out in _The House that Jack Built_. The original, as given by Halliwell in his _Nursery Rhymes of England_, is said to be a Hebrew hymn, at first written in Chaldaic. To the Hebrews of the Middle Ages it was called the _Haggadah_, and was sung to a rude chant as part of the Pa.s.sover service. It first appeared in print in 1590, at Prague. Later, in Leipzig, it was published by the German scholar, Liebrecht. It begins:--

A kid, a kid, my father bought For two pieces of money: A kid, a kid, Then came the cat and ate the kid, etc.

Then follow the various repet.i.tive stanzas, the last one turning back and reacting on all the others:--

Then came the Holy One, blessed be He, And killed the angel of death, That killed the butcher, That slew the ox, That drank the water, That quenched the fire, That burned the staff, That beat the dog, That bit the cat, That ate the kid, That my father bought For two pieces of money: A kid, a kid.

The remarkable similarity to _The Old Woman, and Her Pig_[8] at once proclaims the origin of that tale also. The interpretation of this tale is as follows: The kid is the Hebrews; the father by whom it was purchased, is Jehovah; the two pieces of money are Aaron and Moses; the cat is the a.s.syrians; the dog is the Babylonians; the staff is the Persians; the fire is the Greek Empire and Alexander; the water is the Romans; the ox is the Saracens; the butcher is the Crusaders; and the angel of death is the Turkish Power. The message of this tale is that G.o.d will take vengeance over the Turks and the Hebrews will be restored to their own land.

Another tale of simple repet.i.tion, whose fairy element is the magic key, is _The Key of the Kingdom_, also found in Halliwell's _Nursery Rhymes of England_:--

This is the key of the kingdom.

In that kingdom there is a city, In that city there is a town, In that town there is a street, In that street there is a lane, In that lane there is a yard, In that yard there is a house, In that house there is a room, In that room there is a bed, On that bed there is a basket, In that basket there are some flowers.

Flowers in the basket, basket on the bed, bed in the room, etc.

_The Old Woman and Her Pig_ ill.u.s.trates the second cla.s.s of acc.u.mulative tale, where there is an addition, and like _t.i.tty Mouse and Tatty Mouse_, where the end turns back on the beginning and changes all that precedes. Here there is a more marked plot. This same tale occurs in Shropshire Folk-Lore, in the _Scotch Wife and Her Bush of Berries_, in _Club-Fist_, an American folk-game described by Newell, in Cossack fairy tales, and in the Danish, Spanish, and Italian. In the Scandinavian, it is _Nanny, Who Wouldn't Go Home to Supper_, and in the Punjab, _The Grain of Corn_, also given in _Tales of Laughter_. I have never seen a child who did not like it or who was not pleased with himself for accomplishing its telling. It lends itself most happily to ill.u.s.tration. _t.i.tty Mouse and Tatty Mouse_ pleases because of the liveliness of its images, and because of the catastrophe at the end, which affects the child just as the tumble of his huge pile of blocks--the crash and general upheaval delight him.

This tale has so many variants that it ill.u.s.trates well the diffusion of fairy tales. It is Grimm's _The Spider and the Flea_, which as we have seen, is appealing in its simplicity; the Norse _The c.o.c.k Who Fell into the Brewing Vat_; and the Indian _The Death and Burial of Poor Hen_. The curious succession of incidents may have been invented once for all at some definite time, and from thence spread to all the world.

_Johnny Cake_ and _The Gingerbread Man_ also represent the second cla.s.s of acc.u.mulative tale, but show a more definite plot; there is more story-stuff and a more decided introduction and conclusion. _How Jack Went to Seek His Fortune_ also shows more plot. It contains a theme similar to that of _The Bremen Town Musicians_, which is distinctly a beast tale where the element of repet.i.tion remains to sustain the interest and to preserve unity, but where a full-fledged short-story which is structurally complete, has developed. A fine acc.u.mulative tale belonging to this second cla.s.s is the Cossack _Straw Ox_, which has been described under "The Short-Story." Here we have a single line of sequence which gets wound up to a climax and then unwinds itself to the conclusion, giving the child, in the plot, something of that pleasure which he feels in winding up his toy animals to watch them perform in the unwinding.