Literature in the Elementary School Part 7

So, when one is choosing literature it is very easy to fill all the time the children have for it in the first four or five years of school with things that are largely objective, and that, so far as their large framework goes, mean just what they say. Indeed, will not most modern teachers concede that throughout the period and in all his subjects it is for the mental good of the child not to be called upon too frequently to formulate principles, or habitually to look below the surface of his facts for interpretations and secondary meanings? Of course, he must be led by the natural stages to see through figures of speech, and to understand and apply proverbs, and the proverbial manner of speech.

Proverbs, indeed, exemplify and epitomize the essentially literary type of thinking and speaking. They are concrete and picturesque rather than abstract, specific rather than general, though we are to understand by them also the abstract and the general; this is the fact that gives them their unique value as literary training. The teacher must call upon his wisdom in choosing proverbs suitable for the children. Many proverbs are pessimistic, even cynical: "It never rains but it pours;" many embody a merely commonplace or unmoral code: "Honesty is the best policy;" some are ambiguous: "There's honor among thieves;" some the modern world has outgrown; many are too mature, too occult, or too worldly for a child.

But a great store remains--vivid, practical bits of experience and tested wisdom which will develop a child's mental quickness, will do something toward equipping him with the common wisdom of his race, and will accustom him to one of the most characteristic methods of literature. This is a good place to say that good results never seem to come of asking the children for an exposition of the proverb. Indeed, it is extremely difficult to get from children an exposition or definition of any kind. The better way of making sure that they have appropriated a proverb is to ask them to invent or re-call an incident or a situation to which the proverb will apply. Naturally this is not an exercise for the youngest children.

In the earlier years a great many of the simple old fables may be taught. One is tempted to say that the traditionary or given moral should never be told to the children; but that is a little too sweeping.

As a rule, however, it is better to lead them to make their own interpretation or generalization, in those cases where such a thing is desired. For, as a matter of fact, many of the fables are so good as stories that they may often be left to stand merely as pleasant tales.

But as the children grow more penetrating, the fable is the best possible form of symbolistic literature to set them at first. These, with the minor exercise in the apprehension and interpretation of figures of speech, will be their share of the symbolistic kind of writing for several years. Then we may introduce more specimens, and more complex specimens, until in the sixth- and seventh-grade periods they may be able to interpret the universal and symbolic side of much that they read, and to handle with ease and delight such parables as _The Great Stone Face_ or _The Bee-Man of Orn_. Their experience in literature will then harmonize with their experience in other directions; for they should then, or immediately afterward, be beginning to look for generalizations, to carry abstract symbols, and to subst.i.tute them at will for concrete matter. At the same time, then, they will study these fables as apologues, making in all cases their own moral and application.

Perhaps this is the place to insert a caution against the practice of extracting a "deeper meaning" out of a child when he does not easily see it, or of so instructing him that he comes to regard every story that he reads as a sort of picture puzzle in which he is to find a "concealed robber" in the shape of a moral or a general lesson. It is a trivial habit of mind, a pernicious critical obsession, of which many over-earnest adult readers are victims--that of wringing from every and any bit of writing an abstract or moralistic meaning. Another practical caution may be needed as to these interpretations: Do not leave the discussion until the cla.s.s has worked out from the fable a moral or application that practically the whole cla.s.s accepts and the teacher indorses. Do not accept numerous guesswork explanations and let them pa.s.s. Even the little children, if they are allowed to interpret at all, should be pushed on and guided to a sound and essential exegesis--to use a term more formidable than the thing it names. Do not let them linger even tentatively in that lamentable state of making their explanation rest upon some minor detail, some feature on the outskirts of the story.

Help them always to go to the center, and to make the essential interpretation. Make a point of this whenever they have a story that calls for interpretation at all. To the end that they may be sincere and thorough, choose those things whose secondary meanings they may as children feel and understand. The sixth-grade children could, in most schools, interpret _The Ugly Ducking_. They may easily be led into the inner significance of _The Bee-Man of Orn_ or _Old Pipes and the Dryad_.

They may go on in seventh grade to certain of Hawthorne's--perhaps "The Great Stone Face" and others of the _Twice Told Tales_; though Hawthorne is so sombre and so moralistic that it is not good for some children to read his tales, still less to linger over them and interpret them. A mature and experienced eighth grade could study "The Snow Image"; but it is too delicate and remote for all eighth-grade cla.s.ses. "The Minister's Black Veil" is an example of the peculiar Hawthornesque gloom, which the children would not understand or by ill luck would understand, and suffer the consequent dangerous depression. Addison's "The Vision of Mirza" is an example of a standard little allegory, simple and easy, and at the same time full of meaning and fruitful of reflection for the children. The parables of the gospels are quite unique in their beauty and ethical significance, and afford an opportunity for a most valuable kind of training in literary exegesis. Certain tales from the _Gesta Romanorum_ might be read in these older grades, adding the interpretations of the ecclesiastics for the gaiety of the cla.s.s, and as a terrible warning against wresting an allegory out of a story by sheer violence.

There are several reasons why the extended allegories do not yield good results with a cla.s.s. In the first place, it takes too long to get through them, so that the process keeps the children too long in an atmosphere of allegorical and symbolistic meanings, which will confuse and baffle them. In the second place, all the extended literary allegories have each behind it a complex system of abstract theology or morals, or some other philosophy, which cannot be conveyed to children, but which cannot be hidden from the cla.s.s. Then in any long allegory, such as _The Pilgrim's Progress_ or _The Fairie Queene_, the multiplied detail all loaded with secondary significance is extremely misleading to all but expert readers. As Ruskin says of myth, we may say of all other allegory: the more it means, the more numerous and the more grotesque do the details become. And we would not choose in a child's literary training any large ma.s.s of material in which grotesqueness is a prevailing note. Nearly all children are interested in _The Pilgrim's Progress_, and will listen with eagerness to the romantic and adventurous side of Christian's experience, but not, of course, to the didactic and theological pa.s.sages. And as a matter of fact, modern religious teaching and the new race-consciousness of our generation have taken all sense of reality out of Bunyan's theology and religious psychology; and of course, it can be read to the modern child only cursorily, as in the home--never in detail and with the privilege of questioning as in the cla.s.s.

One would expect a really good eighth-grade child to be able to detect and express the lesson in Lowell's _The Vision of Sir Launfal_, or Tennyson's _Sir Galahad_, or Longfellow's _King Robert of Sicily_. It need hardly be said that the exercises in the symbolistic kinds of literature are to be inserted here and there among the other lessons. It would be a serious mistake to give any cla.s.s a whole year--or a whole month, indeed--of this experience in reading.

CHAPTER XII

POETRY

There are certain results in literary training that can be secured with children only by the teaching of poetry. In story we and they are intent upon subject-matter, and on the larger matters of the imaginative creation. And, while we older students know that the choice and arrangement of material involved in the making of a story are extremely important and most truly educative, we also know that they belong in the larger framework of the story and do not lend themselves to close inspection or detailed study when our scholars are elementary children.

Again, most of the stories best suited to the children must be used in translated and adapted versions, and all of them should be told in a way that varies more or less from telling to telling, in vocabulary, in figure, and occasionally in material detail. As a result, the stories, until we come down to the very last year of the period, make on the children no impression of the inevitableness of form, or of any of the smaller devices of style and finish. These may be brought to bear in verse. It should not be necessary to say again that the children will know nothing of "larger effects" and "smaller details;" but the teacher should know them, and should have some plan that will include both in his teaching. Neither is it necessary to say that these minor matters of style and finish that we will pause over with our elementary cla.s.s will prove to be very simple matters from the point of view of the expert and adult critic.

It is verse that gives the child most experience in the musical side of literature. The rhythm and cadence of prose have their own music--perhaps more delicate and pleasing to the trained adult ear than the rhythm of verse. But the elementary children need the simple striking rhythm of verse, of verse whose rhythm is quite unmistakable.

Indeed, it is profitable in the first verses that children learn to have an emphatic meter, so that the musical intention may not be missed, and that it may be possible easily to accompany the recitation of the verses with movement, even concerted movement as of clapping or marching. One who is trying to write a sober treatise in a matter-of-fact way dares not, lest he be set down as the veriest mystic, say all the things that might be said about the function of rhythm, especially in its more p.r.o.nounced form of meter, among a community of children, no matter what the size of the group--how rhythmic motion, or the flow of measured and beautiful sounds, harmonizes their differences, tunes them up to their tasks, disciplines their conduct, comforts their hurts, quiets their nerves; all this apart from the facts more or less important from the point of view of literature, that it cultivates their ear, improves their taste, and provides them a genuinely artistic pleasure. If it happens that the sounds they are chanting be a bit of real poetry, it further gives them perhaps more than one charming image, and many pleasant or useful words.

Most children are pleased with the additional music of rhyme. This is true of all kinds of rhyme, but of course it is the regular terminal rhyme that most children notice and enjoy and remember.

Sing a song of sixpence, A pocket full of rye, Four and twenty blackbirds Baked in a pie.

all the children will rejoice in _rye_--_pie_. But there will be some to whom _sing_--_song_--_sixpence_--_pocket_, _full_--_four_, _blackbirds_--_baked_, are so many delights, and there may be some to whom the wonderful chime of the vowels will make music. Anyone who knows children will have noticed the pleasure that the merest babies will take in beautiful or especially pat collocations of syllables. A child whom I knew, just beginning to talk, would say to himself many times a day, and always with a smile of amused pleasure, the phrases "apple-batter pudding," "picallilli pickles," "up into the cherry tree,"

"piping down the valleys wild." It is probably true that some of his apparent pleasure was that species of hysteria produced in most babies by any mild explosion, and the little fusillade of _p's_ in the examples he liked best would account for a part of his enjoyment. But we must think that there was pleasure there, and, whether it were physical or mental, it arose from the pleasing combination of verbal sounds. Most children have this ear for the music of words; and some attempt should be made to evoke it in those that have it not.

This quality, then, is the first thing we ask of the verse we choose for the youngest children. The mere jingles, provided they are really musical, are useful to emphasize this side of verse, because, being free from content, they can give themselves entirely to sound. It is also most desirable that some of these earliest verses be set to music that the children can sing; that the cla.s.s march to the rhythm of recited verses; that they be taught, if possible, to dance to some of them.

Some such form of accompaniment of the verses, deepens the impression of the music, records in the child's consciousness an impression of the poem as an image of motion, and opens a channel for the expression of the mood produced in the children by the verses--a more acceptable channel of expression, certainly, for all the lyrics and for most of the narrative verses, than mere recitation, and a more artistic one than what we commonly know and dread as elocution.

The teaching of verse gives a chance and an invitation to linger over and enjoy many fine and delicate aspects of the art that we are likely to miss in the story. Something in the nature of verse--the condensation, the careful arrangement, the chosen words--seems to call upon us to go slowly with it. It may be that we linger to apprehend one by one the details of an image or picture, like--

Daffy-down dilly has come up to town In a yellow petticoat and a green gown,

The captain was a duck, with a jacket on his back;

The cattle are grazing, Their heads never raising, There are forty feeding like one;

In the pool drowse the cattle up to their knees, The crows fly over by twos and threes;

some apt or beautiful phrase--

Snowy summits old in story;

some bit of simple wisdom that deserves pondering; some flash of wit or epigram, or enticing touch of nonsense.

These are really about all that we would pause over in teaching verses to the younger children. Indeed, are not these elements about all of what we call the smaller matters of literary art that elementary children may be expected to concern themselves with--the music of the spoken verse, appreciation of the beauty or adequacy of striking pictures and images, recognition of some specially fit epithet, interpretation of an aphorism or a paradox or a bit of nonsense? We will discuss later some possible ways of getting these things done.

When we say that a poem gives us our best chance to study these finer details, we should not by any means understand that in teaching a poem we are to ignore the other matter of plan and structure. The very condensation and beautiful organization of a poem are likely to result in a charming plan, which both adds to the children's sense of its beauty and helps to fix it in their memory. Every teacher will notice--merely to mention examples--the perfect structure, what we have called the "pattern," of Stevenson's "Dark brown is the river," of Allingham's "I wish I were a primrose," of Wordsworth's, "I heard a thousand blended notes;" and every teacher will realize the greater cla.s.s utility of a poem with such a structure.

The kinds of poetry suitable by virtue of their content for the children throughout the whole elementary period are first, lyrics of the simpler varieties, beginning with those which are practically only jingles, and going on to those that are more complex in form and more mature in thought, but which still record, as it were, the first reaction of the mind, the primary mood, not the complex and remote moods of developed lyric poetry; and second, poetry of the epic kind, beginning with the Mother Goose ballads, and advancing to the objective heroic ballads in which English literature is so rich, and perhaps (undoubtedly in certain schools) including some of the longer narrative poems of the type of idyls.

It is clear to most teachers that the less the earlier lyrics say, the better. The simplicity of the content makes it possible to emphasize all the more the music and the motion. As the lyrics increase in content, and as we begin to expect the children to enter into the mood which their poem reflects, it becomes important to select such as record a mood or an experience which they can apprehend or might legitimately apprehend. Luckily, in our day it is no longer necessary to remonstrate against what one may almost call the crime of requiring children to study and to return "The Barefoot Boy," "Still sits the schoolhouse by the road," "I remember, I remember the house where I was born"--adult reminiscence of childhood, which is undoubtedly the most alien of moods and processes to the child. But we are likely to be caught by the apparent simplicity of certain verses which, written after the pattern of _A Child's Garden_--indeed, the cla.s.s includes some of these very poems--record feelings about children and childhood. These verses, like some of the delightful stories and studies mentioned in a previous chapter are studies and realizations of the child's consciousness calculated to delight and illuminate the adult reader. If children read and understood them, the result would be that ghastly spectacle--a child conscious of his own childhood.

No poetry given to children should be too imaginative, too figurative, or too emotional. Here, to be sure, one must judge afresh for each cla.s.s. It is obvious that children of the eighth grade can apprehend a poem that would bewilder the sixth; that children in one community, even in one neighborhood, will understand a poem which children of a different community and upbringing could not fathom. But the standard is, after all, not infinitely variable. A good average seventh grade almost anywhere would appreciate without difficulty, including the spiritual application, Tennyson's "Bugle Song;" they could not find their way among the many figures and the alien imaginative mood, the poignant unknown emotion, of "Tears, idle tears."

It is not easy to go wrong in choosing the ballads. And by "ballads" we are to understand the short narrative poem, traditionary or artistic.

The folk-ballads need translation here and there, and are scarcely available at all for the youngest children. But those who are old enough to hear the Robin Hood tales will enjoy the folk-ballads, if the teacher take pains to prepare them and read them aright. As in the case of some of the heroic epics, some editing is necessary for most of the ballads.

They should be given in the "say and sing," manner, turning the duller or the link portions into prose narrative, and reading the exciting and beautiful pa.s.sages in the original form. Even this accommodated form of the folk-ballads may prove impossible in some cla.s.ses. There are ballads ideal for the grades in nearly all the modern poets--Cowper, Scott, Wordsworth, Campbell, Browning, Longfellow, Whittier, Kipling.

It is not so easy to choose for elementary children among the longer narrative poems. As a matter of fact, a great number of them are of the idyllic kind, and there is in this cla.s.s of poems something soft and meditative, or over-emotional and, if one must say it--sentimental or super-romantic, that fits them for the comprehension of older readers, and spoils them for the children. Others, such as Scott's narrative poems, are too long and a bit too difficult for children younger than the high-school age. Here and there one finds a poem, like "Paul Revere's Ride," really more ballad than tale; a tender simple tale like "King Robert of Sicily," for a mature eighth grade. "The Vision of Sir Launfal;" not forgetting Morris' _The Man Born to Be King_, "The Fostering of Auslag," and perhaps other things from _The Earthly Paradise_. The simple but lofty style and feeling of "Sohrab and Rustum"

makes it possible for the older children. Any teacher who knows both literature and children will see at once what it is that const.i.tutes the fitness of these poems, and what the unfitness of "Enoch Arden," "The Courtship of Miles Standish," or "Lancelot and Elaine."

Perhaps the only library of literature that is perfectly suited to its purpose and its public, and the only collection of masterpieces to be put into the hands of its readers without misgiving, is the nursery rhymes that we call _Mother Goose's Melodies_. It needs no more general praise, and there is no room for specifications. But it is always in order to urge teachers in this case, as in that of the fairy-tales, to increase their knowledge of those traditionary bits of art. When one knows their origin and something of their social and literary history, they take on new dignity and importance. One ceases to look upon them as mere nonsense to be rattled off for the amus.e.m.e.nt of the baby, and learns to see them as little treasures of primitive art, miraculously preserved and pa.s.sed down from baby to baby through these many generations: bits of old song and ballad, games and charms, riddles and incantations, tales of charming incidents and episodes--a gallery of unmatchable portraits, sallies of wit just witty enough for the four-year-old, mild but adequate nonsense; all freed by the lapse of years and the innocence of its devotees from every taint of utilitarianism and occasionalism, winnowed and tested by the generations of mothers and babies that have criticized them, they yield a new charm at every fresh reading to the most experienced reader. They should const.i.tute the first literary material of every English-speaking child.

Every well-nurtured child will come to school already in possession of many of them. But he will be glad to go over them for the sake of those less fortunate, as well as for the sake of enjoying them with the whole community, and in consideration of the new pictures, games, and songs that will be joined with them.

Stevenson's _A Child's Garden of Verses_ is in some sense a quite unique poetic production; and this remains true in spite of the many things produced in imitation of it and inspired by it. It is a wonderful example of the recovery by a grown person of the thread of continuity leading him back to actual childhood; the recovery, too, in many instances of the child's consciousness. It is the gate for us all to the lost garden of our own childhood, pathetic in every line with the evanescence of childhood, "whose hand is ever at his lips, bidding adieu."

Yet in spite of this most poignant appeal to the grown-up person, many of the verses are ideally suited to children. They do not induce in them our mood of pathos and regret, nor do they set their child-readers imaginatively in another experience. They do very really const.i.tute, as Stevenson suggests, a window through which the child sees

Another child far, far away, And in another garden, play;

a child with whom he tenderly sympathizes, at whom he lovingly smiles, at whose games he looks on, whose toys and books he knows and loves.

The Child in the Garden is an only child, a lonely child, and a very individualistic child; there is no comradeship in the verses; they cannot be becomingly recited in concert; there is not a chorus or a refrain in the whole book, in which all the children may join; there is nothing communal about them. In spite of all the efforts, they cannot be set to music, except as solos; and if the music matches the mood, it is likely to be difficult for a child to sing. Several of them are too imaginative--"Windy Nights," "Shadow March;" some are a bit ironic--"Good and Bad Children," "System," "A Happy Thought;" some too poignantly pathetic--"The Land of Nod;" some look at childhood too obviously with the man's eyes--"Keepsake Mill;" but all these exceptions leave many altogether suitable for children; and their perfect structure, their musical verse-form, their childlike objectivity, and the divine simplicity of their style render them an unceasing delight.

Though the Child of the Garden was a solitary child, he had a constantly haunting sense of the world beyond--other children in other lands, the foreign countries he might see by climbing higher, the children who would bring his boats ash.o.r.e far down the river, the children singing in far j.a.pan, the long-ago Egyptian boys, hints at the wider experience and bigger world to which the six- and seven-year-old children are so eagerly reaching out. At the same time n.o.body but Stevenson--n.o.body at least, that has written a book--has ever taken adequately the point of view of the human being three feet high--his tiny horizon, the small exquisite objects to which he comes close, the fairy-dells he sees, the rain-pool sea, the clover tree; nowhere else in art is the little world of the little people adequately pictured--the little world, and its obverse, the colossal grown-ups, with their elephantine furniture amidst which the little men and women must ordinarily move.