There is a wealth of sources from which to draw for this early period. Often it is necessary to adapt material, because many a tale whose framework is suited to little people is told in language beyond their understanding. “David and Jonathan,” by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, is a good example. Written for adults, yet it is so universal in its appeal that the lad of six listens to it with as much sympathy as his father or mother. The account of the affection of dog and master for each other, the pathos of the separation and the joy of the reunion, touch him as much as they touch his parents, and to receive it from the lips of one who feels and loves the tale will make him kinder to dumb animals and gentler to the aged.
This is true of many another story that is the creation of an artist. I mention particularly Ouida’s “Dog of Flanders,” John Muir’s “Stickeen,” and Ernest Thompson Seton’s “Monarch, the Big Bear of Tallac,” each of which I have used with children of all ages. The characters in them are living, breathing creatures, the kind that if met in real life would arouse affection and awaken both laughter and tears, and whether these stories are told in monosyllabic language or colored by fine rhetorical effects, they strike the tender places and appeal to the best. When the child meets Nello before the altar of the cathedral in Antwerp, kneeling in front of a painting by Rubens and fondling his dog, he instinctively feels that this boy is not a stranger living in a far-away land and speaking a foreign language, but that he represents all the orphaned children in the world, and that his affection for his dog is the same tie that binds every other child to the pet he loves. So too with Monarch, the majestic captive of Golden Gate Park. He is not just a bear, a creature larger and more ferocious than many other animals. He typifies wild life caged, and the boy who has pitied him in listening to the account of his tramp, tramp, tramp about the pit, never quite forgets that proud but eternal unrest, the ever present longing for the white peaks and the pines.
One need not fear that putting these stories into simple language may be deemed a sacrilegious act, or that telling the plot of a masterpiece will kill delight in that masterpiece itself. Goethe’s mother, sitting in the firelight in their home, gave her boy tales from the old poets, creating in him a desire to read that helped to make him a profound student and master thinker. And the twentieth-century child will doubly enjoy reading a beautiful piece of literature at some future day, because in the magical long ago it touched his heart. Workers with little children should be ever on the alert, seeking stories that deserve the name of literature, with plot and characters that will appeal to their small charges, because such stories mold a child’s taste and give a key that will unlock doors into the great treasure house of art. Whenever the mother or teacher or librarian reads a story that is a literary gem, let her analyze it and determine whether or not, if told in simple language, it would delight a child. The old-time narrators who molded national taste and ideals did this constantly, and the great story-tellers are doing it today.
Sicilian peasants, for instance, have a knowledge of the classics that amazes the average American. The stories are pictured on the market carts, those gaudy conveyances that brighten the island highways from Catania to Palermo, and the conversation of these simple folk is colored with allusions that would do credit to a professor of literature. Most of them cannot read, but they know the plots of Jerusalem Delivered, “Sindbad the Sailor,” “The Merchant of Bagdad,” and many more of the world’s great stories. They heard the tales in childhood, and their fathers before them heard them from the lips of men who loved to tell them, and so they have become a national heritage. Let us do as much for the children of our land, that the men and women of the future may have a noble culture and more splendid possessions than their parents have, and let us do it in the world-old way, by story-telling.
Sources of Story Material for the Rhythmic Period
Adams, William: Fables and Rhymes—Æsop and Mother Goose.
Bailey, Carolyn Sherwin: Firelight Stories.
Bailey, Carolyn Sherwin, and Lewis, Clara: For the Children’s Hour.
Bryce, Catherine T.: That’s Why Stories.
Burnham, Maud: Descriptive Stories for All the Year.
Cooke, Flora J.: Nature Myths and Stories for Little Children.
Davis, Mary H., and Chow-Leung: Chinese Fables and Folk Stories.
Dillingham, Elizabeth, and Emerson, Adelle: “Tell It Again” Stories.
Harrison, Elizabeth: In Story-land.
Holbrook, Florence: ’Round the Year in Myth and Song.
Hoxie, Jane: A Kindergarten Story Book.
Jordan, David Starr: The Book of Knight and Barbara.
Lindsay, Maud: Mother Stories; More Mother Stories.
Miller, Olive Thorne: True Bird Stories.
Milton Bradley Company: Half a Hundred Stories.
Moulton, Louise Chandler: Bed-time Stories.
Pierson, Clara D.: Among the Farmyard People.
Poulsson, Emilie: Child Stories and Rhymes.
Richards, Laura E.: The Golden Windows; Five-Minute Stories; The Pig Brother.
Skinner, Ada M.: Stories of Wakeland and Dreamland.
Verhoeff, Carolyn: All about Johnnie Jones.
Wiggin, Kate Douglas, and Smith, Nora A.: The Children’s Hour.
CHAPTER THREE
The Story Interests of Childhood (Continued)
B. IMAGINATIVE PERIOD
When the child leaves the rhythmic, realistic period he enters a world of make-believe and no longer desires tales and jingles that are nothing more than a recounting of facts he already knows. He delights in playing he is some one other than himself, in pretending he is doing things beyond the range of his possibilities, and because he craves a larger experience he craves also fanciful, imaginative tales in which he may have those experiences. He knows that bees sting, that the dog has a cold, wet nose, that the cat lands on its feet, and the squirrel holds its tail up. He wonders about these things, but he is still too limited in experience and in mental capacity to give them real theoretical meaning. Consequently he enjoys the wonder tale, or, as some authorities term it, the “primitive-why story.” Early racial tales are those of forest and plain, varying according to the locality in which they originated, from the lion and tiger stories of India and Central Africa to the kangaroo fables of the Australian aborigine.
Primitive man through fear and fancy personified the forces of nature and gave them human attributes, and because they were less tangible than the creatures of jungle and plain that figured in his earliest fables, his mind visioned them as fantastic beings, sometimes lovely and sometimes grotesque, fairies and goblins, destructive monsters and demons, and avenging giants who preserved him from that which he feared. Thus originated the fairy story that was the expression of his religion. The child enjoys these tales.
The narrator can gather this material with comparative ease, because the science of ethnology has