Lucy Sprague Mitchell

“ Can we not speak in rhythm, in pleasing sounds, even in song for the mere sensuous delight it gives us and them, even though it adds nothing to the content of our remark? If we can, I feel sure children will not lose their native use of words: more, I think those of six and seven and eight who have lost it in part,—and their stories show they have,—will win back to their spontaneous joy in the play of words. This is the ultimate test of stories and verse,—whether they help children to retain their native gift of play with language and with thought. ”

“ The sky scraper stands in the heart of the great city. From its top one can see the city, one can hear the city, one can smell the city—the city where men live and work. One can see the crowded streets full of tiny men and tiny automobiles, the riverside with its baby warehouses and its baby docks, the river with its toy bridges and toy giant steamers and tug boats and barges and ferries. The city noise,—the distant, rumbling, grumbling noise,—sounds like the purring of a far-away giant beast. ”

“ When we look at the forms which have been presented to children with these their spontaneous patterns fresh in mind, we can see, I think, why Mother Goose has been taken as a child’s own and Eugene Field and even Stevenson rejected as unintelligible. I do not believe there is anything in the content of Mother Goose to win the child. I believe it is the form that makes the appeal. Vachel Lindsay, whose daring play with words has made him an object of suspicion to the reluctant of mind, has given us one poem in pattern singularly like the children’s own and in content full of interest and charm. ”

“ And every child (and grown-up) enjoys being a hero. Higher still comes “Kidnapped” and so up to Stanley Weyman and “The Three Musketeers” which differ in their art, not in their appeal.
Now is it not possible to give children these adventurous excursions which they crave and should have, without so much killing of animals or men, and so many blood-thirsty excitements, and so much fake heroism? What relationships do such tales interpret? What truths do they give a child upon which to base his thinking? The relation of life to life is a delicate and difficult thing to interpret. ”

“ In essence the relationships with which they deal are human,—social. The story of Siegfried, of Achilles, of Abraham,—these are great sagas. Each is a tremendous picture of a human experience, the first two under heroic, enlarged conditions, the last under a human culture picturesquely different from our own. But even as straight tales of adventure they do not carry for little children. The environment is too remote, the world to be conquered too unknown to carry a convincing sense of heroism to small children. ”

“ Not one clarifies any relationship which will further his efforts to order the world. Nonsense when recognized and enjoyed as such is more than legitimate; it is a part of every one’s heritage. But nonsense which is confused with reality is vicious,—the more so because its insinuations are subtle. So far as their content is concerned, it is chiefly as a protest against this confusing presentation of unreality, this substitution of excitement for legitimate interest, that these stories have been written. ”

“ This is quite different from the adult mixtures of the animal, the social, and the moral worlds. Does not Cinderella interject a social and economic situation which is both confusing and vicious? Does not Red Riding-Hood in its real ending plunge the child into an inappropriate relationship of death and brutality or in its “happy ending” violate all the laws that can be violated in regard to animal life? Does not “Jack and the Beanstalk” delay a child’s rationalizing of the world and leave him longer than is desirable without the beginnings of scientific standards? ”

“ I have tried to use it in “Pedro’s Feet” which is an attempt to give them an ordinary story by means of sounds. And even less than to city sounds do we listen for the cadences in language. We listen only for the meaning and forget the sensuous delight of sound.
But happily children are not so determined to wring a meaning out of every sight and every sound. Children play. Play is a child’s own technique. Through it he seizes the strange unknown world around him and fashions it into his very own. He recreates through play. And through creating, he learns and he enjoys. ”

“ You think you’re wonderful, you poor little creeping worm tied to the earth! I pity all you slow, slow things that I look down on as I fly through the sky. Ox made way for horse, horse made way for engine, car and auto but all,—all make way for me. ”

“ There is other folk-lore less gripping in its human intensity. Through this may not children safely gain their needed adventures? And here we come again to the real “Märchen,”—the fairy tales. They take us into a lovely world of unreality where magic and luck hold sway and where the child is safe from human problems and from scientific laws alike. I have already said in talking of the younger children that I feel it unsafe to loose a child in this unsubstantial world before he is fairly well grounded in a sense of reality. ”

“ The sky scraper houses an army of ten thousand men. All day they clamber up and down its core [Pg 360] like insects in a giant tree. They buzz and buzz, and then go home.
But there with the shadowy silent streets at its feet stands the lofty sky scraper. On its head there glows a monstrous light. The rays pierce through the fogs. And when the storm is screaming wild, the light struggles through to the frightened boats tossing on the mountain waves. The storm howls and beats on the sides of the lofty lacy tower with the shining light on top. ”

“ It is too bad that the fish and the frog are scared away when the summer boy goes in bathing. But it is only for a little while anyway. For the little summer boy’s mother doesn’t let him play in the lake all day as does the mother of the slippery shiny fish and the mother of the spotted green frog. She has called him now, and he calls back, “One more time!” for no one loves the little lake as much as the little boy in the red bathing suit. He has climbed up on the rock. The water is running down him, for he is as wet as a baby seal. ”

“ Now that it is finished, the men who walk about its feet forget how deep into the ground it reaches. But they can never forget how high into the blue it soars. Their necks ache when they throw back their heads to see to the top. For of all the buildings in the world this sky scraper is the highest. ”

“ There is no better play material in the world than words. They surround us, go with us through our work-a-day tasks, their sound is always in our ears, their rhythms on our tongue. Why do we leave it to special occasions and to special people to use these common things as precious play material? ”

“ There is another kind of relationship by which little children interpret their environment. It is the early manifestation of the associational process which in our adult life so largely crowds out the sensory and motor appreciation of the world. It runs way back to the baby’s pleasure in recognizing things, certainly long before the period of articulate questions. We all retain vestiges of this childlike pleasure in our joyful greeting of a foreign word that is understood or in any new application of an old thought or design. ”

“ The little girl looked after him with astonishment. “I just wish no cow would ever give that silly boy anything!” she thought.
Before long he met an old woman. The old woman was crying too.
“What’s the matter with you?” asked Silly Will.
“Oh!” cried the old woman wringing her hands. “Our sheep has fallen over a cliff and broken its legs and it’s going to die. I don’t know how we shall get along without her wool for spinning. We depended so much on her!”
“Depended on a sheep!” cried Silly Will. “Whoever heard of such a thing! I’ve often heard your stupid old sheep bleating. Sheep are no good. ”

“ Now, the ordinary fairy tale which is the chief story diet of the four-and five-year-olds, I believe does confuse them; not because it does not stick to reality (for neither do the children) but because it does not deal with the things with which they have had first-hand experience and does not attempt to present or interpret the world according to the relationships which the child himself employs. Rather it gives the child material which he is incapable of handling. Much in these tales is symbolic and means to the adult something quite different from what it bears on its face. ”

“ I do believe that children play with words naturally and spontaneously just as they play with any material that comes to their creative hands. And further I believe,—though this too I cannot prove,—that we adults kill this play with words just as we kill their creative play with most things. Most of us have forgotten how to play with anything, most of all with words. ”

“ Suddenly Boris remembered what he had come for. He was looking for the wide green country, for a place where grass grew everywhere. “This is the funniest thing in the world,” he thought scratching his head. “Wherever I walk in New York I come to water. So many people and water on every side of them! How do they ever get out?” As soon as he thought of this, he began to look around. Across the East River he could see a giant bridge leaping from New York over to another city and on the bridge were trains and cars shooting back and forth and autos and horses and people. ”

“ The five-year-old is still motor; his conception of cause is still personal. He thinks through his muscles; he personifies in his thought and his play.
Nevertheless there is very real danger in anthropomorphism,—in thus leaving the world of reality. There is danger of confusing the child. We must be sure our personifications are built on relationships which our child can understand and which have an objective validity. We must be sure that a wolf remains a wolf and an engine an engine, though endowed with human speech. ”

“ Outgrown adult thinking in social matters is no more suitable to children than outgrown thinking on physical facts. We do not teach that the world is flat because grown-ups once believed it was. We are not afraid of a round earth so we [Pg 38] tell the truth about it. But we come near to teaching “spontaneous generation” with our endless evasions. We are afraid of a reproducing world, and so we fall back on curious mixtures of sex fables,—on storks and fairy godmothers and leave the mysteries of sex to be interpreted by Achilles and Siegfried and Guinevere! ”

“ We have good ideas told without charm of design; and we have meaningless patterns which tickle the ear for the moment but fade because they spring from no real thought. Literature is only achieved when the [Pg 70] thought pattern and the language pattern exactly fit. A refrain for the mere sake of recurrent jingle, that has no genuine no essential recurrence in the thought, is a trick. If the pattern does not help the thought and the thought suggest the pattern, there is something wrong. It is an artifice, not art. ”

“ Surely no school would advise giving classical literature without the setting which would make the stories and verse understandable. It is a question whether the fact of desirable literature has not in the past and does not still govern our whole school program more than many educators would be willing to admit. What seems to be more logical is to set up that which is psychologically sound so far as we know it and create if need be a new literature to help support the structure.
In the presence of art, schools have always taken a modest attitude. ”

“ It is not important that he know this or that particular fact; it is important that he be able to fit any particular fact into a rational scheme of thought. Accordingly, the relationships which a story clarifies are of much greater import than the facts it gives. All this, of course, concerns the content of stories—the intentional material it presents to the child and has nothing to do with the pleasure of the presentation,—the relish which comes from the form of the story. I do not wish this to be interpreted to mean that I think all fairy stories forever harmful. ”