Porter Lander MacClintock

“ At the same time nobody but Stevenson—nobody 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. ”

“ Concerning the ultimate, distant return we cannot speak in terms of teaching and learning. Art is long; like the human child, being destined to a long and vicissitudinous life, it had a long childhood; and this is true of its growth in each individual as of its growth in the race. So far as regards many of the most desired results of literature, we can but sow the seed, and wait years for the bloom—a lifetime, maybe, for the fruit. But though we may not reach a hand through all the years to grasp the far-off interest of our toil, we have every reason to believe that the harvest will be fair. ”

“ Odysseus combines in himself all those characteristics that endear a hero to the child and the childlike mind. He is active and ever-ready; strong, too, beyond the measure of any ordinary man; quick in the battle; good at a game, resourceful and handy in any emergency; subtle and quickwitted; full of tricks and riddles; equipped at every point for the effective undoing of his foes. Inevitably in any class of modern children as old as the nine-ten-year grade the delicate problem of Odysseus' moral character will come up for discussion. ”

“ Titania and Oberon, flower-fairies, dew-fairies, gauzy wings and spangled skirts, were not in the mind of the people who told these tales of the sometimes grim and schauderhaft and always serious beings—fairies, elves, goblins, or what not. Wicked little brown men disappearing into a green hillock with the human child, in exchange for whom they have left in the cottage cradle a brown imp of their own; the godmother with the fairy-gift who brings justice and joy to the wronged maiden; the slighted wise woman foretelling death and doom over the cradle of the little princess ”

“ It is undoubtedly wise to make upon the teacher and the children the impression that reading is a tool, a key—perhaps we would better call it a gate through which one gets at many things—the joys and rewards of literature, to be sure, but also the images of history, the facts of nature, the details of handicraft. A reading-book, or any system of reading-lessons that contains nothing but literature is therefore a mistake. ”

“ 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 amusement of the baby, and learns to see them as little treasures of primitive art, miraculously preserved and passed 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 ”

“ It is, first of all, as one cannot say too often, the imaginative level of the folk-tales that fits them for the child's use. They are the creative reconstruction of the world by those who were rich in images and sense-material, unhampered in the use of it by any system of logic or body of organized knowledge, simple, sincere and full of faith—as our own well-born children are at six-seven-eight. It is this simplicity, sincerity, and earnestness that gives them their childlikeness—all qualities that one fails to find in the modern fairy-tale written by a grown person for children. ”

“ But in either case they help to form the whole atmosphere of beauty and distinction that surrounds a bit of good literature. And we cannot fail to believe in the refining and stimulating influence upon the child's taste of his contact with formal beauty in this as in the other arts.
As distinctive of literature, setting it apart from other kinds of writing, one must note that it always has in it the warmth, the fervor, of emotion, "Dowered with the scorn of scorn, the love of love, the hate of hate," is the poet, and always the glow of feeling lights up his line. ”

“ So the child, when the details he knows or may know in real life are set in literature, sees them surrounded with a halo of new beauty and value. This halo, this well-known radiance of art, spreads itself over the objects that he sees about him, and they, too, take on a new beauty, and so pass into his storehouse of images with their meaning and usefulness increased. ”

“ Nothing is so alien to the consciousness of the child as the consciousness of the grown-up educated man. It is by nothing short of a miracle that he can keep his own sophistications out of what he writes for children. His fairy-tale, failing in simplicity, will betake itself to babbling inanity; failing in earnestness, it gives itself over to sentimentality; failing in belief, it is likely to be filled with cynicism and cheap satire under the guise of playfulness. ”

“ It is precisely the response we should like to have when we tell our children the Hebrew myth of the creation—an emotional reaction, vague but deep, to the dim and sublime images of the Days—a response that constitutes itself forevermore a part of his religious experience. If we are willing that he should have a similar reaction upon the story of Zeus and the Titans, if we are willing that he should lay this down, too, among the foundations of his religious life, by all means tell it. But we can not quite fairly tell one to awaken a religious response, and the other an artistic one. ”

“ From the very earliest times of which we have record of this myth, Apollo was known to be a spiritual and ethical force at work in man's soul. He was named when men tried to speak of those experiences which wrought expiation and purification. He stood for milder law, for beneficent and benevolent social order, for art, for the songs of the sacred bard, the dirge of grief, the paean of victory, the games—all the gentler things of social culture and personal experience. ”

“ It is well to study with the children occasionally a tragic tale, to give them that sort of artistic experience and to secure the exercise of the tender sides of sympathy and pity. But because they are not provided by their experience with reasons for expecting and accepting tragedy they should be prepared for the calamity and led to justify and accept it—not as a visitation of justice, for a true tragedy is never of that kind—but as a beautiful pathos or grief. ”

“ This nimbus of art casts back upon life some of its own radiance, dignifying and enriching it, and to many minds revealing for the first time beauty and meaning which they would otherwise never have seen; so that we truly see and rightly interpret many of the people and things in our own lives only after we have seen the mates of them in a story or a poem. A group of children who had been helped to make a verse about rosy radishes, and had then done a water-color picture of a plate of the same vegetable, found for many days new and artistic joy in a grocer's window. ”

“ If the grade has had the King Arthur stories of Malory or Tennyson in large amounts with a very earnest teacher, they can very certainly be said to need Don Quixote—always, of course, shortened and expurgated, and in carefully chosen episodes; from which process—such is its essential greatness, and such the character of its unity—it suffers less than any other story in the world. We should be quite aware of the danger of giving the children any large amount of this peculiar kind of realism—that which constitutes itself a satire and a sort of parody on some over-serious bit of romance. ”

“ Not even a sense of humor is so useful in his intellectual experience as the ability to understand and use figures of speech. What makes so pathetic or so appalling a spectacle as the person who never catches the transferred and ironic turns of expression of which even ordinary conversation is full? The poor belated mind stands helpless amidst the play of allusion that flashes all about him, and not even fear of thunder, which is the most alert sensation Emerson can attribute to him, can put him into touch with his kind. ”

“ Now, one would hasten to add that there are children in every class, and it may be in every family—unimaginative, matter-of-fact, commonplace children—who need to have given them, and to learn to enjoy, if possible, the mere vagaries and haphazard inventions; and it would be a pity to deprive any child of them in his hours of intellectual play. But it is from his contact, frequent and deep, with the more artistic and ordered bits of literature that we may expect the child to find that special cultivation of the imagination, the power of seeing an organized imaginative whole ”

“ If so, she may reflect that it is triumphantly true that such is the affinity between the child and the story that he will get much delight and nourishment out of any telling of it. Who has not hesitated between a smile and a tear at the spectacle of a child or a class hanging enthralled and hungry upon a story rendered by a mother or a teacher whose every pronunciation was a jar, whose every cadence a dislocation, and whose every emphasis a misinterpretation?
And remember, the art of story-telling is not the art of the theater, not the art of the actress, but the art of the mother, the nurse ”

“ It should be one of the considerations that weigh in choosing the material for his literary training even throughout his college experience, in order that his ear for musical speech may grow ever more subtle, more responsive to the delicate and noble cadences of poetry and of beautiful prose. Beautiful and musical speech is the crowning quality of literature, and the final note of distinction in style, and no amount of originality in image or figure, no degree of delicate fitness in word or phrase, no perfection of skill in logical coherence and arrangement, should persuade us to forgo it. ”

“ Story is, in general, the narrative of a succession of incidents or events. It is a large, general form or device, useful, indeed inevitable, in all subjects. Like language itself, story is a universal medium, conveying the facts of history, of science, of life. Whenever we have the steps of any experience arranged according to any of the laws of subsequence or consequence, we have story; such as the story of the dandelion seed, the story of the life of Mary Stuart, the story of the invention of the steam engine, the story of a day in the city. ”

“ Only a genius, or a student who has immersed himself in the matter, can produce a story whose psychology, sociology, and archaeology will throw real light upon a bygone age or event. There are such stories, but they are not for elementary children; or, if they are, only as adventure, not as history. No one who chooses books for children should be misled by these cheap manufactured stories which claim as their reason for being that they have a historical background. After all, it is Scott who has given us the best big stories of adventure. ”

“ We may feel contented if we have succeeded in cultivating an appreciation of the musical side of speech—among the younger children an enjoyment of the obvious things of meter and rhyme, reaching in the older children enjoyment of the rhythm of prose, and many of the more subtle harmonies of arrangement and tone-color. We may hopefully labor to impress upon them a sense of structure, an appreciation of "composition." We may refine and build upon their instinctive love of story, until we see it taking on within this period the certainty of a cultivated taste. ”

“ In proportion as we find in literature abstract thinking, statement of general truth or plain fact, facsimile description or mere sentimentalizing, in that proportion do we find it dull and inartistic. "The orange is a reddish-yellow semi-tropical fruit," is a statement of fact plain and scientific. It would be so inartistic as to be absurd in a line of poetry. "Among the dark boughs the golden orange glows," lifts the object into the world of art, sets it in a picture, even gives it to us in the round, makes it moving and vital. ”

“ Indeed, literature may be completely unmoral, and still safely serve the purposes of amusement and of distinctively literary training—as witness the nursery rhymes, the Garden of Verses, Alice in Wonderland. But if it be immoral, it is also artistically unsound, and does not yield satisfactory literary results. No teacher is in danger of teaching a story which depicts the attractions of vice or glorifies some roguish hero. ”

“ In the second place, literature, whether it be handling beautiful material or for any reason dealing with ugly material, is always seeking beauty of form. There are the larger matters of art-form, such as unity, harmony, completeness, balance—those large beneficent elements of beauty which should be in the child's literature as in all his other art, constituting the genial atmosphere which he breathes in without knowing it. ”

“ When Scott takes from history the figure of Richard Cœur de Lion, it is not for the purpose of teaching historical fact, but for the sake of putting into his picture a striking person and an effective motive. When Macaulay employs many figures of speech, when he rounds out his periods and balances them carefully, when he uses picturesque concrete and particular persons and objects rather than abstractions and generalizations, all to make clear and vivid the information he is giving, he is still writing history and not literature, since he is aiming first at fact and not first at beauty. ”

“ There are those who fix upon its emotional nature as grounds for suspicion, if not of condemnation, of literature as a means of discipline. And we must all hasten to confess that this atmosphere of emotion is the snare of the weak teacher and the curse of weak literature. Emotion displayed or aroused unworthily, or attached to inadequate or ignoble stimuli, is either mere sentimentality or undue enthusiasm. It should be reckoned nothing short of a crime to stimulate unduly a child's emotion, and to awaken in him feelings for which his nature is not ripe. ”

“ There are kings, to be sure, and princes, but except in certain of the stories that took permanent literary shape in the seventeenth century, they are, like the kings and princes in the Odyssey, plain and democratic monarchs, on terms of beautiful equality with the noble swineherd and the charming tailor. King Arthur in the nursery ballad stole a peck of barley meal to make a bag-pudding, in the homeliest and most democratic way, and the picture of the queen frying the cold pudding for breakfast seems only natural to the little democrats of six and seven in our own day. ”

“ This is because the images and pictures they find in literature retain in the minds of the children the glow of imagination, the warmth of emotion, the vitality of a remembered joy. And it is true, as every teacher knows who has taught it aright, that a bit of literature arouses in the children a mood of creative imagination such as no other subject ever can awaken. This mood of imaginative creation instinctively expresses itself in literary composition, in drawing, painting, designing, modeling, acting, or music. ”