Literature in the Elementary School Part 10

The case was equally bad when literature was const.i.tuted the center of the scheme, and when it was attached to a scheme having some other center--geography, for example, or history. For in the first case it was altogether likely that some detail or aspect of the piece of literature, merely subsidiary in the literature, would be selected for emphasis and elevated into the correlating detail; the background or setting would be taken out for study and elaboration, crowding the action, the human and really literary elements, out of sight. As, for example--and it is an authentic example of a scheme of correlation--the first-grade children are given as the center of their work _The Old Woman Who Found the Sixpence_; from this story we take out the dog, which we study as the type of _digitigrade carnivora_. Or--again an authentic example--having read to the first grade _The Musicians of Bremen_, as one of them happens to be a donkey, we seize the opportunity to teach in detail and over several weeks of time, the physical peculiarities of the donkey and his kinsman the horse, among many exercises drawing out of the children some speculation or information as to how much water or hay the horse consumes; to which hook we attach instruction as to weights and measures; and so on into the remote fringes of information about objects and persons used in the story only in the literary way.

In the second case, that in which literature is attached to some other center, in feeling about for some bit of literature to fit into a geographical fact, a meteorological condition, or a historical event, the teacher was quite likely to hit upon a third- or fourth-rate specimen, unsuitable for his children in other respects, and in teaching it he was likely to force from it a meaning and an emphasis that as literature it would not bear; as, when the children were studying the migration of birds, he taught them Bryant's "To a Waterfowl,"

emphasizing the migration and ignoring the true emphasis of the poem--the lesson of a guiding providence; or as, _apropos_ of December weather, he set the fifth grade to reading Whittier's slow-moving, meditative, and much too mature "Snow-Bound."

As a matter of fact, no art yields kindly to any method of adjustment to other subjects that emphasizes the subject-matter or information material that may perchance be involved in the art. Information-giving is not the method nor the mission of art; the four, or five arts if we include acting, with which we may have to do in elementary discipline combine and play into one another without difficulty. It is not necessary to speak again of the close and easy a.s.sociation of literature with all the forms of acting that the children have, from marching, dancing, and simple gesture, on to the acting required in an organized drama. On the musical side, particularly the verse-form of literature, it combines most acceptably with music. A great many of the lyrics that are simple enough for the children to learn, and many of the verses that they write, are also adaptable as songs to be sung. And even when they cannot be set to melodies they share, in their spoken form, with the actual musical notes, in the training of the ear. The exercises in drawing, painting, and modeling co-operate to fine advantage for the objectifying of the visual images, of which the children get so large a store from literature. As a matter of fact, when the children are set the task of objectifying an inner image, it is most likely to be some figure or scene from literature that comes up for expression--Nausicaa throwing the ball, Robin Hood stringing his bow, Siegfried tempering his sword, Paul Revere mounting his horse, the lodge of old Nokomis. 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.

On the very surface of the problem of the correlations of literature lies the somewhat difficult question of the relation of the children's literature to their lessons in reading--as regards both their beginning to read and their later practice in reading. It remains true that with all our experimenting and in spite of all the enthusiasm we can muster, to the majority of children and in the hands of most teachers the mechanics of learning to read is drudgery. This drudgery literature should share with the other subjects in its due proportion. One would not ignore the fact that this "due proportion" may be very large--larger than that of any other subject. It is quite legitimate to employ the charm and interest of literature in the service of reading; and it would be a serious misfortune for the children to learn their reading entirely through the medium of colorless fact. We have agreed that there is such a thing as literary reading, different in many ways from the reading of history or science. Even the younger children can feel this, and can produce it if correctly guided. But they should not always be doing literary reading; they should acquire the colorless but good style of merely intellectual reading. This they will not do if in their early reading exercises they are given more than their due proportion of literature.

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.

From another point of view it is a misfortune to identify the reading-lessons with literature. As has been said more than once in these chapters, the alert teacher of our day is eager to emanc.i.p.ate literature again from its bondage to the printed page, and to set free once more its function as a truly social art; making it also once more a matter of the listening ear and the living voice.

To identify the reading-lessons of the younger children with their literature lessons is to keep them at things much too immature, and to r.e.t.a.r.d their mental and artistic growth. They can apprehend and appreciate many things that they cannot read. It is a commonplace that a child's listening vocabulary is far in advance of his reading vocabulary, no matter how or how early he learns to read. Of course, this is the secret of the revolt against book-reading of the children who learn to read late--the simplicity of the thought and expression in the matter they are mechanically able to read, makes it unacceptable to them intellectually. It is in the literature received by his ear that a child grows and exercises his maturer powers. The older children should be taught and exercised in literary reading, the simple interpretative reading of their literature. The best results in this most profitable aspect of the teaching of literature can be obtained in the secondary period, when the children are expert enough as readers to think while they read, and when their voices are, as mere mechanical organs, more completely under control.

The objections to the a.s.sociation of drill in writing, in spelling, in grammar, and in compositions are of like kind. It may be granted that there is something in the fact that literature represents the most effective use of language, and is, all things considered, the most interesting kind of writing. Still this does not const.i.tute a sufficient reason why the burden, and in all too many cases the odium, of teaching these things should attach to literature. It is a perfidious breaking of the promise of literature, or of any art, which should keep as much as possible of the atmosphere of play. Of course, drill in language and in written expression should be attached to every subject in the elementary curriculum; and this not only for the sake of relieving the literature from a burden of unattractive tasks, but because of the fact that the literary style and vocabulary are not good for all subjects and purposes, and the children should not be trained exclusively in these.

On the large scale of things, it is a pity at any stage of the child's education to identify "English" with literature, since there is and should be so much English that is not literature, and so much literature that is not English.

One of the pleasantest and most profitable co-operations of literature is with the training in languages other than the vernacular. In those elementary cla.s.ses where the children have instruction in either German or French--or, for the matter of that, in Spanish or Italian--every effort should be made in their use of story and verse to secure the characteristic and universal literary effect. The German lyric has all the beauty of music and of image that the English has; the French fairy-play has most of elements of dramatic art that the children could use in English translation.

A few of the fallacies of correlation, or mere co-relation, of literature with other aspects of the children's school experience are these:

The fallacy of setting out to teach children the love of home, or country, or nature, or animals, by teaching them literature that expresses or reflects those emotions.

The love of one's own country must be in our day a thing of slow and gradual growth. Our feelings about our country should arise out of our knowledge of the heroic things in her history, out of the n.o.ble plans for her growth, out of the generous things she provides for her children and the children of other lands. Out of this or some such basis arises the emotion of patriotism, a poem or a story which reflects this emotion has some such back-ground by implication. To hunt about for a poem or story which teaches patriotism is a putting of the cart before the horse. First arouse in your children the emotion--an original personal emotion of their own, growing out of the legitimate background; then, if perchance you are so fortunate as to find a poem or a story which also reflects this emotion, and which is at the same time good as art, you are so much the richer. The children will find their own feeling reinforced and n.o.bly expressed, and consequently deepened and dignified.

The same thing is true as to the love of animals. If the children have the literature first, or only the literature, they may have only a second-hand and perfunctory love of the beasts. But first give your grade a dog, or a cat, or a canary; or give your child in the country a pony, or a lamb, or a pig; that they may feel at first hand the throb of dramatic brotherhood, of humorous kins.h.i.+p, that const.i.tutes love of animals. Then, when, judging by the proper canons that test good literature, you find a piece that reflects and deepens this, it is so much pure gain.

The same thing is true of nature. The children should have many things that reflect feelings about nature and natural phenomena, and that give the interpretations which great and gifted artists have made of these things. But one should no more go to literature for creating first-hand love of nature than he would go to the same source for facts about any specific phenomenon in nature. Of course, this is not saying that we demand that a child shall have had a previous experience of every image and phenomenon of nature that is presented to him in literature. Indeed, we expect literature to complement and supplement life in the matter of imagery; to deepen and to arouse experience in the matter of emotion.

But the fallacy lies in choosing literature on this ground, and in depending upon literature to create at first hand what is, and should be, an extra-literary feeling. Now, from time to time there comes the teacher's way one of those rare chances when he finds the time, the place, and the poem all together, as when on some March day of thaw he can teach "The c.o.c.k is crowing," of Wordsworth; on the first morning of h.o.a.r-frost he can read "The Frost;" on another day, "The Wind"--the things that harmonize with the spirit of an experience.

Another of the fallacies of correlation is the determined, if not violent, a.s.sociation of the work in literature with the festivals. As a matter of fact, there is not much more than time in certain schools to teach the younger children the things they are expected to know about Thanksgiving, Christmas, Was.h.i.+ngton's birthday, Easter, June. The work for the next celebration begins just as soon as the foregoing one is past. The part.i.tioning of the year into these very emphatic sections, and the carrying of the children through the same round year after year, are questions too general to be treated here. But we are interested in the fact that in most cases the specimens of literature that can be considered applicable to the festivals would never be chosen from out the world of things for their absolute value as literature, nor for their peculiar suitability for the children. So it comes about that the children--the younger cla.s.ses, at least--spend as much as two-thirds of their time at second- or third-rate specimens of literature.

There is not much reason for protesting in our day against that species of correlating literature with something else which consists in teaching in connection with this literature things that the children ought to know later, regardless of their immediate fitness or acceptability; as for example the facts of Greek mythology, the characters and plots of Shakespeare's plays; we can never be too grateful for that interpretation of childhood and of education which has made this hereafter impossible. At the same time, if we choose wisely now, choose in the light of our best knowledge, the children will be glad all their lives to know the things we choose for them.

The connection of literature with history is a many-sided question, and is not easily disposed of. As a matter of fact, the partners.h.i.+p between history and literature, so vaguely a.s.serted and so complaisantly accepted in many quarters, is a combination in which the literature has usually gone to the wall. Indeed, the practical adjustment of history and literature wavers about between two equally fallacious schemes. One of these is to give the children the literature produced by the nation whose history they are studying; as for example, the Homeric poems when they study the history of Greece, that they may imbibe the true Greek spirit from the poems. Now, children of elementary age cannot distinguish, or even unconsciously feel, a national spirit in a poem. It is the broadly human, the universally true, elements and spirit that they feel. Besides, the Greek national spirit, the spirit of the characteristic Greek period, was not Homeric, and the literature of the characteristic Greek period would never do for the elementary children.

In the case of Greek literature one cannot unreservedly demur because the Homeric poems are never bad for the children. But the same principle applied to other nations and their literature may bring disaster.

The other scheme for relating history and literature is to choose the literature on the basis of the fact that it deals with some person or event or period with which the history is concerned; as, when we have a cla.s.s in the history of the Plymouth colony, we give them Longfellow's "The Courts.h.i.+p of Miles Standish" for literature, which, except for one or two picturesque scenes, one would never choose as literature for young children; and as, when we study the American Revolution, we give them as literature some mature and sentimental modern novel, or some sensational and untrustworthy juvenile, choosing these merely because they profess to incorporate events connected with the historical period.

The whole matter of the historical romance is important and complicated--too complicated and involving too many critical principles to be handled here. It must be sufficient to say in this connection what is sufficiently obvious to any thoughtful critic--that he who takes up and handles legitimately and justly an epoch, an event, or a group of historical persons, and at the same time produces good literature, is a master and produces a masterpiece--much too mature and developed for elementary children. Only Scott possessed the faculty of keeping generally in sight of his history, or of segregating it in an occasional _longeur_, and adding to it a rattling good story. But Scott is too mature and complex for elementary children up to the very oldest, and they are not likely to be studying the periods in history that interested him.

No, the kins.h.i.+p between history and literature, and the co-operations between them in the children's experience, are not of this external and artificial kind. It is for the mature and philosophical student to study literature as a culture product--its relation to the country and the times that produced it. It is for much older students to read the great romances, like Tolstoy's _War and Peace_, that adequately mirror an epoch or an epoch-making event.

For the children there is a deeper spiritual kins.h.i.+p between history and literature. It has to do with the personal and dramatic side, the biography and adventure of history. It lies in the spirit and atmosphere of human achievement, in the ident.i.ty of the motives that express themselves in literature and in actual accomplishment. When we study the pioneer and the colonist--the born and doomed colonist--we find his kinsman and prototype in Robinson Crusoe. When we study the Revolution, the revolt against unjust laws, the protest of democracy against cla.s.s-oppression, we find the spirit of Robin Hood.

I hasten to disclaim any intention of advising these particular combinations. The examples should merely serve to make clear certain aspects of the kins.h.i.+p of spirit between literature and history. Of course one does now and again, and as it were, by special grace, find a story or a poem--like the "Concord Hymn," or "Marion's Men," or "The Landing of the Pilgrim Fathers"--precisely _apropos_ of his event and beautifully adapted to his literary needs. And one often comes upon a historical doc.u.ment--like _The Oregon Trail_ or _The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin_--so picturesque and concrete, so observant of effects of unity and harmony, so full of appeals to the imagination, and so effective in verbal expression, as to yield many of the effects of literature.

In spite of all protests against forced and mistaken a.s.sociations of literature with other subjects in school, we must constantly insist that it is no isolated thing, detached from life. On the contrary, literature arises out of life, and is always arising out of it and reacting upon it. It is effective and practically operative in a child's life precisely because it, too, is life. It is closer, therefore, to his business and bosom than any item or system of knowledge could be. It is not to disturb its trustworthiness and value to say that it does not primarily convey information and cannot be called upon to deliver facts.

It does render truth and wisdom, the summary and essence of fact and knowledge. It does not destroy its educational value to say that we shall search it in vain for a body or a system of organized discipline; for, since it is art, it disciplines while it charms and teaches us while it sets us free.

The natural correlations of literature are with the other arts, but, above all, with the spirit of childhood, and with the consciousness of children; with the tone and spirit of their other work, rather than with its actual subject-matter.

CHAPTER XVII

LITERATURE OUT OF SCHOOL AND READING OTHER THAN LITERATURE

Were it not for appearing captious or extravagant, one would like to say that in these days of cheap and easy books, and amidst the temptations of the free libraries, the problem is that of keeping the children from reading too much, rather than of inducing them to read enough. This is particularly true of children in our large American cities, whom we must, in our first generation of city-dwelling, guard against eye-strain, and nerve-strain, and library-air, and physical inactivity of all sorts. Luckily, our generation has learned some things about the educational processes that have tended to lessen materially the danger of over-reading. In many homes, and to many children out of school, books and magazines have hitherto been a sort of opiate, from the point of view of the child deadening the hungry sensibilities and lulling the stifled activities; and from the point of view of the parent securing silence and providing an apparently innocuous occupation. This is all too little changed now, though more and more homes are providing opportunity and encouragement for other occupations: shop and studio, and more abundant material and opportunity for play. In the cities the public playgrounds and gymnasiums--and all too rarely the public workshop and studio for children--begin to share with the public library the task of safely taking care of the children out of school.

But there will always be time for reading, and by all means the legitimate share of the children's time should be given to it. The so-called supplementary reading given them by the school is largely, I take it, a question of the much reading that will make the process easier, and not a matter of acc.u.mulating facts, or of acquiring a wider knowledge of literature. In many schools that I have observed it is often unwisely and carelessly chosen, so far as the literary share of it is concerned. It should be selected partly for its bearing upon the fact-studies, and not wholly made up of things of the literary kind. The bearings of the question of the school's supplementary reading are not literary, or, so far as they are, they have been discussed in other connections.

Every child should ideally have free access to a collection of books got together with reference to his needs and tastes. It may be serviceable to indicate the kind and number of books that might be included in such a library of a child up to his fourteenth year.

There should be in such a collection several biographies. On the whole, let them be of the older, idealizing type, not of the modern young university instructor's virtuously iconoclastic type. Children get at their history first through heroic and dramatic figures and events. In their earlier years it is the imagination that appropriates the images and events of history. It is therefore only good pedagogy to present the figures on their heroic and ideal side. Let these biographies include the record of different sorts of men--a statesman, a pioneer, a preacher, a soldier, an explorer, an inventor, a missionary, a business man, a man of letters--so that many types of character and kinds of experience may be reflected.

As the children grow older, they will dip into history for the images--the persons and detachable events. The search for facts and philosophy will come many years later. Some tempting books of history should appear on their shelves; _The Dutch Republic_, _The Conquest of Mexico_, Parkman's romantic narratives, and John Fiske's; if possible the ill.u.s.trated edition of _Green's History of the English People_. Most of the history they get from their own reading, however, should be what they get from the biographies of the central figures in the events--Columbus, William of Orange, Francis Drake, and all the other picturesque and heroic persons. Other historical reading would best be done under guidance and in connection with the work in school.

There should be a few books of travel and exploration. Among these there should be some of the original sources, if possible the _Bradford Journal_, the _Jesuit Relations_, the _Lewis and Clark Journals_.

Froissart and Marco Polo should be included; the fable-making travelers perform a very useful function. To these may be added a few most recent explorations--African, Arctic, Andean, Thibetan.

Children, barring the exceptional child, will not read formal science; but it may develop or help on a desirable taste and interest to have some of the many pretty out-door books in their collection--not romances of the wild, but simpler treatises about the things to be found in the door-yard and the home woodland. And when a child develops a taste or a gift in any scientific direction, he should have access, as easy as possible, to some good reference books suited to his needs. All children should have access to some of the more popular technical and scientific journals which give interesting accounts of current discoveries and inventions.

By way of nature and animal books we will include the _Jungle Books_, an expurgated edition of _Reynard the Fox_, _Aesop's Fables_, and, of course, _Uncle Remus_. Other semi-scientific nature-writers will doubtless appear in most collections of children's books--and may do no harm.

A book of Greek myth seriously and beautifully told should be accessible. No other myth is so beautiful or so imaginative, or so artistically put together. The children do not need to have to do with many myths until they know something about interpreting them. Of course, they should have access to the Bible in some attractive form. A large ill.u.s.trated edition--Dore's or Tissot's--will please and instruct them from their earliest days. This is one of the cases in which pictures--good and imaginative pictures--form a desirable gateway into a realm where the children are not naturally at home, and where they need the help of a great and serious artist in finding their way. Of course, poor and materialistic pictures are a misfortune, especially those that attempt to body forth preternatural events and supernatural beings.

Dore's pictures are not undesirable, because they often help a child to a n.o.ble and imaginative conception of a thing he is himself powerless to construct; while Tissot's are good because they set forth with beauty and richness of detail the many phases of life which the child must try to image in reading the Hebrew stories--from the nomadic simplicity of the saga of pastoral Abraham to the luxurious refinements of the Romanized and cosmopolitan Jerusalem.

The little scholar should find on his shelves Lanier's _King Arthur_, Pyle's _Robin Hood_, Palmer's _Odyssey_, some translation of the _Iliad_; in short, some form of each of the great hero-tales; a selected few of Scott's romances--_Ivanhoe_, _Quentin Durward_, _Guy Mannering_, _Anne of Geierstein_; a few of Cooper's; _Robinson Crusoe_, _Don Quixote_, William Morris' prose tales, a pair of Quiller-Couch's, and as many of Joseph Conrad's; these might const.i.tute his romances. But unless he is a very unusual child, he will never read in these masters, if he is given ma.s.ses of cheap and easy reading, such as the Henty books and the Alger series; or if he finds in his mother's sitting-room a stack of "the season's best sellers" and the ten-cent magazines. The cheap and easy style and the commonplace material of this sort of books offer the line of least resistance to the young reader. They flow into his mind without effort on his part, while, if he would apprehend the masters, he must actively co-operate with them at every step, arousing his best powers to comprehend their expressions and to grasp their ideas. One would hesitate to say that there is absolutely no use for books of the Henty and Alger type. One can imagine a child whose every bent was against reading, being enticed to begin by some such easy and commonplace experience. And one can imagine their being useful to wean children away from really vicious books. In a certain boys' club I know, organized in a social settlement, which was really a reorganization of a gang, these particular books were for a year or so an acceptable subst.i.tute for the b.l.o.o.d.y romances they had been reading. Many of those boys have never pa.s.sed beyond them; but to many others they were, as was hoped, stepping-stones to better things. There is no place for them in the ideal collection of children's books. Certain books, harmless and as recreation even desirable, will inevitably make their appearance on the children's shelves--Miss Alcott's, Mrs. Richards', and others of the many series of girls' books and boys' books; they are doubtless innocent enough, and to be discouraged only when they keep the children from something better worth while; to be encouraged, on the other hand, only for those children who must be tempted by easy reading into any habit of using books. To be sure, you will probably find that your child has found one of them, perhaps a whole series, to which for a certain period she seems to have given her whole heart; but if treated with wisdom this symptom will disappear, and you will find her at some surprisingly early day re-reading the tournament at Ashby, and patronizingly alluding to the time when she was enslaved to "The Little General" series, or the "Under the Roses" or the "Eight Half-Sisters" series, or any other particular juveniles, as "when I was a child."

In the matter of fairy-tales one must discriminate and renounce quite resolutely. It is not good for a child who has early mastered that edged tool of reading to have access to all fairy-tales and all kinds of fairy-tales. Eschew all the modern ones. Of course, if you have a personal friend who has written a book of them, for reasons other than literary your children will read them. But as to those you choose freely for them let them have Grimm and Perrault, and the _Arabian Nights_, and after a while Andersen; which, together with what they will pick up here and there in magazines and in their friends' houses, will be enough.

For poetry, the child should have on his own shelves some pretty edition of the _Nursery Rhymes_, _The Child's Garden_, some really good collection of little things--_The Posy Ring_, for example, Henley's _Lyra Heroica_, Lang's _The Blue Poetry Book_, Allingham's _Book of Ballads_. For the rest he should be read to from the poets themselves, and as soon as he is old enough, sent to the volumes of the poets for his reading. As in school so at home the children should hear their poetry read until they acquire some real degree of expertness as readers. Children who can not understand at all, poetry which they read silently, will delight in it read aloud.

This little collection should contain the cla.s.sic nonsense, but not all kinds of inartistic fooling and rude fun. There should be _Alice in Wonderland_ and _Through the Looking-Gla.s.s_ (always the one with Tenniel's pictures). We must remember that _Alice_ is very delicate art, and that its final and deepest appeal is to the mature person. Certain very imaginative children take to it as a fanciful tale at the moment of ripeness; others miss it then, and must wait until the wonderful dream-psychology of it, and the delicate satire of its parodies can make their appeal to them as older persons. Lear's _Nonsense Rhymes_ in judicious doses every child should have; "John Gilpin's Ride;" certain of the _Bab Ballads_; a little of Oliver Heresford's delightful foolishness. Among the folk- and fairy-tales he will find many comic bits whose kind or degree of humor will suit him admirably in his younger years. In Clouston's _Book of Noodles_ may be found a mine of such funny tales. _The Peterkin Papers_ is the best of modern noodle-tales. No family can be brought up without the help of _Strewel Peter_, nor should they miss _Little Black Sambo_. Most American children are enchanted with the fun of Tom Sawyer and Huck Finn though one must sadly acknowledge that it is woven into back-grounds of a sensational kind not at all improving to an unformed taste.

One cannot feel that parodies are in general good for children; though, after they have had a good share of serious enjoyment out of their fairy-tales, and especially if they seem too much or too long absorbed in them, they ought to have _The Rose and the Ring_ and _Prince Prigio_.

Picture-books and ill.u.s.trated books are another independent little problem. It is a curious fact that it is not the beautiful lithographs of birds and animals, flocks and landscapes, children in irreproachable Russian dresses and short socks, seated in the corner of ancestral mahogany sofas, refres.h.i.+ng themselves from antique silver porringers, that the little living heads hang over by the hour on the nursery floor.

It is much more likely to be the thunderous landscapes of the old Dutch woodcuts in Great-grandmama's Bible, the queer, chaotic, symbolistic plates of the _Mother-Play_; the wonderful prints of Comenius' _Orbis Pictus_; the casualties of John Leech's hunting fields. True, they delight in the charming details of all Kate Greenaway's books; and Walter Crane's pictures so rich in color and beautiful detail give ceaseless joy; but one must confess that they are a bit inclined to "shy" at pictures they know to be intended for them. Every nursery that can compa.s.s it should have as many as possible of the books ill.u.s.trated in color by Boutet de Monvel. The children should never see comic ill.u.s.trations of their nursery rhymes and stories. They are all ba.n.a.l as wit and trashy as art, subst.i.tuting an ugly and distorted image for the possibly beautiful one the child might have made for himself. After they have pa.s.sed out of infancy, they do not need pictures in their stories.

The black-and-white print is inadequate when color and movement should be a part of the image, and children should have the discipline of relying entirely on themselves in visualizing the images of the text.

There should also be in the "little library," or accessible to the little readers in the big one, beside the ill.u.s.trated Bible, the one big volume of Shakespeare with Gilbert's pictures--an inexhaustible mine of life and art; Engelmann and Anderson's _Atlas of the Homeric Poems_, a _Dictionary of Cla.s.sical Antiquities_, and an encyclopedia that the older children can use, should have a place on these shelves.

It is so often said as to amount to a mere convention that the best possible literary experience for a child is to be turned loose to browse (they always say "browse") in a grown-up library. One always finds a malicious pleasure in detecting in these people (and they are always to be found in great plenty) those baby impressions, still uncorrected that they got of many books in the course of their browsing. Of course, in a house where there are many books the children will experiment, will taste of many dishes, and possibly devour many things not intended for them. From some of these they will take no serious harm, while in many other cases they will get a permanent warp of judgment or of feeling. It would seem to me wise to guide the child in his explorations, giving him plenty of those grown-up things that you believe to be good for him, and heading him off as long as possible from the others. For all your caution, however, children will be found buried in _Tom Jones_, mousing about in Montaigne, chuckling over _Tristram Shandy_, and befuddling themselves with _Ghosts_ and _Anna Karenina_. In these cases we can only hope that nature has mercifully ordained that, not having the necessary apperception experience, they will not get at the real truth of these books, and that they will have the luck--rare, to be sure--to remove and correct their mistaken impressions in some subsequent reading.

The ideal co-operation between home, school, Sunday school, and library is yet to be brought about; teacher and parents can do much to promote it. As a step toward this co-operation they should provide every child who reads in a library with a list of books. The imaginative books in the list given out by the public libraries are practically all juveniles, apparently chosen mainly for the purpose of amusing children who have no books in their homes. These things are undoubtedly amusing; they are superficially appetizing; and they have the same effect that the soda fountain at the corner drug-shop has upon the children's appet.i.te for true nourishment--they take the edge off his hunger so that he has no relish for his bread and b.u.t.ter, though he has had nothing to eat but a hint of cheap flavor, a dash of formaldehyde, a spoonful of poor milk, and a gla.s.sful of effervescence. The lists given by parents and teachers may change all this, but only if they include good things, beautiful and interesting enough to make these wasteful juveniles seem unattractive.