LIBRARY OF CONGRESS. 
 US r»-°7 
 
 Chap. Copyright No. 
 
 Hhel£*S-ML 
 
 UNITED STATES OF AMERICA. 
 
THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL 
 
 AND 
 
 OTHER ESSAYS 
 
 BY 
 
 NORA ARCHIBALD SMITH 
 
 Author of "Under the Cactus Flag," "The Kinder- 
 garten in a Nutshell," and "The Children of the 
 Future": Joint-Author with Kate Douglas Wiggin 
 of " The Republic of Childhood," " The Story Hour," 
 and "Children's Rights" 
 
 Kovimt lasst mis unsern Kindern leben 
 
 1900 
 MILTON BRADLEY COMPANY 
 Springfield, Mass. 
 
 New York Philadelphia \ 1 1 anta San Francisco 
 
76085 
 
 Library of Congrosa ] 
 
 Two Copies Received 
 NOV 15 1900 
 
 SECOND COPY 
 
 Oeiivorod to 
 ORDEK DIVISION 
 
 MOV 24 
 
 No 
 
 
 Copyrighted, 1900. 
 By MILTON BRADLEY COMPANY, 
 
 SPRINGFIELD, MASS. 
 
 SPRINGFIELD, MASS. . 
 
 SPRINGFIELD PRINTING AND BINDING COMPANY. 
 
 1900. 
 
CONTENTS * 
 
 The Message of Froebel, -."'-- 5 
 
 The Spirit of Reverence, - - - 15 
 
 Training the Imagination, - 23 
 
 The Unsocial Child, - -• - 31 
 
 The Children's Guild of Play, - 41 
 
 The Guild of the Brave Poor Things, - 49 
 
 The Social Inclosure of Childhood, - 57 
 
 Dame Nature's Play-School, - - 63 
 
 Shooting Folly as it Flies, - - - 73 
 The Personality of the Kindergarten Training Teacher, 85 
 
 Our Nursery Tales : To-day and Yesterday, - - 91 
 
 * Thanks are due to the editors of "The Outlook," "The Nursery," 
 "The Kindergarten Review," "Table Talk," and "The Congregational- 
 Ist," for permission to reprint the above essays, which have been 
 revised and extended for the present volume. 
 
The Message of Froebel. 
 
 "Koiumt lasst uns unsern Kindern leben." 
 
 In a late number of the Cornhill Magazine a witty 
 and forcible writer arrays himself in argument against 
 the "message/ 5 which he declares to have been "de- 
 livered to the world by Froebel, the great apostle of 
 modern theories of education.' 5 
 
 This message, which Froebel adopted from Schiller, 
 by the wav. is given by the Cornhill writer as "Come let 
 us live for our children;" and by the change of an in- 
 significant preposition is thus converted into some- 
 thing quite different from its original purpose. 
 
 The thought in its ideal and inclusive form has 
 confessedly been taken as the watchword of the kinder- 
 garten; it has been painted on banners, embroidered 
 on cardboard, illuminated beneath pictures, wrought 
 in evergreen, set in stained glass, painted on title- 
 pages, used as a text for sermons; but note that the 
 motto as it shines and glows in silk and color and gild- 
 ing, or looks out upon you from the fair white page 
 runs. "Come let us live with our children.** 
 
 To live for them is something we are all loo prone 
 to do, in the sense of desiring to bear their burdens, to 
 save them grief through the imparting of our own 
 experiences; to live with them is another matter, and a 
 far more dillicult one. implying on our part, as Dr. 
 
G TILE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 Bailmann says, "Sympathy with childhood, adapta- 
 bility to children, knowledge and appreciation of child - 
 nature"; but it was this that Froebel advocated, and 
 upon this ideal that the kindergarten is builded. 
 
 If we consider the Froebelian message as given in 
 the article mentioned, we see at once that it makes a 
 famous windmill for a modern Don Quixote to tilt 
 against. "Let us live for our children," — a saying 
 which being interpreted according to Mr. Stephen 
 Gwynn, means educating them so that they may live 
 for their children, a process which would culminate in 
 a world perpetually full of parents sacrificing their 
 lives to make their offspring so moral that they in 
 their turn would repeat the sacrifice. "And so on, 
 ad infinitum" says Mr. Gwynn, though we may assure 
 ourselves that this phrase at least is a mistaken one, 
 for after a few generations of complete self- forgetf ill- 
 ness, self-suppression, and self-effacement all healthy 
 instincts would be so crushed out that there would be 
 nothing to transmit to descendants and the world 
 would come to a sudden stop, like a clock run down. 
 
 Fathers and mothers take themselves too seriously 
 nowadays, says our antagonist, and the model Froe- 
 belian parent is apt to become a prig and maker 
 of prigs and to acquire "a habit of imparting instruc- 
 tion which makes him intolerable in all societies. 7 ' 
 This amusing statement, if true, might well give 
 us pause in our mad career of Froebel ianism, lest we 
 end in establishing, as did the father of Maria Edge- 
 worth, "an appalling family seminary of all the vir- 
 
THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. i 
 
 tues where nothing escaped the system of education 
 and everything was made subservient to the moral 
 discipline of the house." That the gifted Irishwoman 
 saved her soul alive in such an atmosphere, however, ( 
 and that her creative faculty and sense of humor were 
 not chilled in the bud by the deadly seriousness and 
 frozen virtue of the household, gives us a ray of hope 
 for ourselves and seems to prove that things were not 
 after all quite so bad with her as they have been 
 painted. 
 
 Let us consider some of the varied objections which 
 Mr. Gwynn adduces to the conduct of life according 
 to his version of the message of Froebel. He com- 
 plains first, as we have noted, that it makes existence 
 a perpetual sorry-go-round of self-sacrifice, and. 
 second, another point already stated, that it develops 
 prigs and prig-makers. A third criticism advanced, 
 is against the folly of attempting to bring unconscious 
 moral influence to bear upon the child according to 
 the suggestions of the great German educator. The re- 
 sult of this mistaken procedure would be, as the critic 
 ingenuously intimates, that the child would early find 
 out the all-too-virtuous intentions of his progenitors 
 and would either knowingly submit to them and thus 
 diminish his own individuality, or rebel openly and al- 
 together against the directing force. 
 
 In the one case we foresee, to give our enemy's 
 theory logical development, that the small sufferer 
 would become the Little Arthur of the Sunday school 
 l )00 k s _the kind of child that sends all his pocket 
 
8 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 money to the heathen; and in the other, that lie would 
 become an infant Ishmael, saying, with his red right 
 hand raised against every man, "I will not he good 
 and no one shall make me !" 
 
 Another diverting objection alleged to living for 
 our children is that we shall thus he ".-ending them 
 out into life equipped with a terribly undue sense of 
 their own importance" ; and still another, and this 
 directed especially against the kindergarten, that "it 
 does not enforce the lesson of personal effort and 
 that in laving itself out to make things pleasant for 
 the learner it does not make sufficient demand upon 
 attention, nor call for exercise of will." 
 
 It is quite true, as a New England woman said of a 
 loquacious neighbor, that "you can't talk all day 
 "thout savin' somethin" once in a while," and there 
 are several things in this undeniably interesting arti- 
 cle that have a keen edge of truth and others that at 
 least require consideration. 
 
 The arguments lor the most part are scarcely of 
 a kind that can be answered, for they spring from a 
 misunderstanding of this so-called message of Froe- 
 bel. It does not call upon us for complete self-sacrifice 
 for our children's sake, and, if it did do so, our own 
 healthy instincts could certainly he trusted to keep 
 us from a morbid desire to live altogether for others, 
 while we trust that our native modi sty would prevent 
 most of us from acquiring the fatal habit deplored by 
 the Cornhill writer, of imparting instruction in all 
 societies. 
 
THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 9 
 
 As to ihf matter of unconscious influence, no disci- 
 ple of Froebel but would agree with Mr. Gwynn thai 
 
 parents who constantly shaped their conduct and con- 
 versation for the particular end of the child's moral 
 advantage Mould he, as Dogberry said, "most tolerable 
 and not to he endured." The silent spiritual influence 
 of which Froebel speaks, and upon which all other great 
 religious teachers are eloquent, can never be directly 
 applied; it is unconsciously given, unconsciously re- 
 ceived; it is a breath from depths of being far below 
 tlie surface waters of self-knowledge, and we cannot 
 prophesy whence it cometh nor whither it goeth. 
 
 It is both true and wise to say that character and 
 health are often best promoted by judicious letting 
 alone, though we votaries of the kindergarten had 
 thought in our blindness that we, of all people, least 
 needed to be adjured to ask a little less of education 
 and trust a little more to nature. 
 
 The truth is that if our clever adversary thoroughly 
 understood the message of Froebel he would probably 
 be in hearty sympathy with it. He has doubtless been 
 talking over the kindergarten with youthful senti- 
 mentalists, with fanatics who claim impossibilities for 
 the Froebel i an theories, with foggy-brained enthu- 
 siasts who have mastered the letter of the law but 
 have never understood its spirit, — and if England 
 has produced as many of these three classes of persons 
 as the fertile soil of America has grown, his oppor- 
 tunities for conversation have been extended, if net 
 valuable. 
 
10 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 We believe, for our part, simply and seriously, 
 and we think sensibly, that this message of Froebel 
 is a divinely-inspired message and that it is one of 
 the texts of a new gospel which will regenerate hu- 
 manity through education. We believe that the in- 
 sight into baby life, into infantile needs, desires and 
 aspirations which living with them imparts, gave to 
 Froebel, and has since given to those of his followers 
 who have adopted his methods of study, a peculiar 
 power in dealing with children. 
 
 We think that the often-quoted tenement-house 
 mother of Chicago had for a moment the vision of a 
 seer and almost the diction of one, when she said 
 one day to her boy's teacher, "I know why Dinny*< 
 allers so good with you — the kindergarten jist matches 
 him with his work." 
 
 It is to this, we think, incontrovertible fact that 
 it does match the child, that it provides him with 
 environment as suitable for his needs as water to the 
 fish or air to the bird, that it develops him so thorough- 
 ly and so harmoniously, and to. the further fact that 
 it matches child-nature in general is due the marked 
 influence that it has already exerted upon later educa- 
 tion. 
 
 Even those who find much to criticise in its meth- 
 ods are bounteous in praise of the spirit of the work 
 and of the marvelous way in which that spirit has 
 begun to permeate all education, to stir beneath dry 
 places and to wake new thoughts into life. 
 
 To begin with small things and proceed to those 
 
THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 11 
 
 which are more important, from its peculiar methods 
 of "playing with brightness" has come all the color- 
 work now so admirably handled in the primary 
 schools. 
 
 Drawing also, modeling in clay, nature study, 
 though all these were used to some -extent before the 
 advent of the kindergarten, have yet received from 
 it so great an impetus and been directed thereby into 
 channels so novel that they may almost be said to-day 
 to be new branches of instruction. 
 
 Country excursions and the planting of school-gar- 
 dens, — direct outgrowths of kindergarten practice; 
 vacation-schools and public playgrounds, fruit of Froe- 
 beFs conviction that happy and purposeful activity 
 is essential to childhood, — these testify in all our 
 great cities to the strength and value of this so-called 
 '"mud-pie theory of education." 
 
 Uno Cygmeus, the deviser of the Slojd system, 
 confesses that to Froebel he owes the seed-thought of 
 his work, the paidologists call him the father of child- 
 study, and the advocates of manual training go so far 
 as to state that the kindergarten is the most perfect 
 "all-round" school of industry in the world. 
 
 When we reflect, moreover, upon the great number 
 of kindergarten normal classes established in the last 
 twenty years, upon the companies of enthusiastic, de- 
 voted young girls who annually graduate from them, 
 upon the mothers' meetings carried on by the directors 
 of all free kindergartens, upon the coteries of educated 
 women who are studying Froebelian theories on a more 
 
V2 THE MESSAGE OE FROEBEL. 
 
 advanced plane, and upon the parents' associations, 
 affiliated with these, in which fathers are studying chil- 
 dren's ways, we begin to have an idea of the power 
 of the movement as a whole, and of the value of 
 Froebel's message: "Come let us live with our chil- 
 dren." 
 
 Nor are we willing to agree with Mr. Stephen 
 Gwynn, whose opinions, already so often quoted, are 
 decidedly stimulating to warfare, that the adoption of 
 these theories has an ironical result, that the modern 
 mother is so profoundly convinced that this business 
 of education is a difficult and a subtle one that she 
 packs her children out of the house as soon as they 
 can walk and salves her conscience by paying the bills. 
 It may indeed be that the modern mother has "learned 
 that the early training of a human creature should 
 be intrusted to a person who has minutely studied 
 the mental processes of children and understood the 
 harmoniously proportionate development of body and 
 mind," but the committing to memory of this stilted 
 phraseology could hardly lessen her own sense of re- 
 sponsibility, nor avert from her mind the conviction 
 that the truth is as applicable to her as to the teacher. 
 
 \<>, while the message of Froebel, as exemplified in 
 the kindergarten, is considered, by some of the highest 
 authorities in these matters, as the greatest educational 
 force of the age, it behooves all persons intrusted with 
 the care of children to gain some knowledge of its 
 basic principles and of the methods which it uses 
 to carry them out. Let it be remembered at the out- 
 
THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 13 
 
 set, to give a wide outlook upon the matter, that it is 
 a system of child training which has nothing to do 
 with class, race, condition or country. It has too 
 often been considered as a charity and not sufficiently 
 valued as a means of education, and there has been 
 great lack of appreciation of the fact that, as some- 
 body has wisely said, while it is a desirable privilege 
 for the children of the poor, it is a vital necessity for 
 the children of the rich. 
 
 Let it be remembered too, in spite of all criticism, 
 that so much as the child-garden has done as an 
 influence in shaping later education, in modifying 
 the work of school, seminary, college and university, 
 so much it may do for the baby in every nursery, for 
 Froebel's view of child culture was that it should begin 
 at birth, in the sub-conscious period of existence. 
 
 He considers the infant in the cradle and provides 
 numerous plays by which his dawning intelligence may 
 be addressed, though this training is to be of a follow- 
 ing kind and is never to interfere with Nature's proc- 
 esses and her slow and gradual unfolding. 
 
 Even should the mother never make use of one of 
 the kindergarten technicalities, she would, by study- 
 ing the writings of Froebel, gain a reverence for the 
 personality of the child and an insight into the three- 
 fold relations of her little one to man, to nature, and 
 to God, which would not only make her a better 
 mother, but a better, truer woman. 
 
THE SPIRIT OF REVERENCE. 
 
 "Man does not willingly submit himself to reverence; 
 or rather, he never so submits himself: it is a higher sense, 
 which must be communicated to his nature; which only, 
 in some peculiarly favored individuals, unfolds itself spon- 
 taneously, who on this account, too, have of old been 
 looked upon as saints and gods. Here lies the worth, here 
 lies the business of all true religions." 
 
 — Goethe. 
 
 If there be any basis of truth in the popular 
 sentiment which affixes labels to the various nations 
 of the earth, stamping one as light and frivolous, an- 
 other as slow of understanding and stiff-necked, an- 
 other still as treacherous and vindictive, then do we 
 Americans stand accused at the world's bar, of the 
 high crime of irreverence. How well founded is the 
 accusation each one of us may judge for himself, 
 though we may maintain with much show of reason 
 that our national fault, if indeed it be ours, is of the 
 Lips and not of the heart and is merely a light and 
 jesting way of looking at things produced and fostered 
 by the youth and gayety and prosperity of our country. 
 We are young and strongs free and rich, — it is more 
 than a generation since any widespread national 
 calamity befell us, what wonder then if -we look at 
 the world through rose-colored spectacles and sec each 
 other's faces broad with smiles as in a convex mirror? 
 May not this so-called irreverence, too, be in some 
 
16 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 sense a matter of climate? In the posthumous diary, 
 lately published, of a gifted 'American girl, she says 
 with keen insight, "How wonderful it is that we 
 should have all the sunshine in our land ! No wonder 
 that we are cheerful, and that we are always half in 
 jest. God said we might be." 
 
 We may consider perhaps that we have divine 
 warrant for an optimistic, joyous spirit, for lightness 
 of heart and some consequent lightness of speech, 
 but we must beware lest this lead us too far. If we 
 are in truth irreverent as a people, irreverent of heart 
 and in the real sense of the word, then we are lacking 
 in the one thing upon which, in the opinion of the 
 world's greatest philosophers, "all depends for making 
 man in every point a man." 
 
 Goethe, in "Wilhelm Meister's Apprenticeship and 
 Travels/' leads his hero to the "Pedagogic Province" 
 where his son is to be educated, and hardly has he 
 crossed the borders of that fair land when he is struck 
 with the three different attitudes and expressions as- 
 sumed by the companies of children he meets as their 
 leaders and teachers pass by. The youngest cross their 
 hands upon their breasts and look joyfully toward 
 heaven; the next in age fold their arms behind their 
 backs and turn upon the earth a smiling look, while 
 the oldest, with frank and spiritual air, their hands 
 by their sides, turn their heads toward their comrades 
 and form themselves into a line, — the younger chil- 
 dren, be it understood, always standing separate. 
 
 These three kinds of gesture are interpreted to 
 
THE SPIRIT OF REVERENCE. 17 
 
 Wilhelm as symbolic of the three reverences which it 
 is the object of education to foster. The first is 
 reverence to a God above who images and reveals him- 
 self in parents, teachers, and superiors; the second is 
 reverence for the earth and all that lives upon it, 
 for its bounty, its laws, and the joys and sorrows that 
 it gives us. 
 
 When the lessons indicated by the first two pos- 
 tures have been mastered the pupil is freed from them 
 and assuming the third attitude learns reverence to 
 man. Turning to his fellows, he ranges himself with 
 them and stands ready to give and take, to love and 
 admire, to help and be helped and in combination with 
 his equals to face the world. 
 
 From these reverences, says Goethe, springs the 
 highest reverence, — reverence for one's self, — and the 
 severest punishment ever inflicted upon pupils in the 
 "Pedagogic Province" is to be declared unworthy to 
 show forth any phase of the virtue which all influences 
 are conspiring to teach. 
 
 It is Goethe's opinion that well-formed healthy 
 human beings bring much into the world with them, 
 but that no child brings reverence. It is a higher 
 sense, he says, which must be communicated, and in 
 the communication lies the business not only of educa- 
 tion bat of all true religions. 
 
 If it is the general agreement that American chil- 
 dren, and consequently adults, are peculiarly lacking 
 in this virtue, then we must cast about for methods 
 by which it may be imparted, for the soul without it 
 
18 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 is but a parched country lacking the gentle dew, which, 
 nightly falling, refreshes every tender bud of good- 
 ness. 
 
 Taking up the first reverence, may we not question 
 whether the religious education of our little ones is all 
 that it might be. Ts their Sunday school really a 
 place of spiritual influences where some simple lesson 
 is learned, some delicate impression made each week? 
 Is the "grace before meat"' they daily hear, a clearly- 
 repeated, heartfelt invocation varied occasionally to 
 suit varying circumstances and looked for and re- 
 membered because so varied? Are the family prayers, 
 whether of daily or weekly occurrence, so planned 
 as to interest even the youngest auditors? Do we 
 speak of religious things with respect in the children's 
 presence, or are we, to quote Goethe again, "indiffer- 
 ent towards God, contemptuous towards the world, 
 spiteful towards equals 7 '? 
 
 Is church-going a matter of importance, of real 
 meaning with us, an occasion looked forward to so 
 gladly that the child counts it a high festival when he 
 also is occasionally allowed to attend the services? 
 It is true that he may understand very few of the 
 songs that are sung and perhaps none of the words 
 that are spoken, but these matters will by no means 
 affect his deep impression of the reverent spirit 
 breathed through the sacred place, of the common 
 aspiration that binds together the many hearts thai 
 beat about him. 
 
 And lastly, is the child's own prayer at night faith- 
 
THE SPIRIT OF REVERENCE. 19 
 
 fully heard and with reverent leisure? The rhymed 
 or metrical petitions which we teach our children are 
 commonly poor things enough and could we not trust 
 the Lord to know what we mean to impart by them, 
 as well as to spread his influence above and through 
 and beyond ours, our charges would often gain little 
 by their infantile devotions. 
 
 The nightly blessing, when the little one is tucked 
 away in bed, is something seldom heard perhaps and 
 yet there is no simple ceremony more devout and more 
 impressive. There is a child of yesterday who well 
 remembers the touch of a cool, soft hand upon her 
 forehead every evening in the dusk and a gentle voice 
 that said as she was wafted into dreamland, "The Lord 
 bless thee and keep thee : the Lord shine upon thee 
 and be gracious unto thee : the Lord lift up his coun- 
 tenance upon thee and give thee peace/' A child so 
 blessed sleeps consciously under the shadow of the 
 everlasting wings and the soul thus early is drawn into 
 communion with the highest. 
 
 As to the second reverence, that gained by com- 
 munion with Xature and comprehension of her varied 
 language, we frequently entirely fail to appreciate its 
 importance or to provide means by which it may be 
 learned. Froebel, whose eyes the Lord had touched 
 that he might see into the heart of the child, tells us 
 that the restless baby may often be quieted at night if 
 he is taken to the window and allowed to look out upon 
 the tranquil moon as she sails serenely through the 
 blue, and the great teacher writes a song to illustrate 
 
20 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 the fact, showing us how we may "make the moon's 
 attraction a point of departure for the development of 
 that spiritual attraction of which it is but the vanish- 
 ing symbol." 
 
 It is not only the moon and the sun and the stars 
 and all celestial phenomena that naturally lead the 
 child to contemplation and wonder, but the life of 
 plants and of animals, the wonderful crystals of the 
 rocks, the exquisite convolutions of the shells, the 
 delicate fronds of the sea-moss, the deep golden heart 
 of the flowers, — he is so made that instinctively he 
 loves and admires all these and he cannot look upon 
 them and study them without an irresistible movement 
 of his soul toward their Maker and his own. Nature 
 study is as essentially religious as the instruction 
 which we are accustomed to think of under that head, 
 and in many cases perhaps it is even more truly so, 
 for we cannot interfere with it so much, we cannot 
 dim the bright page so sadly by the overhanging 
 shadow of our own personality. The Great Artificer 
 and that which He has made teach the lesson together 
 and we have but to provide the right atmosphere for 
 the lesson. 
 
 x\nd what may we do to teach the third reverence ? 
 In the first place let us supply the child with definite 
 ideals which he may admire. Hero-worship is but an- 
 other name for reverence, and the tides of the soul ever 
 need a moon to draw them upward to the flood. In 
 history, ancient and modern, in romance and ballad 
 and legend, we have unlimited treasures at our com- 
 
THE SPIRIT OF REVERENCE. 21 
 
 mancl and if the story-teller's art be ours we need no 
 other magic to create wonder and reverence in the 
 youthful heart, ^ot only must we search the stores 
 of the past, but, lest the child think the giants are 
 all dead, let us hold up to his admiration the men and 
 women of to-day in his own village and township and 
 state and country, those who are now and here living 
 noble lives and doing noble deeds. Let us strive, too, 
 never to destroy youthful enthusiasms, if reasonably 
 well-founded, by unduly sharp criticism given from 
 the standpoint of the adult. Reverence is a virtue 
 which, like any other, grows by exercise, and the 
 ideal toward which first it climbs must needs be nearer 
 the earth than the point to which it last aspires. 
 
 Let us too, as parents and guardians, strive ever 
 to maintain a just and firm government in our various 
 domains, lest the child, seeing how easily 'our rule is 
 set at naught, learn to scorn those who are set in 
 authority over him and from despising earthly laws 
 and law-givers begin to scoff at those which are 
 heavenly. 
 
 And what is the conclusion of the whole matter? 
 It is that the pure flame of reverence must glow in 
 our own spirits before we can hope to light it on 
 another's altars. Our pessimism, our bitterness, our 
 hopelessness, our contempt and carelessness for those 
 things which are high and holy will breathe out like 
 noxious vapors, do what we may to suppress them, and 
 will suffocate the first feeble flames of reverence as 
 they kindle in the soul of the child. 
 
TRAINING THE IMAGINATION. 
 
 " For, sec, he soared 
 
 By means of that mere snatch to many a hoard 
 Of fancies ; as some falling cone bears soft 
 The eye, along the fir-tree spire, aloft 
 To a dove's nest." 
 
 — Robert Browning. 
 
 The question whether education should devote it- 
 self to cultivating faculties already strong, or to wak- 
 ing those which lie dormant, in order to develop the 
 mind upon all sides, is one about which there is 
 wide difference of opinion, and concerning which many 
 fierce battles of argument have been fought. If the 
 child is "born short" in any line, say the warriors 
 of the one party, no amount of training can supply 
 what Dame Nature has withheld: why not, therefore, 
 expend your energies in cultivating the powers which 
 have been given in fullest measure? 
 
 Such an adage as Poela nasciiur, non fit, has a 
 broad reach, it must be confessed ; and many of us, 
 after a despairing day in the schoolroom, spent in 
 hammering at the door of an absent faculty, are 
 ready to take it as a life motto, and to protest that 
 the cultivation of natural aptitudes is the only fit 
 task of the educator. 
 
 But here comes the party of the other part, which 
 has been breathlessly waiting its chance to argue, and 
 declares that harmonious development should be the 
 
24 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 object of ideal education, and that every faculty of 
 the child must be so dealt with that it may have an 
 opportunity of growth, should the life-germ prove to 
 lie within it. This seems a sensible argument also, 
 and we can but wonder where, between such opposite 
 views, the real truth may be said to lie. 
 
 It seems to be clear, however, that, though special- 
 ists are the order of the day, and though we incline 
 more and more every year to the opinion that the 
 full development of individuality is the goal to be 
 reached in education, yet an infant specialist is an 
 abnormal creature, and the object of early training, 
 at least, should be to make an "all-round child." 
 
 These varied thoughts were suggested by the remark 
 of a small boy which was published among child-say- 
 ings the other day. "Mother," said the infant skeptic 
 in the midst of a fairy story, "I really don't want to 
 hear any more of that stuff; I don't believe a word 
 of it." 
 
 It is difficult to decide just what remedies to apply 
 in such a case as this, unless we know something of 
 the attendant symptoms, or can learn enough of the 
 patient to discover the probable cause of the malady. 
 It may, indeed, be no malady at all, but an inherited 
 defect, like deafness or dipsomania; but certainly 
 some attempt should be made to cure it, should it 
 threaten to become permanent. There is a possibility, 
 of course, that it may be only a phase of development, 
 for Sully points out in his "Studies of Childhood" 
 that most children are at once matter-of-fact observers 
 
TRAINING THE IMAGINATION. 25 
 
 and dreamers, passing from the one to the other as the 
 mood takes them; and that the prodigal output of 
 fancy, the reveling in myth and story, is often charac- 
 teristic of one period of childhood only. 
 
 "The wee mite of three and a half," he says, 
 "spending more than half his days in trying to realize 
 all manner of pretty, odd, startling fancies about ani- 
 mals, fairies, and the rest, is something vastly unlike 
 the boy of six or seven, whose mind is now bent 
 on understanding the make and go of machines, and of 
 that big machine, the world." 
 
 Should the skepticism of our small child then, be 
 only a passing mood, we can look upon it with com- 
 parative indifference, assuring ourselves that human 
 growth is not always and uniformly loyely at every 
 stage. Assuming, for the moment, that the trouble we 
 are considering is only skin-deep, we may find various 
 reasons for it without much difficulty. 
 
 Who knows but that the boy may have been re- 
 peating in a parrot-like way some remark he had 
 heard made on a different topic, fully cognizant, as 
 children often are, that it would serve to adorn him, 
 for a time, with a peacock tail of notoriety? 
 
 Who knows but that the mother may have been 
 reading him one of the clumsy modern fairy tales, 
 finally shown by the author to have been only a sham, 
 or the product of mince pie, from which the child's 
 fancy rightly revolted as from a sin against the spirit ? 
 
 There is a chance, however, that the matter may 
 be a much more serious one, and in that case we must 
 
26 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 ask ourselves what is to be done for the mending of 
 it. 
 
 If any one sweeping assertion in regard to chil- 
 dren is more often made than another, it is, perhaps, 
 that they are full of fancy; and yet there is plenty 
 of evidence that nature makes now and then a decid- 
 edly matter-of-fact and unimaginative specimen, as if 
 to vary the pattern. Let not the parents of our 
 little infidel, then, despairingly persuade themselves 
 that theirs is a difficulty never encountered before, for 
 every one who has seen much of children knows that 
 such a white blackbird is now and then to be found 
 among them. Xor let them, on the other hand, pride 
 themselves on the unusual quality of the mind of 
 their offspring, believing that it will develop into good 
 hard common sense by and by. Such mental bent as 
 it does indicate" will, on the contrary, if not modified 
 by education, be the greatest of misfortunes, for he 
 who is absolutely destitute of imagination can have no 
 charity, no sympathy, no creative ability, no ideality, 
 no reverence, and no true love. 
 
 Yet we need not conclude that because the child 
 does not care for myths and fairy tales he is therefore 
 utterly lacking in imagination. Mr. Kuskin has told 
 us in "Prseterita" that, when a boy, he was incapable 
 of acting a part or telling a tale, and that he never 
 knew a child "whose thirst for visible fact was at 
 once so eager and so methodic." The imagination was 
 there in this case in superabundant measure, but was 
 not yet in working order, for the whole mind was 
 
TRAINING THE IMAGINATION. 27 
 
 absorbed in other things, and doubtless more than 
 all else in the study of Nature and her manifestations. 
 
 The imagination, too, may early be directed to 
 science, and the child show inexhaustible interest in 
 machines and their working, in rocks or stars or 
 flowers or animals or atmospheric forces. Such a 
 child would obviously be a bright and thoughtful one, 
 and would give such clear indications of his natural 
 bent as to make his future equally clear. 
 
 But is there a little one who shows no keen inter- 
 est in any of these things, and who does not care for 
 talcs of fancy, it will probably also be noted that his 
 powers in play are somewhat below the average, and 
 that he docs not invent for himself any of those 
 charming nursery dramas in which the youthful actor 
 is sometimes so absorbed as apparently to lose his 
 own identity. Must we therefore conclude that he is 
 a dullard? It may be so, or it may be that he is 
 merely undeveloped. If the former hypothesis seem 
 correct, let us delay to write him down an ass until we 
 assure ourselves that his physical condition is normal. 
 We can hardly expect a child who cannot hear the 
 tick of a watch a foot from his ear to be prompt in 
 response to verbal suggestion: we can hope for little 
 mental brilliancy from a small creature so afflicted 
 with adenoid growths, for instance, that the act of 
 breathing takes all his strength; and the faculty of 
 imagination, which depends for its power on rapid, 
 frequent, and clear perceptions, cannot be supposed 
 to have a fighting chance to live in a small bein^ 
 
28 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 whose eyesight has never permitted him to see things 
 as the}' are. All these millstones not only may hang 
 about the neck of a so-called dull child, but have hung 
 there in numbers of well-known cases, and yet no one 
 has seen them till their weight had utterly distorted 
 the growing intelligence. 
 
 But, say the subject of our discussion is in good 
 physical condition and yet is heavy and stolid and 
 devoid of fancy, what then shall we do? If we think 
 of imagination in its supremest meaning, as the crea- 
 tive faculty of the poet or the artist, it passes, so says 
 Alexander Bain, "entirely out of the reach of express 
 training, and is excluded from schemes of education 
 as too high for the school." 
 
 Yet if, as already said, it is dependent upon knowl- 
 edge received from the outward world through the 
 perceptions, and is a rearranging or creative power, 
 there are many ways in which it may be developed. 
 
 Perhaps, though the child has been looking all his 
 life, he has never really seen anything for want of 
 some one who could direct his vision; perhaps the 
 one thing of all others which would really wake 
 him up has not yet come within his ken; perhaps, 
 being naturally slow of perception, he has never met 
 anyone who could vivify for him the objects of the 
 outside world, interpreting the thing seen to the dor- 
 mant intelligence. 
 
 All these hindrances to the growth of fancy may 
 be removed by dint of effort, and we may at least 
 supply the child in babyhood with something which 
 
TRAINING THE IMAGINATION. 29 
 
 will interest him. with playthings which he can re- 
 arrange and combine according to his will, with ob- 
 jects which give him genuine delight, and thus, by 
 force of occupying himself with what is small and 
 near at hand and concrete, lie may by and by gain the 
 power of reaching out to that which is beyond. 
 
 If he has no love of fairy stories, time is worse 
 than wasted in reading or telling them to him. Why 
 not substitute the wonder tales of science, whose truth 
 can be demonstrated to any little doubting Thomas? 
 " After nil." as Lowell said, "there is as much poetry 
 in the iron horses that eat fire as in those of Diomed 
 that fed on men. If you cut an apple across, you 
 may trace in it the lines of the blossom that the bee 
 hummed around in May ; and so the soul of poetry 
 survives in things prosaic." 
 
 Some kind of literature the young human crea- 
 ture must have ; and if it be neither myth, fairy lore, 
 nor science stories, we may try hero tales when he is 
 older, and read him sounding ballads that must stir the 
 blood of any young thing that loves by nature, strife 
 and pursuit and conquest, the ring of steel, the clash 
 of armor, and the shouts of battle. 
 
 Dickens has etched for us in "Hard Times" a pic- 
 ture of child-training which deliberately excludes all 
 appeals to the imagination; and we know the fate of 
 that unfortunate little Gradgrind who was so often 
 bidden never to wonder. Even a McChoakumchild, 
 we might suppose, should know that wonder is an 
 essential element in human development, that it 
 
30 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 stretches the mind and sets all the faculties on tiptoe 
 striving to catch the bright visions that float just out 
 of reach. Let us reverse the Gradgrind motto for our 
 children, and insist that they cultivate the imaginative 
 powers, for it was a great lover of their kind who 
 said that childish wonder was the first step in human 
 wisdom. 
 
THE UNSOCIAL CHILD. 
 
 "And so there is not any matter, nor any spirit, nor 
 any creature, but it is capable of a unity of some kind with 
 other creatures, and in that unity is its perfection and 
 theirs, and a pleasure also for the beholding of all other 
 creatures that can behold." 
 
 — John Ruskin. 
 
 Since the majority of children conform with more 
 or less exactness to a certain standard, it would appear 
 nnprofi table, perhaps, to devote much time to a con- 
 sideration of the exceptions ; and yet, to a mother who 
 has an ugly duckling in her own family, he seems 
 of far more importance than the whole flock of her 
 neighbor's swans. 
 
 One might be tempted, if one were asked by such a 
 parent how to train the social instincts of the young, 
 for instance, to reply hastily that the question was 
 ah automatic, self-answering one, for that children 
 bring children is a proverb known in every land. And 
 yet the exception has as much right to be considered 
 as the normal case; and now and then in families of 
 every grade of society we find a little one who seems 
 to prefer his own society to that of others. He cares 
 to mingle, apparently, neither with his brothers and 
 sisters, nor with visitors, and it is often a difficult 
 matter to discover the cause of this peculiarity and 
 find its remedy, if indeed we see fit to apply one. 
 
32 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 It must be conceded to be a peculiarity, of course, 
 and the child that shows it is exceptional in one way 
 or another ; for by nature life seeks life, and youth 
 yearns after youth. It is only necessary to notice 
 the riotous behavior of a puppy when he has another 
 of his kind to roll and tumble about with, or to watch 
 twin Lambs sporting in a meadow, and contrast these 
 things with their demeanor when alone, to know that 
 companionship is needful and delightful to all young 
 creatures. 
 
 For what reasons, then, would a child voluntarily 
 withdraw himself from his fellows and prefer to occupy 
 himself alone? 
 
 In the first place, there might be a very simple and 
 obvious cause which would make the separation not 
 his fault but his misfortune — that of ill health. A 
 child may be neither a cripple nor an invalid and yet 
 be so far below par in strength and energy that the 
 society of ruddy, boisterous, reckless, romping urchins 
 of his own age may be a positive weariness to him. He 
 is not to blame for this; indeed, older people can well 
 sympathize with him and can remember certain times 
 when the aggressive strength and spirits of lively, un- 
 tiring, effervescent, high-keyed friends have been evils 
 not to be borne. 
 
 If the little one is in good health and yet is solitary 
 in his habits, it may be that he is too advanced in mind 
 to care for the companionship of children of his own 
 age, just as a grown cat looks down with dignified 
 scorn upon the trivial gambols of a kitten. Perhaps ho 
 
THE UNSOCIAL CHILD. 33 
 
 would get on extremely well with older playmates and 
 a more elaborate system of games, while he finds those 
 offered to him by circumstances not in the least worth 
 while. 
 
 It may be, too, that he is of a thoughtful, fanciful 
 temperament and is absorbed in the society of dream- 
 companions tenfold more real to him than the people 
 of the outside world. In many cases a solitary child, 
 or one who is exceptionally imaginative, evolves for 
 himself an "invisible playmate" who becomes as dear 
 as a real one, to whom he gives a name, who shares all 
 his sports and nestles by his side at night. Sometimes 
 such a figure of fantasy, never more than half believed 
 in and yet the dearer for the doubt, persists in the 
 mind for years, serving all purposes of companionship 
 to the little dreamer. 
 
 Xow and then, too, an exceptionally bright child, 
 active of mind, quick of perception, fertile in expedi- 
 ents, is surrounded by unkind fate with little dullards 
 who can neither originate anything themselves nor 
 carry out properly the details of a game intrusted to 
 them. The fiery spirit endures their company as long 
 as it well can and then breaks impatiently away, pre- 
 ferring solitude to the crushing weight of such stu- 
 pidity. There are plenty of stolid, unimaginative chil- 
 dren who, having no adequate views about play as a 
 really important and engrossing business, are quite 
 willing to go through the same stereotyped games day 
 after day, and their society is doubtless quite as tire- 
 
34- THE MESSAGE OE FROEBEL. 
 
 some to a bright child as that of a grown-up bore may 
 be to us. 
 
 Sometimes, again, a baby comes into the world 
 with the birthmark of genius on his brow, and is 
 constrained by the very conditions of his nature to go 
 through the world to some extent a solitary. Sully 
 says, in his "Studies of Childhood/' speaking of the 
 unusual and original child, "It will possibly be found 
 that, although not a romping, riotous player, nor, in- 
 deed, much disposed to join other children in their 
 pastimes, the original child has his own distinctive 
 style of play, which marks him out as having more 
 than other children of that impulse to dream of far-off 
 things, and to bring them near in the illusion of 
 outer semblance, which enters more or less distinctly 
 into all art." 
 
 If you have never seen one of these strange, gifted 
 children, you may find a touching sketch of one in 
 "Missy," the heroine of Charlotte Bronte's "Villette," 
 and another, done from life by George Sand of herself, 
 in her "Histoire d'une Vie." 
 
 With the thoughts .and dreams ana fancies, the 
 wonderful solitary plays, of such a gifted human crea- 
 ture, who would presume to meddle? Who would 
 force the society of a rosy little earthly mortal on one 
 whose spirit-wings have already budded? 
 
 If the want of sociability in our ugly duckling is 
 due to any of the foregoing causes, we have no reason 
 to be anxious, but may rather joyfully look forward to 
 the snowy whiteness of plumage the swan will put 
 
THE UNSOCIAL CHILD. do 
 
 on by and by; but, unfortunately, there is another side 
 to the picture, and ugly ducklings have been known 
 before now to grow up into still uglier ducks and 
 drakes. 
 
 The unsocial child may be a selfish and a miserly 
 one, who cannot endure that any hands but his own 
 shall touch his cherished toys, and would rather doom 
 himself to complete isolation than have his treasures 
 meddled with. 
 
 He may also be a youthful tyrant, and betake him- 
 self to sulk in a corner if he cannot order every detail 
 of the game. Unless he chances upon very gentle and 
 timid companions, he must of necessity be unsocial, 
 for, no matter how much he wants to play, he can find 
 few who are willing to play with him. 
 
 There is still another unsocial child sometimes 
 (and we must touch very tenderly upon his peculiari- 
 ties), who, from either physical or mental defect, is not 
 quite as other children; and, worse than this (or is 
 it better — who can say?), he realizes the fact. He 
 knows that he does not hear as soon, does not under- 
 stand as quickly, cannot carry out ideas as rapidly, as 
 the rest; he is always stumbling along heavy-footed 
 after them, not quite able to "catch up," and is often 
 the butt of their thoughtless gibes. Who can wonder 
 if by and by he steals away from his playmates now 
 and then, or at last isolates himself entirely, shut in 
 with the self that is so sore a burden. 
 
 Yet such an unfortunate, and all the other little 
 erring mortals we have touched upon, are in most 
 
36 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 dire need of the society they seem anxious to reject. 
 The dreamy, fanciful child would be the better* now 
 and then for the company of" a good, prosaic, ordinary 
 little mortal, such as he will meet and perhaps be 
 housed with all along life's journey; the exceptionally 
 bright child needs to come in contact with those 
 equally gifted, and even more gifted than he, that he 
 may more justly estimate his own qualities ; the selfish 
 child must learn through love to give up to others; 
 the tyrant must find out early in life that he cannot 
 always rule, and that disaster will come if he attempts 
 to do so ; and the small sufferer who is not quite normal 
 will make wonderful improvement if he can mingle 
 with companions of his own age who will be kind and 
 gentle and considerate and allow him to forget his 
 defects now and then. 
 
 A child who is determinately unsocial can some- 
 times be led to break the outer shell at least of his 
 reserve and shyness — for the trouble sometimes lies in 
 these defects also — through the company of pet ani- 
 mals. If he is given whatever living things his 
 heart most longs for, whether rabbits or pigeons or 
 guinea-pigs or white mice or kittens or canaries or 
 puppies; if they are understood to be his own and 
 he is taught what they need in the way of care and 
 food and shelter; if he is made entirely responsible 
 for their welfare, the new duties and interests will 
 often take him quite out of himself. He will be busy, 
 happy, and absorbed ; he will learn to forget himself 
 somewhat in the needs of others, and that is the first 
 
THE UNSOCIAL CHILD. 37 
 
 essential of living; and he will have no time to think 
 of "the immense me who has blocked the way to his 
 knowing his companions. He will meet another child 
 in community of distress over the ailments of a pet 
 rat, when he would be consumed with shyness if there 
 were no subject of mutual interest, and thus he learns 
 unconsciously how to get on with his fellows. 
 
 Akin to this resource which may be given to an 
 unsocial child is the persuading him to take up some 
 interesting and suitable occupation. If he be of a 
 scientific turn, cultivate his taste for collecting plants 
 or stones or shells; if he has a mechanical bias, give 
 him a turning-lathe or a printing-press; if he is artis- 
 tic, let him study wood-carving, drawing, or clay 
 modeling: it does not matter which one of these things 
 he takes up, so long as it interests him; but let him 
 do something which will employ physical as well as 
 mental activity, that so he may be delivered from 
 moping and brooding. 
 
 It is essential that this want of sociability should 
 be cured in children if it comes from any such defects 
 as have been described, and the cure must begin early 
 or it will be altogether useless. Let us study the 
 reasons for the peculiarity evinced by the special child 
 in question, and then see what may be done to remove 
 them. The trouble may be only a temporary one. 
 Perhaps the little one has been too much with older 
 people and is embarrassed at first with those of his 
 own age; perhaps he is morbidly self-conscious, and 
 perhaps he is not well. Let us study to provide suit- 
 
38 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 able companions for him, suitable in age, in tastes r 
 and in temperament, remembering that his whole 
 future destiny may possibly be colored by this small 
 sunbonneted maiden or this lad in brief trousers 
 whom we bring to his side. And let us beware of 
 setting him down in a throng of children and ex- 
 pecting him to gambol at once. Do you remember, 
 in that piece of child-study, "Great Expectations/' 
 how Miss Havisham took the frightened Pip by the 
 shoulder and fiercely said, "Play, boy, play ! Why 
 don't you play?" 
 
 Such an admonition naturally chills the blood like 
 sitting down to a dinner shadowed by the hostess's, 
 prayer that you will be brilliant. 
 
 There is one last remark to be made in this paper, 
 if the writer may be forgiven in advance for a consti- 
 tutional tendency to dwell upon it, an idea that be- 
 longs here by mental and spiritual right, and if we 
 are to do the subject justice it must be introduced. 
 
 If you have a child who shows a tendency to alien- 
 ate himself from his fellows, who has never learned 
 how to combine his plays and occupations with others, 
 and is thus not only missing all the benefits of fellow- 
 ship and communion, but is setting himself altogether 
 wrong for the practical business of living, then I do 
 believe, and therefore I must speak, that if such a 
 child were early sent to a good kindergarten these evils 
 would be corrected in the bud. If anything can be 
 recommended as a cure for selfishness, tyrannical 
 spirit, morbidity, shyness, listlessness, and too great 
 
THE UNSOCIAL CHILD. 39 
 
 precocity in a little child; if anything will prove a 
 help to sluggishness and inertness of mind, it is the 
 kindergarten atmosphere, the Froebelian theories car- 
 ried out in work and play and everyday religion, 
 under an earnest, intelligent, spiritual-minded woman, 
 who not only understands the principles she is inter- 
 preting, but the living, breathing, faulty, wonderful, 
 human creatures under her care. 
 
THE CHILDEEN'S GUILD OF PLAY. 
 
 "A great historian many centuries ago wrote it down 
 that the first things conquered in battle are the eyes; the 
 soldier flees from what he sees before. But so often in 
 the world's fight we are defeated by what we look back 
 upon; we are whipped in the end by the things we saw in 
 the beginning of life." 
 
 — James Lane Allen. 
 
 Life is so dreary in the slums ; poverty so crushing 
 there. Your own lacks and pains and discomforts are 
 multiplied by the lacks and pains and discomforts in 
 all the other beehive cells pressing upon yours, till you 
 feel the many-sided weight to the very center of your 
 being. 
 
 Poverty in the country, where at least you are not 
 scanted of air and space and quiet, is scarcely poverty 
 at all ; it is deprivation, but neither stunting nor 
 suffocation. A country child, though he tramp by 
 the side of a gypsy or beggar, or house at night, half 
 fed, half covered, in a tumble-down hovel, is not, 
 after all, so much to be pitied if he have his freedom. 
 That outdoor play-school which Maurice Thompson 
 talks of,— the school of the woods, the fields, the hills, 
 the streams ; the school from which the greatest think- 
 ers of the world have been graduated, — this, at least, 
 is open to him, without money and without price. It 
 is the education in ideality, which such tuition gives, 
 which is the great lack of our poor city children, and 
 
42 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 this which it seems essential to supply to them, in so 
 far as our limited knowledge and powers admit. 
 
 Contrast the play-school of nature with the play- 
 school of man, which is naturally and inevitably the 
 street, and weigh one against the other, — the train- 
 ing given by each. 
 
 Plato, in his "Republic," plans his system of edu- 
 cation so that the first twenty years of every human 
 life shall be in the main devoted to a nurture of the 
 abiding, deeper, greater self, that it may become easily 
 the master over the other, the transient self. It is 
 to be a training of the unconscious sort; such a feed- 
 ing of the young mind and the young heart that they 
 shall come to love above all things those which are 
 honorable and intrinsically lovable, and to hate those 
 which are dishonorable and unlovable; so to feed 
 this under self that at length it becomes the master- 
 ful self. 
 
 We need not pause here to inquire wiiether or not 
 it would be possible to regulate for such a length of 
 time all the influences surrounding the young human 
 creature; or, even if it were possible, whether we 
 should be sufficiently daring to make the attempt. 
 It is practical and timely, however, to inquire for 
 ourselves just what sort of an unconscious training is 
 given by the play-school of the street, and endeavor 
 to supply to its pupils, as best we may, some of its 
 most glaring deficiencies. That such schooling is al- 
 together evil no one for a moment supposes. Lessons 
 in patience, courage, generosity, and sympathy are 
 
THE CHILDREN S GUILD OF PLAY. 43 
 
 often set there for those who are apt at learning. But 
 the atmosphere is confused, noisy, full of ugly, often 
 brutal, sights and sounds, harsh, sordid, and greatly 
 lacking in reach, insight, vision, and ideality. 
 
 It is in the endeavor to supply some of these ele- 
 ments, to touch the imagination and the heart as well 
 as train the body, that the Children's Guild of Play 
 has been organized in London; and because many of 
 the ideas which it is working out are true and valuable 
 ones, it is here described, as a contribution toward 
 the settlement of one of the vexed questions of great 
 cities. The founder of the Guild, Sister Grace of the 
 Bermondsey Settlement, South London, says that it 
 was started "as an attempt to solve the problem of 
 giving the children of our slums a chance of a cleaner 
 life than would seem to be their lot by inheritance." 
 Its proceedings include not only games, singing, and 
 music, but the telling of fairy tales; its meetings are 
 held on one evening in each week, and it is generally 
 found that the managers of Board-schools are willing 
 to throw open one or more of their rooms for these 
 occasions, thus avoiding the expense of rent. 
 
 The Bermondsey Settlement Guild is managed by 
 three workers, — musician, play-mistress, and story- 
 teller. — and the exercises are conducted as follows : 
 "Our Guild-evening," says Sister Grace, "begins with 
 the opening of the doors, when little girl children of 
 all ages march in two by two. Sometimes they may 
 have been waiting outside in fog or rain for an hour 
 beforehand. After every one has made a curtsey 
 
44 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 and said 'Good evening/ the games begin — quaint old 
 English song-games, with pretty words, rhythmic 
 lu lies, and dainty gestures; and then come fairy talcs 
 and songs — the three together providing continual 
 motion for restless limbs, voices, and brains. And 
 before we go away we kneel together for the beautiful 
 closing prayers and benediction. That is all." 
 
 The Guild has no punishments save those which 
 follow as the natural penalties of broken laws, no 
 rewards save that greatest of all pleasures, the work- 
 ing for others. There are no buns or oranges, no 
 costly toys, no magic-lantern shows, no direct religious 
 teaching; there is not even the giving away of useful 
 information; while the highest prize ever offered is 
 the privilege of being allowed to go and play before 
 the children's own parents, or before old people in the 
 workhouse or infirmary. 
 
 It is intended that the Guild of Play shall supple- 
 ment the brain-training of the day school, and it is 
 considered essential that every helper should personally 
 know, and thus be able to co-operate with, the teachers 
 of all her play-hour children. "The benefits arising 
 from such co-operation will not be all with the chil- 
 dren/* says the Guild, "nor, as regards teachers and 
 helpers, will they be one-sided. Such comradeship is 
 truest socialism; such workers truly are pioneers in 
 the great march of the coming century. " 
 
 There is nothing new, it may be said in passing, 
 in the use of music, singing, and games as instruments 
 of education. Plato, Aristotle, Quintilian, Comenius, 
 
THE CHILDREN'S GUILD OF PLAY. 45 
 
 Rousseau, Fichte, Pestalozzi, Locke, Spencer, Richter, 
 and Froebel, all had many wise things to say about 
 them ; and if, in the endeavor to establish a Guild of 
 Play, we meet persons unwilling to contribute to our 
 needs because doubtful of the benefits accruing, we 
 may batter down their walls of prejudice with argu- 
 ments drawn from the pages of these great philos- 
 ophers. 
 
 The act of singing in itself is a healthful one, 
 setting the chest to work, expanding the lungs, and 
 making the blood course through the veins with double 
 force, while the gestures and rhythmic activities at- 
 tendant upon the plays are most valuable for the 
 modern child who is constrained to stillness in the 
 schoolroom for so many hours of each day. 
 
 Modern life tends everywhere to the hiving together 
 in cities and the results are seen in the great increase 
 of nervous disorders. That these ailments are present 
 in the bud in many of the pupils of our metropolitan 
 public schools will be attested by any physician who 
 has made a study of them, and oftentimes they 
 are so well advanced as to render a cure a matter of 
 considerable difficulty. "By prolonging the period 
 of play," as one of its best advocates has said, "we 
 shall be providing a counterbalance for this tendency.*' 
 
 "The need of muscle-culture in our great cities 
 is an imperative one," says George E. Johnson, in 
 his monograph on Games and Play; and rhythmic 
 movement in part supplies this need. It is clear, too, 
 that children cannot engage in these singing games 
 
46 TTIE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 without learning many lessons in self-control and 
 comradeship, and these are valuable qualities, useful 
 every day in life. The imagination must also be 
 trained and the aesthetic faculties cultivated by play 
 and story-telling, and such training is of necessity 
 altogether absent in the education of the ordinary 
 street child. He is precocious, poor infant phenom- 
 enon, in all that concerns the practical, while the 
 ideal in him, his powers of loving and dreaming, are 
 crushed and pallid like the growing things under a 
 stone. It is for this reason that carefully selected fairy 
 tales, and fairy tales only, are told to the children of 
 the Guilds, for, as Sister Grace quotes most appro- 
 priately, "where there is no vision, the people perish." 
 "A child without imagination/ ' she goes on to say, 
 "will become a man without ideals, with narrow sym- 
 pathies here, and little interest or treasure in the great 
 Unknown Land. Wherefore let us kindle imagina- 
 tion ; and for this purpose we know of no better in- 
 struments than fairy tales. " 
 
 The children are happy on these golden evenings 
 of song and play and story, as we well may fancy; 
 and happiness is not only their right but their neces- 
 sity if they are to develop properly in mind, soul, and 
 body. It is surely not much to ask of those who have 
 everything in life which these little ones lack, that they 
 should give an hour or two a week of their leisure to 
 a service of love, such as the Guild of Play. 
 
 It may be that American guilds would be con- 
 ducted on different lines, in some respects, from those 
 
THE CHILDREN'S GUILD OF PLAY. 47 
 
 of the Bermondsey Settlement. There seems no 
 reason, for instance, why boys as well as girls should 
 not have the benefit of games and singing, though 
 their organizations might not be conducted in the 
 same way. It would seem probable, too, that plays 
 might be found superior to the old English singing- 
 games in some respects, and full as rich in the desired 
 elements of repetition, succession, sequence, dialogue, 
 rhythm, and rhyme. And when the children have 
 grown to know one another and to feel the influence 
 of their leader, we may plainly see that all the ends 
 we are striving to gain would be more easily attained 
 by a country play-hour when weather and season are 
 favorable. Although the trolley seems to some of us 
 an impertinent attack upon the retirement of rural 
 life and a noisy, vexatious interruption to quiet and 
 seclusion, yet it cannot be denied that it takes away 
 from him who hath to give to him who hath not and so 
 is one factor among the great leveling tendencies of 
 modern social conditions. 
 
 Thousands of green fields are now easily and 
 cheaply accessible to the dwellers in great cities where 
 a few years ago they were only to be reached by horse 
 or bicycle power and thus we may, with very little 
 expenditure of time or money, transport our Guilds 
 to the country since the country cannot come to them. 
 
 Again, when we consider the literary side of the 
 undertaking, there are numberless stories and poems, 
 outside of the realm of fairy-lore, which would serve 
 our purposes occasionally, but these are variations 
 
48 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 upon the original theme which would occur to any- 
 one who was sufficiently interested in it, and when 
 all is said, it is the spirit of the enterprise which will 
 be found to be its important element. 
 
 It is vitally important, too, that the right kind of 
 persons should manage the Play Guilds. The work is 
 not for teachers worn out with the nervous strain of 
 the day; it is not for the toilers either among men 
 or women ; it is for those who are fresh, bright, joyous, 
 unworn by care or labor, whose own sheltered youth 
 and prolonged opportunities for many kinds of play 
 have preserved in them their vigor and optimism and 
 who can lift the children above the pressure of the 
 street on the wings of their own life- joy. 
 
THE GUILD OF THE BRAVE POOR THINGS. 
 
 "It is to be called the Book of Poor Things, mother dear. 
 It 's a collection — a collection of Poor Things who 've been 
 hurt, like me; or blind, like the organ-tuner; or had their 
 legs or their arms chopped off in battle, and are very good 
 and brave about it, and manage very, very nearly as well 
 as people who have got nothing the matter with them. 
 Father does n*t think Poor Things is a good name. He 
 wanted to call it Masters of Fate, because of some poetry. 
 What was it, father?" 
 
 " 'Man is man, and master of his fate,' " quoted the 
 Master of the House. 
 
 "Yes, that 's it. But I don't understand it so well as Poor 
 Things. They are Poor Things, you know, and of course 
 we shall only put in brave Poor Things, not cowardly Poor 
 Things." 
 
 If you ever happened to meet a little lad named 
 Leonard, who lives in the pages of Mrs. E wing's 
 "Story of a Short Life," then you will remember, with 
 misty eyes and' an ache in the throat, that chapter 
 wherein the hero directs from his wheeled chair the 
 ruling and printing and illuminating of his Book of 
 Brave Poor Things. 
 
 The child has been the victim of an accident, 
 which not only makes him a cripple, but racks him 
 with distress and pain, and, under the nervous strain 
 of the affliction and the consequent "spoiling,*' lie has 
 become capricious, tyrannical, a torment to himself 
 and to others. Fortunately, when things have reached 
 a climax of wretchedness, his wise mother comes to 
 
50 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 the rescue, and, appealing to the hoy's courage, his 
 sense of honor, and to his passionate interest in soldiers 
 and soldierly qualities, teaches him that, though 
 a military life can never now be his, he yet may be 
 "a brave cripple. 1 ' The ancestral motto of the family, 
 Lcietus sorte men, is so interpreted to the child that he 
 grows to feel it a matter of duty to be happy with his 
 fate, and begins to think that perhaps there are "lots 
 of brave afflicted people, and perhaps there never was 
 anybody but him who was n't so." 
 
 Leonard has a touching interview with a hero 
 of the Victoria Cross, in which, true to his great life- 
 interest, he is intent on finding out whether, if he 
 is very good and patient about a lot of pain in his back 
 and his head, that would count up to be as brave as 
 having one wound if he *d been a soldier; and whether 
 being ill in bed might count like being a soldier in a 
 hospital. 
 
 "I suppose nothing — not even if I could be good 
 always, from this minute right away till I die — noth- 
 ing could ever count up to the courage of a Y. C. ?" 
 questions the boy, wistfully; and the brave, tender- 
 hearted wearer of the priceless bit of iron answers 
 tremulously, "God knows it could, a thousand times 
 over !" 
 
 Leonard, and the Book which he thought out so 
 carefully, suggested to Sister Grace the formation in 
 the Bermondsey Settlement, South London, of the 
 Guild of the Brave Poor Things. It is an association 
 of men, women, and children, of any creed or no 
 
THE GUILD OF THE BRAVE POOR THINGS. 51 
 
 creed, who are crippled, blind, or maimed in any way. 
 Anyone is eligible for membership if thus afflicted 
 and if at the same time he is resolved to make a good 
 fight in life. Laetus sorte mea, Happy in my Lot, is 
 the watchword of the Guild; and its hymn, the one 
 which Airs. Swing's hero called the Tug-of-War hymn, 
 because, at the military chapel which he often at- 
 tended, the soldiers sang the verse beginning, "A noble 
 army, men and boys/' with such tremendous impetus 
 and vigor that, after a brief contest, they invariably 
 pulled away from the organ and the whole choir. 
 
 The deepest purpose of the Guild, says Sister 
 Grace, is found in this verse of the hymn: 
 
 "Who best can drink His cup of woe, 
 Triumphant over pain; 
 Who patient bears His Cross below, 
 He follows in His train." 
 
 It is by "awakening the heroic that slumbers in 
 everv heart," and by teaching its members that the 
 courage to bear and the courage to dare are really one 
 and the same, that the Guild lives up to its motto; for 
 its founder believes that it is not enough patiently to 
 accept one's life-burden, but that one must also learn 
 to bear it cheerfully. If it be heavy it is all the more a 
 proof of strength and valor to support its weight brave- 
 ly and in such fashion that each soldier in the suffering 
 army may profit by the spirit and enthusiasm of the 
 comrade marching by his side. 
 
 It is inherent in the very idea of the Guild that 
 
5Z THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 it should bring light and brightness into cold, gray 
 lives; and so, in every room in which it meets, the 
 walls are draped with the Union Jack, and high above 
 shines out in brilliant scarlet letters the watchword, 
 Laetus sorie mea. There are badges, membership 
 cards, and banners, all in red, the soldier's color, and 
 the true military spirit is insisted upon in every way. 
 
 "It is important/' says Sister Grace, "to guard 
 against anything like a sentimental glorification of 
 suffering; and, to shut out such a possibility, the 
 Guild must have a knowledge of the conditions of 
 life of all its members, and must be ready to do every- 
 thing that can be done to minimize their actual 
 distresses." It is not a charity, however, and does not 
 give relief; it is merely a friendly organization of 
 afflicted persons meeting frequently with leaders who 
 are interested in their troubles and who can give 
 strength and courage to bear them more bravely. 
 Where relief must be given, it is done through other 
 societies, and so there is no asking nor giving here, 
 save in the things of the spirit. 
 
 The Guild of Brave Poor Things was organized 
 in 1894, and so great a need has it apparently met, 
 and so well has it taken advantage of the "together" 
 spirit of the age, that it now has six branches, with 
 a membership of more than five hundred. It is a 
 pitiful thought that there are so many persons in one 
 locality who belong by right to such a club, but even 
 more pitiful would it be were nothing done to lighten 
 their double woes of poverty and disease. 
 
THE GUILD OF THE BRAVE POOR THINGS. 53 
 
 The various things necessary to a successful con- 
 duct of the Guild are thus stated by Sister Grace: 
 
 "1. To visit members in their own homes and 
 establish personal links between the workers and mem- 
 bers. 
 
 2. To hold regular meetings at stated intervals 
 for games, singing, and social intercourse. 
 
 3. To bring, as far as possible, technical classes 
 and suitable lectures within the reach of members of 
 the Guild; to arrange for periodical excursions, con- 
 certs, etc., for them, together with any other means of 
 widening their necessarily restricted lives. 
 
 The Guild's rules are few and simple : merely that 
 the name, motto, and hymn shall be the same in all 
 branches, that flags shall always be used in the decora- 
 tion of the rooms, that the soldierly virtues of loyalty 
 and prompt obedience be cultivated in every way, and 
 that records be kept of the name, address, and condi- 
 tion of each member. 
 
 And what are the proceedings at the Guild meet- 
 ings ? you ask. 
 
 These may be held either in the afternoon or even- 
 ing, and so great is the interest in them that many 
 of the members gather at the entrance long before 
 opening time, reminding one of that even in Caper- 
 naum when the sun did set and when they brought 
 unto Him all that were sick of divers diseases, and 
 all the city was gathered together at the door. 
 
 There are blind people here; there are deaf-mutes; 
 there are paralytics who can drag themselves a Ion--. 
 
51 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 and others who must be pushed in chairs or peram- 
 bulators; there are as many phases of distress and 
 deformity, perhaps, as there are persons, and all ages 
 are represented; but there is much good-fellowship, 
 and constant helpfulness. 
 
 Tables are set in the Guild-room, where books and 
 papers and magazines are scattered for those of seeing 
 eyes; there is a piano for the blind; there is a lending- 
 library from which books may be taken home; there 
 are toys for the younger children; and there is always 
 a painting table, for it seems that mottoes and pic- 
 tures to color are in great demand the year around. 
 
 Many of the blind women bring their knitting or 
 other handiwork and chat quietly together as their 
 busy fingers move ; the men fall into conversation over 
 the games and pictures, and thus the grace of friend- 
 ship is added to these lives of deprivation and suffer- 
 ing. 
 
 In many of the Guilds weekly half-hour lectures 
 on science, history, and travel are given, and seem to 
 be greatly enjoyed; and always when games and lec- 
 tures and conversation are over there is the ever- 
 delightful singing practice. If any of the members 
 are found to have special musical ability, or a knack at 
 recitation, they are encouraged to help in entertain- 
 ment, and considerable talent is thus discovered and 
 a new value given to the self -estimate of the possessor. 
 
 At the close of the exercises the roll is always 
 called, each soldier of the army, from baby to gray- 
 beard, answering to his name, and then comes Leon- 
 
THE GUILD OF THE BRAVE POOR THINGS. 55 
 
 ard's "Tug-of-War" hymn, for which all stand, or at 
 least assume as nearly erect a position as weak limbs 
 and twisted spines will allow. 
 
 It is their battle-hymn, and if with its echoes ring- 
 ing in their ears they can go back to their poor homes 
 and quit themselves like men, if they can fly their 
 scarlet banner with its joyous motto, if they can fight 
 the battle of life with courage, heavily weighted as they 
 are, then indeed may they be called the bravest army 
 that ever went forth to warfare. 
 
THE SOCIAL INCLOSURE OF CHILDHOOD. 
 
 "It is not only likely — it is inevitable — that the child 
 make up his personality, under limitations of heredity, by 
 imitation, out of the 'copy' set in the actions, temper, 
 emotions, of the persons who build around him the social 
 inclosure of his childhood." 
 
 — ./. M. Baldwin. 
 
 There is an old Spanish proverb which runs, "Tell 
 me with whom thou walkest and I will tell thee who 
 thou art," and if we were to invent a game calling for 
 pithy sayings from all languages on any given subject 
 we should probably find that the greatest number 
 would cluster about the influence of companionship. 
 We need no further proof that the topic has always 
 been prominent in the attention of men and we 
 may easily conjecture that the nucleus of thought on 
 the subject came from arboreal foremothers who 
 plucked their offspring away from undesirable play- 
 mates and, as they tossed them into their own trees, 
 sharply queried why they never could be content at 
 home. 
 
 Rousseau felt so strongly that out of the three 
 educations which life brings to us, — the education 
 of nature, circumstances, and other men, — only the 
 last could be partially controlled, that he proposed, as 
 you remember, absolutely to isolate his "Emile" from 
 the rest of the world. 
 
 This idea is of course quite impracticable and. 
 
58 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 even if it were not so, would be undesirable, for it is 
 not so much the object of education to keep the human 
 being away from temptation as to render him proof 
 against it. It never was of any use, you know, to wall 
 the princess up in the high stone tower, for the prince 
 always came that way, and when other means of ingress 
 failed he climbed up the golden ladder of her braided 
 locks. 
 
 To keep children away from companionship is 
 impossible, and the only course remaining is to see 
 that it be of the best. The modern demands of 
 education require the mother to be so Argus-eyed that 
 it is no wonder if she misses seeing something now 
 and then in one and another direction, but if she 
 is sightless or of weak vision here, the matter is a 
 serious one. It is difficult to realize perhaps that the 
 flaxen-haired, blue-ginghamed dumpling "playing 
 house" with your daughter over there can be any 
 more important in her influence than the robin that 
 sings in the bough above them, but if you think so you 
 will be mistaken, — seriously, perhaps fatally, mis- 
 taken. Little Blue Gingham may easily, if she have 
 time enough, taint your child's mind for life, and the 
 taint will be the more enduring if the mind be an 
 imaginative one. She may implant vicious thoughts, 
 ideas, and images there, which it will require years 
 of struggle to drive out, or rather to suppress, for they 
 can never be altogether driven out. You are thought- 
 less of danger because you know the inheritance of 
 your own child and know that she is flower-like in 
 
THE SOCIAL INCLOSUKE OF CHILDHOOD. 59 
 
 purity. How much do you know of little Blue Ging- 
 ham, pray, that you leave the two children together 
 those long uninterrupted hours? 
 
 It is a much-discussed question whether parents 
 should choose their children's companions for them, 
 or allow them to make their own selection. Certainly 
 the latter, we would say upon reflection, proper sur- 
 veillance being afterwards exercised upon the chosen 
 friend and upon his influence. It is to be remembered 
 that these boys and girls of ours, tiny as they may be, 
 are already possessed of independent individualities 
 and have their own fancies and characteristics. It is 
 by no means to be assumed that their tastes in person- 
 ality are the same as our own, and when we select some 
 neat and proper "Miss Nancy" and present him to 
 Jack as "such a sweet little playfellow" it is not un- 
 likely that Jack will find him intolerably dull and 
 prefer the company of Patsy Hogan over in the alley. 
 And we should reflect, before we send Patsy flying 
 home, that though he be neither any too clean, nor his 
 clothing any too whole, yet he may after all be a better 
 hoy than Miss Nancy and have a better influence. 
 
 Xo, it is inevitable that the child should commonly 
 find his companions in the families of those who build 
 his social inclosure about him, but within those limits 
 let him do his own selecting and see only that you 
 watch the playmate carefully, as well as the influence 
 he is exerting. 
 
 The little child is daily creating himself from 
 the material about him and it is, as Emerson said, the 
 
60 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 things of which he is not thinking that are educating 
 him. If the mother can supply him with good models 
 at this juncture Froebel tells us that she can accom- 
 plish by a touch light as a feather what later she could 
 hardly do by a hundredweight of words. The child 
 must imitate, he can only grow by imitation, there- 
 fore observe him closely and note the unfolding of 
 his nature and the possibilities for good or evil that 
 it discloses. 
 
 You may think if the evil tendencies are there, 
 that he will inevitably develop them sooner or later, 
 no matter what influences surround him now. Not 
 at all. So long as the earth rolls the Jack will never 
 come out of the box unless you loosen the cover, and 
 if he stays down in the dark long enough his mechan- 
 ism will so rust that he cannot jump at all. 
 
 Give serious attention to the child's playfellows 
 then, watch their effect in his speech and in his temper 
 and mannerisms, and keep so close to his heart that 
 he is willing to tell you something of his thoughts and 
 feelings. In no other way can you so protect him from 
 evil and give him a bias toward good as in providing 
 him with the right companions. 
 
 And are these only to be found among other chil- 
 dren? you ask. Ah no, the matter is not so simple a 
 one as that. The growing human being needs the 
 companionship of nature as well, the sweet influence 
 of trees and birds and winds and the sense of respon- 
 sibility and tenderness engendered in his heart by the 
 dependence of his pets upon him. 
 
THE SOCIAL INCLOSURE OF CHILDHOOD. 61 
 
 Later, when the mysteries of the printed page are 
 opened to him, the papers and magazines and books 
 which he reads are wisely to be selected; and here is 
 a potent influence for good or evil not sufficiently 
 considered. Search your own recollections and consult 
 child-students of to-day in choosing this literature, 
 for there are certain ages which imperiously demand 
 certain kinds of reading and will have it by one means 
 or another. If the boy of eight to ten years cannot get 
 "Robinson Crusoe/' or "The Jungle Books," he will 
 read the adventures of "Red Dog, Blue Horse and 
 Ghost-that-lies-in-the-Wood," and learn to content 
 himself with Brummagem jewelry when he might 
 have had pure gems of radiance and color. 
 
 And when we have done all these things so far as 
 our limited knowledge admits, shall we not think of 
 the child's earliest, best, nearest companions, those 
 whose -faces are the first he sees, whose hands the first 
 he grasps, whose words the first he understands, whose 
 lives encompass him as the blue depths the star? If 
 aught be amiss with this dear companionship, rough 
 is the road for childish feet to climb and dark indeed 
 the skies that bend above the little pilgrim. 
 
 Underneath all other friendships this rests firm, 
 strong and steadfast and as the dewdrop exhales from 
 the sea to wander above in independent life, but still 
 returns at last to mingle with the waters that gave it 
 birth, so the child-heart, after each new journey into 
 the unknown, slips back again into the great profound 
 of father and mother love. 
 
DAME NATURE'S PLAY-SCHOOL. 
 
 "If so the swiftness of the wind 
 Might pass into my feet; 
 If so the sweetness of the wheat 
 Into my soul might pass, 
 And the clear courage of the grass." 
 
 — E. R. Sill. 
 
 "Every third generation should he rolled in the 
 dust," said Henry Ward Beecher; and the great divine 
 was right in this, as in many another thing, whether 
 he meant that the race needs frequently to go back to 
 first principles and begin over again, or whether he 
 thought only of the Herculean myth and the strength 
 the earth gives out to those who lean upon her bosom. 
 
 As the love of nature was the dominant passion 
 of the primitive world, so it lives again in the little 
 child, who is ever re-making history in his own per- 
 sonality. He is a natural tiller of the ground, a 
 natural observer and collector, and all he needs is op- 
 portunity, a hint of encouragement, and a word of 
 direction, to mount these hobbies and gallop bravely 
 off on all sorts of delightful and profitable journeys. 
 
 Eor once in the year, at least, many children are 
 given the key of the fields, or the freedom of the 
 seashore and, overcome by the possibilities before 
 them, stand uncertain what to do. Xor are their small 
 country cousins prepared to lead them in most eases, 
 for children, and indeed grown persons, who live in 
 
64 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 the very midst of nature's wonders, often go about, 
 like falcons, hooded from the light. 
 
 How shall we teach these little ones to see, and 
 what shall we teach them to do? for they cannot be 
 happy, even in vacation, if they have not some kind 
 of regular employment. Spring and summer are' the 
 golden times of the year for watching living and grow- 
 ing things, for investigation and experiment, and 
 there is no better way to compass all these ends than 
 to plant and tend a garden. Give the child a small 
 plot of ground ready spaded and dressed, then, and 
 let him sow a few hardy, quick-growing flower and 
 vegetable seeds, fencing the plot afterwards, watering 
 and weeding it. No matter if he only sows lettuce 
 and sunflowers, his products will still combine the 
 useful and the beautiful, and one plant is as good as 
 another for observing the wonders of germination and 
 growth. 
 
 Teach him also in these summer days how to pluck 
 flowers, cutting them carefully with proper length 
 of stem, and by leaving a few specimens on each plant 
 securing against the entire extermination of the 
 species. The natural desire of the child seems to be 
 to tear up whole families and plantations of flowers, 
 roots and all, with one fierce tug, a desire which, grati- 
 fied often, soon rids a country-side of its natural deco- 
 rations as effectually as if fire and sword had been laid 
 to them. Gathered in such careless fashion they are as 
 carelessly guarded, and one frequently knows that a 
 junior naturalists' club has been in the vicinity, merely 
 
DAME NATURE'S PLAY-SCHOOL. 65 
 
 by the clusters of faded blossoms lying in the dust of 
 the roadway, by broken branches, trodden leaves and 
 grass, and a general effect in once flowery nooks and 
 bowers of beauty as if a herd of wild mustangs on the 
 stampede had trampled through them. 
 
 Children need commonly to learn that it is possible 
 to love and admire a flower, indeed to study it and 
 know its characteristics, and still leave it on the 
 parent stem. As Monckton Milnes said: — 
 
 "Simply enjoy the present loveliness! 
 Let it become a portion of your being! 
 Close your glad gaze, but see it none the less; 
 No clearer with your eye, than spirit, seeing. 
 And when you part at last, turn once again, 
 Swearing that beauty shall be unforgot." 
 
 When this lesson has been mastered and the further 
 one of handling the blossom respectfully when it be- 
 comes necessary to cut it, we may, if large gardens or 
 fields of wild flowers are at our command, instruct our 
 pupil how to make up posies for hospital or flower 
 mission work, and even before he attains to the degree 
 of carefulness and dexterity necessary for this labor of 
 love, he may be engaged as a helper at watering-time, 
 a little inevitable splashing and spilling being wisely 
 overlooked. 
 
 For still younger children there are many delight- 
 ful plays with materials drawn from nature's toy-shop. 
 There are wreaths and garlands to be made of leaves 
 and flowers; there are chains of lilacs and dandelions 
 and daisies and four o'clocks, there are nuts and seeds 
 
66 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 to be strung, there are dolls of poppy seed-cups to be 
 dressed and tea-sets to be made from the same ma- 
 terials and from acorns. Then there are charming 
 ladies with long dresses to fashion from morning- 
 glories ; tiny leaf hats and bonnets to be fastened to- 
 gether with thorns and twigs ; furniture to be made of 
 burdock burrs; rose pancakes to mix, rose petals to 
 gather for potpourri; mud pies to bake in small tins, 
 and leaves and twigs and ferns to press into wet sand, 
 making attractive designs and borders. On rainy days 
 the leaves and ferns may be cut from green paper and 
 mounted on cardboard ; or, if there is a clay bank near, 
 the heavier ones may be impressed upon clay plaques of 
 various shapes which may afterwards be baked in a slow 
 oven. 
 
 The study of the birds of a neighborhood might 
 occupy every waking hour of a whole company of 
 children for an entire summer, first learning to watch 
 them quietly and unobtrusively, cither with their own 
 bright eyes or with an opera-glass, then with the aid 
 of a bird-book becoming acquainted with their names ; 
 next studying their habits, their ways of nest-building, 
 their songs and calls, their special services to man, 
 and making as thorough an investigation as may be 
 possible of their favorite foods. If an older person 
 will record these observations of the children they may 
 be found really valuable in the preservation of bird 
 life, and a remedy may thus be discovered for the 
 startling decrease of our native songsters in many 
 parts of the country. 
 
DAME NATURE'S PLAY-SCHOOL. 67 
 
 Dr. C. F. Hodge of Clark University, who is an 
 acknowledged authority on the subject, tells us that 
 during the last fifteen years this decrease in thirty of 
 cur states and territories amounts to forty-six per 
 cent, and he suggests that children be taught to make 
 safe places of shelter and bird-houses for their feath- 
 ered friends, and especially to provide them with food 
 in bad winters. Their houses should be built with 
 perches or a tiny platform below each door, should be 
 made of proper proportions and placed at a safe height 
 from the ground.* One live bird, Dr. Hodge calculates, 
 may be worth one hundred dollars a year to a com- 
 munity, so considerations of economy as well as senti- 
 ment may well urge us on to the task of caring for 
 them. Dr. Hodge also suggests, as a useful autumn 
 occupation for children, that they be taught to take a 
 census each season of the birds in their own localitio by 
 counting the nests after the leaves have fallen. Thus 
 some reliable information will be gathered as to the 
 gradual increase or decrease of our bird-neighbors year 
 by year. 
 
 Then there are the insects to be studied, the valu- 
 able little ladybug or ladybird, loved by all children; 
 the ants, bees, and wasps ; the hornets, spiders, dragon 
 flies, and butterflies; the potato bugs and cucumber 
 bugs with their shining striped coats, and much of 
 real importance is to be learned as to their food, 
 their time of appearance, their transformations, and 
 
 *For plans, proportions and designs, see Cornell Nature Study Leaflets 
 and Bulletins, No. 10, April 10, 1898. 
 
(58 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 their ability to serve or injure man. If we knew the 
 true relation between birds and insects it is said that 
 we could entirely transform our insect-ridden land 
 in two decades, but to do this, authoritative informa- 
 tion must be disseminated. Dr. Hodge makes an 
 interesting calculation on this subject. "The school 
 system of the United States," he says, "costs $420,- 
 000,000 a year, while authorities on the subject esti- 
 mate that insects destroy crops to the value of between 
 $300,000,000 and $400,000,000 yearly. Children can 
 save the larger portion of this vast sum and have a 
 most delightful time during their work by learning 
 something of nature and applying their knowledge to 
 the assistance of those species of birds that will destroy 
 noxious insects." 
 
 It is doubtful whether the aforesaid children would 
 be at all stimulated in any such task by a reali- 
 zation of the immense sum they would thereby be 
 saving the country, and they would scarcely be im- 
 pressed even by knowing that they were earning 
 their own tuition by their labors. Four hundred and 
 twenty millions of dollars is an impossible sum to 
 realize and the mere work of reading the numbers 
 would be fatiguing to a youthful naturalist, but if 
 "those set in authority over him" should ever complain 
 of the long hours he spends a-birding he can offer as his 
 best excuse the mints of money he is thus virtually 
 helping his beloved country to save. 
 
 Bats, snakes, toads, frogs, earthworms — the names 
 of the quintette are not attractive, but it is unlikely 
 
DAME NATURE'S PLAY-SCHOOL. 69 
 
 that they would ever be repulsive to children if they 
 were properly introduced, and it is certain that none 
 of them, save possibly the snake in some parts of the 
 country, would be at all harmful. The bat, for in- 
 stance, if he can be gently caught and kept under glass 
 for an hour while he is examined, is generally attrac- 
 tive to children and is never afterward feared if his 
 work in the world is explained. 
 
 As to toads and frogs, among the most interesting 
 and useful of all animals, they may easily be studied 
 either in neighboring ponds or in a home-made aquari- 
 um, from the egg to the bright-eyed, beautifully dap- 
 pled grown-up creature. 
 
 It is estimated that one toad eats in a single season 
 cutworms that would else have destroyed twenty dol- 
 lars worth of crops, the family services in this direc- 
 tion being so well known in France that they are sold 
 by the dozen in that enlightened country for the pro- 
 tection of gardens. 
 
 During last summer's drought certain members of 
 a junior naturalists' club were so much impressed 
 by this information, as well as by the yeoman's service 
 done by the tree-toad in destroying insects and the 
 unceasing labors of the frog at the same task, that 
 they became alarmed at the way the tadpoles were dy- 
 ing off and, translating their faith into works, scooped 
 many of them up in tins and carried them to a better 
 supply of water. 
 
 From zoology we turn to the wide and not less 
 interesting field of botany, and here the subject of 
 
70 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 collections naturally comes up. All the children of 
 a neighborhood may join in this work, from the toddler 
 to the boy in his teens. A pleasant task is to gather, 
 mount, and mark a certain number, say fifteen each, 
 of the leaves, flowers, seeds, and grasses of a district, 
 keeping leaves of trees in one category, of shrubs and 
 flowering plants in another and so on. 
 
 If any prudent pel rent should fear that quests such 
 as these collections would entail, over wood and field 
 and meadow, would bring danger in the form of poison 
 to the child, who naturally touches and handles every- 
 thing he passes, we may answer that there are, after all, 
 very few poisonous leaves or berries in our country and 
 that these are easily distinguishable by appearance or 
 odor. As Froebel says, "Each one of these plants 
 utters its own word of warning." 
 
 William Hamilton Gibson in his "Sharp Eyes" 
 tells us that there is one page of botany which every 
 dweller in the country should learn, that which deals 
 with the Ehus or sumach. There are five species 
 more or less common in the eastern part of the United 
 States, but it appears that only two of these are 
 poisonous, and Mr. Gibson offers several verses con- 
 veying information as to their appearance, — jingles 
 which can be learned in a moment by any child and 
 which will serve as mental talismans against danger. 
 
 Ferns, shells, and sea-moss make equally good 
 collections, of course, and there is scope for consider- 
 able ingenuity, suited to the various ages of the col- 
 
DAME NATURE'S PLAY-SCHOOL. 71 
 
 lectors, in gathering the desired objects and devising 
 ways of preserving them. 
 
 For juvenile scientists, old enough for a moderately 
 late bedtime, there is unlimited and fascinating occu- 
 pation in studying the heavenly bodies. With a field 
 glass and a chart they can con every night the blue 
 page of the sky, learn the names and characteristic 
 colors of the stars, spy out the nebulae or satellites, 
 and by day study the mythological fancies woven about 
 them. 
 
 For still older children, there are the common 
 minerals and rocks to learn, — not a difficult task with 
 all the modern manuals on the subject, and boys 
 especially seem to take great delight in gathering 
 specimens and in making cabinets to hold them. 
 
 A child who is really interested in Nature's serial 
 story and who is old enough to write, will probably 
 be delighted if he is given a diary in which he can 
 record the happenings of every day of the season, — not 
 only rainfall and sunshine, but the dates when the 
 frogs begin to trill, when the various leaves unfold, 
 when the different birds appear and disappear, when 
 each flower of the long procession makes its bow, 
 when the white butterflies come and the grasshoppers 
 begin to whir and the crickets to chirp and the wasps 
 to make friendly calls. Books already prepared may 
 be had for this purpose, but an ordinary blank book 
 with stout covers is as good, — is really better in fact, 
 for it gives scope for individuality in choice of sub- 
 ject, arrangement, and decoration. 
 
72 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 It is generally found that all this nature work and 
 stud}^ is made much more attractive if a number of 
 children take it up together and band themselves into 
 a club, which should be given an attractive name. An 
 older person is needed as Secretary or Grand Adviser 
 of such an association to direct the work, to record 
 observations and mark specimens. Such a Grand Ad- 
 viser will find the summer catalogues of all the pub- 
 lishers rich with books on birds, reptiles, insects, 
 flowers, trees, fishes, ferns, stars, and rocks, most of 
 them provided with plates, colored or uncolored, and 
 all pleasantly familiar in style and adapted to the 
 needs of a tyro in science. 
 
 Nature stories, too, the Grand Adviser will find 
 very useful at the meetings of her society, to give a 
 fillip to general interest, and poetry will furnish need- 
 ful inspiration, for literature is ever the useful hand- 
 maid of art and science. 
 
SHOOTING FOLLY AS IT FLIES. 
 
 '"Eye Nature's walks, shoot folly as it flies, 
 And catch the manners living as they rise; 
 Laugh where we must, be candid where we can, 
 But vindicate the ways of God to man.'' 
 
 — Alexander Pope. 
 
 There are many kinds of philanthropists. Some 
 found free libraries and orphan asylums and found- 
 ling homes; some give to foreign missions and histor- 
 ical societies ; some support soup kitchens and temper- 
 ance restaurants; others endow chairs in universities 
 and fit out polar expeditions. There are others still 
 who are retail dealers in the virtue, as it were, and 
 do their good deeds in a small way, in accordance with 
 their capital. Of this last class was' a certain New 
 England lover of nature, who gave his whole time 
 to preserving line trees from vandalism, driving where- 
 ever it was reported that a tree was to be cut down and 
 paying the sum demanded, that it might stand as a 
 perpetual joy to the neighborhood. Another dear 
 saint, whose memory is still green, devoted a portion 
 of his income every year to dispatching letters held 
 for postage; and an eminent author whom we all ad- 
 mire, owns, as his philanthropic hobby, a manful 
 attempt to lessen the sum of error in the world, by 
 contradicting, in polite notes to the editor, any state- 
 ment seen in the periodicals of the day which he can 
 
7-i THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 prove to be false. This interesting whim leads him a 
 busy and a vexatious life; but in one case, at least, and 
 to-day, the present writer is resolved to emulate his 
 example. 
 
 There seems to be a distinct impression in some 
 quarters of this country that the kindergarten is a 
 sort of Mahometan Paradise, where children recline on 
 flowery beds of ease, lulled by soft music, their only 
 exertion being to open their mouths occasionally that 
 they may receive the mental and spiritual blessings 
 that drop from the gilded clouds above. 
 
 A few representative extracts cut from some of 
 our prominent papers in the last two months will 
 illustrate this point of view. 
 
 a. "The 'laissez faire treatment of children, 
 which the kindergarten exploits." 
 
 b. "Young j)eople did want to learn something 
 once from those who cared for them, before the univer- 
 sal 'kindergartening' r ' (Jove, give us patience!) 
 "brought to them, without exertion, all that they once 
 imbibed by discipline and by the restraint of learn- 
 ing submissively and with effort/' 
 
 c. "The kindergarten weakness is that it fails to 
 recognize the fact that life is not all pleasure, and that 
 children must learn to do things which are disagree- 
 able, — the grim Puritanical idea, which makes men 
 and women of backbone and moral fiber." 
 
 cl. "The experiment of the kindergarten system 
 has yet to demonstrate its values, and older people 
 doubt whether the discipline of work for Avork's sake. 
 
SHOOTING FOLLY AS IT FLIES. 75 
 
 and obedience out of respect for authority will find 
 an adequate substitute in the plan where Jack's ex- 
 perience is all play and no work. May kindergarten 
 graduates find themselves prepared to meet the trials 
 and disappointments of a world which has often de- 
 manded in its successful combatants the bracing prepa- 
 ration of early hardship and neglect/' 
 
 Here are live distinct indictments of the kinder- 
 garten ; — its "laissez faire" treatment of children, the 
 indirect statement that it teaches without effort on 
 the child's part or discipline on its own, a suggestion 
 that its methods produce neither backbone nor moral 
 fiber, an implication that it cultivates disobedience 
 and scorn of authority, and finally a pious -hope that 
 its graduates may be able to meet the trials and dis- 
 appointments of this troublous world, — a hope whose 
 tone reminds us of Reynard's politeness when he 
 brought the duck to his kennel. 
 
 Perhaps you are not familiar with the story; but 
 it is rumored that he said, as he dropped the fluttering 
 creature among his hungry cubs, "I trust you've had 
 a pleasant ride, ma'am, and will enjoy yourself this 
 evening." 
 
 As there is no smoke without some fire, it is safe 
 to suppose that the writers of these and similar criti- 
 cisms may have seen certain specimens of kindergarten 
 training which merited, in part at least, the diatribes 
 directed against them; but granting this point, what 
 logic or justice is there in condemning an entire edu- 
 cational system because of some local fault of inter- 
 
76 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 pretation? Do we flout the modern schools of medi- 
 cine because unskilled practitioners kill their patients 
 now and then? Do we condemn electric lighting be- 
 cause a stray wire may occasionally be deadly? Do we 
 jeer at Christianity because its votaries, sometimes 
 fall from grace? 
 
 This matter of the kindergarten is too vital a one, 
 its issues too far-reaching, to be court-martialed 
 and sentenced in this summary fashion. If indeed, 
 when interpreted according to the precepts of its 
 founder, it can be proven in the majority of cases to 
 cultivate idleness, love of luxury, weakness, lack of 
 moral fiber and energy, disobedience, misrule, and 
 anarchy, then the sooner it is swept from the face of 
 the earth the better for the nations thereof. If, on the 
 contrary, these charges are unfounded, when made 
 against the system considered as a whole, then a great 
 wrong is being done to a profound educational phi- 
 losophy devoutly believed in by large and increasing 
 numbers of people. 
 
 The charge that it fosters idleness might easily 
 be refuted, it would seem, for the most ignorant on- 
 looker could not but agree that there is no busier 
 creature than a kindergarten child. His hands are 
 literally never still; for when he is not occupied at 
 his table, he is joyfully active in song and play. Nor 
 is this occupation at the table anything which is 
 forced upon him, which he does with little grace, 
 drops as soon as possible, and neglects if the eye of 
 authority be not upon him. It is done eagerly and 
 
SH00T1XG FOLLY AS IT FLIES. 77 
 
 with delight, because it is worth doing and he loves 
 it. If this is not "work for work's sake/' — a motive 
 which our last critic affects to consider as out of date, 
 where may we find a clearer illustration of the phrase ? 
 for there is no reward connected with the industry, 
 save that of success, and the finished product is com- 
 monly bestowed upon others. So far is the kinder- 
 garten child from idleness, that another class of critics 
 cries out that he is being forced and overworked and 
 that he is frequently made nervous by excess of in- 
 dustry. 
 
 The charge that FroebeFs system of education 
 cultivates luxurious habits scarcely needs a moment's 
 consideration. If keeping the pupil in a bright clean 
 room, gay with plants and flowers, and hung with 
 appropriate pictures, is breeding in him a love of 
 luxury, then the Creator's idea of the earth as a 
 training school for man must be a wholly mistaken 
 one; and if the baby may not employ himself with 
 brilliant colors and graceful forms, though fashioned 
 from the plainest and most universal materials, then 
 the promptings of Nature for playing with brightness 
 must be altogether disregarded and set at naught. 
 
 The statement that the kindergarten produces 
 weakness and lack of energy in the pupil evidently 
 springs from the belief that every experience comes 
 to him ready made in that enchanted region; that he 
 is a little pitcher which passively allows itself to be 
 filled, in the Gradgrind fashion, with imperial gallons 
 of facts. 
 
78 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 If there is any one idea in the whole range of 
 educational thought, upon which Froebel insisted and 
 re-insisted, upon which he lectured and theorized, and 
 which he conceived that he had finally reduced to prac- 
 tice, it was that of self-activity on the part of the 
 learner; and it would seem extremely difficult so 
 to conduct a kindergarten as to hurl from its place 
 one of the chief stones of its foundation. It is not 
 to be supposed, because the work is agreeable to the 
 child, that it is therefore so easy as to require no 
 effort on has part. It is for the joy that is set before 
 him that he endures the difficulties, and because he 
 has once tasted the pleasures of success that he is 
 willing to labor. 
 
 Xo one who is familiar with the everyday handi- 
 work of kindergarten children and knows how neat 
 and well-wrought and artistic it commonly is, — no 
 one who knows this and at the same time knows the 
 powers and capabilities of children from three to six 
 years old, could for a moment doubt, it might be 
 supposed, that it was executed by dint of the greatest 
 industry, energy, ardor, patience and perseverance. 
 
 That children enjoy putting forth such efforts 
 is quite true ; but one would imagine that this fact 
 might place the matter in a still more favorable light. 
 No one doubts the statement of one of our critics that 1 
 the world often demands of its successful combatants 
 the bracing preparation of early hardship and neglect ; 
 but it can hardly be seriously supposed that an edu- 
 
SHOOTING FOLLY AS IT FLIES. 79 
 
 cation al system for babies could successfully be built 
 upon such a foundation. 
 
 It is true enough that many of the world's heroes 
 struggled up through bitter waters of trial to the 
 sunlight above, but who is to say that such experiences 
 are fitted for the non-hero, for the ordinary mortal 
 who is not called upon to do great deeds or think 
 great thoughts but simply to perform his own share 
 of the world's work and to help a fainting brother 
 here and there? 
 
 Another skeptic, evidently a blood-relation of the 
 writer whose criticisms we are now considering, lately 
 complained in a Boston paper, that schooling nowadays 
 from kindergarten to university is far too pleasurable 
 a process, opined that the school should be a sort of 
 drill-ground for the stern realities of life and pre- 
 dicted that having had no previous experience in 
 hardships the modern child would be conquered by 
 the first attack of life's natural woes. 
 
 This is a specious sort of reasoning, — one that 
 when first considered seems to have some elements of 
 good sense about it and yet, after all, looked at more 
 closely, they melt away quickly enough. As a wise 
 man said the other day in discussing the value of a 
 happy, sheltered childhood ; "Does n't everybody know 
 from observation that nine times out of ten the 
 man who has been gently bred, with every puff of an 
 ill wind kept from him by loving hands, meets a great 
 disaster when it comes with a grace or a defiance, as 
 the case may be, seldom seen in men who from baby- 
 
80 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 hood up have known almost nothing but hard knocks ? 
 Somehow the 'training process* lias taken the stamina 
 out of such social victims — has depleted their courage 
 so that the great ill, when it comes, overwhelms them 
 completely, at least for a time." 
 
 And now the question as to lack of moral fiber 
 in the kindergarten graduate. What does this mean, 
 exactly ? Probably that the child is selfish, capricious, 
 unscrupulous, tyrannical, and perhaps untruthful. 
 Certainly such children have been seen in many kin- 
 dergartens ; but similar monsters have ere now issued 
 from decent, well-ordered homes, and nobody has 
 therefore cried out upon the sacred institution of 
 the family ! 
 
 How can a system of training which was framed 
 to teach helpfulness, the value of co-operation, the 
 beauty of brotherly love and the joy of working for 
 others, degenerate, even under unfavorable conditions, 
 into a nursery for selfishness ? 
 
 How can a system whose tools of education are 
 evolved systematically one from the other, and inter- 
 connected: whose plays, of whatever kind, are logical 
 developments of thought ; whose products require sus- 
 tained, purposeful and continuous effort; — how can 
 such a system, when administered by even a moderate 
 intelligence, develop capriciousness ? 
 
 How can a training which leads a child uniformly 
 to consider the weaklings and younglings of the flock, 
 to observe that leadership in any line is synonymous 
 with worthiness, to note that "all are needed by each 
 
SHOOTING FOLLY AS IT FLIES. 81 
 
 one' 7 and that his own powers, no matter how great, 
 are lost without co-operation ;— how can this training 
 develop a tyrant ? 
 
 And how can a system which neither terrorizes, 
 nor punishes revengefully; which endeavors to tea.!, 
 fair-dealing and loving kindness; which daily gives 
 concrete experience with the connection of cause and 
 effect, with error and its natural result, with wrong- 
 doing and retribution; which aims to cultivate clear 
 seeing, clear thinking and clear speaking within its 
 small range of subjects ;— how can it justly be charged 
 with fostering unscrupulousness and falsehood? 
 
 As to the "laissez faire" treatment of children, we 
 might answer that in one sense, the phrase very well 
 illustrates kindergarten procedure. We do believe, 
 if you choose to put the matter in that way, in letting 
 the children alone to a certain extent, believing that 
 like trees, if they are set in the right soil, in the righl 
 climate, properly cultivated and under the right at- 
 mospheric conditions, they may be trusted to do their 
 own growing. 
 
 Our critic, however, has nothing of this in mind ; 
 his meaning is closely allied to the last indictment,' 
 that of the child-garden as a school of disobedience,' 
 misrule, and anarchy. This complaint is more often 
 seen than any of the others, and in any kindergarten 
 center, one or two institutions could perhaps be found 
 which would come dangerously near furnishing the 
 prosecuting attorney in the case with evidence leading 
 toward conviction. 
 
82 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 The fact is that FroebeFs ideal in discipline is a 
 difficult one to reach; and since kindergartners are 
 only ordinary women, it is the less wonder that they 
 sometimes fail to attain unto it. It must he a dis- 
 cipline which has nothing of formalism or rigidity 
 about it; it must exist by consent of the governed; 
 it must be free and elastic, and yet it must implant 
 a reverence for law, order, and authority in each one 
 of the embryo citizens for whom it is maintained. 
 No one doubts that the practical workings of a des- 
 potism are simpler than those of a republic, and it 
 was a republic that Froebel desired to make of his 
 training school for babies. 
 
 To suppose, however, that a good, or even a fairly 
 good, kindergarten tolerates disobedience, or allows 
 lawlessness or anarchy within its bounds, is the great- 
 est of mistakes. There is no better discipline when 
 the proper person is at the head of affairs, and none 
 more ideal, because it aims to make each individual 
 self-governing. Order is an essential part of every 
 exercise of the day; a reverence for law is constantly 
 instilled in every study whose beginnings the child 
 takes up ; and under these conditions and with the 
 right hand at the helm, the ship glides along on an 
 even keel, her sails filled with the winds of peace 
 and harmony. 
 
 It must always be easier to handle a simple tool 
 than a fine and delicate instrument; anybody can 
 whittle, but not everybody can manage a turning 
 lathe. If the kindergarten fails here and there, as it 
 
SHOOTING FOLLY AS IT FLIES. 83 
 
 does of necessity fail, as everything must sometimes 
 fail whose management is intrusted to human intelli- 
 gence, we need not use these failures to discredit the 
 principles upon which the system is based. We may 
 disbar the unworthy practitioner, but we do not there- 
 fore cry out upon the law. 
 
 An adopted citizen of this country (the Hon. Carl 
 Sehurz), one who is more truly an American than 
 many who were born on the soil, lately said a few 
 thing's in discussing the failures of a democratic gov- 
 ernment which are not only valuable in themselves, 
 but of application here. "Indeed,"' he said, "our 
 government has had its failures and will have more. 
 Honest and earnest criticism of those failures — even. 
 if need be, the most searching and merciless — is a good 
 citizen's duty. So is the pointing out of threatening 
 dangers. But criticism and the pointing out of danger 
 must never have the object of discouraging wise and 
 vigorous effort for improvement. If they do, they de- 
 generate into that dreary pessimism which, whenever 
 something goes wrong, cries out that everything is lost. 
 If the pessimist who employs his criticism to prove 
 democratic government a failure would apply the same 
 spirit and method of criticism to monarchical or aristo- 
 cratic governments, he would easily prove them fail- 
 ures, too — and, in some respects, failures of a worse 
 kind. In fact, he would prove any and every form of 
 government a failure, ending in the demonstration of 
 the failure of the universe." 
 
THE PERSONALITY OF THE KINDERGAR- 
 TEN TRAINING TEACHER. 
 
 "How can I hear what you say when what you are is 
 thundering in my ears?" 
 
 — R. W. Emerson. 
 
 Although the work of the Fates once done is 
 done forever, although they have never been persuaded 
 to take up again a task once fallen from their hands, 
 yet no one supposes, I fancy, that their skill is un- 
 erring, nor that there are not some days when they 
 would not be the better for a competent overseer. 
 
 It is obvious that Atropos, as she severs the thread 
 of human life, sometimes snips it too quickly, and 
 sometimes lets it run through her hands too long. If 
 this were not so, why should some persons keep on 
 living whose absence from the earth would greatly 
 enhance its attractions, and some be taken away whose 
 permanent presence seems the one thing desirable? 
 Nor are the other weird sisters more trustworthy. 
 Clotho is not a faultless workwoman, for it appears 
 that she does not always spin her thread of the 
 same tensile strength. It may be the fault of Lachesis, 
 who, being a gifted person, is possibly subject to 
 moods, and may not twirl the spindle at the same rale 
 on every day of the week. It is difficult to fix the 
 responsibility for the deviations, but obviously the 
 thread turned out is by no means uniform, some of it 
 
86 THE MESSAGE OE EROEBEL. 
 
 being thick enough for a hawser, and some fine enough 
 to hem a cambric handkerchief. 
 
 It is not so surprising, then, that we sometimes 
 fail to get the right quality for the required purpose, 
 since we commonly do not trouble to select from a 
 large assortment, but rather take the first specimen 
 that comes to hand. This is so true and so much a 
 matter of everyday experience that the moral needs no 
 pointing, the tale no adorning. George Eliot once 
 said that when we consider the tragic errors made in 
 selecting persons to fill the only relationships open 
 to choice, we are overcome with gratitude to a wise 
 Providence who so ruled it that all the remaining ties 
 should be formed before our birth. Would that this 
 arrangement might have been a little further extended, 
 we sometimes think, to cover responsible positions in 
 business and professional life; for then, had we seen 
 the square peg painfully trying to squeeze himself 
 into the round hole and the round peg ardently striv- 
 ing to expand himself to fit the corners of the square 
 one, we should have resigned ourselves to the inevi- 
 table, bowed our heads and said "Kismet \" 
 
 All this is by way of preamble; and now, if you 
 are one of those persons whose minds are given to 
 leaps, you have but to exercise your faculty and, con- 
 sidering duly the title of the paper, you need read no 
 further, for the subject is spread out before you. Yet 
 for those who like better to be personally conducted on 
 a tour than to make out the route for themselves, there 
 
THE KINDERGARTEN TRAINING TEACHER. 87 
 
 is something still to say and a special application to 
 make of the foregoing generalities. 
 
 As the kindergarten grows in public favor and 
 repute, as it is lifted into greater prominence, we are 
 enabled to see more clearly the difficulties which attend 
 the proper development of its principles and the draw- 
 backs which hang upon it and impede its progress. 
 There are many of these, — as there must of necessity 
 be whenever a great idea is introduced to the world; 
 but one of the foremost has always been the lack of 
 ideal persons to interpret the doctrine. This is doubt- 
 less no more true of the kindergarten than of Chris- 
 tianity, for instance; but has it been equally appre- 
 ciated? Those of us who have been studying Froebel 
 so long that his views have become second nature 
 feel that the pre-eminent value of the kindergarten, 
 its distinguishing mark of perfection, lies in the out- 
 look it gives upon the world, the clear, rational, and 
 no less spiritual attitude of mind which it engenders. 
 This is true of child, and true of adult; but true of 
 neither, perhaps, if the kindergarten influence be not 
 radiated from the right quarter. Much has been said 
 of the personality of the ideal kindergartner, but have 
 we sufficiently considered that of the ideal training- 
 teacher? Yet why is one matter less important than 
 the other? Or if there be a difference, why should 
 not the personality of a teacher of teachers be a still 
 more vital question, because through her students she 
 must eventually act not only upon the children of the 
 present but upon those of the future. 
 
88 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 Lack of appreciation of the spiritual side of the 
 kindergarten among those empowered to select train- 
 ing teachers often results in thinking only of the 
 mental attainments of the person under consideration. 
 These may all be there ; she may possess every diploma, 
 every certificate of proficiency and experience offered in 
 the kindergarten field; and yet the highest powers of 
 all may be lacking, — those that take their root in per- 
 sonal^, deep down below the conscious self. Dr. 
 Stanley Hall wisely says on this point : "We have 
 sought the real ego in the intellect. It is not there, 
 nor yet in the will, which is a far better expression 
 of it than thought. Its nucleus is below the threshold 
 of consciousness. The mistake of ego-theorists is akin 
 to that of those who thought icebergs were best studied 
 from above the surface, and were moved by winds; 
 when, in fact, about nine tenths of their mass is sub- 
 merged, and they follow the deeper and more constant 
 oceanic currents, often in the teeth of gales, vitiating 
 all the old aerodynamic equations/' 
 
 It is from this deeper self, from this real per- 
 sonality, that unconscious influence, which is the only 
 real influence, is radiated; and it is this that we 
 must regard, if what is so ethereal and indefinable may 
 be apprehended, when we think of the ideal training 
 teacher. Not that her mental equipment is to be 
 held of less account, but that what lies below and 
 around it is to be considered as something more price- 
 less still. 
 
 It has fallen to woman to be the £reat civilizer and 
 
THE KINDERGARTEN TRAINING TEACHER. 89 
 
 educator of the race m all times, but her work has 
 been accomplished by force of her spirituality, and it 
 is there that her strongest influence must always lie, 
 however learned, philosophical, and scientific future 
 training may make her. 
 
 Goethe's Iphigenia, says Dr. Felix Adler, works a 
 twofold miracle in the play. "She humanizes a bar- 
 barian and she absolves a sinner; and how does she 
 accomplish these results? Not by what she does, but 
 by what she is; — by her radiant personality, by the 
 crystalline truthfulness of her nature, by the new 
 faith in the good which she inspires in all who come 
 in contact with her." 
 
 Such a radiant personality, such a crystalline truth- 
 fulness of nature, is needed by the kindergarten train- 
 ing teacher, whose character must inevitably make deep 
 impression upon the minds of her students; and the 
 more surely so, as they are all engaged in the same 
 work, all thrilling with the same thoughts, all busy 
 upon the same experiments. "It is a characteristic of 
 the estate of youth," says Dr. Hall again, "that it is 
 molded by contact with great characters; and, if it 
 does not find needed heroes and leaders, makes them 
 often of the poorest material, or finds tinsel idols in 
 the cheapest fiction." 
 
 Let us remember that revelation is, and always 
 must be, personal in the first instance; and that the 
 depth, the strength, the height, the beauty, and the 
 tenderness of kindergarten principles are unfolded 
 to the pupil in the beginning only through the 
 
90 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 instrumentality of the training teacher. We cannot 
 doubt that in many cases the attitude of mind in which 
 the student shall ever after regard her vocation, is abso- 
 lutely fixed by her first month's work in the training 
 class. The student may not know it ; her leader cannot 
 know it, — for the influence which she is exerting 
 comes from that part of herself which the plummet 
 of her consciousness has never reached. Down, deep 
 down, below the surface waters of what she has 
 learned and read and been told and thought she 
 believed, and thinks she is teaching, lies what she is; 
 and it is this which is of supreme and eternal im- 
 portance. 
 
 "We buy ashes for bread; 
 We buy diluted wine; 
 Give me of the true, 
 Whose ample leaves and tendrils, curled 
 Among the silver hills of heaven, 
 Draw everlasting dew." 
 
OUR XURSERY TALES— TO-DAY AXD YES- 
 TERDAY. 
 
 "I would not for any quantity of gold part with the 
 wonderful tales which I have retained from my earliest in- 
 fancy, or have met with in my progress through life." 
 
 — Martin Luther. 
 
 All the earth is full of tales to him who listens, 
 and there is no there nor here, no then nor now for 
 the fairy and the folk story. They were no more thor- 
 oughly at home, no more suited to their environment, 
 when they flowed from the lips of our Aryan ancestors 
 in some far-off region in the misty long ago than they 
 are to-day as they appear in new type on the pages of 
 a new magazine in new America. 
 
 In one sense they are as old as time itself, as old 
 as that "childish wonder which is the first step in 
 human wisdom**; in another, we may be tempted to 
 call them modern, for the earliest collections in any 
 of the tongues of the Occident were made one hun- 
 dred years after Montaigne, whom Lowell calls our 
 first modern writer, and a century and a half later 
 than the latest date commonly assigned as the begin- 
 ning of modern history. In the true meaning of 
 the word, however, the fairy tale can no more be con- 
 sidered modern than the coming of the dawn or the 
 falling of the dusk, though renewed each day. may 
 be considered modern instances. Like these phenom- 
 
92 THE MESSAGE OE FROEBEL. 
 
 eua of nature, fairy tales have been since time began. 
 for the first naked savage no sooner rose above the 
 stage of mere brute existence, no sooner looked with 
 wonder on the world about him, than he endowed with 
 life the objects of that world, supposing, as he could 
 not but suppose, that their workings were due to an 
 inward volition of which he was conscious in himself. 
 He saw in the great white clouds, cows with swelling 
 udders, driven to the milking by the wind-god; in 
 the sun a yellow-haired divinity, wedding at even-tide 
 the violet light which he had forsaken in the morn- 
 ing ; in the moon a horned huntress coursing through 
 the blue sea of air, and in the lightning a fiery serpent 
 whose bite was fatal and whose hissing as he fell 
 savagely upon the earth was the rolling of the thunder. 
 Robert Browning, in contemplating the childhood 
 of the world, says in "Paracelsus," 
 
 " Alan, once descried, imprints forever 
 
 His presence on all lifeless things; the winds 
 
 Are henceforth voices, wailing or a shout, 
 
 A querulous mutter or a quick gay laugh, 
 
 Never a senseless gust now man is born. 
 
 The herded pines commune and have deep thoughts * * 
 
 The peerless cup afloat 
 Of the lake-lily is an urn, some Nymph 
 Swims bearing high above her head." 
 
 These myths, as they first became current, were 
 doubtless felt to be neither poetic nor fanciful, but 
 were merely considered to be satisfactory explana- 
 tions of familiar phenomena, quite as acceptable as our 
 
OUR NURSERY TALES. 93 
 
 modern scientific theories on the eclipse of the sun, or 
 the rising and falling of the tick's. 
 
 One well-devised and wonder-satisfying myth 
 speedily became the parent of countless myth-chil- 
 dren and these again, as time flew on, produced in their 
 kind until the world is peopled with their progeny, 
 and history, science, art, literature, and common speech 
 all palpitate with their presence. 
 
 We need not here attempt to recite the arguments 
 on that great mooted question, whether the body of 
 these ancient myths, so startlingly alike among all 
 primitive peoples, originated in the same ancestral 
 tongue, or whether similarity of conditions in man and 
 nature may account for the production of some of 
 them at least, in widely distant times and countries. 
 We have only here to consider their relation to 
 the nursery tales, only here to answer the poet's ques- 
 tion 
 
 " Whence these stories, 
 
 Whence these legends and traditions, 
 
 With the odors of the forest, 
 
 With the dew and damp of meadows?" 
 
 It can be proven, undoubtedly, that the classic 
 fairy story, the perfect example of its kind, one which, 
 like that humble plant we call the "live forever," 
 cannot be crushed, or trampled, or weeded, or discour- 
 aged out of existence — one which persistently reap- 
 pears in all times, all countries, all arts, and all Liter- 
 atures — that such a tale is invariably based upon a 
 universal myth and that it is as much a part of our 
 
94 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 inherited equipment as a belief in a Supreme Power. 
 These stories descend to us from a time when there 
 was ik no supernatural because it had not vet been 
 discovered that there was such a thing as nature/' and 
 from days when primitive man felt that close com- 
 munity existed between himself and the brute. The 
 doctrine of metempsychosis, which is found in some 
 shape or other all over the world, implies, as John 
 Fiske says, a fundamental identity between the two, 
 and who can positively deny that in ages long past 
 there might not have been a period when there was 
 such a rapprochement, such a similarity of develop- 
 ment between man and his brothers "in air and water 
 and the silent wood," that he might not have understood 
 their language as we, by sympathy and daily inter- 
 course, grow to understand the almost inarticulate 
 babblings of the infant amongst us? 
 
 Xe less remarkable than the age of these stories is 
 their universal spread. Whatever their date or origin, 
 they all alike have wings, and as the bird knows his 
 nest, they know their resting place in the heart of all 
 peoples. It gives one a new sense of the brotherhood 
 of man, of the essential oneness of humanity, to find 
 that the very same tale which charms its hearers in 
 the Arabian desert and the coffee houses of Bagdad, is 
 listened to with delight by the Zuhi cliff dwellers, by 
 the fur-clad Esquimaux, and by the American-bred 
 negroes on our Southern plantations. 
 
 Not only so, but the philologists prove that the 
 primitive Aryan, w 'as he took his evening meal of yava 
 
OUR NUBSEKY TALES. 95 
 
 • and sipped his fermented mead," undoubtedly listened 
 to tales of "Cinderella," "Boots/' or the "Master 
 Thief," that were absolutely identical in all their main 
 features* with those your little daughter takes down to- 
 day in their gay covers from her nursery shelves. 
 
 The Orient seems in all times to have been one 
 of the richest storehouses of myths, allegories, para- 
 bles, apologues, folk stories, and tales of terror and 
 wonder. Much of this profusion is due, no doubt, 
 to the mental characteristics of Oriental races, and 
 much to the tropical climate, which renders possible 
 and desirable long hours of serene and contemplative 
 leisure in which the art of the story-teller can be per- 
 fected. 
 
 The Crusaders unwittingly did literature a great 
 service in bringing home from the Orient many of 
 these magical tales which were spread abroad by 
 preaching friars,— for illustrated sermons seem to have 
 been as much the fashion then, as they are among 
 revivalists to-day; were repeated by travelers and 
 mendicants to secure food and a night's lodging, and 
 were recounted, with others of their kind— sagas 
 household tales, legend,, and fables— by minstrel, glee- 
 man, jester, jongleur, and trouvere. 
 
 In days when there was no literature save what 
 could be communicated orally, when every man was 
 his own novelist, so to speak, as well as his own maga-! 
 zine and newspaper, the profession of story-teller 
 mustjiave been one of great delight and profit. The 
 
 ♦John Fiske : " Myths and Myth Makers." 
 
9G THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 memory, sole and sufficient resource for those who 
 have never weakened it by reference to printed word, 
 was for many centuries the only library of these 
 artists, for the literary faculty seems to have been 
 used only in embellishing the form of the tale's, trans- 
 posing them from prose to poetry and vice versa, 
 and in adding jokes, local hits, or corroborative de- 
 tail. 
 
 In the first years of the twelfth century those few 
 English story-tellers who were also Latin scholars, 
 if there were any such among the humbler folk, might 
 reinforce their stock of magical and supernatural lore 
 from the Disciplina Clericalis, which was put together 
 about that time by Peter Alfonsus, a Spanish Jew. 
 It was a wonderful book, partly derived from the 
 Talmud, partly from Arabian fables, and partly from 
 Sanscrit tales, which had been translated into Persian, 
 thence into Arabic, and thence again into Greek. 
 
 Komance had taken root at the court of Henry I. 
 at the very beginning of this century, where, under 
 Queen Maud's patronage, that "daring fabulist,* 1 
 Geoffrey of Monmouth, transcribed, rewrote, and adapt- 
 ed old Welsh myths, dreams, and traditions, partly 
 from old Latin manuscripts and partly from Breton 
 legends, calling the glittering whole a History of the 
 Britons. 
 
 More than a century after this the Gesta Roma no - 
 rum appeared in England, a curious jumble of classi- 
 cal, Oriental, and Gothic fictions, but a wonderful store- 
 house for romancers. In its pages Boccaccio found 
 
OUR NURSERY TALES. 97 
 
 his Two Friends, Grower and Chaucer the History of 
 Constance, Shakespeare his Merchant of Venice, and 
 in still more modern days Schiller his Fridolin, Par- 
 nell his Hermit, and Walpole his Mysterious Mother. 
 
 The great body of story-tellers, however, in what- 
 ever land they lived, had for hundreds of years no 
 thought of reference to written literature for their 
 material, for the mass of myth-descended tales and 
 romances was at the command of all who having ears 
 could hear and having tongues could speak. 
 
 When we begin to consider these stories as the 
 art of printing has fixed them in permanent form, we 
 are amazed at the fidelity with which their inner 
 meaning and spiritual content have been preserved 
 from age to age. Even the clothing of the tale lias 
 frequently been retained, the story-teller often using 
 certain old-time words here and there, which had no 
 longer any meaning either to him or to his hearers, but 
 were repeated mechanically as somehow or other, — no 
 one knew how, — an essential part of the narrative. 
 
 The oldest known manuscript of the Arabian 
 Nights is comparatively modern, dating from 1548, 
 and it is supposed to have been collected in its present 
 form, only a century earlier, the work being done in 
 Egypt in 1450. 
 
 Whatever books the English mariners, Sebastian 
 Cabot and his crew, may have brought with them on 
 their various voyages to this Western Hemisphere, t hex- 
 could not have been fairy or household tales, for those 
 contained in the Disciplina Clericalis and the 
 
98 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 Gesta Romanorum were respectively two and three 
 centuries old. and quite out of the ken of simple 
 mariners, and the modern collections had not yet 
 been made. 
 
 America had been discovered nearly a century and 
 a half, the bones of Cabot and Columbus too, all were 
 dust and their good swords rust, and Shakespeare, the 
 great fairy lover, had been dead for twenty years, when 
 modern fairy talcs may be said to have had their liter- 
 ary birth in the publication by a gay Italian signor, 
 II Cavalier Giambattista Basile, Conte di Torrone and 
 Conte Palatine, of a delightful collection called II 
 Pentamerone. It was written in Neapolitan patois, 
 though the various tales are supposed to have been 
 gathered in Crete and in Venice, but they are in essen- 
 tials exactly what have always been told as nursery 
 tales in all times and all countries, and our old 
 friends, the myth-makers, are answerable for every one 
 of them. 
 
 It should be understood of course that the term 
 fairy as here employed is not confined to narratives 
 in which elves or spirits actually appear, but is taken 
 as Chancer used it, to cover tales in which there is 
 something faerie, that is. something enchanted or 
 extraordinary, whether it be fays, giants, dwarf's, 
 speaking animals, or indeed human beings of remark- 
 able wit or stupidity. 
 
 Basile obviously had no notion of the philological 
 or mythological value of ins collection, or he could 
 never have been so gay and witty, as he tells of The 
 
OUR NURSERY TALES. 99 
 
 Months, The Throe Enchanted Princes, Pernonto and 
 the Fairy Wishes, Vardillo's Stupidity. Cenerentola, 
 and The Enchanted Doe 
 
 "The Dawn." he says at the beginning of one of his 
 tales, "had gone forth to grease the wheels of the Sun's 
 chariot and with the fatigne of stirring the fat into the 
 wheelbox with a stick, had grown as red as a rosy 
 apple." Here is modernism for you, assuredly. 
 And again, as a moral to one of the tales, •'He who does 
 not bait the hook of the affections with courtesy never 
 catches the fish of kindness." 
 
 The taste of the times in regard to proprieties and 
 improprieties of allusion is sufficiently evident in the 
 Pentamerone to render it inadvisable reading for chil- 
 dren, but the, Cavalier evidently set everything down 
 with a light heart and sang as he wrote. 
 
 Sixty years later than Basile, only two centuries 
 ago now, comes dear Charles Perrault, commonly e<>n- 
 sidered the literary parent of the fairy tale. A con- 
 temporary of Boileau and Moliere and Bossuet, his 
 fame in his own line is as bright as theirs and if. as 
 somebody says, we can judge of a work by the quantity 
 and quality of things which it teaches and inspires, we 
 may easily say that the Contes de Perrault have at- 
 tained the highest mark in their line, lie also wrote 
 with perfect unconsciousness it seems, and repeated his 
 narratives as he heard them from grandams and grand- 
 sires, old nurses and simple ountry folk. Me says of 
 them himself that "they lack sense and are therefore 
 designed for children that have little sense as yet." 
 
 v*. Of V. 
 
100 THE .MESSAGE OF PROEBEL. 
 
 and he does not dream of their immense age, or their 
 great ethical value. Xo one doubtless would have 
 been more astonished than Perranlt if he had been 
 told that he was dealing with fragments of ancient 
 religions, with sun-myths and cloud-myths and that 
 several of his tales could be found bodily in the 
 Mahabharata and the Panchatantra. It is said of the 
 C antes that they are incomparably the most ingenuous 
 and charming of all the collections, which, if true, may 
 be due to the fact that they were all told by the 
 author and his friends to the children of the family 
 around the fireside in the evening, and, being often 
 repeated as dictation exercises next morning, undoubt- 
 edly received the benefit of many suggestions from a 
 bevy of competent, if youthful, critics. 
 
 A I'vw years after Perrault's collection appeared 
 (1704) came the translation of the Arabian Xights 
 into French, and then Gozzi, the rival of Goldoni 
 ( 1722), rose upon the romantic horizon with the in- 
 troduction of those fairy dramas which had such an 
 astounding run for several years in Italy. L' Angellino 
 lid rcnlc. II Re Corvo, Turandot are completely for- 
 gotten now, but they were remarkable and beautiful 
 productions in their time and exercised a marked in- 
 fluence upon succeeding literature. 
 
 Dean Swift published Gulliver's Travels thirty 
 years after Perrault's Contes appeared, but they are 
 scarcely to he classed as fairy-tales, perhaps, though 
 the touch of the myth-maker is visible upon them. 
 
OUR NURSERY TALES. 101 
 
 and are rather humorous extravaganzas based on the 
 impossible stories of travelers in the Middle Ages. 
 
 The nineteenth century was about to open when 
 Tieck wrote his Folk Tales and Phantasus, partly 
 original these and partly drawn from an inexhaustible 
 source, the memories of a race of child-lovers and child 
 interpreters, who in their simplicity had kept close 
 to Nature's heart. He was closely followed by the 
 Grimm brothers, who, while Great Britain and Amer- 
 ica were fighting the War of 1812, were collecting their 
 wonderful treasures of fairy lore from the German 
 peasants, many of them from the wife of a cowherd 
 near Cassel. With the advent of these books fairy 
 tales became the subject of scientific thought and 
 study and the earlier collections came to be regarded 
 in their true light. 
 
 Perhaps the best teller of fairy stories in the 
 literary sense that the world has ever seen was Hans 
 Christian Andersen, but his volumes contain more of 
 himself and less of myth and tradition than other 
 collections, and the tales are ethereal, symbolic, ex- 
 quisitely poetic and distinctly touched with the later 
 modern feeling. The ubiquitous myth-maker, who 
 will not be left out of literature, is responsible for 
 some of them, witness the story of the Wild Swans, hut 
 in The Ugly Duckling, The Flax, The Little Match 
 Girl and their fellows, the literary artist with a con- 
 scious purpose is supreme. 
 
 Serious, practical, sober-minded England, who had 
 been colonizing and fighting and trading while her 
 
102 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 neighbors were collecting fairy tales, came to the 
 front in 1838 with the first complete translation of the 
 Mabinogion, that great Welsh storehouse of the ro- 
 mantic and the supernatural, but it must not be 
 thought because there had been no notable collections 
 in England, thai the people and the authors thereof 
 were ignorant of fairy-lore. English literature is a 
 Living witness to the great extent of that knowledge, 
 and Thomas the Rhymer, as early as the thirteenth 
 century, wrote an enchanting description of that Queen 
 of Faery, whose love he was so fortunate as to win. 
 
 That purely English fairy tales once existed in 
 tolerable numbers there are evidences in the celebrated 
 library list of Captain Cox, among others, and in odd 
 references in literature and in chap-books, but they 
 were routed by the superior elegance of Perraulfs tales 
 when these appeared, and sought refuge in remote 
 country regions. 
 
 There are certain indications that the common 
 form of the English fairy tale was the cante-fab/c, a 
 mixture of prose and verse of which the most illus- 
 trious example in literature is Aucassin and Xicolete. 
 
 Mr. Joseph Jacobs, an authority in folklore, has 
 lately collected two volumes of these early English 
 narratives, and thus viewed, in mass, they are seen to 
 be remarkably vigorous, dramatic, and humorous. The 
 story of Tom Tit Tot is unequaled in its line, Mr. 
 Fox, breathlessly exciting, and The Well of the World's 
 End, a striking and poetic rendering of a familiar 
 t heme. 
 
OUR 3STURSERY TALES. 1U3 
 
 If English children were nurtured on such narra- 
 tives it is no wonder that the first English translation 
 ( from the original) of the Arabian Nights, in 1840, 
 was received with such applause, for the seed fell on 
 ground already well prepared for the sowing. 
 
 The Ettrick Shepherd gives us a delightful account 
 of the origin of fairy-folk in Britain. 
 
 The Knight of Dunblane, he says, a certain gentle- 
 man of honor and repute, met on the hills one day 
 while hunting, a golden-haired dam-el. more beautiful 
 than his eyes had ever seen before. He lost no time 
 in making love to her and she responded with equal 
 impetuosity, the outcome of the affair being her eon- 
 sent to be his bride, whereupon, his word given, she 
 spirited him away with her to Fairyland. 
 
 For twelve months and a day he remained in the 
 enchanted underground halls, surrounded by every 
 luxury, but hearing no voice and seeing no face but 
 that of his bride, who came to him each evening in 
 fresh attire and fairer than the moon on a clear 
 night. 
 
 At the fin} of the year, when the fay was about 
 to become a mother, she apparently grew exceedingly 
 anxious as to the future of the expected babe, on ac- 
 count of the racial difference between its parents, and 
 so wearied the Knight with her plaints that one day 
 he pettishly exclaimed that he wished he were at home 
 again. 
 
 To wish is to have, you know, in Fairyland, and on 
 the instant he was transported to the doors of his castle, 
 
10 J: THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 where at first no one knew him and even his dogs 
 refused to come at his call. He was indeed greatly 
 changed, and as days went by grew pale and wistful, 
 took no interest in things of earth and longed un- 
 ceasingly for his bride. At last one day, a lovely lady 
 appeared leading a beautiful child by either hand and 
 at once the Knight welcomed her as his fairy bride, 
 having no need of the love-tokens she showed to con- 
 vince him of her identity and gladly acknowledging 
 the twin-chilclren as his own. He was still in trans- 
 ports of joy when a second fair lady and other twins 
 appeared and upon her heels still another dame, until 
 seven resplendent beings attended by fourteen infants 
 were assembled in the room, each one producing ir- 
 refutable testimony that she was the rightful wife. 
 
 Upon this scene of confusion the Knight's old 
 mother entered and by a few simple spells proved that 
 the brides were the Seven Weird Sisters doomed to 
 remain under enchantment until some gallant cavalier 
 should wed them all. 
 
 They one and all disappeared at the sign of the 
 cross made by the old mother, considerately leaving the 
 fourteen children behind them lest their father be 
 lonely, and chanting as they vanished this last in- 
 junction : — 
 
 "Sweet babes, adieu ! and may you never rue 
 The mingled existence we leave to you. 
 There is part of virtue and part of blame, 
 Part of spirit and part of flame, 
 Part of body and passion fell, 
 Part of heaven and part of hell. 
 
OUR NURSERY TALES. 105 
 
 You are babies of beauty and babies of wonder. 
 But fly from the cloud of the lightning and thunder, 
 And keep by the moonbeam or twilight gray. 
 For you never were made for the light of day. 
 Long may you amid your offspring dwell, — 
 Babies of beauty, kiss and farewell!" 
 
 The Knight of Dunblane, it is- reported, never 
 afterward uttered a word, which is not surprising, con- 
 sidering the shock his system must have received, but 
 moved about for a time like a spirit in pain and then 
 vanished from mortal sight. 
 
 It is said that he was eventually made the Patri- 
 arch King of the Scottish Fays, but however that may 
 be, his progeny seem to have made themselves entirely 
 at home on British soil, apparently preferring their 
 father to their mother land. 
 
 An interesting thing to be noted in connection with 
 fairv beings is that they seem to decrease in size with 
 the progress of civilization. The old myth-makers, 
 weaving their mighty fancies on the mighty forces 
 of the universe, attributed no personality or physical 
 presence to these forces, and it was only as they de- 
 generated into gods and demons and thence into mag- 
 ical beings of various orders, gifted with beneficent 
 and malevolent powers, that they began to appear as 
 flower-folk, as elves, sprites, brownies, trolls, pixies, 
 and other creatures of diminutive size. They appear 
 to be markedly influenced by political changes also, for 
 their scarcity in modern France is accounted for by 
 the story that, terrified by the thunders of the Revolu- 
 tion, they left the country in a body, first assembling in 
 
106 THE MESSAGE OF FKOEBEL. 
 
 grateful concourse around the tomb of Perrault, upon 
 whose manes they conferred the boon of immortality. 
 We doubt not that they then followed the example 
 of other illustrious fugitives and took refuge in 
 England, the home of the exile, for no one race of 
 home-bred fairy-folk could have existed under as 
 many names as English speech has for them to-day. 
 
 These same Protean and magic creatures appear to 
 be extremely adaptable in religious matters, embrac- 
 ing Christianity and serving as decorous godfathers 
 and godmothers, if occasion requires, or riding broom- 
 sticks, weaving horrid spells and dancing at the revels 
 of demon worshipers, if they so elect. On the 
 whole it may be said that they are, as a race, but im- 
 perfectly inoculated with religious ideas as yet, and 
 since the possession of a soul seems to be an object 
 of aspiration with some of them at least, it may be 
 that a modern mission to the fairies would be crowned 
 with encouraging success. 
 
 Their dispositions seem to be easily affected, which. 
 perhaps, makes the case somewhat more hopeful, in one 
 light at least, for an Irishman of to-day complains 
 that the Scots have had a baleful influence on the 
 ghost and fairy temperament, making it both "dour 
 and dowie.*' 
 
 Leaving the wee folk themselves and returning to 
 their legends again, we find that in all times and 
 countries they deal with the following subjects: Fairy 
 Births, Changelings. Robberies from Fairyland, Super- 
 natural Lapses of Time in that Country. Bird Maidens. 
 
OUR NURSERY TALES. 107 
 
 Invisible Caps and Cloaks. Shoes of Swiftness, Magical 
 Captures and Rescues, Inexhaustible Purses, Gold- 
 Producing Animals, Dragons and Monstrous Birds, 
 Sub-Aqueous Fairy Halls, Forbidden Rooms, Magic 
 Words, Impossible Tasks, Cupid and Psyche Legends, 
 Fairy Hinds. Magic Boats, Life Depending on some 
 Extraneous Object, Enchanted Horses, Demons in 
 Bottles, Contracts with the Evil One, Three Wishes, 
 Ring- and Fish Legends, Men Swallowed by Monster 
 Fish, Magical Transformations, Thankful Beasts, and 
 Secrets Learned from Birds. 
 
 Stories dealing with these last two topics, with 
 beasts gifted with human speech and human intellect, 
 capable even of assuming human form sometimes, and 
 their relations with man are very ancient, as has been 
 shown, and are always classed with fairy tales; though 
 they seem, in some respects, hardly to belong to them. 
 They are called specifically "household tales," though 
 the name labels rather than defines them and they form 
 a separate branch of the great mass of folklore, one 
 in which that view of the animal kingdom shown 
 by Totemism is distinctly traceable. 
 
 Still another class of folk-tales common to all 
 times and countries is the "cumulative story.** such as 
 "The House that .lack Built/' or "The Old Woman 
 and her Crooked Sixpence." This latter narrative is, 
 in fact, an almost literal translation of a mystical 
 hymn in the "Sepher Haggadah" of the Talmud, and 
 is an interesting example of the hoary old age of some 
 of our modern nursery favorites. 
 
108 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 When we begin to study the subject we are sur- 
 prised to note how many of our English writers, em- 
 inent in other lines of literature, from Chaucer and 
 Spenser, Milton and Shakespeare, down to the present 
 time, have written, collected, and edited plays, poems, 
 and stories devoted to the world of faerie. To give only 
 the most ordinary and well-known examples of yester- 
 day and to-day, there are the Kingsleys, Charles and 
 Henry, with their Water Babies and Boy in Grey; 
 Lewis Carroll with his famous Alice books; Andrew 
 Lang with his Rainbow series ; George Macdonald and 
 his Back of the North Wind ; J can Ingelow and Mopsa 
 the Fairy; Hawthorne and his Wonder Book and 
 Tanglewood Tales; Drake and his Culprit Fay; Laf- 
 cadio Hcarn and Stray Leaves from Strange Litera- 
 tures, and Stevenson and the Bottle Imp, The Isle of 
 Voices, Will CT the Mill, Thrawn Janet, Markheim 
 and several of the fables, which are not fables at all 
 in the strict sense of the word. We may add to the 
 illustrious roll, Dickens, Thackeray, Lowell, Tennyson, 
 Eobert Browning, Charles Lamb, George Sand, Char- 
 lotte Bronte, Miss Yonge, William Morris, most of 
 whose longer poems are based on faerie subjects, Miss 
 Mulock, Sir Richard Burton, Longfellow, Ruskin, 
 George Meredith, Quiller-Couch, Frank Stockton, W. 
 D. Howells, James Whitcomb Riley, Joel Chandler 
 Harris and Rudyard Kipling. 
 
 As soon as we begin to attempt a classification of 
 these productions we see at once the entirely new 
 element which has entered into the fairy tale of to- 
 
OUR NURSERY TALES. 109 
 
 day and the complete departure of some of them 
 from the old traditions. 
 
 This new element makes no part of the various 
 modern collections, which are merely the old favorites 
 clad in new garments, nor of the classic myths retold, 
 which are so fashionable just now ; nor does it show its 
 face in the nursery tales recently gathered in strange 
 countries and among strange peoples, the Zulus, the 
 Zuhis, the Esquimaux, the Persians, Arabians, Chinese 
 and Japanese, and the folk of the Deccan. These are 
 all hoary with antiquity, all bear a family likeness 
 to one another and to our own primitive fireside tales 
 and would be welcomed as at least distant cousins 
 wherever met. 
 
 Lewis Carroll's books, on the contrary, represent 
 a distinct new class, a class of freakish adventures, 
 topsy-turvy conditions and general upsidedownness. 
 The chief joy of these stories is the delicious unex- 
 pectedness of everything — the pleasure, for instance, of 
 hunting an impossible beast, under impossible circum- 
 stances, with impossible weapons through an in)]><>s>il>l,> 
 journey and finding out at the end that he was some- 
 thing else after all and even that something else has 
 escaped us. 
 
 This is grotesqueness certainly, and grotesqueness 
 is nothing new in the branch of literature we are 
 discussing, but the marked point of difference is thai 
 Lewis Carroll, as a product of modern times, is gro- 
 tesque on purpose, and here he is a sworn brother of 
 Frank Stockton's, who exploits the grotesque as sue- 
 
110 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 cessfully in his fairy tales as in his stories for mature 
 readers. 
 
 This is the great distinction, perhaps, that might- 
 be made between the fairy stories of the last half cen- 
 tury and their predecessors — that they are now com- 
 monly written with a conscious purpose to serye as a 
 vehicle for instruction, for satire, be it bitter or play- 
 ful, for argument, or for .furtherance of political 
 views. Such are the fairy tales of the Kingsleys, 
 M.icdonald, Dickens, Thackeray, Lamb, and Howells, 
 to give a few conspicuous examples, and such also is 
 an exquisite little book, The Elf Errant, published 
 lately by Moira O'Neill. Then there are the pure- 
 ly sportive narratives, like Anstey's Tinted Venus, and' 
 Vice Versa, which toss about the old fairy-tale conven- 
 tions like shuttle-cocks and laugh as they see them 
 flying through the air, and the eccentric variety, 
 resembling the Beardsley illustrations in their dis- 
 tortion of possibilities. These are decidedly decadent 
 in general tone, ephemeral in their make-up and 
 really give no more lasting pleasure to the children 
 for whom they are written, than the clown does when 
 he puts his head between his legs and grins at the 
 audience upside down. 
 
 Many of the recent fairy tales, exclusive of this last 
 variety, arc witty, tender, graceful, amusing — serious 
 and thoughtful, too, sometimes; but the blight of 
 modernism has fallen upon them; they no longer 
 believe in themselves, and hence their deep indwelling 
 charm has vanished. 
 
OUR NURSERY TALES. Ill 
 
 There have been also of late years a number of 
 old "motives" in fairy lore worked up into new com- 
 positions with modern backgrounds, and these have 
 been humorous and decidedly successful among chil- 
 dren, a good example being Chris and the Wonderful 
 Lamp, an Aladdin-up-to-date production, which won 
 much youthful applause in the St. Nicholas lately. 
 
 Perhaps Mr. Palmer Cox's "Brownies" may be 
 counted under this head, unless, indeed, from their 
 astounding and phenomenal success they merit a sepa- 
 rate compartment by themselves. There was a time 
 when juvenile literature was overrun by a Tartar 
 horde of Brownies, and all other fays, elves, sprites, 
 and hobgoblins hid their heads in caves and lonely 
 forests. 
 
 Nor is the invasion over; new Brownie adventures 
 are still being published and witnesses to the mighty 
 power of the race are to be seen in Brownie plays, 
 Brownie cards and note-paper, Brownie caps and 
 dresses, Brownie dolls, Brownie candy, Brownie pins, 
 paperweights, penwipers, and pincushions. 
 
 For several years the old hymn was altogether 
 superseded and children refused to sing anything but 
 
 "I want to he a Brownie 
 And with the Brownies stand," 
 
 and yet these little beings seem ultra-modern in 
 costume and bearing to the true fairy-lover and eon- 
 descend, in his opinion, far too much to present con- 
 ditions in their favorite sports and enterprises. 
 
112 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 Among our recent revealers of fairy treasure, of 
 myth and legend, outside of the collectors of nursery 
 tales in all nations, Howard Pyle merits especial men- 
 tion, perhaps, for the originality of his tales, their 
 graceful composition, their inherent interest, the dex- 
 terous way in which ancient and modern have been 
 blended in them, and the old-world atmosphere which 
 wraps them round. 
 
 George Meredith's Shaving of Shagpat is said by 
 an English critic, Mr. Alfred Nutt, to be the only one 
 of the modern, consciously invented fairy tales which 
 conforms fully to the folk-tale conventions. 
 
 It is not a child's story, of course, but the critic 
 is right in saying that it follows the ancient formulae 
 as closely and accurately as the best of Grimm's or of 
 Campbell's tales. 
 
 "To divine the nature of a convention and to use 
 its capabilities to the utmost is a special mark of 
 genius/' says Mr. Xutt, and the observation brings us 
 naturally to Eudyard Kipling's Jungle Stories, the 
 great achievement of recent literature in this line. 
 Overtopping all other books of the kind as the century 
 plant overtops the geranium, they show the mighty 
 power of genius which can deal with subjects eternally 
 old, and with a touch of the finger make them eternally 
 new. 
 
 There have been many well-authenticated cases of 
 native children in India, suckled by wolves and spend- 
 ing years in a wild life but little different from that 
 of the savage creatures among which they found refuge. 
 
OUR NURSERY TALES. 113 
 
 Xot only may such a case be true to Fad. though that is 
 of slight importance, but it is true to spirit also; there 
 is a deep meaning in it which the old myth-makers 
 universally felt and utilized and which Emerson voices 
 in his poem on "Power." 
 
 "Cast the bantling on the rocks. 
 
 Suckle him with the she-wolfs teat, 
 Wintered with the hawk and fox, 
 
 Power and speed be hands and feet." 
 
 "Mowgli" has many predecessors in the realm of 
 myth, legend, and folk-tale, and his attendant animals 
 many brothers in the household stories of all nations, 
 but herein lies one great power of their lives and 
 adventures, that they are built on foundations rock- 
 ribbed like the hills and ancient as the sun. 
 
 It is evident enough that Mr. Kipling, as a child 
 in India, was nurtured on these animal tales, ami it 
 is probable that with his tremendous receptive power 
 he absorbed the whole literary stock in trade of many 
 a dusky native, but that does not account for the 
 Jungle Stories any more than carbon accounts for 
 the luster of the diamond, or than hydrogen and oxy- 
 gen in specific quantities account for the sparkle in 
 the fountain. It is the old myth over again. The 
 treasures are ever waiting, but the door of the cave 
 will not open till the hero says the magic word. 
 
 The beasts of Mr. Kipling's jungle live as no ani- 
 mals have ever lived before in literature, though his 
 life-giving power and his wide and tender sympathy 
 
Ill THE MESSAGE OF FKOEBEL. 
 
 with the brute creation were shown us long ago in 
 Her Majesty's Servants, My Lord, The Elephant and 
 The Maltese Cat. Up to Mr. Kipling's time the beasts 
 of fable and folk-tale were but skins stuffed with 
 straw ; now they live and move and have their being, 
 for the gods have breathed into their nostrils. 
 
 It is in their relations with Mowgli that the 
 wolves, the tiger, the python, the monkeys, stand out 
 most boldly, and this is always so in the household 
 tale, — man and the brute must be contrasted, must 
 be set over against each other that the characters of 
 both may appear more strongly. 
 
 Although Mr. Kipling's achievements may be said 
 to be ours because he is of our race and language, yet 
 we have a writer nearer home, a tale-teller of the 
 domestic jungle, of whom we have great reason to be 
 proud. Mr. Joel Chandler Harris' Uncle Eemus Sto- 
 ries are as valuable to literature as Mr. Kipling's in 
 that they are of a distinct, new kind, and told with 
 consummate grace and art; and as valuable to the 
 student of folklore because they show the universal 
 elements of the tales of all nations, preserved in this 
 case and brought to this country by the native African. 
 Mr. Harris' animals are wonderfully lifelike and con- 
 vincing, but though they more abound in humor they 
 are commonly somewhat less serious, purposeful, and 
 dramatic than the beasts of the Indian jungle. 
 
 There are exceptions to this statement, however, 
 and one is the Black Stallion's story of his wonderful 
 midnight gallop to save the Yankee schoolmaster from 
 
OUR NURSERY TALES. 115 
 
 lynchers, which is full to the brim of dramatic fire and 
 thrills you with every heat of his hoofs and every pant- 
 ing breath he draws. 
 
 Both jungle writers are absolutely spontaneous and 
 are evidently so carried along by the vivid interest of 
 their subjects that they believe for the time in every 
 word they say and therefore fill the reader with a 
 similar conviction. 
 
 One of Mr. Harris* latest characters ""Aaron, the 
 Arab Slave," tells us that he who has been "touched/ 1 
 that is, he who has had the sign of the double cross 
 made on the inner side of his left thumb, knows the 
 language of all animals, and we arc sure at once that 
 both Mr. Harris* nurse and Mr. Kipling's performed 
 the mystic rite upon their charges in early infancy.* 
 
 Another most valuable contribution to American 
 literature is Mr. Charles Lummis* collection of Pueblo 
 folk-tales, entitled The Man Who Married the Moon. 
 There is an Antelope boy in this book who is a near 
 relative of Mowgli on the foster mother's side and a 
 Coyote whose ancestors certainly knew "'Brer Rabbit" 
 and "Brer Fox." The stories are full of quiet humor, 
 full, too, of tenderness, insight, and wisdom, and are 
 altogether so superior to some of the nursery tales of 
 other countries that we feel an added interest in the 
 peopLe who have preserved and transmitted them. 
 When we consider the Zuni Tales and the Uncle Remus 
 Stories we can but feel that the African essayist was 
 partially right at least, who lately wrote in relation to 
 the contribution of his people to our civilization: "A1- 
 
1 16 THE MESSAGE OF FROEBEL. 
 
 ready we come not empty handed, there is to-day no 
 true American music but the sweet wild melodies of 
 the negro slave ; the American fairy tales are Indian 
 and African, we are the sole oasis of simple faith and 
 reverence in a desert of dollars and smartness/'* 
 
 It was lately remarked in one of our leading literary 
 periodicals that there are now a large and increasing 
 number of children who find no pleasure in fairy 
 tales, but rather delight in the records of actual 
 occurrences. The statement was not supported by any 
 proofs, however, and was possibly a hasty generaliza- 
 tion made by a writer, who, condemned to wearing 
 blue glasses himself, saw the whole world of the same 
 dull hue. 
 
 It has always been true that fairy tales failed to 
 appeal to a few exceptional children and doubtless 
 even in the time of the myth-makers, hard-headed and 
 scornful savages existed who said naught but "Pshaw !" 
 when told that the Sun and the Dawn-maiden were 
 lovers and pooh-poohed the theory that the mountains 
 were the mouldering bones of a mighty Jotiin, the 
 stars golden missiles useful for stoning the devil. 
 
 So sweeping an assertion as that of a general decay 
 of childish interest in fairy tales would require proof 
 by scientific investigation, for in the very nature 
 of things it would appear impossible that it should be 
 true. To one who holds in any degree to the theory 
 
 *W. E. Burghardt Du Bois, Atlantic Monthly, August, 
 1897. 
 
OUR NURSERY TALES. 117 
 
 of parallelism of development between the child and 
 the race, it seems clear that these talcs which were 
 "conceived by primitive men as concrete examples of 
 general truths must naturally be received with joy 
 by children who are in a corresponding stage of de- 
 velopment.'' 
 
 It may be that the small persons of to-day, who 
 are somewhat imbued from birth with the scientific 
 spirit, linger a shorter time in the realm of the 
 fairies than did their ancestors, but some term of resi- 
 dence there seems to be fundamentally necessary to 
 development. To shut the child away from myth 
 and fairy tale is, as Lowell says in regard to poetry, 
 "to close up the windows of nature on the emotional 
 and imaginative sides," and from such a course dis- 
 aster must inevitably come. 
 
 The poets have long whimsically protested against 
 the too early inoculation of children with the scientific 
 virus and there are those who contend that the practice 
 involves a distinct element of danger to the growing 
 mind and soul. There is a story of Tennyson and 
 one of his nephews which is doubtless mythical, but 
 is worth quoting as illustrative of the poetic point 
 of view. The conversation on a certain occasion, it 
 seems, turned on education and the spread of scientific 
 knowledge. "Yes/' said the Laureate, "it is spreading, 
 and it is crushing all the romance and poetry out of 
 children's lives. It was only yesterday I was walking 
 in the fields with one of my nephews, a little chap of 
 eight or ten. when we came to a fairy ring. 'Look,' 
 
118 THE MESSAGE OF FEOEBEL. 
 
 I said ; 'look here, my boy, here 's a fairy ring.' C A 
 what, uncle? 5 he asked, in a surprised sort of way. 
 
 '"Why, a fairy ring, my lad/ I said. f The wee 
 good folk must have been dancing here last night, 
 and this is the mark of their feet on the sward.' 'Oh, 
 Uncle Alfred,* he replied quite gravely, "it is well 
 known that those fairy rings, as you call them, are 
 caused by a species of fungus." " 
 
 Sucli a little prig. as this would he the despair of 
 any right-minded mother, and we can but think him 
 a lusus mi I unic, or one of those exceptions required 
 to prove a rule. 
 
 One can but wonder if the parents, and there are 
 such, who entirely disapprove of fairy tales for chil- 
 dren, have given the subject careful thought, and 
 realize how the ideal representatives of this branch of 
 literature in their simple humor, their ingenuous views 
 of all* things, their poetic subject-matter, their dis- 
 closure of constancy, generosity, fidelity and purity in 
 man and beast, their scorn of definite time and place, 
 their youthful way of seeing and feeling, how abso- 
 lutely suited these are to childhood and how admirably 
 adapted to developing the imagination as well as to 
 introducing the young human creature into universal 
 human conditions. The recounting of actual occur- 
 rences, a- suggested by the critic already quoted, though 
 most valuable at a later stage of development, cannot 
 serve the purpose of the folk story in early years, and 
 neither can the fairy tales of science, so-called. This 
 term, by the way, is a complete misnomer, for they are 
 
OUR NURSERY TALES. 119 
 
 as far removed from the primitive nursery tale as 
 the east is from the west, originating in a differenl 
 
 stage of the world's progress, suited to a different 
 age and serving different purposes in the cultivation of 
 mind and soul. One is no more to be substituted for 
 the other than night for day, though both are useful 
 in their turn. We may indeed call them wonder sto- 
 ries and reverence their power of leading the soul 
 from nature up to nature's God, but fairy tales they 
 are not and can never be. 
 
 If we tell fairy stories at all then, let us tell "truly" 
 ones, as the children say, and decline to countenance 
 those mummers of modern literature who hold the 
 lesson book under their gay clothing and whack the 
 unsuspecting child with it when safe occasion offers 
 itself. Let us have, too, not only a "truly" fairv tale, 
 but one which remains such to the end, for there is 
 nothing so insulting to the youthful imagination as 
 that clumsy, makeshift narrative which closes by say- 
 ing, "And then little John, or little Jane, as the case 
 may be, awakened and found it was all a dream.'* 
 
 We need not, of necessity, although warm in our 
 convictions, be such devotees of the fairy tale as to 
 clamor for it for ourselves and for our children first, 
 last and all the time, but we may well claim for it the 
 same place in daily life that we claim for poetry. 
 
 The soul needs food as well as the body, indeed 
 it needs more and better food, for one is the germ of 
 life, the other but the husk which envelops it. The 
 imagination must he ministered unto, and it is idle 
 
120 THE MESSAGE OF FKOEBEL. 
 
 to suppose that it will content itself altogether with 
 the practical, the instructive, the didactic. 
 
 "In a last analysis," wrote Mr. Lowell, " it may 
 be said that it is to the sense of wonder that all 
 literature of the fancy and of the imagination appeals, 
 and if this sense is the survival in us of some savage 
 ancestor of the age of flint, we may well be thankful 
 to him for his longevity, or his transmitted nature, 
 whichever it may be." 
 
 The whole Romantic movement in literature, when- 
 ever and wherever it has appeared, appeals to this 
 same ancestor and his sense of wonder, and that good 
 red blood of his runs in our veins to-day as hotly as 
 it did in the veins of our fathers, and thrills at the 
 same magic touch. 
 
 "Romance is dead, say some; but I say no!" 
 
 "God keep my youth and love alive, that I 
 May wonder at this world until I die; 
 
 Let sea and mountain speak to me, that so 
 Waking or sleeping, I may fight the lie; 
 
 Romance is dead, say some; but I say no!" 
 
NOV 15 1900 
 
LIBRARY OF CONGRESS 
 
 019 840 056 7