LlTeRARY-- LANDMARKS i=OR ^ eOPL6 ' B Y • ' ' lOH MIFFUN S^CO, ^ j-WTT7rir,i|T,t,i, i,i,r,TiTTT7T,Tn rrT Trr7ii^TTlT7T n' ih^hii'iii'i N'rTrri Stfl^^ Collep.: I Class .Ac. . -0X8.'%p^5^ : .v.;.50 i'Ti»iiii|i rnriT,Tfr7Tin T>ii|i|ii' 7 T7Ttr,-Trrp 7i-rtrri»iit» ir,i,i,i,fr i.hiiiii; ^^MB.. ^"^1!^'' 6 Z.S . 5" BOOK 028.5.895 c 1 BURT # LITERARY LANDMARKS 3 T1S3 000S7qb3 M #d '40 LITERARY LANDMARKS A GUIDE TO GOOD READING FOR YOUNG PEOPLE, AND TEACHERS' ASSISTANT 2- \(DC)3 WITH A CAREFULLY SELECTED LIST OF SEVEN HUNDRED BOOKS BY MARY E. BURT MEMBER OF THE CHICAGO BOARD OF EDUCATION, FORMERLY TEACHER OF LITERATURE, COOK CO. NORMAL SCHOOL, AUTHOR OF " THE WORLd's LITERATURE," " THE STORY OF THE GERMAN ILIAD," " BROWN- ING's women," " SEED THOUGHTS FROM BROWNING," ETC., ETC. BOSTON AND NEW YORK HOUGHTON, MIFFLIN AND COMPANV 1897 Copyright, 1889, 1892 By MARY E. BURT. All rights reserved. The Riverside Press, Camhrirlgc, Mass., U. S. A. Electrotyped and Printed by H. 0. Houghton & Company. To MY EARLY TEACHER AND LIFELONG FRIEND, MRS. S. J. G. FISK. 4f PREFACE TO FIRST EDITION. It is not because I know so much of books, but because I know so little, it is because I have spent many years and hundreds of dollars to get a small knowledge of books, where, by taking a direct road I might have had a much larger knowledge at less expense, that I offer the results of my twenty years' work in the school-room to the public. I have tried to make my work so broad that it may meet the needs of every class of readers, broad enough to answer all questions asked me in the many letters I receive asking advice in the selection of books for school and home libra- ries. And more especially have I tried to make it an exposition of a more profitable use of books in the school-room than the cramming system of education recognizes. MARY E. BURT. Cook County Normal School, Englewood, III. PREFACE TO REVISED EDITION. Pedagogy is the science of correct teaching. There is such a science. There are* laws under- lying this science. Those laws are definite. It is possible to become conscious of those laws, to abide by them, to become free through obedience to them. "All knowledges are external separa- tions implying an original inner unit}^" It is one of the laws of Pedagogy that all correct teach- ing must be done with reference to the bringing of the child's knowledge into harmony with the great unity of knowledges. To subject a child to the continually unrelated thought in reading- books during the "• budding moments " of his in- tellectual activities is clearly a crime against the child and a violation of the laws of Pedagogy. The time will come when America will point with horror to the transgressors of this law. Since writing " Literary Landmarks," the au- thor has had a delightful surprise in coming acci- dentally upon an ideal condition of affairs in the schools of dear old Athens where no such thing as a " little reader " has ever found entrance. The classics of Greece, England, and other coun- tries are the only reading-books known. In sending out this revised volume the author wishes to thank the many school superintendents, principals, and teachers in the rank and file, as well as the librarians in public libraries, and crit- ics of our best journals, who have recognized and generously applauded the spirit of the work. MARY E. BURT. Chicago Board of Education. September, 1892, TABLE OF CONTENTS. CHAPTER PAGlt "^ I. Theories of Chiij)ren's Reading 1 II. Reading which does not deal with Totals — Epigrammatic Literature 9 III. Works of the Creative Imagination .... 17 IV. Scientific and Geographical Reading, Books of Travel 77 V. History and Biography 97 VI. Utilitarian Literature, Books of Referen'CE, Miscellaneous 103 List op Books referred to in the Preceding Pages 109 Additional List of Books 152 LITERARY LANDMARKS. CHAPTER I. THEORIES OF CHILDREN'S READING. BLnow not for knowing's sake But to become a star to men forever. ROBEBT BeOWNINQ. The world is bristling with theories concerning the relation of reading to a child's education, and many and convincing are the arguments as to whether it should be juvenile or classic, scanty or abundant, poetry or prose, fact or fancy, imagina- tive or utilitarian, dead or living. One enthusiast will tell you that a child should read only that which supplements his observations of natural objects ; he should never read about an object which he has not first seen ; another, that the child's studies should all be made from nature, reading almost nothing from books " lest his pow- ers of observation be undeveloped," or his health suffer, small appreciation of nature and weak nerves always being placed in the same category with books ; a third premise of the same theorist is that the child who reads will neglect and de- 2 LITERARY LANDMARKS. spise work and grow away from his parents who are unable to keep pace with him because their time and strength are absorbed in caring for their family. One writer tells us that the child should read everything he pleases, because it will give him a habit of reading, the habit being the important point, and that his reading should never be se- lected, since children are like rose-bushes which can draw from any soil only that which will nour- ish the rose-bush ; another, that reading should all be expurgated and simple and as far as may be in monosyllables ; one (I quote from a corre- spondent in a school journal), that children should have " only American books, written by American authors born on American soil, fired with Ameri- can fire, kindled by American oil (petroleum)." One writer insists that children should have only facts ; another, that " easy science " should constitute the principal part of the child's library. Many parents think that all necessary educa- tion can be derived from text-books, and that they have supplied the child abundantly with reading when they have given him a school reader and some good periodical like The Youth's Companion or St. Nicholas. Teachers are numerous who place no higher value on a child's reading than that it gives him the power of word calling or per- haps an opportunity to display rhetorical effects, or to accumulate stores of desultory truths. THEORIES OF CHILDREN'S READING. 3 After surveying the various theories as they range in line one sees that they all point in one direction, namely, to the fact that reading has something to do with a child's education ; what that relation is and what it ought to be are the points to be considered. It is a matter of statistics that seventy-five per cent, of the children who leave school to begin the work of the world take with them no knowledge of the laws which distinguish good books from poor ones, nor do they know how to select a li- brary with reference to the development of a taste for systematic reading, and perhaps have no de- sire to possess any library whatever. A little reading is a dangerous thing, too much reading is more dangerous, and no reading whatever is the most dangerous of all. That the majority of young folks read almost iiothing, or only what is extremely commonplace, and that the theory that those young people who devote their leisure time to the best literature learn to despise ordinary people and things largely prevails, deserves the first consideration. Nothing is so homeless as a bookless house, un- less it be a house whose books betray a vulgar and narrow conception of life. A man's books form an average portrait of himself. Without books the merchant's palace becomes but a prison, " the trail of the iipholsterer over it all," while a small library, well selected, may, like Aladdin's lamp, turn the abode of poverty into a princely home. 4 LITERARY LANDMARKS. It is a sweet remembrance, that of a quiet old farm-house where a tired mother after a hard day's work gathered her seven children about her, her knitting-needles keeping time to the measures of the verses read by one of the group from a great poet. The poetry which she knit into the lives of her boys has out-lasted all the stockings, and crowned her memory with a halo of poetic recol- lections. The boy whose mother " would not go to bed until she had finished reading Pepacton " with him is more to be envied with his poor jacket than the elegant lad whose mother, with no time to read, makes time to consult the latest fashion plates that he may be handsomely attired. There seems to be a settled conviction in the minds of many that children must make intellectual prog- ress beyond their parents who are fated to lose out of their own lives any interest in books ; and we often see stories of toil-worn parents who, hav- ing educated their children through many sacri- fices, are pushed aside and kept behind the scenes because they are not up with the times. Inves- tigations would doubtless show that such parents have had time to gossip abundantly while educat- ing their children, and have shut themselves away from their children's mental life through wilful preference. It is not probable that many parents who are " behind the times "or do not keep up with their children deserve any sympathy. Chil- THEORIES OF CHILDREN'S READING. 5 dren crave intellectual comradeship, and the par- ent who enters into intellectual companionship with his child will not get " behind the times." An uneducated working-man deploring his lack of early advantages was in the habit of taking his little son on his lap at night to hear his les- sons. He followed the boy through all of his high-school work, and is to-day an educated man through giving the child continued sympathy in his studies. Herbert Spencer tells us that the father who has alienated his sons from him by his harshness might better have studied Ethnology than ^schylus, and cites also the mother who can read Dante in the original, but who is mourn- ing the child who has sunk under the effects of over-study. Herbert Spencer might well spare himself the trouble of quoting such instances. Fathers and mothers who have ever read even so much as a good translation of ^schylus or Dante are not so numerous that they need suppressing. The man who reads ^schylus is not the one who is likely to force an abominable dogma on a child, and the woman who reads Dante in the original is far less apt to allow her children to be over- crammed with books than is the woman who can- not read at all. The mothers who do not read are far more to be dreaded than those who are guided by Dante. " The learned eye is still the loving one." 6 LITERARY LANDMARKS. Ignorance is far less sympatlietic than is wisdom, far less careful. Nor does greater danger lie in the direction of over-study. Where one person is injured from ex- cessive use of the brain, many become degenerated from lack of mental work. It is safer to have no intellect at all than to have an unused intel- lect, since the unused mind, like an unused limb, becomes diseased, and destroys the health of its possessor. It seems a strange thing in this age of books to plead in favor of reading, and yet it is true that one may find everywhere young men and women who have never read a standard book, and scores of children, often from " the best fam- ilies," who innocently confess that they read only the criminal news in the newspapers. That fifty per cent, of all children who ever enter school leave before the age of eleven, that seventy-five per cent, have left at the age of twelve, and that they go from school without any literary discrimination, without any basis for directing their future reading, are large and significant facts, and should call forth the earnest efforts of all educators. Next to the child who reads nothing at all, the child who reads too much is the most to be pit- ied ; the child whose mind is a sieve through which all sorts of literary decoctions are strained, leaving behind only the refuse. If Dante "had gone astray in the gloomy forest" of modern "lit- THEORIES OF CHILDREN'S READING. 7 erature for children," he would have found a harder task to keep the direct path, worse pan- thers, leaner wolves, and the gateway to a deeper Hell than his own age afforded. Baron Mun- chausen relates that he stopped at a spring in a market-place to water his panting steed. The horse drank uncommonly with an eagerness not to be satisfied. The Baron, on looking backward, found the beast cut in two, and the hind quarters clean gone, while the water ran out behind as fast as it ran in before, without refreshing the animal at all. The children who imbibe unceasingly the " weak tea " steeped for them by people who " write down to children " are in much the same condition as was the Baron's horse. Their mental digestive organs have been cut off, and the " weak tea " is pouring through them. Children gener- ally start out with good literary stomachs. They have strong appetites, and can digest many things which would discourage older people. They eat more rapidly, and often assimilate more com- pletely. Children should have as much as they can grow by. They should neither be starved nor over-fattened, nor should their minds be dissi- pated by the ceaseless tide of " Juvenile Litera- ture " which is inundating the land. The child who goes almost daily to the public library for a new book is on the road to literary debauchery. There are exceptional cases where in an hour a child will run lightly through a book and get all 8 LITERARY LANDMARKS. that it holds for him. If he has a few good books to which he returns again and again, reading them with thorough appreciation, there need be no great fear if he uses many books for desultory reading, picking a sentence here and there as from an encycloj^aedia ; but literary dissipation, like physical intoxication, can only end in degeneracy. The theory that rose-bushes will take up from any soil only what will strengthen the rose-bush is gen- erous and beautiful, and would be practical if chil- dren were always rose-bushes. But if there is any poison-ivy tendency in a child, he will take up that which will nourish the poison-ivy if it is there for him to take up. CHAPTER II. READING WHICH DOES NOT DEAL WITH TOTALSc EPIGRAMMATIC LITERATURE. Books should not be judged by brilliant passages. Goethe. The theory that text-book literature is all suf- ficient in the education of children is yet more mischievous than that text-books should be entirely dispensed with. Text - books give outlines for work, and supply much valuable material in every- thino^ unless it is in readino^. Children are often injured much more than they are helped by throw- ing away text-books, since they lose out the con- nection between one day's work and that of another. Even the modern school-reader with its ill-assorted, namby-pamby, scrappy selections sometimes affords a chain, broken though it be, which vaguely hints at the possibility of an un- broken chain, a grand unity in reading, while it gives the child a small grasp of the printed page and a few gems worthy to be stored in the mem- ory. Children should have ichole i^ieces of literature. Said a little girl, " I do not like my reader, be- cause you no more than get interested when the 10 LITERARY LANDMARKS. story stops," and after thinking a little, she added, *' I don't think the stories amount to much." A little boy, being asked to criticise the lesson he had been reading, laconically summed it up by saying, " It 's too young " ; and another child, after vainly trying to get interested in an extract from one of Cooper's novels in a school-reader, said, " I don't like the middle of a story." Chil- dren want the beginning and the end as well as the middle. It is about as practical to try to in- terest a child in complex fractions before he has learned simple addition or subtraction as to ex- pect him to take up a chapter or a few pages from the middle of one of Scott's novels, without knowing the beginning of it. What, it may be asked, does an entire piece of literature do for a child's education that selections in reading-books do not do, and this is an important point. Text- books give us fragments, while whole pieces of literature, especially masterpieces, give us units. The sense of fitness of part to part, the feeling for correct relations of things, this it is that distin- guishes the one from the other. There are text- books which build up the sense of entireties in children, but this is not often true of school-read- ers. Epigrammatic writing is very like the bad text- books, but is far more pernicious, since it tends in a greater degree to destroy the sense of correct relation in children. It is a fallacious idea that EPIGRAMMATIC LITERATURE. 11 children can derive great benefit from the reading or memorizing of many short texts or aphorisms to the exclusion of complete works. Lowell has described an epigrammatic writer as giving us perfect leaves, bark, wood, and roots for a tree, but clapt hodge-podge together in such a manner as never to make the unit — the real tree with its life. The losing out of life of this sense of artistic unity is one of the saddest results of an exclusive devotion to epigrammatic literature or to text- books. Artistic perception is not satisfied with distinct and isolated facts or fancies ; it demands that pervading spirit which can exist only through the proper relation of part to part, and the master- piece of literature, like the living body, is not a bundle of different characteristics but a gradual development. It was artistic perception which made ^schylus greater than Plato, Hawthorne greater than Emerson, George Eliot greater than all other writers of fiction, and Shakespeare greater than all other dramatists. Education is a seamless robe in which all present effects are nat- urally interwoven with past causes. The power of seeing this robe in its wholeness is the most important feature in a child's education, indeed only as he approaches to this large vision has he any education worth the name. The power of see- ing entireties is the power which distinguishes the great artist from the poorer, the conscientious man from the merely honest one, the master from 12 LITERARY LANDMARKS. the servant. The knowledge of entireties is the only real knowledge of truth. Goethe condemns the practice of judging a book by its brilliant passages. A book should be judged as a whole he tells us. And one of Browning's philosophers proves that a great truth may contain a dozen lies, while a dozen truths may be so put together as to make a great lie, the main thing being to get to the bottom principle. Epigrammatic read- ing begets an inability to find the leading thought in writings whose parts are correctly arranged and related. Circumstances having thrust upon me the necessity of studying an individual who read Emerson constantly, carrying a little note-book to jot down epigrammatic sayings, but who could see no deep underlying lesson in Wilhelm Meister or Hugo's Ninety-Three, my observations in this direction were first aroused. Following up my chance discovery, I found this person to be a type of the readers who exclude artistic writing and indulge almost exclusively in epigrammatic. It does not take large power to make an epigram, or large vision to grasp it after it is made. Epictetus does very well to sermonize from as do Plato, Em- erson, and Seneca ; keen intellectual enjoyment as well as some development of reasoning ability may come through a careful weighing of their sen- tences. But one can get nearly all of their apho- risms in Victor Hugo, George Eliot, ^schylus, Goethe, and Hawthorne with a magnificent super- EPIGRAMMATIC LITERATURE. 13 structure in addition. Goethe's Faust for older people and Dante for younger are worth more than all the epigrammatic literature that has ever been written. Epigrams are in nine cases out of ten only half-truths. Take the following as exam- ples. " He builded better than he knew." This is not even a half-truth. Michael Angelo knew how to build much better than he ever builded ; he worked under compulsions and limitations distaste- ful to him and crippling to his art. . Take this epigram, " Do not think you can make a woman lovely if you do not make her happy." All the Madonna pictures contradict that. It takes only a glance to recognize that epigram as a half-truth ; so also with the following which sound not only reasonable but invis'oratino- until we look into them : " A good conscience expects to be trusted," " All strictly private ends are immoral," " Never was a sincere word utterly lost," " All the victo- ries of religion belong to the moral sentiment," and so on. If one would take the great mass of such sentences which form the staple of to-day's so-called " deep thought " and investigate them, he would be amazed to find how few really great truths he could get out of them. Nevertheless, the epigram has its place in furnishing an occa- sional text for reasoning, and so affords a small culture. The danger lies in using too many epi- grams without weighing them. One epigram well considered is worth many unweighed. Aside 14 LITERARY LANDMARKS. from The Meditations of Thomas a Kempis, The Journal of Eugenie de Guerin, Carlyle's Heroes and Heroism, The Wit and Wisdom of George Eliot, Quotations from Robert Browning, and Bartlett's or any other volume of good classical quotations, I know of no books coming more or less under the head of epigrammatic writing really desirable in the school-room or worth putting into a child's library. The sayings of Thomas a Kempis are sweet and wholesome ; the sentences from Eugenie de Guerin often have the delicacy of Keats and the majesty of Goethe ; the sayings of Marcus Aurelius would be a landmark in any life. A sixth grade teacher in Chicago told me that she put a copy of the Meditations of Marcus Aurelius on her desk, and the children carried it to and from school, reading it by the way, gathering its pithy sentences as they would gather wayside flowers. I have seen many children delighted with the book, and stirred to gentle loving deeds through the thoughts from Thomas a Kempis, or quotations from Robert Browning. The Wit and Wisdom of George Eliot and Carlyle's Heroes and Heroism are adapted to eighth grade pupils, as are also the sayings of Epictetus. The Phsedo of Plato contains many wholesome sayings which even the average seventh grade pujDil may under- stand. I have seen sixth grade jjupils somewhat pleased and profited by Emerson's Essays, but his writings might better be reserved for older stu- EPIGRAMMATIC LITERATURE. 15 dents who can find, as did many of tlie teachers in our Teachers' Training Class during the past year, much pleasure in tracing his thoughts to their various sources in earlier writers. I have spoken at length on the subject of epi- grammatic books because they serve as an illus- tration of many other kinds of books closely al- lied to them, and to the illogical arrangement of affairs generally which is often mistaken for a systematic course of education. If education means anything, it means such an arrangement of concepts in a child's mind as shall enable him continually to link each event to the one on which it ought to hinge, so that he may see the world as a masterpiece of creative goodness rather than as a few groups of disconnected incidents. It has long been my suspicion, and through many years of work in the school-room has at last become my conviction, that there is a natural logical sequence, not only in reading, but in all knowledge which should be applied in all teaching and learning, and which, if applied, would send the student forth, not with a small desultory knowledge of a lot of unassorted material, but with such an assortment of facts, such an architectural plan as should enable him to comprehend things in their entire history, and should cause him throughout life to continue the structure whose strong foundation promises so symmetrical a superstructure. 16 LITERARY LANDMARKS. " To my son Hermann, and may the world never be too large for him," wrote a father on the fly- leaf of a world's history which he presented to his son, thus showing that he comprehended the value of learning things in their natural sequence ; and one of our best thinkers sums up the same thought, saying, " The lowest stage of thinking supposes that its objects are all indejDcndent of one another." " To know by wholes," or to see totalities, as Plato says, this is the point to be emphasized ; to see the world in its evolution from its early physi- cal forms to its latest songs. CHAPTER III. WORKS OF THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION. The development of soul, little else is worth study. Robert Bbownino, The reading which appeals most strongly to the young child is that which deals with the rela- tions between people. The first study from life which a child makes is that of the motives of the people about him, their relation to himself. Scarce has the babe learned the touch of its mother's hand ere it instinctively begins to weigh the meaning of that touch. " What has it to do with me f Will it hold to my lips the cup of life ? Does that touch mean protection, or does it mean destruction ? " This is no doubt the reason why the fairy tale and the myth excite his first, his last, his eternal interest, since that class of reading depicts so strongly, so picturesquely, so humanly the relation of one living being to another. A letter from Colonel Parker presents this claim of the child most vividly : — The liveliest conscious activity of a child is fancy ; the little creator creates his own world and lives and 18 LITERARY LANDMARKS. moves and has his being in it. Without jDictures, images created by fancy, a child's existence would be a desert waste. All history proves this ; myths, fairy tales, parables, have made children and childish peoples happy throughout the ages. Myths and fairy tales are the sure signs of the upturning of the hearts of the little ones to God. The proper function of fancy in intellectual life is spirituality. Spiritual truths are hidden in the precious honey of stories. My friend, Professor Hall, of Clark University, has said that a precept may be a lie to a child, while a tale of fiction may be the essential truth the growing soul needs. The atheism, the materialism of the present day in our land, is largely due to the banishment of fiction and fairy tales by the Puritans. " Facts," Gradgrind, " Facts," drive beauty and holiness from the child's heart. The prevailing school of pedagogics in Germany, the Herbartian, have made the develojDment of spirit- ual life by means of fairy tales a special purpose of education. In Dr. Rein's Manual for Teachers there is a large collection of fairy stories for children. Dr, De Garmo, of Normal, 111., has translated a number of them. Of course the greatest care should be taken in the selection of these tales. " The pure in heart shall see God " should guide the teacher in the selection and relating of the stories. It takes the deepest and clear- est discrimination to understand the needs of the child's heart. With fancy, as an irresistible ten- dency, comes curiosity. God made man a seeker for truth ; this truth and the truth which fancy brings do not wholly satisfy. WORKS OF THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION. 19 Every child is a born naturalist, his heart turns to flowers, birds, and beasts, to all the animals and inani- mate things as the blossoms do to the light. Fancy- may lead to fanaticism, to dreaming and idle re very ; the softly, beautifully told tales of the Creator, by the expression of his thoughts in nature, modify, recon- cile, and avert these dangers. The study of Nature makes the child a truth lover. I would place with fancy, elementary science, observa- tion, followed by reading. John Burroughs's little book. Birds and Bees, is a joy forever. I read it through at one sitting. In it fancy meets science, and science conquers. Truth is stranger than fiction. Follow science, the plants, animals, how they live and grow, with the lives and growth of good men and women, that is history ; fancy, science, biography, history, to develop the divine tendency of truth, seeking, " Blessed are they which do hunger and thirst after righteousness for they shall be filled.'' One word about the teaching. Everything depends upon the teacher's being filled with the subject. The light that shines from the teacher's eyes leads the children upward and onward. In a word, the more the teacher is animated by the story or subject up to a certain point, the higher the children will climb to meet her. Full comprehension of meaning on the part of the child is not necessary. A taste of a great thought is far better than the full com- prehension of a small one. Though the child should people his world with 20 LITERARY LANDMARKS. its chemical, its vegetable, its animal life, though rocks and rivers should tell him their stories, flow- ers and trees whisper to him the secrets of their birth, though books of science, history, and travel should reveal to him the wonders of the world's material forces, he would yet have failed to find its deepest life and truest history unless he has en- joyed its works of creative imagination. Poetry is truer history than is history itself. The songs which have burst forth from the human heart from the early dawn of thought to the pres- ent are far more significant than stories of lifeless pebbles, or of flowers which wither and decay, or of birds and beasts which perish and are not. The meanest myth which ever sprang from the lips of the simple, wondering savage in the earth's long childhood has more of aspiration, more of inspiration in it, than the whole world of soulless wonders. The highest office of reading is not to open the eyes of the child to the evolution of the material world, or to teach him to adapt its re- sources to his own subsistence ; he needs no books for that. The greatest hunger of the human soul is not for food. It is that he may better under- stand soul-motives and heart-needs ; that he may more freely give to the heart-hungry, and more freely receive from the soul-full ; that he may live out of and away from his meaner self ; that he may grow all-sided ; that he may look with analytic rather than with critical eyes upon the erring ; that WORKS OF THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION. 21 lie may relish tlie homely side of life, and weave beauty into its poverty and ugly hardships ; that he may add to his own strength and wisdom the strength and wisdom of the past ages ; it is that he may find his own relation to the eternal that the child, equally with the grown person, turns to the songs which ravish the ear and gladden the heart. I have heard educators urge that the children of laboring people should be taught merely to read and write a little lest they " become educated above their employment," and, learning to despise work, grow unhappy. In something of the same spirit, Ruskin speaks rather derisively of " the people who do not distinguish between books for the laborer and the school-man." I once asked a division of pupils, most of them children of work- ing-men, which would make life more endurable to them if they were obliged to lead very poor lives, — obliged to do the meanest labor, such as scavengers' work, — to be in total ignorance of good books, supplied only with the poorest if with any, or to be finely educated, acquainted with the greatest classics. There followed a lively discus- sion, and one child admitted, much to the disgust of all the rest, that a fine education would sub- tract from one's power to endure the hardships of a menial life. One little boy thought he could be a better ditch-digger with Marcus Aurelius to think of, and a little girl from a saloon believed people would not come to the saloon to spend 22 LITERARY LANDMARKS. their money if they loved good books ; for her own part, she would rather stay up - stairs with her books than tend bar. The little library she had collected was better than many which may be found in the homes of teachers and ministers. A little girl whose father was a laboring man of no literary pretensions, poor and sick, who lived in a crowded tenement house in a degraded street where cleanliness was next to impossible, told me that it always called a smile to her father's face when she brought a good book from the public library ; reading was almost the only pleasure they had. It always excites my indignation and contempt to hear " scholars," putting themselves on haughty pedestals of classicalism, sj)eak dis- paragingly of giving the greatest works to labor- ing men or their children. If any one needs " the consolations of philosophy," or of beautiful poetry, it is the laborer ; and of tener than otherwise the child who has to work for his daily bread will lay hold vigorously of what is fine and poetic with a grasp that wealth and previous culture have no conception of. Almost any teacher can show bet- ter writing from children than there is in Queen Victoria's Journal, and sentences equal to Ruskin's. There are no " books for laborers and books for scholars," unless it be that the great books belong to the working-man and inferior books to the school-man. Instead of assuming that laboring men would be made unhappy and dissatisfied w^itli WORKS OF THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION. 23 mean work if they were to know the best books of the world, it would be far better to assume that laboring men and their children might learn to love their work better by clothing it with the garment of thought which the good book is sure to furnish. The sophistry that men can be more cheerful workmen if they know nothing of books is only equalled by the sophistry that " men of brains " need know nothing of hand work. There are many popular fantasies in regard to classic reading for young people ; one, that the classics are very difficult and should be reserved for young men at college ; another, that those young men who read them in the original know more about them than the people who read trans- lations. A scholastic, given to nice and fine points of speculation on various philosophical systems, was once asked to give a talk on Dante to an audience of country school-teachers and replied, with a face radiant with self -superiority, "What can thei/ want of Dante ? " as if a few divinely appointed " scholars " held a monopoly of that gracious poet. And a very kindly but rather in- credulous critic w^onders what will be left for peo- ple when they get older if they master the classics while they are young. It is a rare instance when any young man who has read the classics in the original in college can give the plan of the Iliad or ^neid, or the main thought in any poem of -^schylns or Sophocles. "Oh, al] that we did 24 LITERARY LANDMARKS. with the classics was to translate them ; we just ponied up for examination ! " is the favorite solu- tion. As if to translate a poem were to pick it up like a basket of chips on one side of a fence and set it down like a basket of chips on the other. The truth is that the classics are simpler by far than the great mass of modern writing. They are nearer to children and the childhood of the race. They are the a, b, c of literature and of history, and give the clue to modern thought. I have lately read the lament of a rather lame writer who is moaning because he read the clas- sics while young, and so is deprived of the pleas- ure of reading them now and having them " fresh " to him. He might spare himself his regrets, for what little mental muscle he has is no doubt due to the classics. It has been one of the pleasing experiences of our recent work with pupils in the the eighth grade, that those children who dipped superficially into Homer a year ago have shown the most eagerness "to return to the Argive ships " this year, and the most intelligence in a careful study of some of those delightful chapters. It is a shallow stream which reveals all of its treasures at the first glance. It is a superficial book that must needs be " fresh " to hold the in- terest. It is a trite character that reads merely " to get the story," and having once got it is palled by it. After a child has done that unheard-of thing, mastered the ancient classics, he might do WORKS OF THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION. 25 as does Gladstone, master them again when he gets older; or, if he is absolutely distressed for want of something intricate and difficult, there is Rosmini's Philosophy, or Browning's Sordello. And after he has arrived at his second childhood there is still left all that juvenile literature he neglected in his first childhood. One has no need to fear that with all the Journals of Psychology, Philosophy, Economics, and Science constantly issued, a person is going to lack reading of a high character after he has " mastered the classics." The danger lies in destroying the power even to begin the classics. A letter from Charles Dudley Warner gives excellent points on this subject : — I cannot, in one letter, say all that I would like about books for children. As a general thing, I do not believe in books written for children. Most of the books of this sort seem to be a fatal mistake, enfeebHng to young minds. To read constantly about children and childish things may do little harm, but there is no lift in it for the imagination or the heart ; and many of those books which introduce the elements of love, of self-conscious relations, of coquetry between the sexes, are positively vicious. This applies to many books which are popular with children. I notice that children who are fed on such books, following this course by jejune goody-goody novels or " stories," are more or less intellectually and morally demoralized. They lose the taste, or never acquire it, for robust, healthful lit- erature. I am not sure but it would be a gain, if all the so-called children's books were destroyed, and the 26 LITERARY LANDMARKS. children depended altogether on what we call adult lit- erature. I know of a family of young children who read, or had read to them, a translation of the Iliad. They were perfectly captivated by it, and they got more out of it, even though not able to read themselves, than they would have got from a whole library of the stuff children now commonly read. Bear in mind, that there is little or no benefit in reading, unless the reading is good. In my district school-days we did not have much juvenile literature, and I remember how the fine selec- tions of good literature in the reading-books ennobled the mind and kindled the imagination. But, as I said, the subject is too large for a letter. With my views I am plainly incompetent to make out a list of " books for children," as the phrase is. Still, I will mention a few "children's books," simply to indicate the character of books of this sort to be pre- ferred, and not intending to exclude others as good. The Arabian Nights (selections of the best tales abridged), Robinson Crusoe, Swiss Family Robinson, Maria Edgeworth's Parents' Assistant, Castle Blair, by Flora Shaw, Jean Ingelow's Stories told to a Child, Holiday Hours, by C. St. Clair, Mrs. Ewing's Stories, and Miss Yonge's Dove in the Eagle's Nest. The list of books of the sort last named might be made much lonirer. Yet I think that children who read these could be as easily and more profitably entertained by The Lady of the Lake, Rab and His Friends, and a great many English stories, or more modern sketches, tales, and biographies written for adults." In the study of reading or literature there is the same hodge-podge arrangement of studies in WORKS OF THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION. 27 schools throughout the land that one finds in the study of geography and history ; and children leave school with all sorts of jumbled ideas con- cerning books and authors, their relation to the world's history, and their comparative value. To satisfy myself on this point, I have asked young people from twelve to fifteen years of age who have left school to give me a sort of summing up of their knowledge of books and authors in a diagram after the plan of the one below with about the following results. LONSPEULOW «COTT TENNYSON MiaSAt-COTT, AGES BEFORE CHRIST Hchrist i ^^ES SINCE CHRlaT ^^gT'^ It is a rare instance where a graduate of a high school can tell whether Dante led Virgil, or whether Virgil led Dante ; whether Homer drew his inspiration from Alexander the Great, or whether Alexander the Great acted under the inspiration of Homer ; whether Charlemagne and Mohammed were factors in the problem which Tennyson has worked out, or whether Tennyson sprang forth, a species by himself, unrelated to any 28 LITERARY LANDMARKS. other age or even to his own. One needs but to glance at a high school " Course of Reading" in any city or town to see the same " system." Here are Enoch Arden and Gray's Elegy, perhaps, lead- ing up to some study from Homer. Studies from Whittier, Longfellow, Pope, and Shakespeare all mixed together to lead up to studies in Scott and Virgil, no one study bearing the remotest relation to any of the rest or to the world's literature in its evolution through the ages. " Whose fault is it ? " Certainly not the fault of the young peo- ple. They are seeking for the truth, the truth in its entirety. In grammar and primary grades, and in country schools, the main object in reading seems to be to drill the children ; in other words, to give them the method, w^hich is too often a mere externality, rather than the motive, which is al- ways sure to propagate many good methods. In the anxiety to call words correctly, to articulate clearly, to gesticulate impressively, to get defini- tions and spelling, the chief objects of reading, namely, the getting of the largest thought of the writer and the relation of the writing to the world's progress, are left out. The emj)hasizing of external forms instead of ideas has led on to a distaste for good reading, and out of that has grown the theory that reading should be very simple and monosyllabic, a theory which has done much to expel good literature from school-readers and substitute weak and pointless studies. The WORKS OF THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION. 29 truth is, that a child does not dread hard words so much as insipid thought ; he will be tripped up a hundred times by short words, where he will stumble once over long ones, and will acquire a better vocabulary of words and better style of pronouncing if the idea is emphasized above the mode of expression. He will read with better expression if his mind is searching after the lar. gest thought in the piece than he will if he is con- tinually nagged at concerning the definitions of words. That children's school-reading is a confusion of great and small, good and bad, important and un- important, fine and coarse, unrelated and unas- sorted, is the main point under consideration. If men and women wish to read in a topsy-turvy fashion it is their own business ; perhaps no adult can or should tell any other adult what he ought to read ; but children at school do not do their own choosing, and it is important that they learn to read in such a way that the materials they gather shall form a something entire. They have the ability " to grow a faculty " for preferring the better book instead of the worse. Many teachers have proved to their own satisfaction that young children prefer great classics to weak reading. I have seen a hundred young people in fifth and sixth grades spontaneously applaud, with no prompting from any teacher, the finest and sub- tlest thought in analyses of Hawthorne's Great 30 LITERARY LANDMARKS. Stone Face and The Christmas Banquet, where I had expected a very funny essay to win all the en- thusiasm. And I know that the vulgar printed matter which is thrust by vile publishers upon in- nocent young people cannot hold its own against the pressure of the great book. The masterpiece will stand against commonplace reading as soon as the child either feels or recognizes the laws of literary art, and he is often more responsive to those laws than are older people. Where the adult will satisfy his conscience with the assump- tion that " It 's all a matter of one's private opin- ion whether a book is great or not " (a common saying among people not acquainted with the laws of criticism), the child with more open sense and a greater desire to weigh matters will delight in applying the tests given by Goethe, Lessing, Dante, and other great thinkers who have revealed those laws. Since the laws which underlie good painting are very much like the laws governing the worth or worthlessness of literature, a teacher can very easily draw the child's attention to both sets of laws by means of photographs from good paintings. Here is a picture of a blind girl, sit- ting in a rocky cavern, holding out a light that others coming into the cave may not stumble. Though blind she is giving light to others. The child will soon discover that the picture is a reve- lation of the beauty of self-forgetf ulness and care for others. Comparing the picture with Warner's WORKS OF THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION. 31 matchless story A-Huntlng of the Deer, the child will find that a story may in the same way reveal the same beautiful sentiment, and by indirect ques- tionino' he can arrive at the law that a work of art which reveals a noble passion must be greater than one which reveals a mean sentiment, all other things being equal. Of other studies illustrating the same law, Enoch Arden, Christmas Carol, The Dog of Flanders, for fifth, sixth, and seventh grades. Browning's Ivan Ivanovitch and Story of Donald, Lowell's The Vision of Sir Launfal, and Craddock's Floating Down Lost Creek, for seventh and eighth grades, are only a few of the many beautiful studies which teachers may select. The drama of Prometheus from ^schylus is a mag- nificent study of self-sacrifice, and our practice teachers at the Normal School, after making a study of the poem, succeeded in the eighth grade in getting warm discussions concerning the mo- tives of the characters. The study of Philoctetes in the seventh grade (Plumptre's translation), al- though pointing an opposite sentiment, leads to similar reasoning. Chaucer's Griselda calls forth various expressions ; some children regard the heroine as an example of self-sacrifice, and others a specimen of stupidity. A child will take home the lesson of self-sacrifice, when he has discovered the beauty of it by looking at it from a scientific standpoint, when he will revolt against it if it is preached at him. ^3f) LITERARY LANDMARKS. A photograpli of Leonardo Da Vinci's Last Supper put in contrast with a photograph of Giotto's Last Supper will lead on to the discovery of a new law in art. In one picture the disciples are arranged in groups, each interested in the others of his group, and all interested in the great central figure, Christ. In the other picture each disciple sits in a stilted position, an independent being, bearing no particular relation to the rest. If the child cannot discover for himself that one picture is greater than the other because its parts are all related to each other and to the whole, a little dis- cussion will bring it out. It is much better for the child to discover these laws for himself than to force them upon him, since it will lead him to try to discover new laws, and consequently make him modest concerning his own private opinion ; it will also teach him to be willing to look at things from different points of view, and to hold his opinions open to new convictions. As a contrast to Da Vinci's Last Supper take Thorwaldsen's Sale of the Loves. Here the child can see a series of beautiful thoughts, each one leading on to the next, but the whole forming a succession of pictures rather than one picture. It is very beautiful but lacks artistic unity. The law that a work is greater whose parts are correctly related to each other and to the whole is universally recognized by great critics and easily demonstrated by young people. An ouHine f'or ^he shady of fhe developmenr or qrowth of Dan^e'5 Divine Comedy The Spiritual Sense of Dante's Divina Commedia W.T.Harris. IK Topics Por diacussion Old Danl'e meanfhelnterno ho represenhttie condi^on of man^ soul oofof Sympal+ty wil+> the Divine? Purqat"ory, a symbol of-qrowl'h ? Paradise, l"he soul in harmony wil"h fhc Dtvinc'' 5tr uchjral beauty of |"hc poem: ihs influence TTnr 5iqnif-icance of'^h* Paradise and descriphon of it" from Shadow »f Dante Significance of the Purqatory, X Mrs Wards Life of Dante. Bead from Shadow of Danhe and. Canfo XII . Lonqfellow's Translation . First fourteen Cantos ... Inferno. DiscuSS. Compare wirh Virqil fiJiomer. Lowell's Essay on Dante Planoj- Dante's worK Drawinqiof Purgatory ^tlevdcs and Paradise . See Shadow <>(■ Dante . Tcr 5hort sKetch of the life of Dante Ros&etti's Shadow of Dante . I T 5 ] k Early ideas 1 Bryants jVirgils expansion or ^Me.. JBooK X, . Oayssevi qI^vT '^T'e.d WORKS OF THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION. 33 Plato recognized it and illustrates it in perhaps an amusing' manner. Two is not two, lie says, by virtue of its being one plus one, but by reason of its quality of twoness, thus showing that two may be looked at in its totality rather than as separate units. Lessing and Goethe emphasize this law. Dante's Divine Comedy is the best possible illus- tration of it. No one reading the Inferno or the Puro'atorio or Paradise alone can make any just estimate of the j^oem, since the whole is a sin- gle concept, and a just estimate of it can be made only by taking a bird's-eye view of it as a totality. Something like such a view of it may be obtained by drawing diagrams of each part as does Miss Rossetti in The Shadow of Dante, and studying the plan of it as given by her. Such studies in connection with the most impressive cantos can hardly fail to show the unity of Dante's work. That almost every pupil in an eighth grade divi- sion would rather have gone on with the study of The Divine Comedy than to have dropped it was sufficient proof to me that my experiment in put- ting the poem before them was a satisfactory one. Midsummer Night's Dream and Philoctetes (Plumptre's translation) for seventh and eighth grades, Lamb's The Tempest for sixth grade, the Antigone of Sophocles for older people, are all in- teresting studies and illustrations of this law of structure. Amelie Rives's The Story of Arnon is one of the most beautiful stories from an artistic 34 LITERARY LANDMARKS. standpoint that American literature affords. A sixth grade class in Chicago during the last year gave their teacher enthusiastic essays upon it, essays which bore conclusive evidence that the artistic unity of the story had made a great im- pression upon them, although perhaps they had not formulated any rule. Of shorter studies whose artistic build may be less pronounced, though none the less beautiful, Matthew Arnold's The Forsaken Merman is to me the most exquisite. This jDoem I have read and had read in sixth, seventh, and eighth grades, generally with great effect. I was introduced to the poem by a pupil reciting it to me. Its ethical is almost equal to its structural beauty. Lowell's The Legend of Brittany for private reading, Swin- burne's Ode to Proserpine (the cleanest and most charming of his poems) and Browning's Saul for older people, Schiller's Veiled Statue of Truth, Goethe's Erl King, Bryant's Ode to a Waterfowl, Holmes's Chambered Nautilus, Tennyson's Lady of Shalott, Sir Galahad, and Elaine, Bryant's Thanatopsis and Death of the Flowers, Whit- tier's Skipper Ireson's Ride, Gray's Eleg}^, Burns's John Barleycorn, Hood's Eugene Aram, Drake's Culprit Fay, Scott's William and Helen and The Lay of the Last Minstrel, Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner, Lanier's Marshes of Glynn (equal to anything AYordsworth ever wrote), Mrs. Brown- WORKS OF THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION. 35 ing's Lady Geraldine, Browning's Ivan Ivanovitch, Herbert's Ode to Virtue, Sarah Orne Jevvett's Caged Bird (Atlantic Monthly, vol. 59), Long- fellow's Bell of Atri, — any of these studies for seventh and eighth grades ; Campbell's Lord Ullin's Daughter, Tennyson's Lady Clare, Christmas, and Lord of Burleigh, Scott's Lochinvar and The Lady of the Lake, Browning's Katisbon, How they brought the Good News to Aix, and Dog Tray, Bryant's Whitefooted Deer, Byron's Prisoner of Chillon and Senna- cherib and Battle of Waterloo, Southey's Blen- heim, Longfellow's The Village Blacksmith, The Birds of Killing-worth, and Psalm of Life, Matthew Arnold's St. Brandan, Mrs. Browning's The Poet and the Bird, Hood's The Song of the Shirt, Hunt's Abou Ben Adhem, Mrs. Hemans's Spring- Song, Shelley's Ode to the Skylark, Wordsworth's The Kitten and the Leaves, Burns's Auld Lang Syne, Whittier's Maud Muller, Cowper's The Dog and the Water-lily, for fifth and sixth grades ; Wordsworth's We are Seven, Burns's To a Mouse, and To a Mountain Daisy, Mrs. Brown- ing's Romance of the Swan's Nest, Lowell's Without and Within, The Heritage, and Rhoecus, Campbell's Hohenlinden, Longfellow's Children's Hour, The Emperor's Bird's-Nest, and The Wreck of the Hesperus, William Blake's The Little Black Boy, and Pipe Me a Song, Southey's The Inchcape Rock, Hood's I Remember, Cowper's 86 LITERARY LANDMARKS. John Gilpin, Dog and Bird, The Silk Worm and The Cricket, Hogg's Skylark, and Sheridan's Ride, for third and fourth grades ; Wordsworth's Lucy Gray, Alice Fell, and Goody Blake, Aldrich\s Baby Bell, William Blake's On Another's Sorrow, J. T. Fields's Rover and Ballad of the Tempest, Campbell's The Harper, Burns's Linnet, Mrs. H. H. Jackson's Spinning, Whittier's Barbara Frietchie, Mrs. Hemans's Casablanca, Longfellow's Paul Revere's Ride, Tilton's Song of the Fly, for first, second, and third grades. These are all studies which children are apt to like very much, and nearly all of them illustrate in a greater or less degree the law of artistic unity. Poems can easily be spoiled as artistic works by burying them in collateral reading, and by stopping very frequently to nag the child concern- ing the definition of some word. Take as an illustration Whittier's Barefoot Boy. " What is a boy ? What is a blessing ? Where did the straw- berries grow ? What are pantaloons ? " and so on. The child's comfort in reading such a piece for totals instead of details can be as completely spoiled by spurious questioning as was the musi- cian's pleasure in trying to render a beautiful piece of music when he mistook a fly-speck for a very high note and tried to sing it. Several years ago I heard a teacher give a lesson on The Vil- lage Blacksmith, taking the word " chestnut " as the key-note of the poem. The lesson was really WORKS OF THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION. 87 a " science-lesson " on chestnuts. I once heard Tennyson's Lady Clare spoiled in like manner. The lily-white doe which Lord Ronald brought to his cousin was made the turning-point of the poem. The doe, the number of its legs, the length of its tail, the shape of its ears, the color of its eyes, its food, the species to which it might have or might not have belonged, these were the points brought forward for consideration, while the eth- ical lesson underlying it, the one thing that tended to make the poem sweet and poetic, never came up at all. One teacher will take an essay of John Burroughs and turning its poetic side out make a poem of it, while another, turning its sci- entific side out, will make the most abominable prose of it. Collateral reading does little more for poetry than to spoil it, since it tends to de- stroy its totality and break it up into epigrams ; nevertheless, preliminary reading may pave the way for it. Studies similar to Romola, Hypatia, Ivanhoe, and Julius Caesar require preliminary reading, geographic, historic, and classic. The study of Dante requires all this, and collateral reading also. But all collateral reading in con- nection with studies of purely artistic value comes under the head of " lumber." In addition to the laws of art already men- tioned, the child can easily see that the work of art which portrays a national life, a religion, is greater than one which shows some pettier feeling. 88 LITERARY LANDMARKS. Macaulay tells us that religion is at the founda- tion of the best art, and that national life is at the foundation of religion. That Homer reveals the most intense feeling of a great nation is suffi- cient reason why he should be read. It is not above a child's comprehension that the greatest work of art will have universal types in the fore- ground and universal life in the background. Hector and Andromache caressing their babe in the foreground form a type of the universal. Every manly man would linger to kiss his wife and babe before going into battle. The great con- tending armies in the background make a type of universal or national life in the days of Homer. Millais's Huguenot Lovers is another picture of the sort, although the national life is suggested rather than represented. Romola is a wonderful illustration of this law. Her trials are just such trials as women in general have, especially if they are loyal and high-minded ; while the contending of different religious factions is a universal state of affairs. As revealed in that book, it was the national life. The Tale of Two Cities, Ivanhoe, and indeed any of Scott's works, the drama of Julius Caesar, Picciola, Les Miserables and Ninety-Three by Victor Hugo, Cooper's novels, Uncle Tom's Cabin, The Courtship of Miles Standish, all stand the test of this law. That a work of art should suggest more than it expresses is another recognized law of art, and WORKS OF THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION. 89 one of the most tlelighttul. An artist painted an irresistibly funny picture called The " 'Possum Story." An old colored man with his hands in the air, the keenest mirth in his face, telling a story to a group of colored boys who were ready to burst with laughter. The fun in the picture surprised me anew into a hearty laugh every time I saw it until the artist painted in the dead " '230s- sum." After that I never saw any fun in the pic- ture, but felt only a pity for the dead animal. The story, or suggestiveness, went out of the pic- ture when the reality came in. Prue and I, by Curtis, is the finest illustration of this law that I have ever seen tried in the school-room. It gives rise to many discussions concerning the pictures it suggests. Prue and I is one of the first books I should put into a child's library. Thoroughly and loyally American, poetic, humorous, it stands alone as a work of the creative imagination^ Among: other studies which illustrate the law of suggestiveness, and are readable by young folks, is My Summer in a Garden (fifth and sixth grade children enjoy that almost equally with sev- enth and eighth, — the book is very funny). Any of Browning's poems are suggestive, leaving the reader to think out the problem for himself. I had the pleasure of reading The Return of the Druses with about twenty of our teachers in the Training Class during the past winter, and a 40 LITERARY LANDMARKS. young girl of the seventh grade who was present discussed the characters in the poem with great concern. The poem would make an admirable eighth grade study, as would Colombe's Birth- day. Such laws of literature as can be obtained from Poe's essay on his composition of The Raven I have presented to a seventh grade class, and they can easily see the contrary effects of long and short vowels and get the idea of coloring in liter- ary art. The laws of music or quantity as taught by Lanier in his Science of English Verse are beyond grammar pupils, but should not be beyond high school pupils in the last year's study. A child may distinguish between good books and worthless ones through his native intelligence, or he may learn to do it from some inner leading, or from some external motive ; as an act of con- science because he thinks it right ; as an act of curiosity because he " wants to see " for himself what makes a book good ; as an act of sympathy because he wants to know what it is his parents or teachers love, and share it with them ; as an act of vanity to make himself superior. I have heard the argument put forth by educators that children usually make hypocrites of themselves, pretend- ing to prefer a good book to a poor one to grat- ify the parent or teacher. A teacher whose efforts in this direction had been dampened by such re- marks told me that she had seen more children WORKS OF THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION. 41 make hypocrites of themselves by pretending to like weak and silly books to gratify an uncultured teacher than by pretending to like the good ; and here she struck a key-note, for most of the hypoc- risy among children (and there is not so very much of it) is the pretence of liking stupid les- sons and flat, pointless books, instead of really good ones. I have seen children read and enjoy a good book with one teacher, and, going to another who did not like the book, and made fun of it, pretend not to like it to gratify the second teacher. Children can be ridiculed into despising a good book they have learned to like far more easily than they can be wheedled into pretending to like a good book. There are older people who illustrate the same point. They read Browning in private, and enjoy his works, but will not tell of it for fear of being ridiculed ; as Amelie Rives says, " One hardly likes to acknowledge that he understands Browning; so much ridicule has been bestowed upon his obscurities that it seems like posing to understand him." Whether a child likes a book or dislikes it is little to the point. He has no judgment in the matter until he has made repeated investigations. A young teacher once told me that she disliked myths, she had never read them, she did not like to teach them, and she saw no use in teaching children anything about the myth-making age ; but being of a receptive and conscientious mind, 42 LITERARY LANDMARKS. after studying Dante and finding out the magnif- icent use he made of that material, she saw how foolish it was to form judgments without premises. The most beautiful road in desultory reading is the road leading out of it, and when a child has learned to distinguish between a good book and a poor one he has taken the first step away from desultory reading ; but he has yet had no fair view of literature, no real basis on which he can build his future reading until he has seen litera- ture in the light of its history or its growth. There are related landmarks in the literature of each epoch of the world's history wdiich may serve as links or as foundation stones in a child's knowledge even in the lowest primary grades. There are studies which may follow each other in natural sequence at every jioint in the child's growth, forming an ever-widening horizon, where- in the world's literature shall grow upon his vis- ion. It is the one office of reading in school to give the child that which will enable him to edu- cate himself as far as reading will do it, and any child who leaves school, even at the age of ten, without an outline in his mind which shall serve him as a basis for future reading, either syste- matic or desultory, a plan by which he can go on educating himself indefinitely and intelligently, has been defrauded of the one thing that makes school worth attending. It is possible, and it Is practical, and it is WORKS OF THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION. 43 necessary for a child to get a worlcVs-view of lit- erature, to see thouglit iii its evolution, if he ever becomes self-educating. The growth of thought is as graspable by a child's mind as is a plant's growth. It lies within the circumference of his ability to see the wave of thought which rippled in the myth rise in grandeur into the drama of ^schylus, and break upon our own shores in the stories of Hawthorne or the songs of Whittier, Longfellow, and Lowell ; to find that the heart- beat of Homer sent the blood leaping through Virgil's veins and quickened Dante's strong hand ; to feel little by little the pulse of the centuries throbbing as one great pulse, the pulse of hu- manity. It is not a theory, it is a fact which has been successfully demonstrated in our last year's work at the Cook County Normal School, and in evi- dence of it I offer some of the work of the chil- dren. At the end of the year I asked the children of the fifth, sixth, seventh, and eighth grades to prove to me by some original design that they understood the development of literature. One little girl drew a tree in which she made the roots symbolize the myth-making age, the trunk all literature, the first large branch Homer and each successive branch the next literary landmark (according to chronological arrangement) which she had in her mind until, arriving at the newest branches at the top of the tree and the buds and 44 LITERARY LANDMARKS. blossoms, she wrote the names of those of our own authors from whom we had been reading in the class. A little boy drew a ladder in which the lowest round was the myth. Each successive round was the landmark he had taken in climb- ing upward toward the present age. Another child took a garden as her symbol, and laid it off in lots, arranging them according to the size and value and succession of her landmarks. A young boy drew a top and painted it in circles. The point on which all reading revolved was the myth, and each circle above symbolized the epochs of literature as he had them in his mind. A young girl drew a castle, each tower representing what was to her a literary landmark. One little girl invented a very ingenious musical design. The staff represented all the literature she knew any- thing about. Each measure was a great epoch. The quarter and eighth notes were the lesser writers, the half and whole notes the great writ- ers according to general opinion. She placed these notes higher or lower on the staff according to her personal opinion as to their value. In this way she had a chance to express her own feelings as well as the critical sentiments of others. To indicate lost literature she used a rest, and as she put rests in wrong places she revealed the fact that literature with which she was unacquainted was " lost " to her. The whole design when fin- ished made a pretty little tune indicating that WORKS OF THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION. 45 literature looked at in its whole history, or in its growth, was a harmony. She then selected one note in the last measure and wrote an essay on it, explaining the relation of the study to the present epoch of literature, and to literature as an entirety, not omitting the main idea of the poem, the ethical jDoint. A seventh grade child invented the preceding design to show that she had landmarks along the road from long ago to now, and the idea of fur- ther growth in it makes it very suggestive. Another seventh grade child invented a design of a clock and brouo'ht me a laro-e and handsome drawing of it, of which I have made a rude copy, and she has written out a description of our last year's work and explained how her design stands as a symbol of it. In the original design she had the minutes indicating the lesser books or writers she had become familiar with between the great landmarks, the hours. OUR year's work in literature. I have been asked to invent a design to illus- trate our year's work in literature and to write an account of it. My diagram shows the development of litera- ture and a few of the authors from whom we have studied. The first lessons that we took were studies from Burroughs entitled Birds and Bees. These were 46 LITERARY LANDMARKS. lovely little sketches from out-of-door life among insects and birds. This, by my diagram, is ten o'clock literature, because it comes in the present age. We took some of the Greek myths. The one about Proserpine, the bride of Pluto, pleased us all. A great many of these myths we read from Hawthorne's Tangiewood Tales and Won- der Book. From the same book we read Hercules and The Three Golden Apples and Baucis and Philemon. This on my diagram comes at three o'clock. We studied from Felielon's Lives of the Phi- losophers, and read the Dialogues of Lucian. We read the myth of the Horse of Troy, and after that Virgil's version of the same story from George Howland's translation. We then took some studies from American authors, and we read and discussed the Niirnburg Stove and Rosa Damascena, also. We studied and wrote a review on the Sad Little Prince by Edgar Fawcett. We were very much interested in this story, which we took to study the motives of the characters in it. Our next author, Charles Dudley Warner, pleased us very greatly. He is the author of In the Wilderness. We studied the American stories to find out about their authors, and to compare their thoughts with those of ancient writers. Unknown Past-. / Shakespeare WORKS OF THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION. 47 After this we went way back to the age of Pericles at five o'clock. In studying Sophocles's drama of Philoctetes we learned how to make character studies. We compared Philoctetes with the man who shot the deer in In the Wilderness. We used Plumptre's translation of Philoctetes, the teacher doing most of the reading as we had only one book. Often in the morning we read a few texts from Marcus Aurelius and discussed them. We took studies in geography, aU the time corresponding to those we had in literature. In geography, when we studied France we had a study from Victor Hugo, and we read about Napoleon ; in Ger- many we studied Charlemagne, and read some of the Stories of Chivalry which rose at the time of Charles the Great, the " Founder of the Western Empire." We read these tales from Legends of Charlemagne by Thomas Bulfinch. Charlemagne rose to his empire about the year 800, nearly half way between Virgil's and Dante's time, or between VI and VII on my diagram. Cervantes, we then found, overthrew this kind of literature, and we read some of his amusing stories about Don Quixote. We read of his start- ing out and being knighted, of his choosing his lady, of the slaying of the wine-bags, about the windmills, and how he mistook them for giants who were challen<>ino' him to a conflict. It is all exceedingly funny, but is a great satire on the 48 LITERARY LANDMARKS. ridiculous customs of that time and effectually overthrew them. We used Duffield's translation. In connection with our geography of Germany we took Grimm's Fairy Tales to find out the early literature of that country, and Goethe's Erl King as a study of the later literature. We read the early legend of Faust from Zig-Zag Journeys. We studied Schiller's The Veiled Statue of Truth, and several other small poems which were written about that time. Chaucer's The Knight's Tale was one of our favorite studies, and in connection with it we took Midsummer Night's Dream, which we found very similar to The Knight's Tale. Addison's Sir Roger de Coverley, a little part of Dante's Inferno, the Story of Socrates' life, part of Victor Hugo's Toilers of the Sea, Browning's Ivan Ivanovitch, The Girl of Pornic, and the Pied Piper of Hamelin, and Matthew Arnold's Forsaken Merman were some of the studies we discussed during the year. We had a very spirited discussion on Ivan Ivanovitch as to whether this mother had any right to sacrifice her children before herself. I believe she had, and I think the majority of the room were on the same side with me. Our teacher told us the story of The Birds by Aristophanes, and the last study we took was The Dog of Flanders. It is a beautiful little story, but ends very sadly. WORKS OF THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION. 49 We had two lessons a week with the practice teachers, and studied Ragozin's Chaldea to com- pare the Chaldean myths with the Greek myths, and a lovely little story written by George Wil- liam Curtis entitled Prue and I. It is very fas- cinating and very helpful. It brings out the idea, '' Have we any right to judge other people's char- acters, unless we mean to do them good, and make them better by it ? " This story brings up many questions as to right and wrong. It is very hard to decide which is right, for each side seems equally balanced. Mr. Curtis always leaves the question open. He never decides it for you. I would rather have written that story than be the Queen of England. Another seventh grade child, who took the les- sons described by the preceding pupil, invented a diagram and has explained it in his essay, showing that he has some literary landmarks in something like the right order, and that he realizes that liter- ature is a chain instead of a hodge-podge mix- ture. LUCIAN. The main thought in Lucian's writing Dia- logues of the Dead was to make fun of the gods, so that people would not believe in them, as that was the age when they were doubting whether there were any gods or not. 60 LITERARY LANDMARKS. The Sale of the Philosophers was written so as to make" the people not believe in those old philosophers so much. I think Lucian went too far in making so much fun of the old philosophers when in reality they were great men. It made the joeople think that they were not so great after all. Lucian is a very witty writer I think, and his wit is not like the wit seen in the newspaper as it is not personal. A young girl of the same class has followed the myth of Charon through several changes, and sees him as the top stone of a wall whose foundation was in the myth-lore. HOW CHARON BECAME A PICTURE. On the walls of the Sistine Chapel in Rome is Michael Angelo's grand painting of the Last Judgment, which was opened on Christmas Day in the year 1541 to the public. At one end of this grand fresco is the scene, Charon waiting for his passengers whom he is to convey over the river of death to the other world. Michael Angelo gets his idea of this picture from Dante's Inferno, and if we would trace it back into the far gone ages we should find that the thought which Michael Angelo so grandly put into his picture is that a ferryman would be ready to convey dead souls across the river of death, WORKS OF THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION. 51 came as far back as the Greek myths ; from thence it was developed first by Homer, second by Lucian, third by Dante, and then into a grand picture by Michael Angelo. Lucian speaks of Charon in an amusing and sarcastic way, as if he did not believe that there was any such ferryman, w^hile Dante looks at it in a dignified and solemn way. A young girl in the eighth grade furnishes a dia- gram, that of ? huge river system, as illustrative of her knowledge of the year's work and of her gTasp on the thought of the evolution of literature. A REVIEW OF OUR YEAR'S WORK IN LITERA- TURE. We began our year's work in literature by finding out that when man was first created he wondered at everything, then he began to imagine, then to reason, and then to express his thoughts, first by pictures, then by wedge-shaped letters, and finally by writing. Many writers think that many of man's first words were imitations of the sounds of Nature, as " splash " is an imitation of the sound made when the foot is placed in the water. As nearly as we could find out, Mesopotamia was the first place in which man lived. We stud- ied the history of Chaldea, the Chaldean myths, and how Nineveh and other cities were destroyed. 52 LITERARY LANDMARKS. We read Ragozin's history of the excavations in these cities by Layard and other explorers. We next took up the Greek myths, for in all our after-reading we will continually find allusions to these myths, and a great many of them are very beautiful. Ruskin says that to the mean person the myth means little, but to the noble person it means much. The myth of Athena is very beau- tiful, and so is the myth of Prometheus. We studied the myths of Chronos, Rhea, Zeus, Juno, Athena, Apollo, Ceres, Vesta, Neptune, Pluto, Vul- can, Hermes, Mars, Orpheus and Eurydice, and Medusa. In the study of Athena we read from Ruskin's Queen of the Air. I take the diagram of a river to show the differ- ent ages of literature, the different authors, and their relative worth, because we will remember it much longer if the eye as well as the ear grasps it. The myths are represented as the lakes in which the great river rises. Homer is a river which drains them all. We next talked about the difference between a good book and a poorer one, and we came to the conclusion that it is not a matter of opinion as some people think, but a fixed law of reason, whether a book is good or bad. We studied what seemed to be the laws which determine the worth of a book. A great book seems to be one, no part of wliich could be dispensed with, and yet have it remain perfect. We illustrated this by the use of different pictures. WORKS OF TEE CREATIVE IMAGINATION. 63 Our next study was Homer. We read five books, and the teacher did most of the reading in order to omit certain parts. We read from Derby's translation. After studying- Homer we compared the Chal- dean myths and the Greek myths, and decided that the Greek myths were much fuller and richer than the Chaldean myths. Then we took up the myth of Prometheus as a study in the age of Pericles, but to show the development of one thought we took all the poems written about Prometheus. We read ^schylus's, Goethe's, Lowell's, and Longfellow's versions of Prometheus, and noticed how the modern authors used new forms, and even developed new thoughts from the old myth. Then we had a lesson from Charles Dudley Warner's My Summer in a Garden. It was not connected with anything we had had before, but we took it as a rest. It was like going off on a summer vacation. We next read from Fenelon's Lives of the Philosophers, first because it really was a great age, and because it would be necessary for us to know something about tJie philosophers when we came to read Lucian. The philosophers lived in the age of Pericles. Then we did not follow the outline chronologi- cally, but omitted Virgil, for we wished to show the connection between the philosophers and Lu- 54 LITERARY LANDMARKS. ciaii. We read the life of Lucian, and then The Sale of the Philosophers. We next took up Marcus Aurelius Antoninus to compare him with Lucian, for their style and thought is so very dif- ferent. We can find many of the thoughts of Marcus Aurelius in many of the modern writers, and especially in Emerson. Marcus Aurelius and Lucian are not large rivers in comparison wdth the others. Then we went back to Virgil, using Rowland's translation, and read in Book I. the storm scene which is very beautiful. In Book II. we read about Laocoon, using a picture of the statue of the Laocoon and reading from Lessing's Laocoon. Then we read a piece written by Virgil about bees, and compared it with what John Burroughs says on this subject. After reading Lessing's Laocoon we had a discussion about how far a face could show agony and still be beautiful, and the reason was to have it serve for a Grammar lesson. Our next lesson was a study from the Life of Chaucer, as he was one of the two great authors in the next age, after which we read The Knight's Tale in the Canterbury Tales. The teacher read the most of it in order to leave out some parts. Then we read some short criticisms of Chaucer by Walter Savage Landor, Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Tennyson, and Lowell. Of all the rivers in my diagram, I think Chaucer is the most sparkling yet peaceful river. We brought WORKS OF THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION. 55 out the thought that Chaucer played more on the emotions than those before him, and that he fixed the English language. Then we studied the Life of Dante, who is placed by some writers as the greatest author who ever lived. He is indeed a grand river. In studying the history of the times in which Dante lived we used Swinton's Outlines of the World's History. Before commencing to read Dante's Divine Com- edy we read from the eleventh book of the Odys- sey, and the sixth book of the ^neid, because it seems as though Dante got many of his ideas from Homer and Virgil, and Dante sometimes uses the same figures of speech (as w^here he compares the spirits dropping into Charon's boat to autumn leaves, which is what Homer and Virgil compare the spirits to). Dante uses the mythology a great deal, but it is the dead part with him, and Chris- tianity is the vital or live part, while the mythol- ogy is the vital part with Homer and Virgil. The mythology is only the frame-work with Dante. We read twelve cantos of the Inferno, and our teacher explained the meaning of each canto. Then she gave us an outline of what was in the rest of the Inferno and in the Purgatorio. We read the description of the beautiful staircase in the twelfth canto of the Purgatorio. We had large drawings of the Inferno and the Purgatorio. We had the promise of having a few lessons in the Paradiso, but the term was too short. 56 LITERARY LANDMARKS. Next we read from that great river — Shake- speare. We read Midsummer Night's Dream, and were delighted to find that Shakespeare used the same old woods which Chaucer used in The Knight's Tale as the scene, and that Shakespeare used the same form which 2Eschylus used, but Shakespeare uses more characters than ^schy- lus does. We also took up the study of Julius Caesar with the practice teachers, but had not time to finish it before the term was up. In pre- paring for the study of Julius Caesar we studied the geography of Italy and of the Roman Empire up to the time of Christ. In studying this we used Swinton's Outlines of the World's History, and Anderson's General History. We also stud- ied how Rome was built, and the different build- ings in Rome, and the pictures of these were of great help. We had one study from Lord Bacon's Essays to compare them with Shakespeare's writings. Then we made a study of Tennyson's Lady Clare, of Robert Browning's Ivan Ivanovitch, of Hawthorne's Great Stone Face, and of John Bur- roughs's Idyl of the Honey-Bee. These studies were short, and we made them more particularly for character studies. I think Browning's Ivan Ivanovitch is very thrilling, and is told in a very charming way, putting the story in its best light, and leaving us to draw our own conclusions. In addition to these studies, with the practice WORKS OF THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION. 57 teachers we have made studies of Schiller's Veiled Statue of Truth, Curtis's Prue and I, and Ivan- hoe, and a Chinese poem concerning Confucius. In studjang Ivanhoe we began by studying the geography of England, then the history of Eng- land, including Chivalry, Feudalism, Feudal cas- tles, and the Crusades, using Ten Boys on the Road, Dickens's Child's History of England, and S win ton's Outlines of the World's History. From a little girl in the sixth grade I received the following essa}^, which shows that she feels the growth of literature, and has at least three landmarks placed in line, and has connected with them the idea of growth. It is a small beginning in the right direction. HOW LITERATURE GROWS. The first thing we know of literature was from the picture writing. If a person wanted to write " fish," he would draw wedge-shaped letters, and it would look like this. Then we know of kings and their history ; the first king wrote his history on one side of the bricks of his palace, and sometimes the next king would turn the bricks around and write on the other side. Next mythology began to sprout in this way : one person saw the sun rise in the morning and said, " Apollo rises '' ; then somebody made it longer and said, " Apollo rose in the morning and 58 LITERARY LANDMARKS. saw Daphne. She was so beautiful that he wanted to marry her, so he chased her and tried to catch her. He chased her through the heavens until she came to the West, and she turned into a laurel tree." There are many other myths beside this, and people believed them ; but that was when people were beginning to think, and that is how they were founded. Homer took many of these mj^ths and put them in one great book all together ; no one had an edu- cation unless he knew all the myths. Homer's book was as the Bible is to us. Most of our writers now have mythology in their writings, as we found in Dickens's and Haw- thorne's stories. The next little essay from a ten-year-old child in the fifth grade, together with the diagram with which she has illustrated it, shows that she has grasped four epochs of literature and the idea that they are related. HOW LITERATURE BEGAN. HOMER CHRIST PHILOSOPHERST A Mk Myths were founded by people giving things names and telling stories about them. For in- WORKS OF THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION. 59 stance, they called the sun Apollo, and said he kept going round the world, and that the moon was Diana, and a fly chased her round the world and she is going round still. And then came Homer, and he gathered the myths together and made one great poem. And after Homer came a lot of philosophers, and some of them made up stories. And one was a preten- der, and he said, " I can go to Heaven by going up that high mountain " ; he went up and never came, so the people thought he had got there ; but a long time after his shoe was thrown out by a volcano, and everybody knew he had thrown him- self down a volcano. Then came the time of Christ, and that was the time the Bible was written. The error which this little girl has made in re- gard to the time when the Bible was written sug- gests the inquiry, " How many people know when the Bible tvas written or appreciate its literary value ? " I once asked a class of young teachers to point out to me where Job or David or Daniel came in regard to other great landmarks, and al- though they were good Bible scholars, they frankly and laughingly admitted that it was the first time in their lives they had associated Bible characters with anything else on the face of the earth. The atrocious way in which the Bible is taught in les- son papers, mangled, disconnected, reduced to 60 LITERARY LANDMARKS. epigrams, is a singular barbarity. Children in general believe the Bible to be a multitude of short texts. It is considered almost a sacrilege by many people to see the poetic beauty, the lit- erary value of the Bible. In the search for val- uable details, its worth as a whole is left out. We can see in the diagram of the little ten- year-old girl (a diagram which she did not in- vent) how simply she started and how easily she can add to her outline new landmarks as she gets older. To look at the other extreme and see what will develop out of so simple a beginning, I pre- sent a chart of our work. At the end of our year's study we found that out of our studies in all the grades, including the Normal, this diagram had grown as a matter of necessity because there was something there which had to grow ; it had invented itself. Beginning with a simple straight line to indicate the four thousand years of litera- ture (about all the literature available in the school-room), placing the cross of Christ in the centre as the great turning-point of the world's history, taking a few simple lessons in the myth- making age, lessons which led on to something in the next epoch to which they were related, step by step, little by little, our chart grew into the shape in which (with a few corrections and sug- gestions from one of our best writers) I present it. It would be worse than absurd to present so in- tricate a chart to a beginner ; the point is to WORKS OF THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION. 61 give him a simple straight line with a cross in the centre, and let him develop his chart himself, putting in his own landmarks as fast as he has any to place there. But no chart or symbol should be put before the child until his mind has fully grasped the idea. That the child may not load his mind with names of authors, it is well for him to place the best thought he has received, instead of the author's name, as a landmark. That children need not confound these symbols with the things symbolized is proved by the fact that so many pupils invented different symbols or ways of indicating the links in their line of knowl- edo^e. A knowled^^e of the names of authors is not a knowledge of literature. It is only as the child becomes acquainted with the thought of the writer, it is only as he recognizes the individuality or the personality of the writer in his own works, it is only when he has taken the book into his heart and made its author seem like a comrade, that the book or the writer is really a landmark. AVhen the child sees a story " sprout " among the myth- makers, and creep along until it pushes forth its leaves in another age, and finally blossom into song in yet later times, his landmarks will seem to bear an organic relation to the world in its en- tirety. The world will no longer seem a wilder- ness of isolated facts. In addition to our chart, I append lesson plans in reading which are so copious that out of any one of them a year's work can easily be selected. G2 LITERARY LANDMARKS. Before a child is seven years of age it is prob- able that much of his work should be desultory. It is the myth-making period of his life, and his mind is one great wonderland of mysteries. But if his parents or teachers are wise they will keep in mind the truth that some time in the future he will need to have his facts and fancies come into shape, and will plan their stories to that end. It is always foolish to try to cultivate reason in a child before the imagination has had its play. Little children in a normal condition love imas:- inative stories, and many of the nursery tales so dear to very young children are of classic origin, and would be far better school-room studies for first and second grade children than the " Oh see my nag " literature which we find in some school- readers. Jack and the Bean-Stalk, Red Riding Hood, Three Bears, Cinderella, Jack the Giant- Killer, Puss in Boots, Ugly Duckling, Hop o' My Thumb can be found in cheap toy-book editions, and are recognized nursery classics. To cut off such stories from a child's life is to prepare him to become stupid in after-life. The brightest pupil I ever had, the one who could pass an ex- amination where two hundred and thirty others failed, the brightest in arithmetic and grammar, and in after years in abstruse philosophy, was brought up on " inane fairy stories." Sciidder's Fables and Folk Stories are noio published as school-readers^ and should be in every young child's hands. Literature Courae. storytelling and receding. First Year or Grade. Average age of child, sixye&ra. Long age [BeforeChnstl 'kc^z. ^ heP lived. [Present Age Myths--- Fire-. Vulcan.Ve&ta, Apollo, Phaeton. Moon-myths: Diana, Hyperion, lo Star-myths ; Orion, Argus. Air-, ^orc^^, /Eolus, Harpies. Earth myths: Cyclops, Antaeus, Sisyphus. Vegetable; Ceres, Animal: Arachne, Latona and Frogs, Picus, Cycnu5, Pegasus Water-. Neptune, Proteus, 5phinx. Red Riding-Hood, Jack a.nd the Beanstalk. Scudders Book of Tables and Folk !?torie5 Emphasi:zLe the Labors of hercules in this grade, Cvlso the Odyssey 5tories , Circes Palace, Lotus Eaters, Bag of Winds. See Bryants translation of the Odyssey. Bible Stories. - Da.n I el, David, S>ampson, Prodiga.1 Son, Ten Commandments. Stones of Roman Heroes to eompare. with preceding heroes. 5ee White's 5torie-s from PI my and Chureh's Stories from Liyy Amenc5an Heroes,— Cdum bus, V-Zashing ton, Putnam, Jefferson, John 3mith, Lincoln. by Seaside and Wayside, fJeyen Little bisters. New Years Bargain, Ea.ch And All, The (Children of the Cold, Hans Andersen's Stories, Rain- bov/s for Children. Eliot's Poetry for Children, Open Sesame Vol I, Jolly Begga-r Little Birdie by lennyson. Baby Bell by Aldrieh, A Midsummer Sxsng by Q i I d e'r. Emphasize Ameriear-> Indian t?tot-ies, Hiawatha, and Esquimaux Stones Mother Goose. WORKS OF THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION. 63 The Adventures of a Brownie, Rosebud, from The Harvard Sophomore Stories, are good supple- ments to first and second grade reading. How- ells's Christmas All the Year Round should be published as a school primer for primary schools, and there ought to be a very nicely illustrated little book of Greek myths compiled for primary grades. Many teachers have agreed with me on that point. De Garmo's Fairy Tales, Clara Doty Bates' Classics in Baby Land, and even Mother Goose are too interesting to older people not to be clas- sics for children in the nursery and first grade at school. Other nursery classics which have been recommended for this chapter by kindergarteners are Mrs. Swing's Miscellaneous Stories, Lydia M. Child's Rainbows for Children, Giants of Killar- ney (in Wide Awake for 1887), Aunt Louisa's Wee Wee. When a child enters the first grade he is sup- posed to be six years of age, and at the end of one year, or at the age of seven, he is supposed to en- ter the second grade. AVhen he is far enough ad- vanced to enter that grade he ought to be able to begin to get his facts arranged into something like systematic order. I am working all the time on the fact that fifty per cent, of all children who ever enter school leave before the age of ten. At seven years of age the child can easily grasp three epochs of the world's history. This will be 64 LITERARY LANDMARKS. the little skeleton -which is to grow, as well as to be clothed with growing flesh. I have been much interested in observing a seven-year-old child to whom I told stories of the present age and of the long past (the myths of Greece) and of the age of Christ, by teaching him to draw a straight line and put a cross in the centre ; he soon learned where to locate his myths, where his New Testa- ment stories, and where the stories from the pres- ent. At the age of eight years — when the child enters the third grade — his outline should ex- pand to take in a new landmark. Perhaps the " age of chivalry " may be the best, since so many tales appealing to childhood come in there. Any teacher who has never educated herself in ancient classics has a rare opportunity to increase her own knowledge at the same time that she gives related lessons in literature in this grade. Take as an examj^le the myth of Pegasus. She can make a little diagram on the blackboard showing the child where the story of Pegasus originated. She can tell it to him as a myth, and have him read it to her from Hawthorne's Tangiewood Tales, and then learn Longfellow's pretty little poem, Pegasus in Pound. Or if she wish to teach him the use of good language at the same time that she helps him to form a taste for good reading, she may let him read the two stories. King Midas from Tangiewood Tales and Ruskin's King of the Golden River, and ^-^^-^ Oq:>n-d f w £ c 0^ b i>-t-'u— >mO> 4; d lOJiJI o_ju_>[i:cl c C lO' i-" x- '^ ^ ^ ° E £ D W V i(i zj "0 > li- i_ 8 X L grr -^ - c > ^^ 0.^± in-ii:x>e; 01 T) E V ^2 3 <^^ '.- I) cr> ^-^ - ot->. eV : <^ E /I 3 4^ U O.— -op _o in ^ t^ U- K) — 1 -C-D 1. . H- "O '1. fc) -TT D WORKS OF THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION. 65 compare the two kings. " Which king was the better?" "Was either king more to be envied than a common laborer ? " Such questions will bring out a child's thought, and his language can be observed and corrected. There is no better op- portunity for a child to learn practical grammar. In the fourth grade a child can add two land- marks to his outline — the ages of Homer and Pericles being all one great Greek age, and the age of Dante and Chaucer all one great epoch. In this grade he can add not only to his stock of myths, but he can trace many of them from the early myth-making period to later writers. The myth Cupid is a fine one to hunt down, and pic- tures of Cupid are so common and so pretty that any child would be interested in him. He can be traced from the early myth to the golden age of Greek literature, where the pretty poem The Threat of Cupid was written. It is translated by Her rick. John Lyly's Cupid and My Cam- paspe, Leigh Hunt's Cupid Drowned, Tom Moore's Cupid Stung are all cunning little stud- ies to illustrate the adventures of " the tiny ras- cal," and may serve not only to fix landmarks of history in a child's mind, but give him a taste for what is artistic in the world of design. Every child in third and fourth grade ought to have a Hanson's Homer and Virgil. These books are so simple and so clean and so well illustrated that no 66 LITERARY LANDMARKS. objections can possibly be offered to them. A child could read them through in three or four hours, and I have used them even in a club of teachers, they are so interesting. In the fourth grade the myth of Proserpine used with the Ger- man story of The Sleeping Beauty affords delight- ful grammar lessons, and shows the child how an old root of the myth-making period may produce a new blossom in the age of Chaucer. In addition to the studies mentioned, the fol- lowing books for third and fourth grade puj)ils are usable and desirable. The names of some studies are purposely repeated. Gulliver's Travels, Robinson Crusoe, Being a Boy, Sandford and Merton, Swiss Family Robin- son, Prince and Pauper (the funniest story I ever read). Rip Van Winkle, Cudjo's Cave, by Trow- bridge, Little Lord Fauntleroy, Heidi, Ruskin's King of the Golden River (a book with a bad moral as well as a good one). Little Women, Daffydowndilly (a fine story to teach children the ugliness and hardships of idleness), Arabian Nights, Daudet's Red Partridge, Susan Coolidge's The New Year's Bargain, Eliot's Six Stories from Arabian Nights, The Snow-Image, Grimm's or Andersen's Fairy Stories, Burroughs's Birds and Bees, Bulfinch's Age of Fable, Hale's edition of Bulfinch's Mythology (for teachers), Hawthorne's Tanglewood Tales and Wonder Book, Bulfinch's Age of Chivalry, Miss Starr's Stories of the 10 E — ic ^ "* k a t; ;r c 5 Oil. r F o-^ a. 13 c id ,- 1^1 is J -C '0 C - " . WORKS OF THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION. 67 Saints, Adventures of Marco Polo, Sarah Orne Jewett's Play-Days, Mrs. Stowe's Pussy Willow and A Dog's Mission. So many pupils leave school from the fifth and sixth grades that it is of the greatest importance that the reading should be made as interesting as possible, and this is particularly the case in poor districts in cities. In these grades the child can easily add to his fourth grade outline two new landmarks. He can separate what in the fourth grade he called the great golden age of Greek literature into the age of Homer and the age of Pericles, and he can insert the age of Shake- speare between the age of Dante and Chaucer and the present age. In these grades any teacher or parent with the least literary taste may find pleasure for herself as well as profit to the child by tracing down the myth of The Animated Trees or the myth of Phaeton. For the former study, the myth of Daphne in Bulfinch's or Cox's Mythology, the story of Polydorus in Virgil, the story of the Sui- cides in Dante, The Meeting of the Dryads, by Oliver Wendell Holmes, the poem Rhoecus, by Lowell (an exquisite poem), Old Pipes the Piper and the Dryad, by Frank R. Stockton, form a series in which the derivation of modern thought from the ancient, or the evolution of modern thought from a myth, may be made a basis for good thought, for the establishing more firmly 68 LITERARY LANDMARKS. literary and historic epochs, and give opportuni- ties for grammar lessons as well as reading and spelling lessons. The story of Pipes should be published as a study for fifth grade children. One of the finest experiments I have seen in tracing a family of myths and legends to one source was made as follows : Each child was sup- plied with Southey's poem, Bishop Hatto, and Browning's Pied Piper of Hamelin. They made careful studies of these poems, and then read the story of the Children's Crusade from Champlin's Encyclopedia. The story of William Tell was told as a historic legend, and followed by the myths of Apollo, Orpheus, and Perseus. Then as a surprise, the teacher summed up the evidence that all of these stories except that of the Chil- dren's Crusade were myths and closely related. The reference book used to get at this evidence was John Fiske's Myths and Myth-makers. The myth of Phaeton is very traceable from Bulfinch's Mythology to John G. Saxe's humorous poem. The myths of Jupiter, Mercury, and Charon, followed by the stories of Diogenes and his tub, Pythagoras and his belief in the trans- migration of souls, Socrates drinking the hemlock, and a few other interesting tales from Fenelon's Lives of the Philosophers (a small book, simple, charming in style), and these followed by Lucian's Dialogues, give a series of lessons irresistibly funny for the most part, while serving to fix more firmly cS£ ^ WORKS OF THE CREATIVE IMAGINATION. 69 three epochs, the myth-making age, the age of Pericles, and the years following Christ. Of course some diagram of these landmarks should be kept before the child, that he may grasp with his eyes as well as with his hearing the distance between these outbreaks of classic thought. I have often told the story of Alkestis from Eurip- ides to sixth grade pupils, and let them discuss the bravery of Alkestis as a grammar or lan- guage lesson. I have found second grade chil- dren equally pleased and interested in the story ; indeed, age has little to do with the ability of chil- dren to receive classic thought and see its relation to inodern thought. There is too much of a ten- dency to " grade " everything. It is a pleasant sight to see a whole family from the aged grand- parents to the wee bairnie enjoy the same story. Any book is not good enough for the youngest child in the primary grade unless it would be a good book for the teacher or parent. There is too much solicitude on the part of school superintend- ents about " flying over the heads " of children. It is one of a teacher's griefs that, work as hard as she may, some pupils will outstrip her in one direction while she is taking the lead in another. As supplements to fifth and sixth grade work, or as lists for home libraries, the following books and studies are appended, though a few of them may be " too old " for very slow children, or for those who have been accustomed to weak readina". 70 LITERARY LANDMARKS. Feats on the Fiord ; Tom Brown's School Days at Rugby, a book with which I have found sixth grade pupils delighted ; The Story of a Bad Boy by Aldrich, a book in which a boy finds that it pays better to be good ; Pickwick Papers ; Ware's Zenobia, and Aurelian ; Paul and Virginia ; Mosses from an Old Manse ; Hoosier Schoolmaster ; Lamb's Essay on Roast Pig (a study with which fifth and sixth grade children have much fun in reading) ; Pilgrim's Progress, followed by Haw- thorne's Celestial Railroad ; Gray's Story of The Children's Crusade ; Undine ; The Courtship of Miles Standish; Hiawatha; Baron Munchausen; Evangeline ; Ten Boys on the Road ; Baldwin's Stories of the Golden Age ; Story of the Ger- man Iliad ; Ruskin's Ethics of the Dust ; Fene- lon's Lives of the Philosophers ; Church's Sto- ries from Greek Tragedians ; Church's Stories from Herodotus ; Ovid for Young Folks ; Lucian's Dialogues ; Kingsley's Greek Heroes ; Marcus Aurelius ; Canon Farrar's Seekers after God ; The Last Days of Pompeii ; Lanier's Morte d' Arthur and Froissart ; Baldwin's Story of Sieg- fried and Story of Roland ; Reynard the Fox ; Mrs. Haweis's Chaucer's Stories ; Travels of Sir John Mandeville ; Lamb's Tales from Shake- speare ; Bulfinch's Stories of Charlemagne ; and any or all of John Burroughs's works. Thirty copies of his Pepacton were given to one of my sixth grade classes by the Chicago Board of Edu- Literature plan for Til'l'h Grade TAveraqe ac^e — ten or eleven years Baldwin's Stones of the Golden -Aqe . My fh 5, Jupiter, Mercury &nd Charon BryanK^ Odyssey, "Hansen 5 iionner or Church's story of the Iliad Churchs Stones [Tom GreeK Trat^edian Ttie story of Orphfcu from Ovid Whrteis Boyk'ami Girls' Plutarc^l Baldwin's Sie^^f rie