confused. A child of
twelve or even ten is quite a different creature, often with clear if
not articulate conceptions of the make-up of the physical and human
world. He has something to measure against, some standards to cling to.
But we are talking about children still in the early plastic stages of
standards who will take the relationships we offer them through stories
and build them into the very fabric of their thinking.

Now, how much of the classical literature follows the lead of the
children's own inquiries? How much of it stimulates fruitful inquiries?
What are the relationships which sagas, myths and folk-lore interpret?
And what are the interpretations? This is a vast question and can be
answered only briefly with the full consciousness that there is much
lumping of dissimilar material with resulting injustices and
superficiality. Also there is no attempt to use the words "myth," "saga"
and "folk-lore" in technical senses.[A] I have merely taken the dominant
characteristic of any piece of literature as determining its class.

[A] For a clear exposition of this field of literature for children
see "Literature in the Elementary School," by Porter Lander
MacClintock, University of Chicago Press, 1907.

Myths, properly, are slow-wrought beliefs which embody a people's effort
to understand their relations to the great unknown. They are essentially
religious, symbolic, mystic, subtle, full of fears and propitiations,
involved, often based on the forgotten,--altogether unlike in their
approach to the ingenuous and confident child. They are full of the
struggle of life. Hardly before the involved introspections and theories
of adolescence can we expect the real beauty and poignancy of a genuine
myth to be even dimly understood. And why offer the shell without the
spirit? It is likely to remain a shell forever if we do. And indeed,
such an empty thing to most of us is the great myth of Prometheus or of
the Garden of Eden.

But sagas! Are they not of exactly the heroic stuff for little children?
In essence the relationships with which they deal are human,--social.
The story of Siegfried, of Achilles, of Abraham,--these are great sagas.
Each is a tremendous picture of a human experience, the first two
under heroic, enlarged conditions, the last under a human culture
picturesquely different from our own. But even as straight tales of
adventure they do not carry for little children. The environment is too
r