emote, the world to be conquered too unknown to carry a convincing
sense of heroism to small children. The same is true of the heroic tales
of romance,--of Arthur and all the legends which cluster around his
name. Magic, the children will get from these tales but little else. But
if the tales should succeed in taking a child with them in their strange
exploits into a strange land, they would surely fail to take him into
the turgid human drama they picture. And as surely we should wish them
to fail. The sagas, like most genuine folk-lore deal with the great
elemental human facts, life and death, love, sexual passion and its
consequences, marriage, motherhood, fatherhood. We grasp at them for
our children, I believe, just _because_ they deal with these fundamental
things,--the very things we are afraid of unless they come to us
concealed in strange clothing. But what kind of a foundation for
interpreting these great elemental facts will the stories of Achilles
and Briseus, of Jason and Medea, Pluto and Proserpina, of Guinevere and
Launcelot make? What do we expect a child to get from these pictures of
sexual passion on the part of the man,--even though a god,--and of
social dependence of woman? Do Greek draperies make prostitution
suitable for children? Does the glamour of chivalry explain illicit
love? Most parents and schools who unhesitatingly hand over these social
pictures to their children have never tried,--and neither care nor dare
to try,--to face these elemental facts with their children. Can we
really wish to avoid a frank statement of the _positive_ in sex
relations, of the facts of parenthood, of the institution of marriage,
of the mutual companionship between man and woman, and give the
_negative_, the unfulfilled, the distorted? This is preposterous and no
one would uphold it. It must be the beauty of the tale, and not the
significance we are after. But _are_ these tales beautiful except as we
endow them with the subtleties of a classical civilization, as we read
into them piquant contrasts of a sensitive, expressive race still
primitive in its social thinking and social habits,--that elusive
thing which we mean by "Greek"? And can children get this without its
background, particularly as they have yet no social background in their
own world to hold it up against? And can children do any better with the
perplexing ideals of the chivalrous knight swept by a human passion?

And in the same way can a child real