m false ideas of art and
morality. They should go sometimes to the theater to see really good
and simple plays, but they should be oftener encouraged to get up for
themselves plays at home. If, as they grow older, they are helped to
think out their costumes with something of historical accuracy, to
be true to the spirit and scenery of the times in which the
representations are laid, the activity can be made to increase in
value to them as the years go by. There is no other art, perhaps,
by which the child so intimately links the world spirit with his own
spirit. It is for this reason that the School of Education in the
University of Chicago is equipped with small theaters in which the
children act.

[Sidenote: Literature]

As for the art of literature, not all children love reading, perhaps,
but certainly all children love to hear stories told, and the skilful
mother will direct this spontaneous affection into a love for
reading. No other single love, except perhaps the love of nature,
so emancipates the child from the thrall of circumstances. If he can
escape from the small ills of life into fairy-land merely by opening
the covers of a book, be sure that these ills will not have power to
crush him, unless they be very great ills indeed.

[Sidenote: Fairy Tales]

There are those who still believe that fairy-tales and fiction of all
sorts are nothing but lies. Poor souls, with their faces against the
stone wall of hard facts, they can never look up into the sky and see
the winged and beautiful thoughts freely disporting there. They make
no distinction between truth and fact, yet truth is of the spirit and
fact of the flesh; and truth, because it is of the spirit, may appear
under many forms, even under the form of play. All rightly told and
rightly conceived fairy-tales are true just as a good picture is true.
The painter uses oil, turpentine, and pigment to represent the wool
of a sheep, the water of a pond, the green spears of grass. Some
literal-minded person might say that he was lying because he pretented
that his little square of canvas truthfully represented grazing sheep
at the brook-side, but most of us recognize that he is really telling
the truth only in another than an every day form. In the same way
the writer of fairy-tales tells the truth, using the pigments of the
imagination.

If children ask whether a given story is true or not, answer without
hesitation, "yes." It is true, but it is a fairy kind