Famous Stories Every Child Should Know | Page 2

the years
which have been more fruitful in works of mechanical genius or
dynamic energy, novels have been more widely distributed and more
eagerly read than at any previous period. The poetry of the time, in the
degree in which it has been fresh and vital, has been treated by
newspapers as matter of universal interest.
Men are born story-readers; if their interest subsides for the moment, or
is absorbed by other forms of expression, it reasserts itself in due time
and demands the old enchantment that has woven its spell over every
generation since men and women reached an early stage of
development. Barbarians and even savages share with the most highly
civilised peoples this passion for fiction.
Men cannot live on the bare, literal fact any more than they can live on
bread alone; there is something in every man to feed besides his body.
He has been told many times by men of great disinterestedness and
ability that he must believe only that which he clearly knows and
understands, and that he must concern himself with those matters only
which he can thoroughly comprehend. He must live, in other words, by
the rule of common sense; meaning by that oft-used phrase, clear sight
and practical dealing with actual things and conditions. It would greatly
simplify life if this course could be followed, but it would simplify it by

rejecting those things which the finest spirits among men and women
have loved most and believed in with joyful and fruitful devotion. If we
could all become literal, matter of fact and entirely practical, we should
take the best possible care of our bodies and let our souls starve. This,
however, the soul absolutely refuses to do; when it is ignored it rebels
and shivers the apparently solid order of common-sense living into
fragments. It must have air to breathe, room to move in, a language to
speak, work to do, and an open window through which it can look on
the landscape and the sky. It is as idle to tell a man to live entirely in
and by facts that can be known by the senses as to tell him to work in a
field and not see the landscape of which the field is a part.
The love of the story is one of the expressions of the passion of the soul
for a glimpse of an order of life amid the chaos of happenings; for a
setting of life which symbolises the dignity of the actors in the play; for
room in which to let men work out their instincts and risk their hearts in
the great adventures of affection or action or exploration. Men and
women find in stories the opportunities and experiences which
circumstances have denied them; they insist on the dramatisation of life
because they know that certain results inevitably follow certain actions,
and certain deeply interesting conflicts and tragedies are bound up with
certain temperaments and types of character.
The fact that many stories are unwholesome, untrue, vulgar or immoral
impeaches the value and dignity of fiction as little as the abuse of
power impeaches the necessity and nobility of government, or the
excess of the glutton the healthfulness and necessity of food. The
imagination must not only be counted as an entirely normal faculty, but
the higher intelligence of the future will recognise its primacy among
the faculties with which men are endowed. Fiction is not only here to
stay, as the phrase runs, but it is one of the great and enduring forms of
literature.
The question is not, therefore, whether or not children shall read stories;
that question was answered when they were sent into the world in the
human form and with the human constitution: the only open question is
"what stories shall they read?" That many children read too many

stories is beyond question; their excessive devotion to fiction wastes
time and seriously impairs vigour of mind. In these respects they follow
the current which carries a multitude of their elders to mental
inefficiency and waste of power. That they read too many weak,
untruthful, characterless stories is also beyond question; and in this
respect also they are like their elders. They need food, but in no
intelligent household do they select and provide it; they are given what
they like if it is wholesome; if not, they are given something different
and better. No sane mother allows her child to live on the food it likes
if that food is unwholesome; but this is precisely what many mothers
and fathers do in the matter of feeding the imagination. The body is
scrupulously cared for and the mind is left to care for itself!
Children ought to have stories at hand precisely as they ought to have
food,