day of discovery of the child’s personality and of accurate attention to the child’s needs.  Because the Odyssey is a great book and will give much to any child does not prove at all that the same child would not be better off by reading it when his interests reach its life.  This outlook on the problem would eliminate the necessity of having the classics rewritten from a new moral viewpoint, which is becoming a custom now-a-days, and which is to be frowned upon, for it deprives the literature of much of its vigor and force.

II.  THE FAIRY TALE AS LITERATURE

From the point of view of the child, we have seen that in a subjective sense, fairy tales must contain the interests of children.  In an objective sense, rather from the point of view of literature, let us now consider what fairy tales must contain, what are the main standards which determine the value of fairy tales as literature, and as such, subject-matter of real worth to the child.

The old tale will not always be perfect literature; often it will be imperfect, especially in form.  Yet the tale should be selected with the standards of literature guiding in the estimate of its worth and in the emphasis to be placed upon its content.  Such relating of the tale to literary standards would make it quite impossible later in the primary grades when teaching the reading of Three Pigs, to put the main stress on a mere external like the expression of the voice.  A study of the story as literature would have centered the attention on the situation, the characters, and the plot.  If the voice is receiving training in music and in the phonics of spelling, then when the reading of the tale is undertaken it will be a willing servant to the mind which is concentrating on the reality, and will express what the thought compels.

The fairy tale first must be a classic in reality even if it lacks the crowning touch of perfect form given through the re-treatment of a literary artist.  In Reynard the Fox we have an exact example of the folk-tale that has been elevated into literature.  But this was possible only because the tales originally possessed the qualities of a true classic.  “A true classic,” Sainte-Beuve has said, “is one which enriches the human mind, has increased its treasure and caused it to advance a step, which has discovered some moral and unequivocal truth or revealed some eternal passion in that heart where all seemed known and discovered; which is an expression of thought, observation, or invention, in no matter what form, only provided it be broad and great, refined and sensible, sane and beautiful in itself; which speaks in its own peculiar style which is found to be also that of the whole world, a style new and old, easily contemporary with all time.”  Immediately some of the great fairy tales stand out as answering to this test—­Red Riding Hood, Sleeping Beauty, Jack and the Beanstalk, Cinderella, Jack the Giant-Killer,—­which has been said to be the epitome of the whole life of man—­Beauty and the Beast, and a crowd of others.  Any fairy tale which answers to the test of a real classic must, like these, show itself to contain for the child a permanent enrichment of the mind.