speaking of his sister's education, said, "She was tumbled early, by
accident or design, into a spacious closet of good old English
reading, without much selection or prohibition, and browsed at will
upon that fair and wholesome pasturage. Had I twenty girls they should
be brought up exactly in this fashion." Lamb would have argued: Set
the child free in the library and let him choose for himself, and feed
on great literature, those stories which give general types of
situation and character, which give the simplest pictures of a people
at different epochs. But with all due respect to Lamb it must be said
that Lamb is not living in this scientific 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.