Page:A Study of Fairy Tales.djvu/146

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A STUDY OF FAIRY TALES

in some way transmit before the school day is ended, even if in forms obscure and hidden. Long years afterwards, he may exhibit this same emotion, imagination, truth and form, in deeds that proclaim loudly the return from his fairy tales. However, if the child is being surrounded by pragmatic influences through his teachers he will soon become aware that his feelings are useless unless he does something because of them; that what he sees is worthless unless he sees to some purpose; that it is somewhat fruitless to know the truth and not use it; and if words have in their form expressed the life of the tale, he is more dead than words not to express the life that teems within his own soul. The little child grows gradually into the responsibility for action, for expression, into a consciousness of purpose and a knowledge of his own problems. But each opportunity he is given to announce his own initiative breaks down the inhibition of inaction and aids him to become a free achieving spirit. As the child listens to the tale he is a thinking human creature; but in the return which he makes to his tale he becomes a quickened creator. The use which he makes of the ideas he has gained through his fairy tales, will be the work of his creative imagination.

Fairy tales, though perfectly ordinary subject-matter, may become the means of the greatest end in education, the development in the child of the power of consciousness. The special appeal to the various powers and capacities of the child mind, such as emo-