czytanie teksty (6)

WTió

1

398

Chnptcr (I Argiimcntaiioo and Pmuasion

may nappen to sec it. But to the children it is just a story—and a good one—lhat‘s all.

And all the otd stories are the same! Constder Jack the it Giant-Kiiler. What a ppngloroeratign ofwecpinj£and wailing, of people shut into Iow 3ungcons, of miiroer. ofsuddcn death, of blood, Etnd of horror! Jack, havinginveigjed an enormous giant irtto eating an enormous quantity of pSrridge, then rips him up the stornach with a huge sword! What a mess!

But it docsn‘1 dislurb Jack or his young readers onolotapln w fact, Jack is ofT again at once with his young readers trailuig ea-gerly after him, in order to cut off at one blow the three huge heads of a three-headed giant and make a worse mess stilt.

From the fairy stories and Jhe giant stories the chiłdren a pnesently pass on—quitc jmscąthgęhłs I see it—to the higher rangę of the blood-and-thonder stories of the pirates and the battles. Herc again the realiiy, for the grown-up mind that can see it, is terrible andgfuesome>but never so for the boys and girls who see in it only the pleasąnt adventurc and bright di-vcrsity.

Take, for instance, this familmr scene as it appears and ai reappears in the hislory of Jack Dare-devil, or Ned Feai^ nothing, or any of those noble boys who go to sea, in books, at the age of fourteen and retire, as admirals, at twemy-two.

"The fire from bolh ships was now becoming warm. A a round shot tearing across the deck swept off four of our fel-lows, ‘Ha! ha!’ said Jack, as be tumed towards Ned on the ąuarterdeck, *this bids fair to becomc Iively.’ ”

h certainły did, in fact, it wouid bc |tvcly already if one a stopped to think of the literał and anatomical mcaning of a round shot—twenty-five pounds of red-hot. iron—tearing through thaATftal^Tsf four men. But the boy reader never gels it this w«iy?~WlTat is saicl is, that four of our fclkyws were “swept ofF’—-just that; merely “jswęfttjrfF* and thats the *-^,way the child reader takes it. And when the pirates “leap on deck,” Jack hiinsclf "cuts down” four 6f them and Ned "cuts down” three, ThaFs atl they do—‘‘they cut them down,” they just “shorten them” so to speak.

Very simiiar in scope and rnethod was the good old n

“half-dimc novel.** writlen of ihe days of the “praine," and Ihe mountajn trail, the Feathered Indian and the Lenthered Scout. In łhesc. unsuspecting strangcrs got scalped in what is now the main Street of Denver—where they get skinned.

These stories used to open with a rush and kept in rapid oscilłation uli the limc. In fact they begun with the eoncussion of firearms.

‘“Bang! Bang! Bang!' Three shots rang out the prairie and three feathered Indian* bil the dust.”

It seemed always to be a lavourite pastime of the Indi-ans—“biting dusi.’*

In grim rcality—to the grown-up mind—these were sto-mtt of terror—of midnighl attack, of stcalthy murder with a kttife from without the folds of the tent, of sudden dcath in dark cavems, of pitiless cncmies, and of crueł torturę.

But not so to the youthful mind. He followed it all through qu»te gayły, sbaring the high eourage of his hero— Dick Danger ihe Dauntless. "I must say," whispered Dick to Ned (this was when the Indtans had them tied to a tree and were piling grass and slicks round it so as to bum them alive>, “I must say, old man. things begin to look critical. Unless we can think of some way out of this fix, we are lost."

Notice, please. this word “lost": in reality they would be worse łhan lost They'd be    But in this class of lit-

erature the word Josi“ is used to cover up a mulliiude of ihings. And. of course. Dick docs think of a way oul. It occurs to him that by moving his hands he can slip off the thongs that bind him. set Ned free, !eap from the tree to the back of a horse. of two horses. and then by jumping over the edge of o chasm inlo ihe forest a thousand feet below, they can find lhemselves tn what is called “compiirative safety.” Alter w hich the story goes calmly on, obliv»ous of the horrible scene that ncarfy brought it to an cnd.

But as the modern parem and the modern teacher have gjown alarmed. the art of story-łelling for children has got to be softened down. There must be no morę horror and blood and violent denth. Away with the gistnts and the ogres! Lei os have mstead the slories of the animal kingdom in which Wee-

is

Co-rP& v. JWł _

j-nt' Łci^d-

hn.C!J /; r^Or^<_aCiŁ£i ^ ^

«

27

29

Ml

c

.11