However, even among racial tales the narrator will come upon pitfalls unless judgment mark his selection. The conditions governing his struggle for existence gave primitive man a harsh standard, and consequently his literature is often tinged with a vindictive spirit wholly out of keeping with the ideals of today. Stories in which cruelty, revenge, and bloodshed have a large part should never be told to the young child, no matter what their age or origin. “Blue Beard” is a good example. Although itself a classic, and a recital of the deeds of a French ruler whose name is a synonym of infamy, this tale and all similar tales should be tabooed from the world of little people.
Charles Dickens was the first man in England whose voice carried weight to plead for fairy tales as a part of the school curriculum, and within a few years Dickens found it necessary to oppose the usage of stories that were corrupting the children of the British Isles. Because they were urged to tell fairy tales, unthinking teachers told any that they found, even those in which all the savagery of early man was portrayed. Accounts of beheadings and man-eatings became part of the daily program, and many acts of cruelty among children were traceable to these stories. Instead of teaching forbearance, courtesy, consideration of the poor and aged, and abhorrence of brute force, which the wisely chosen fairy tale will do, story-telling was turning the children into young savages. If the dominant element in a story is cruelty, strike that tale from the list; for even though the deed be punished in the end, the fact that the attention of an unkind child is focused upon cruel acts often leads him to experiment and see what will happen. And I plead also for the elimination from the story-teller’s list of every tale in which an unkind or drunken parent plays a part, even though the tale itself be a literary gem. The father or mother is the child’s ideal, and it is not the mission of the narrator to shatter that ideal. Even if little folk have discovered that there are delinquent parents in the world, it is a mental shock to have that fact emphasized, and the story that shocks in any way had better be left untold.