Now, not all these results will appear in all the children. Some of them the teacher will not see in any child of certain classes. They are not easily ponderable and measurable--even less so than those of other disciplines. It is easy to know when a child can multiply and divide. It is not easy to know when he is in a hopeful stage of literary experience. But it is only in the direction of the results we have been discussing that the teacher of literature can always hopefully work. CHAPTER III THE KINDS OF LITERATURE AND THE ELEMENTS OF LITERATURE SERVICEABLE IN THE ELEMENTARY SCHOOL In modern literary study we have been placing much emphasis upon the kinds or species of literary production. In the light of the aesthetics of our day and the newer psychology of art we have been learning much concerning the nature, the function, and one might say the habits of these species. These studies have coincided in time, most opportunely for the teacher of literature, with those that have aimed at the establishing of the needs and tastes of the elementary and adolescent ages. There is a real satisfaction born of the confidence one feels in approaching his problem of choosing literature for children from these two largest points of view--that of the species or fundamental kinds of literature on the one hand, that of the child's actual needs and tastes on the other. This method of approach seems to put the whole field adequately before his view, and to give authority and certainty to his final choice. As a matter of fact there are certain characteristics invariable and inevitable in each of the five species of literature--epic, drama, lyric, fiction, essay--that tell us at once something of its fitness for our purpose. The essay, for example in its typical form is by its essential nature inappropriate. The literary essay, as it is actually constituted, is in subject-matter too abstract and remote, in mood too complex and intricate, and in style too allusive and evasive. Its invitation is to a region for which a child has neither chart nor map. The essay rests upon old, old presuppositions; these very presuppositions it is that must be slowly and through many experiences built into the mental life of the child. To be sure, there are a few bits called essays--such as certain of Lamb's more anecdotal papers, some of the narrative numbers of _The Spectator_, nature-studies with marked literary qualities like some of those of John Burroughs--that the grades can understand and enjoy. But these are not typical essays, and they have not the true essay spirit. This spirit, which creates for itself an atmosphere hard to describe, compounded as it is of universal knowingness, ironic indirection, delicately intellectual emotion, and faintly emotional intellectuality--this spirit is quite alien to childhood.