(3) A patronizing story-teller is as great an obstruction. His manner is unctuous and “glawming.” It dwarfs the listener, belittling him and undermining his frankness. Hear how the great queen did in Morris’s tale:
“Then she held him a little season on her weary and happy breast,
And she told him of Sigmund and Volsung and the best sprung from the best;
She spake to the new-born baby as one who might understand.”
The spirit of the italicized words should be the story-teller’s guide. Watch the child the first time he comes under the sway of the patronizing story-teller, how he eyes the babying smile meant to be engaging, how he holds aloof. The story-teller must trust the child and trust the story. He chooses the story for its suitability in arousing and directing the child’s imagination, sympathies, or æsthetic sense. Having made the selection on this basis, his part now is to be, not officious meddler, no matter how well meaning, but communicator.
The patronizing story-teller is inclined to “thin out” the story. There is a proper kind of remaking allowable in telling a story or in fitting it to younger or older audiences. If too much is necessary, the story is probably not in any degree suitable; it might better be left until the children are older. There are for the meantime plenty of stories more nearly available. Some modes of simplification of the content allowable are: omission of details in description and omission of minor characters and incidents, in some cases to be added later; preparatory talk or explanation, reduced to its very lowest terms; conversation or explanation after the telling, to be followed soon by another telling. The form may be made easier by simplification of the complicated sentences or unchildlike modes of speech, by very sparing use of running explanation, by use of roundabout easier phrase to be replaced by the directly descriptive word.
The power and the glory for the listening child are more surely in the message as the seer, yourself or another story inventor, saw and delivered it, than in any garbled paraphrase of it, all that many attempting story-telling can manage. Their opportunity lies in the field of interpretation, unless they are genuinely engaged in changing the story or in themselves telling a different story or in truly artistic simplification. Have faith in the little child: in his sensibility to artistic fitness, in his intelligence, in his ready sympathy. Have faith in the story.
Best of all modes, the story may be simplified, not by making it over into something else, but by making it into itself through interpretation.
(4) Some story-tellers bring an uninformed self to the story. The root of their difficulty is failure to see and feel the child world. So important is the principle of insight that it will be taken up at length, under the heading spontaneity.
(5) A story-teller lacking in artistic sensibility does not discern the story as a form of art, though a naïve form. He intrudes between the story and the child what, for lack of a better term, the writer called a “sledge-hammer” self, or a didactic self. It resorts to pedagogical pounding, dealing largely in stress on words and in the falling inflection. It vainly attempts to force the story and the child into contact through the intellect, or sometimes the bugaboo of conscience, instead of by the open pathway made by freeing the spirit of the story.