The over-strained, anæmic, goody-good story is likely to breed up a generation of canting hypocrites. The little child is much occupied, it is true, with the task of being good, and he is a great admirer of the good people in the stories. There is room in children’s literature for the rather obviously moral tale, if it be not too often presented and if it be really charming. From this point of view, Constance D’Arcy Mackay’s book of plays called “The House of the Heart and Other Tales” is a suggestive contribution to children’s drama.
For the younger children the story with plenty of action, often with animals as characters, and with happy ending has proved best. The story with less joyous “inevitable ending” is, however, not to be excluded; life is not to be distorted. Besides, not all sad-ending stories are negative in effect, leaving the child knowing only “what not to do” rather than “what to do.” A story like Hans Andersen’s “Daisy,” for example, induces constructive inference and effect.
The Principles of the Art of Telling Stories
Story-telling is one of the most spontaneous of the social arts. Yet it is an art, governed by at least partially discerned principles. Analysis of them will be helpful to the story-teller, but only in so far as he grasps the fundamental principle that story telling among the speech arts, like wood-carving among the manual arts, indeed, even to a greater degree, must be kept what it is by nature, apparently without art, naïve and unelaborate.
Getting the Story
The story-teller must wholly take into himself the life of which he speaks, must let it live and operate in himself freely.
—Froebel.
The story-teller must himself possess the story before attempting to give it to another. This sounds obvious, but it is not granted in practice. Much poor schoolroom story-telling is evidently “unprepared.” People born with a natural turn for story-telling, and those who in their childhood heard real story-telling, need to make less preparation than others; but all story-tellers need to make preparation. Much of the story-telling masquerading as such is quackery, showing neither genius nor study. Even in the very early days when formal instruction in story-telling was unknown, the wandering story-teller watched constantly to make his performance tell, modifying his method in the light of its effect upon his hearers. Later on, in the Middle Ages, the court story-teller was professionally trained (and also handsomely remunerated and given the place of honor at the banquet). Intellectual study of the story will not, by the way, destroy spontaneity. It may dash it temporarily. Coleridge tells us that his professor in poetics did not hesitate to subject to the scrutiny of the microscope the most delicate flowers and fruits of fancy. (English in the schools has suffered from the results, in its teachers, of the “literary affectation,” which condemns attempt at definite English scholarship.) Let us give all outlet possible to natural ability, and to the inspiration of time and audience; but let us not neglect the forethought of preparation. Shakespeare did not, Sir Henry Irving did not, Duse does not. Some teachers fall back on reading the story; this has its own place, but it cannot take the place of telling. The belief that story-telling should be studied is gaining ground in a most convincing quarter, the home. The office of motherhood is deeply associated with things done instinctively right; but the mother herself at mothers’ clubs and elsewhere is seeking instruction in this chief mother art.
To get the story, relax your imagination and sympathy and let them go out to it. Sit down with it and read and re-read it, or listen to it, and brood upon it until you absorb its life, until you think and feel and move in its being. Conjure up its scene and people and happening.