| The Cat and the Mouse | In Firelight Stories |
| The Little Gray Pony | Maud Lindsay, in Mother Stories |
| The Little Boy Who Found his Fortune | In Firelight Stories |
| The Story of Ibbity | In Firelight Stories |
| The Cat, the Cock and the Fox | Kate Douglas Wiggin, in Tales of Laughter |
| Tom Tit Tot | Kate Douglas Wiggin, in Tales of Laughter |
| The Little Pink Rose | Sara Cone Bryant, in Best Stories to Tell to Children |
| The Little Traveler | Maud Lindsay, in Mother Stories |
| Tom, the Water Baby | Charles Kingsley, adapted in For the Children’s Hour |
CHAPTER X
STIMULATING THE EMOTIONS BY MEANS OF A STORY
A GROUP of school children recently started quarreling in the school yard during the morning recess time. The storm center was two small boys who had fallen out over a game of marbles. The entire class took sides; for Edgar and against Edgar, for Lawrence and against Lawrence and proceeded to wage individual warfare like a miniature army. Even the ringing of the school bell failed to stop the quarrel. The children took their seats unwillingly and with sour faces carrying the feud with them into the classroom.
The teacher was a wise young person who believed in attacking the matter of discipline along the lines of least resistance. She saw immediately that a general feeling of anger possessed the children; no one child could be blamed. So she set about creating an opposite, general feeling as quickly as possible. Setting aside other work for ten minutes she announced a story. Instantly, the tension was loosened. By the time she had finished Grimm’s story of “The Pot and the Kettle,” in which, as a climax, neither is able to taunt the other with being black, the children’s anger was gone, peace was restored, and the children were smiling. An emotional crisis had been successfully met by means of a story.
Our emotions, that is, our feelings of anger, joy, sorrow, hatred, jealousy, and love are older than we are. They may almost be classed as instinctive, for they manifest themselves so early. The baby gives examples of emotional explosions in his first month. These feelings have their rise in mental conditions over which we have no control; they are not dependent upon sensory stimuli; they are isolated, incoherent. They take hold of the personality of the subject in a hypnotic fashion, for the period of the feeling’s mastery we are anger, love, sorrow, or whatever emotion enthralls us.
The psychologists classify and subdivide the emotions into many divisions but the story teller is most concerned with making one elastic, wide classification of a child’s emotions; those that are concerned with bodily expression. A child is happy, he laughs; he is sad and he cries; he is angry, he fights; he is afraid, and he gives active evidence of cowardice. Because, during the time of his obsession by one of these emotions, a child is so completely mastered by his feelings, we discover that we can create for him by story suggestion a similar mental state.
The story which a child feels is going to be a force in his emotional development.
I came across one of my own, old Mother Goose books not long ago with the leaves that held the story of the “Babes in the Wood” pinned securely together. It told me as nothing else could have done the emotion caused in a child’s mind by this gruesome tale. I was afraid when I read the story. I felt all the terror experienced by the Babes in the Wood. My fear emotion was so unpleasant that I had pinned the story out of my sight. I wanted to feel some other emotion. Other children have similar emotions.