CHAPTER XI
IMAGINATION AND THE FAIRY STORY
WHAT is child imagination?
The Puritans thought the imaginative person was a liar. Old Salem said that such a vision as is conjured into reality by the imagination constituted witchcraft. Even to-day there are parents and teachers who believe that the child who has the power to pierce the veil of reality and see into a beyond is a dreamer who lacks stability of mind and practicality of purpose. But the unexplainable power by means of which a human mind grasps a bundle of bare, dry facts, sorts them over speculatively and then pieces them together into a new, luminous bit of mind stuff, different from anything seen, or heard or handled by that personality before—this is the miracle working of what we know as constructive imagination. Edison chaining electricity and perpetuating the human voice imaged these wonders before he realized them. Moissant saw air craft through the telescope of his mind before he built bird machines. Jane Addams saw, felt, imaged herself alone, poor and an outcast before she could successfully help her fellows. In adult life, the power to image the unreal, the power to feel with another personality spells genius, as well as imagination.
Child imagination is a kaleidoscopic mind method of seeing, and piecing, and patching together ideas gathered by the senses, and making of them a new concept.
No child ever saw a live fairy, but any child will explain a fairy to you, quite plausibly, because he has formed his own fairy concept. A being with hair like his favorite small girl friend, and the stature of his little sister’s doll, having wings like the dragon fly he saw last summer and dressed in something colored and soft and rustling like his mother’s dresses, a person capable of doing all that the story books say she can do—this is a child’s mind picture of a fairy.
No one of us ever saw Heaven but all of us can describe it. A place of this world’s grass and flowers and music and familiar, beloved personalities transplanted, renewed, translated—this is our manner of describing, of seeing Heaven.
The child’s method of imaging a fairy and our method of imaging Heaven are identical. From known, experienced, familiar perceptions we make a new, as yet unexperienced concept. If we want a child to see Heaven, we must help him to see fairies. Success, happiness, efficiency, belief—all these in adult life are dependent upon the proper stimulating of the child’s constructive imagination.
A good fairy story is the best stimulus to child imagination.
Not any fairy story, selected with slight discrimination and told to a child just because it is a story of fancy, however. “Blue Beard,” “Ali Baba,” “The Cruel Stepmother” do little but cause child nightmares and give children ideas of cruelty, vengeance and crime. These concepts will present themselves to the child soon enough in the daily newspapers. Let us shut them out of the story hour. In selecting a fairy story to tell to children, we will first analyze it with exceeding care, asking ourselves these questions in regard to it:
What constitutes the imaginative element of this story?