Is its point of unreality an idea which we want to give permanence in the child’s mind?
Is the story told in a series of such familiar, known images that there is material in it for stimulating the child’s constructive imagination?
If a fanciful story survives these three tests, we may be sure that it is perfect.
There is Hans Andersen’s story of “The Faithful Tin Soldier.” Its climax is told in a lesson of heroism and faithfulness, qualities that we wish to make permanent in the child’s mind through the medium of the imagination. And how are these qualities presented? We find that they are made real to children by means of familiar settings; a little boy is playing with new toys upon his birthday, we see the child going to bed, there is the coming-alive of the toys in the play-room, the tin soldier’s experiences in the street, his return to the kitchen. Every child knows toys, a birthday, a play-room, a city street in the rain, a kitchen; but out of these patches of gray, every-day pigment Andersen paints for children a new, colored picture of fancy. Presented in terms of the real we have the unreal; a live tin soldier who is as heroic and faithful as we wish our children to be. This is a perfect imaginative story, a bit of unreality which we wish to make real for children and told in terms of child experience.
Alice Brown’s wonderful allegory, “The Gradual Fairy,” is also perfect in its theme and construction. Its hero, the Green Goblin, wishes to become a fairy. The story of his changing his ugly colors for those of the flowers when he promises never to hurt them again, losing his harsh, shrill voice by being kind to the brook, and so gradually finding beauty, is a marvellously compelling bit of imagery to leave with a child and it is told in familiar, right-at-hand word pictures. In the several chapters of Jean Ingelow’s, “Mopsa, the Fairy,” child hearers are transported to familiar places, but places where the unusual, the beautiful happens. The story tells of the Winding Up Places where tired-out horses are put in green pastures and are allowed to grow back to colt-hood, and where weary working folks are wound up, like clocks, and given such vigor that they never run down again.
Charles Kingsley, from the reality of a dirty chimney sweep and a sooty chimney, takes children voyaging into his paradise of fancy under the sea. Eugene Field gives children a permanent picture of Santa Claus in his legend of “Claus.” There is the little lad, Claus, up in the Northland, finding his greatest happiness in carving wooden dolls and animals for the children. When his parents disappear, Claus lights his father’s forge fire and in the wonder light of the Northern star pledges himself to create child happiness. The elves bringing him gifts of metal and precious stones for his work, the forest giving him its trees and greens, the reindeer drawing his sleigh full of toys, the snow and frost speeding him on his way—these give children the true meaning of Claus’ world saint-ship in terms of the imagination.
Apply this threefold test to every imaginative story and your selection will be infallible.
What does the story image?
Do I want to vivify this image for my children?
How does it stimulate the imagination?