That whiff of odor from a city flower cart brings suddenly to my mind an incident that I had not been cognizant of for years—the memory of a certain long-ago day when I purloined my Grandmother’s scissors and cut off two of my curls to make a wig for a hairless rag doll. What is the connection between this day of badness of my childhood and a dingy city flower wagon? Ah, I have it! There was a pot of Martha Washington geraniums in the room where I sat when I cut my hair. My small, serge sleeve brushed the leaves as I held the curls triumphantly to the light and the pungent odor found a permanent place in my mind, side by side with the other memory, ineffaceable, always ready to produce a recall.
Dr. Van Dyke once said that if he were able to paint a picture of Memory, he would picture her asleep in a bed of mint. He illustrated the value of sensory stimuli in fiction. One gauge of a perfectly constructed piece of fiction is its sense content. Does it include such writing as will make the reader see, taste, smell and hear? So, in stories for children we must apply the same test.
A child’s story, to interest, should have a strong sense appeal.
Many of the old, handed-down jingles and folk tales are full of eating and drinking, smelling delectable odors, hearing the sounds of child life and seeing over again child scenes. Therein lies their world appeal and the reason for their ancient and obvious popularity.
“The Queen of Hearts,
She made some tarts.”
“Little Tommy Tucker, sings for his supper;
What shall he eat? White bread and butter.”
“Ding, dong bell, Pussy’s in the well.”
“Hark, hark, the dogs do bark,
The beggars are coming to town.”
“Rockaby baby, your cradle is green.”
“The rose is red,
The violet blue,
Sugar is sweet
And so are you.”
One might go on indefinitely quoting lines of Mother Goose that tickle a child’s fancy and are undying in their appeal for the sole reason that they are sensual in the broader understanding of the term. They include simple, direct references to the mental concepts that the child has gained through his senses. Practically all that the normal, natural child has accomplished, mentally, up to the age of three or four years, has been to note bright colors, to handle everything he has come in contact with,—not, as so many persons suppose, for purposes of mischievous destruction, but rather to touch each object and make its feeling an integral part of his ego,—to eat and drink and to use his nostrils as a dog does. What more natural than that his beginnings in English should have for their basis a sense content that will help the child to name, put into words his previously acquired but unnamed sense impressions?
Miss Emilie Poulsson’s finger plays for little children have for their basic appeal the stimulating of a child’s ability to recall previously acquired sense impressions. In addition, the finger movements with which the child illustrates these rhymes give the added association of the sense of touch to strengthen and vivify the child’s interest in and memory of the rhyme stories. To illustrate:
“Here’s a ball for baby,
Big and soft and round.
Here’s the baby’s hammer,