Oh, how he can pound.
Here’s the baby’s music,
Clapping, clapping so.
Here are baby’s soldiers
Standing in a row—”
As the child grows beyond the age when Mother Goose and Finger Plays appeal to him, he still finds his greatest interest in those stories which stimulate his acquired sensory images. The mental operation of apperception described in the last chapter is so inclusive a process, covering, as it must of necessity, memory and perception, that it explains the appeal of the sense story to the mind of a child. Many of the stories quoted at the end of the chapter as being of universal interest to all children find their common points of interest in their sense pictures, so quickly grasped and so warmly welcomed by the child mind whose sense doors are always flung wide open.
It is to be questioned whether or not the story of “The Little Red Hen” would have been awarded such immortality if its heroine had been a plain hen and not red. Having been dyed with the crimson pigment of the imagination, however, by some old-world story teller, she has taken her cheerful, cackling way through the streets of childhood, an undying, classic fowl of fiction because she is colored. So it is with Elizabeth Harrison’s wonderful allegory of “The Little Gray Grandmother.” She might have been described in the story as a spirit, a fairy, a mythical character who influenced for good the lives of Wilhelm, Beata and the others. But instead of describing her invisibility—Miss Harrison paints it, colors her story heroine with the shades of intangible things. She is a little gray grandmother and her clothes are sea fog and her veil is of smoke. She is an animated part of the seashore home and is made of gray mist. What could be more artistic than the sense appeal of this story?
Why do children—all children—listen, gaping and ecstatic, to the account of the many and hazardous adventures of the Gingerbread Boy? Why do they beg to have the story told over again, even after they have heard it so many times that they know it by heart. Its universal popularity is not due to its folklore quality. Neither is it due to its plot and treatment, although these undoubtedly strengthen it. Its big appeal, however, is to the child’s sense of taste. The story arouses tasting images in the child’s mind, that are pleasurable and strong.
... “A chocolate jacket and cinnamon seeds for buttons! His eyes were made of fine, fat currants; his mouth was made of rose-colored sugar and he had a gay little cap of orange-sugar candy”—Sara Cone Bryant says in describing her Gingerbread Man. So, from this delectable, luscious paragraph about his make-up, to the climax of the story when the Gingerbread Man is devoured by the fox, the child hearers eat in imagination all the way.
“Why the Chimes Rang” makes a different and more ethical sense appeal to the child’s mind. The story stimulates in the listeners a deep interest in the old chime of bells that has hung silent for so long a time in the tower. One longs to hear them and waits anxiously for the miracle that will start their pealing. At the story climax, when an unselfish offering laid upon the altar works the wonder, it is possible to listen, in imagination, to the bells’ sweet music.