We are now coming to the most important part of the question of Story-Telling, to which all the foregoing remarks have been gradually leading, and that is the Effects of these stories upon the child, apart from the dramatic joy he experiences in listening to them, which would in itself be quite enough to justify us in the telling. But, since I have urged upon teachers the extreme importance of giving so much time to the manner of telling and of bestowing so much care on the selection of the material, it is right that they should expect some permanent results, or else those who are not satisfied with the mere enjoyment of the children will seek other methods of appeal—and it is to them that I most specially dedicate this chapter.
I think we are on the threshold of the re-discovery of an old truth, that the Dramatic Presentation is the quickest and surest, because it is the only one with which memory plays no tricks. If a thing has appeared before us in a vital form, nothing can really destroy it; it is because things are often given in a blurred, faint light that they gradually fade out of our memory. A very keen scientist was deploring to me, on one occasion, the fact that stories were told so much in the schools, to the detriment of science, for which she claimed the same indestructible element that I recognise in the best-told stories. Being very much interested in her point of view, I asked her to tell me, looking back on her school days, what she could remember as standing out from other less clear information. After thinking some little time over the matter, she said with some embarrassment, but with a candour that did her much honour:
“Well, now I come to think of it, it was the story of Cinderella.”
Now, I am not holding any brief for this story in particular. I think the reason it was remembered was because of the dramatic form in which it was presented to her, which fired her imagination and kept the memory alight. I quite realise that a scientific fact might also have been easily remembered if it was presented in the form of a successful chemical experiment: but this also has something of the dramatic appeal and will be remembered on that account.
Sully says: “We cannot understand the fascination of a story for children save in remembering that for their young minds, quick to imagine, and unversed in abstract reflection, words are not dead things but winged, as the old Greeks called them.”[37]
The Red Queen (in “Through the Looking-Glass”) was more psychological than she knew when she made the memorable statement: “When once you've said a thing that fixes it, and you must take the consequences.”
In Curtin's Introduction to “Myths and Folk Tales of the Russians,” he says:
“I remember well the feeling roused in my mind at the mention or sight of the name Lucifer during the early years of my life. It stood for me as the name of a being stupendous, dreadful in moral deformity, lurid, hideous and mighty. I remember the surprise which, when I had grown somewhat older and began to study Latin, I came upon the name in Virgil where it means light-bringer—the herald of the Sun.”
Plato has said: “That the End of Education should be the training by suitable habits of the Instincts of Virtue in the Child.”