“The Child is wholly absorbed in his play, and yet under the ebb and flow of thought and feeling like still water under wind-swept waves, he has the knowledge that it is pretence after all. Behind the sham ‘I’ that takes part in the game, stands the unchanged ‘I’ which regards the sham ‘I’ with quiet superiority.”
Queyrat speaks of play as one of the distinct phases of a child's imagination; it is “essentially a metamorphosis of reality, a transformation of places and things.”
Now to return to the point which Mrs. Ewing makes, namely, that we should develop in normal children the power of distinguishing between Truth and Falsehood.
I should suggest including two or three stories which would test that power in children, and if they fail to realise the difference between romancing and telling lies then it is evident that they need special attention and help along this line. I give the titles of two stories of this kind in the collection at the end of the book.[42]
So far we have dealt only with the negative results of stories, but there are more important effects, and I am persuaded that if we are careful in our choice of stories, and artistic in our presentation (so that the truth is framed, so to speak, in the memory), we can unconsciously correct evil tendencies in children which they only recognise in themselves when they have already criticised them in the characters of the story. I have sometimes been misunderstood on this point, therefore I should like to make it quite clear. I do not mean that stories should take the place entirely of moral or direct teaching, but that on many occasions they could supplement and strengthen moral teaching, because the dramatic appeal to the imagination is quicker than the moral appeal to the conscience. A child will often resist the latter lest it should make him uncomfortable or appeal to his personal sense of responsibility: it is often not in his power to resist the former, because it has taken possession of him before he is aware of it.
As a concrete example, I offer three verses from a poem entitled “A Ballad for a Boy,” written some twelve years ago by W. Cory, an Eton master. The whole poem is to be found in a book of poems known as “Ionica” (published by George Allen and Co.).
The poem describes a fight between two ships, the French ship Téméraire and the English ship Quebec. The English ship was destroyed by fire. Farmer, the captain, was killed, and the officers taken prisoners:
“They dealt with us as brethren, they mourned for Farmer dead;
And as the wounded captives passed, each Breton bowed the head.
Then spoke the French lieutenant, 'Twas the fire that won, not we: