Just in the same way that an actor thinks it worth while to go through so many years' training to fit him for the stage, although dramatic literature is also only one branch of general literature. The region of Storyland is the legitimate stage for children. They crave for drama as we do, and because there are comparatively few good story-tellers, children do not have their dramatic needs satisfied. What is the result? We either take them to dramatic performances for grown-up people, or we have children's theatres where the pieces, charming as they may be, are of necessity deprived of the essential elements which constitute a drama—or they are shrivelled up to suit the capacity of the child. Therefore it would seem wiser, whilst the children are quite young, to keep them to the simple presentation of stories, because, their imagination being keener at that period, they have the delight of the inner vision and they do not need, as we do, the artificial stimulus provided by the machinery of the stage.[48]
Question II. What is to be done if a child asks you: Is a story true?
I hope I shall not be considered Utopian in my ideas if I say that it is quite easy, even with small children, to teach them that the seeing of truth is a relative matter which depends on the eyes of the seer. If we were not afraid to tell our children that all through life there are grown-up people who do not see things that others see, their own difficulties would be helped.
In his Imagination Créatrice, Queyrat says: “To get down into the recesses of a child's mind, one would have to become even as he is; we are reduced to interpreting that child in the terms of an adult. The children we observe live and grow in a civilised community, and the result of this is that the development of their imagination is rarely free or complete, for as soon as it rises beyond the average level, the rationalistic education of parents and schoolmasters at once endeavours to curb it. It is restrained in its flight by an antagonistic power which treats it as a kind of incipient madness.”
It is quite easy to show children that if you keep things where they belong they are true with regard to each other, but that if you drag these things out of the shadowy atmosphere of the “make-believe,” and force them into the land of actual facts, the whole thing is out of gear.
To take a concrete example: The arrival of the coach made from a pumpkin and driven by mice is entirely in harmony with the Cinderella surroundings, and I have never heard one child raise any question of the difficulty of travelling in such a coach or of the uncertainty of mice in drawing it. But suggest to the child that this diminutive vehicle could be driven among the cars of Broadway, or amongst the motor omnibuses in the Strand, and you would bring confusion at once into his mind.
Having once grasped this, the children will lose the idea that Fairy Stories are just for them, and not for their elders, and from this they will go on to see that it is the child-like mind of the Poet and Seer that continues to appreciate these things: that it is the dull, heavy person whose eyes so soon become dim and unable to see any more the visions which were once his own.
In his essay on Poetry and Life (Glasgow, 1889), Professor Bradley says:
“It is the effect of poetry, not only by expressing emotion but in other ways also, to bring life into the dead mass of our experience, and to make the world significant.”
This applies to children as well as to adults. There may come to the child in the story-hour, by some stirring poem or dramatic narration, a sudden flash of the possibilities of Life which he had not hitherto realised in the even course of school experience.