“I never realised before,” she said, “how glad the Greeks must have been to sit down even inside a horse, when they had been standing for eleven years.”
III.—The danger of introducing unfamiliar words. This is the very opposite danger of the one to which I have just alluded; it is the taking for granted that children are acquainted with the meaning of certain words upon which turns some important point in the story. We must not introduce (without at least a passing explanation) words which, if not rightly understood, would entirely alter the picture we wish to present.
I had once promised to tell stories to an audience of Irish peasants, and I should like to state here that, though my travels have brought me into touch with almost every kind of audience, I have never found one where the atmosphere is so “self-prepared” as in that of a group of Irish peasants. To speak to them (especially on the subject of Fairy-tales) is like playing on a delicate harp: the response is so quick and the sympathy is so keen. Of course the subject of Fairy-tales is one which is completely familiar to them and comes into their every-day life. They have a feeling of awe with regard to fairies, which in some parts of Ireland is very deep.[5]
On this particular occasion I had been warned by an artist friend who had kindly promised to sing songs between the stories, that my audience would be of varying age and almost entirely illiterate. Many of the older men and women, who could neither read nor write, had never been beyond their native village. I was warned to be very simple in my language and to explain any difficult words which might occur in the particular Indian story I had chosen for that night, namely, “The Tiger, The Jackal and the Brahman.”[6] It happened that the older portion of the audience had scarcely ever seen even the picture of wild animals. I profited by the advice, and offered a word of explanation with regard to the Tiger and the Jackal. I also explained the meaning of the word Brahman—at a proper distance, however, lest the audience should class him with wild animals. I then went on with my story, in the course of which I mentioned the Buffalo. In spite of the warning I had received, I found it impossible not to believe that the name of this animal would be familiar to any audience. I therefore went on with the sentence containing this word, and ended it thus: “And then the Brahman went a little further and met an old Buffalo turning a wheel.”
The next day, whilst walking down the village street, I entered into conversation with a thirteen-year-old girl who had been in my audience the night before, and who began at once to repeat in her own words the Indian story in question. When she came to the particular sentence I have just quoted, I was greatly startled to hear her version, which ran thus: “And the priest went on a little further, and he met another old gentleman pushing a wheelbarrow.” I stopped her at once, and not being able to identify the sentence as part of the story I had told, I questioned her a little more closely. I found that the word Buffalo had evidently conveyed to her mind an old “buffer” whose name was “Lo” (probably taken to be an Indian form of appellation, to be treated with tolerance though it might not be Irish in sound). Then, not knowing of any wheel more familiarly than that attached to a barrow, the young narrator completed the picture in her own mind—which, doubtless, was a vivid one—but one must admit that it had lost something of the Indian atmosphere which I had intended to gather about it.
IV.—The danger of claiming the co-operation of the class by means of questions. The danger in this case is more serious for the teacher than the child, who rather enjoys the process and displays a fatal readiness to give any sort of answer if only he can play a part in the conversation. If we could depend on the children giving the kind of answer we expect, all might go well, and the danger would be lessened; but children have a perpetual way of frustrating our hopes in this direction, and of landing us in unexpected bypaths from which it is not always easy to return to the main road without a very violent reaction. As illustrative of this, I quote from “The Madness of Philip,” by Josephine Dodge Daskam Bacon, a truly delightful essay on Child Psychology, in the guise of the lightest of stories.
The scene takes place in a Kindergarten—where a bold and fearless visitor has undertaken to tell a story on the spur of the moment to a group of restless children.
She opens thus: “Yesterday, children, as I came out of my yard, what do you think I saw?”
The elaborately concealed surprise in store was so obvious that Marantha rose to the occasion and suggested “an el'phunt.”
“Why, no. Why should I see an elephant in my yard? It was not nearly so big as that—it was a little thing.”