The Art of the Story-Teller

by Marie L. Shedlock

"In nursery rhymes the child is entertained with all the pageant of the world. It walks in fairy gardens, and for it the singing birds pass. All the King's horses and all the King's men pass before it in their glorious array. Craftsmen of all sorts, bakers, confectioners, silversmiths, blacksmiths are busy for it with all their arts and mysteries, as at the court of an eastern King."

In insisting upon the value of this escape from the commonplace, I cannot prove the importance of it more clearly than by showing what may happen to a child who is deprived of his birthright by having none of the fairy tale element presented to him. In "Father and Son," Mr. Edmund Gosse says:

"Meanwhile, capable as I was of reading, I found my greatest pleasure in the pages of books. The range of these was limited, for storybooks of every description were sternly excluded. No fiction of any kind, religious or secular, was admitted into the house. In this it was to my Mother, not to my Father, that the prohibition was due. She had a remarkable, I confess, to me somewhat unaccountable impression that to 'tell a story,' that is, to compose fictitious narrative of any king, was a sin. . . . Nor would she read the chivalrous tales in the verse of Sir Walter Scott, obstinately alleging that they were not true. She would nothing but lyrical and subjective poetry. As a child, however, she had possessed a passion for making up stories, and so considerable a skill in it, that she was constantly being begged to indulge others with its exercise. . . . 'When I was a very little child,' she says, 'I used to amuse myself and my brothers with inventing stories such as I had read. Having, I suppose, a naturally restless mind and busy imagination, this soon became the chief pleasure of my life. Unfortunately, my brothers were always fond of encouraging this propensity, and I found in Taylor, my maid, a still greater tempter. I had not known there was any harm in it, until Miss Shore, a Calvinistic governess, finding it out, lectured me severely and told me it was wicked. From that time forth, I considered that to invent a story of any kind was a sin. . . . But the longing to do so grew with violence. . . . The simplicity of Truth was not enough for me. I must needs embroider imagination upon it, and the vanity and wickedness which disgraced my heart are more than I am able to express.' This [the author, her son, adds] is surely a very painful instance of the repression of an instinct."

In contrast to the stifling of the imagination, it is good to recall the story of the great Hermite who, having listened to the discussion of the Monday sitting at the Académie des Sciences (Insitut de France) as to the best way to teach the "young idea how to shoot" in the direction of mathematical genius, said: Cultivez l'imagination, messieurs. Tout est Là. Si vous voulez des mathé maticiens, donnez à vos enfants à lire—des Contes de Fées."

Another important effect of the story is to develop at an early age sympathy for children of other countries where conditions are different from our own.

I have so constantly to deal with the question of confusion between truth and fiction in the minds of children that it might be useful to offer here an example of the way they make the distinction for themselves.

Mrs. Ewing says on this subject:

"If there are young intellects so imperfect as to be incapable of distinguishing between fancy and falsehood, it is most desirable to develop in them the power to do so, but, as a rule, in childhood, we appreciate the distinction with a vivacity which as elders our care- clogged memories fail to recall."

Mr. P. A. Barnett, in his book on the "Common-sense of Education," says, alluding to fairy-tales:

"Children will act them but not act upon them, and they will not accept the incidents as part of their effectual belief. They will imagine, to be sure, grotesque worlds, full of admirable and interesting personages to whom strange things might have happened. So much the better: this largeness of imagination is one of the possessions that distinguish the better nurtured child from others less fortunate."