The Art of the Story-Teller

by Marie L. Shedlock

The following passage from Stevenson's essay on "Child Play" [38] will furnish an instance of children's aptitude for creating their own dramatic atmosphere:

"When my cousin and I took our porridge of a morning, we had a device to enliven the course of a meal. He ate his with sugar, and explained it to be a country continually buried under snow. I took mine with milk, and explained it to be country suffering gradual inundation. You can imagine us exchanging bulletins; how here was an island still unsubmerged, here a valley not yet covered with snow; what inventions were made; how his population lived in cabins on perches and traveled on stilts, and how mine was always in boats; how the interest grew furious as the last corner of safe ground was cut off on all sides and grew smaller every moment; and how, in fine, the food was of altogether secondary importance, and might even have been nauseous, so long as we seasoned it with these dreams. But perhaps the most exciting moments I ever had over a meal were in the case of calf's foot jelly. It was hardly possible not to believe—and you may be quite sure, so far from trying, I did all I could to favor the illusion—that some part of it was hollow and that sooner or later my spoon would lay open the secret tabernacle of the golden rock. There, might some Red- Beard await his hour; there might one find the treasures of the Forty Thieves. And so I quarried on slowly, with bated breath, savoring the interest. Believe me, I had little palate left for the jelly; and though I preferred the taste when I tool cream with it, I used often to go without because the cream dimmed the transparent fractures."

In his work on "Imagination," Ribot says: "The free initiative of children is always superior to the imitations we pretend to make for them."

The passage from Robert Louis Stevenson becomes more clear from a scientific point of view when taken in connection with one from Karl Groos' book on the "Psychology of Animal Play":

"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 pretense 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 realize 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.[39]

Thus 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 recognize in themselves only when they have already criticized them in the characters of the story. I have sometimes been misunderstood on this point, and, 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."[40]