Yet in many homes story-telling is almost unknown because the mother does not deem it of sufficient value to make some sacrifice of her time and provide for it. She does not know that the story-telling mothers of the past have been those whose children have risen up and called them blessed; that the confidence of their boys and girls, won around the fireside as old-time tales were told, has been held unshaken to the end.
The force that in the long ago moved men to great achievement has lost none of its power. Twentieth-century children respond to stories as eagerly as did boys and girls by the sea of Hellas when Greece was young, as they did in medieval castle hall to the strains of minnesinger and harper, because child nature does not change. The story hour in the home is a formidable rival of the street and the nickelodeon, and the teacher whose fund of tales is large and who tells them joyously has little trouble with discipline. Her charges know that she holds the key to Magic Land, and that if they are good she will open the gate. They remember her with affection, and best of all remember the dreams that came into being under her spell. She is queen of her little realm through the royal right of the minstrel, and no pretender can dislodge her from her throne in the hearts that she has won.
Yet some school officials, men of education and refinement, regard story-telling as a very good means of entertainment, but unworthy of a place in the curriculum, and when urged to include it ask, “Does it pay?”
If it is worth anything to make formal schoolroom subjects joyous instead of boresome, then story-telling pays; if it is necessary to give the child something that will be a perennial rainbow in his soul, something that will keep him sweet and full of faith and hope when disappointments come and illusions go, that will cause him to laugh at age even in the time of white hairs and wrinkles, then story-telling is vitally necessary. He cannot grow bitter who possesses Aladdin’s lamp. Dark skies may lower over his head and the thunder crash ominously about him, but if the seeds of romance have been planted in his soul, if poesy has been nurtured into flower there by the world’s best stories heard in his youth, he will retain, even in the midst of blackness and tempest, a vision of turquoise skies behind the clouds, a dream of sun-kissed fields where grow everlasting flowers of fragrance and beauty.
Is the reward to the worker not worth the price? One guerdon lies in the thought that he who joins the ranks of story-tellers becomes a member of a glorious company, one with which the greatest souls of the world were not unwilling to be identified. Goethe never felt it beneath his dignity to gather a group of children about him and delight them with a tale, and nothing speaks more eloquently of the sweetness of Verdi’s nature than one of his letters to his librettist that relates how, in his visits back to the hill town where he was born, it gladdened him to see gamins swarm from every quarter, exclaiming, “Una favola, signor, una favola!”
“He is a happy man,” says Châteaubriand, “who keeps through a turbulent lifetime the heart of a child, who carries with him to the end of his journey some of the illusions stored up in his youth, for contact with envy and calumny and deception are apt to cause them to take flight.” The author of Faust and the creator of Otello each had his share of brushing against the things that make men bitter. They had sounded the depths of discouragement and disappointment, yet they had the hearts of children, and who knows but that telling stories to children had something to do with keeping them young? During Verdi’s period of struggle and heartbreak, when Milan jeered at his compositions and critics declared him a man of no talent, when obstacles piled so high it seemed beyond mortal power to remove them, when no one in the city but himself and his wife believed in him, instead of becoming sour and worthless, as any but a granitic nature like his would have done, he returned to his native highlands and told stories to children who thought him more wonderful than a king; then he went back to his labor strong and fit. Forgetting himself in delighting the village bambinos bolstered up his courage and his faith and helped to make him an exuberant giver. Perhaps the present-day story-teller, like that master at Roncone, if he approach his work reverently and keep in mind a thought of what it has meant to the world, may receive as much as he gives.