Once upon a time there lived in a small village in the country a little girl, the prettiest, sweetest creature that ever was seen. Her mother loved her fondly, and her grandmother doted on her still more.
“The Twin Brothers” by Grimm:
There were once two brothers, one of whom was rich and the other poor. The rich brother was a goldsmith and had a wicked heart. The poor brother supported himself by making brooms, and was good and honest.
It is the same in Ruskin’s “King of the Golden River,” in Robert Southey’s “Three Bears,” in all the tales of De Maupassant that are suitable for telling, and in those of Alphonse Daudet. Note the beginning of Daudet’s “Last Lesson”:
Little Franz did not want to go to school that morning. He would much rather have played. The air was so warm and still. You could hear the blackbirds singing at the edge of the wood, and the sound of the Prussians drilling down by the old sawmill.
Every one of these stories begins with narrative, and every one is a perfect tale for telling.
Next in consideration comes the body of the story, which our rhetoric teachers taught us is a succession of events moving toward the climax. Until the climax is reached the oral story must be full of suspense. In other words, the hearer must be kept guessing about what is going to happen. The child does not care about a story in which he sees the end. He does enjoy hearing the same story told over and over again if it thrilled him at the first telling, because he likes to re-experience that thrill. But if a new tale holds no suspense, it falls flat. Stevenson says: “The one rule is to be infinitely various—to interest, to disappoint, to surprise, yet still to gratify. To be ever changing, as it were, the stitch, yet still to give the effect of an ingenious neatness.” In other words, the succession of events must follow one another in a regular sequence, and each must contribute something to the one following it.
As a rather homely illustration of the meaning of this, we may say that plot centers around a hole, and in a well-constructed story the steps by which the hero gets into the hole are traced, and then those by which he gets out. The getting out is the climax or, as Dr. Barrett says, “the apex of interest and emotion.” In other words, it is the top of a ladder, and the story must move in an unbroken line toward that topmost rung. If it does not do this, if the thread of the tale is broken to interpolate something that should have been told in the beginning, the narrator loses his audience.
The climax must be a surprise to the child. This holds good in all the great oral stories. Take as an example “The Ugly Duckling”: