CHAPTER EIGHT

STORY-TELLING TO LEAD TO AN APPRECIATION OF LITERATURE

One of the specific aims of education is to endow children with an appreciation of literature, and to this end much of a teacher’s energy is directed. From the elementary school through the university the curriculum includes a course in English, and even in kindergarten and primary grades a point is made of introducing children to those authors whose work is conceded to have a strong appeal for them. The first, second, or third grade boy is required to read and memorize selections from Stevenson, Riley, and Eugene Field; not infrequently he is detained after school because of failure to have his lesson prepared at recitation time, and responds to the requirement in a mood that brings discouragement to his teacher.

On the other hand, there are schools in which the literature or reading hour is a period of joy, where the learning of songs of the singers of childhood is accomplished without coercion. These schools are the ones in which the teachers have learned that the acquisition of knowledge, to be of real value, must be attended with enjoyment.

It is a mistake to believe that although the function of the school is to equip the man, the aim of education is only to give enjoyment in the future. It is also the aim of education to give enjoyment now, because in this way capacity for enjoyment in the future is made possible. The boy or girl whose early association with poetry or beautiful prose is attended with displeasure and discomfort is no more likely to be drawn to the finer types of literature later than the man or woman is apt to be fond of a person, the first meeting with whom was a disagreeable experience. If we would have the man love good literature, we must first lead the child to love good literature, and we can do this only through having him enjoy good literature.

Because story-telling brings pleasure to the child, it is a most effective means of leading him to an appreciation of literature. Through the medium of the story we not only can heighten his capacity for enjoyment and elevate the standard of his taste, but we can equip him with knowledge he will never acquire if the literature period is associated with force and punishment. If a tale brings pleasing pictures before his eyes and is beautiful in theme and language, he unconsciously forms a taste for beautiful language, for he is not only getting the succession of events that make the plot, but is also absorbing words and expressions. Certain sentences stick in his memory, and teachers who have children reproduce stories know that frequently they use the exact phrases and sentences that have been used by the teller. They do not remember these for a day or an hour and then forget them; they remember them as years go by, and associate certain words with certain narratives.

William McKinley once said that the mention of willows by a river made him think of the story of Moses in the bulrushes, and brought to mind this sentence: “And she hid the basket among the rushes in a spot where willows hung over the river.” The story had been told him in childhood and brought him enjoyment, and some of the narrator’s expressions left a lasting imprint on his mind. “I believe that story, more than anything else,” he once said, “gave me a fondness for elegant English.”

James A. Garfield voiced almost the same thought, declaring that his taste for literature was shaped by stories from great authors told him by his mother during his early years, and many other men of achievement have attested to the same truth. They have proved conclusively out of their own experience that even with little children it is possible to lay a foundation upon which a noble and enduring structure can be built. We can give them an appreciation of stories and poems that are among the gems of literature.

We can also interest children in the life of an author so that they will want to know something of his work. This statement often brings the question, “How, since little children want stories that are full of action, and not biographies of men and women they never have seen?” Is it not true that the childhood of all great men contained interesting experiences, that if told as stories will lead little people to want to know about what these boys and girls did when they grew up?

Robert Louis Stevenson is a good example. Every child will listen sympathetically to the tale of the poor little rich boy who was often so ill that he could not run and play, but who made the best of things and amused himself with toys on his bed. He built cities out of blocks. He watched the lamplighter go on his evening rounds along the street, and sometimes in the summer, the dewy, Scotch summer that can be pictured so attractively to children, when he went with his nurse to the country or the shore, he put leaves and chips in the river and pretended that they were boats. He dug holes in the sand with his wooden spade and laughed to see the vagrant waves come up and fill them. The child who hears about his various experiences will become intensely interested in little Robert, and will grow to love “The Land of Counterpane,” “The River,” “At the Seashore,” and other selections from _A Child’s Garden of Verses_. Every time he reads or hears them he will see a picture of the wee Scotch lad whose story touched his heart.

This is no untried theory. Through story-telling, the author of _Treasure Island_ has become a living personage and _A Child’s Garden of Verses_ a source of delight in more than one first grade. A teacher who had charge of forty little Italians devoted fifteen minutes each morning to stories of writers and their works, and by the end of the term the children had a knowledge of Stevenson and Field that amazed the superintendent. More valuable than the knowledge acquired was the capacity for real enjoyment of some of the works of these men, enjoyment so intense that during the half hour of song and games that was a feature of every Friday, it was not unusual for a small Tony or Gulielmo to flutter a brown hand and ask to be permitted to recite:

Of speckled eggs the birdie sings, And nests among the trees.

Another teacher was rewarded for her work by hearing the mother of one of her pupils tell at a parent-teachers’ meeting of how a certain little lad amused himself while recuperating from measles by entertaining the household with songs from Stevenson and stories about little Robert, who became the big Robert that wrote the book.

In doing this sort of work, however, it is necessary to keep in mind the story interests of childhood, to remember that children are interested in children, and not begin, “When Robert Louis Stevenson was a little boy,” but rather, “Once there was a little boy who lived far away from here, and his name was Robert.” Let the approach be from the child to the man instead of from the man to the child. Focus the interest of children upon one like themselves, then lead in a natural way to the man and his achievements.

Sometimes children can be interested in a piece of literature through a story about it or suggested by it, because often one tale helps to illuminate and clarify and add interest to another.

Suppose a primary teacher or a mother wishes to take up Tennyson’s “Sweet and Low,” a piece of literature that is either a succession of vivid, delightful pictures or a vague group of words, according to the manner in which it is presented. Tell of the baby who lived with the father and mother in a fishing village on the Isle of Wight. Each day the father had to go far out to sea in a boat to catch fish to sell for money with which to buy food for his dear ones, and each night the baby laughed and crowed when he came home. Once he stayed later than usual, and baby did not want to go to bed without seeing him; but the mother sang a pretty song, saying that father would soon be home, and crooned and rocked her little one until he fell asleep. It was a pleasant evening, with a big, silver moon, and a man was out walking—a rich man who lived in a house on a hill high above the fishers’ huts. As he went by the cottage where the baby lived, he heard the mother singing, and the song was so sweet that he hurried home and wrote what it made him think about. Then follow with the poem, and the children will receive it gladly.

This same plan can be used with older children, but let the material be given in story form instead of as a series of disconnected incidents.

An excellent method is to give the story of a great writer’s work. This is effective with children of all ages, and often leads to the reading of books that otherwise would never be opened. Sometimes the objection is made that it is wrong to substitute the story of a work for the work itself, a statement no thinking person will gainsay. But this does not mean substitution. It means whetting the appetite until the child hungers for the thing you want him to have. Instead of telling him what he should read, arouse his curiosity to the point where he wants to read it, and the desired result will follow. Fifty years ago it was safe to give a boy or a girl a beautiful piece of literature and tell him he ought to read it, but it is not safe now, not because there is anything wrong with the children of our time, but because conditions are different. Books were rare and costly then, and young people read whatever came to hand. Today books are cheap and plentiful, and present-day literature plunges directly into the complications of the story. People are in a hurry to know what it is all about, because of the spirit of the age. There is less leisure now than there was half a century ago, as there is more competition, and results must be realized more rapidly than our forefathers realized them. Consequently we travel faster, get rich faster, and move more speedily in every way. Present-day literature reflects present-day spirit, and the story must begin with the opening sentence. Boys and girls simply will not go through pages of introductions and descriptions before striking the plot of the tale, no matter how beautiful those introductions and descriptions may be. They want books that get somewhere from the beginning. So the problem confronts all who are interested in the education of children: “How can we make them as eager to read Dickens, Scott, and Thackeray as they are to read Jack London and Phillips Oppenheim? How can they be made to go as gladly to Bulwer Lytton as they go to the Henty books?” By means of story-telling. Give them an idea of the plots of the masters of literature, enough to whet the desire to know more about them.

It is not sufficient just to tell the story, because it was not the plots of these writers that made them great artists. It was their manner of handling their plots, their delineation of character, the philosophy and human wisdom they put into the mouths of their heroes, and the boy or girl who does not become acquainted with these great creators during school days is likely never to know them, because he forms a taste for reading of a more ephemeral nature, and he may go through life a devourer of books, yet be only half educated.

Why is it that so many young people never look at the English classics after they leave high school, and would rather spend a morning at hard labor than in reading _As You Like It_ or _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_? Because too much attention was given to the dissecting process when they studied these plays. Instead of being taught to see the beautiful and finished creation of some master, they were made to see the skeleton and to pull it to pieces. Some teachers assign a certain number of pages or paragraphs or stanzas for a lesson, and the pupils look up the words in the dictionary, point out the figures of speech, and scan the lines. Sometimes the teacher reads the assignment when it is made. Sometimes children dramatize it after they have torn it into shreds, or write a paraphrase. But the heart and soul of the masterpiece, the sheer beauty of it, are considered least of all, and students end by heartily hating something that they might have enjoyed and loved. Yet people wonder why the average American has so little appreciation of good literature, and think something is wrong with young folk who, after a high-school course in English, will read nothing but popular novels. There is nothing whatsoever the matter with the boys and girls. They simply follow the bent of all human beings and steer from the unpleasant toward the pleasant. They go to the books of the day that they can understand, because much of our great literature, presented as it is, means nothing to them. Less fortunate than youths of fifty years ago, they are not forced to read good books if they read at all. There are verdant, if less beautiful, meadows on every side where they may browse, and into them they go.

It is infinitely better that a child’s school life provide him with a capacity for the enjoyment of literature than that he have a technical knowledge of a few pieces of literature, because the latter endows him with a narrow, academic viewpoint, while the former makes possible a future growth, without a capacity for which life must be narrow and one-sided. A boy or girl may know that Shakespeare wrote _Twelfth Night_ or _Macbeth_, that Milton created “The Hymn to the Nativity” or Shelley “The Skylark,” be able to paraphrase each and analyze the sentences that comprise them, and not be a bit better fitted for life than he would be without that knowledge. But he is better equipped for life if he has acquired a capacity for the enjoyment of literature, so that to read a great book gives him pleasure or causes him to respond with sympathy, and the English teacher who does not develop this capacity in children has failed in his function.

The approach to the great field of literature must be through specific examples, just as the approach to an understanding of art or architecture must be through the canvases of Raphael, Cimabue, or Giotto, or the temples that were the triumphs of Egyptian, Babylonian, or Hellenic builders. But if they are to be enjoyed, acquaintance with these specific examples must be made in a pleasurable manner. They first must be beheld in a perspective that gives glimpses of them as complete and beautiful wholes, and not through the detailed workmanship of architrave or abacus or by focusing the attention on the massing of figures according to square or triangular outline. And just as the understanding and enjoyment of one great structure or painting give added interest to every other one, so, in the realm of literature, each masterpiece enjoyed gives capacity for the enjoyment of every other masterpiece met with in the future. Therefore the story, because it is a means of flashing the entire structure on the screen and making it possible for children to see the completed whole in all its beauty, is the English teacher’s most valuable tool.

Take _Evangeline_ as an example. Most children leave school knowing that Longfellow wrote that poem, and that Evangeline lost her lover on the wedding day and spent the remainder of her life seeking him. But you cannot coax them to read the poem again because of the memory of the time when they studied it. And the pity of it is that there is no work of American literature so appealing to boys and girls in the adolescent period as _Evangeline_, if it is presented wisely.

Before they are asked to study it, if the story of the Acadian girl is told sympathetically and feelingly they are touched by its pathos and fired by the idealism of its characters, and they feel the charm of life in the quaint old village of Grand Pré. If, before they are told to read it, they have gone with the heroine through the magic of the narrator’s picturing, in her wanderings over mountain and lowland, into Indian camp and sequestered mission, living among strange peoples and sleeping by strange fires, they will read it with enthusiasm. It will become a joy instead of a burden, because they will have felt something of what was in the heart of the poet who wrote it, and not merely what appeared on the printed page.

Besides the main thread of the story, there are many sub-stories that, if told in connection with the poem, will add to the child’s enjoyment and understanding of it. Sometimes a name is rich in story material, yet often it is passed over with nothing more than a definition found in the pronouncing gazetteer, and a golden opportunity is lost.

Take, for instance, the line, “Now in the Tents of Grace of the gentle Moravian missions.” There is a footnote in most editions stating, “This refers to the Moravian mission of Gnädenhütten.” But what does that signify to children, since there were many missions in those early days? But if they are told of how the Moravians came from the distant German mountains to plant the tree of their faith in the Western wilds, they grow interested. They are fascinated as the tale goes on, picturing how these simple folk founded a mission in the woods of Ohio, which they named “Gnädenhütten” or “Tents of Grace,” and telling how a massacre occurred there in 1790, not savages killing off whites, but a band of marauding British troops slaughtering Christianized Indians as they toiled peacefully in their cornfields. Then, as Evangeline roams over the Southwest, into the bayou country of Louisiana, if pictures of the early life there are painted vividly by the story-teller, if she gives some of the events of old Creole days, the children will look forward to the _Evangeline_ period.

This same method will add enjoyment to the study of other pieces of literature. _The Courtship of Miles Standish_, aside from the main plot, is rich in stories from the Bible. The children should look up these allusions, but the teacher should put life into them by giving the story. In fact, there is no piece of literature studied below the high school, or even during the early part of the high-school course, that cannot be presented with splendid results through the story-telling method. The concrete precedes the abstract in the order in which selections are considered, those through which a story thread runs being given in advance of the essay or treatise. By making the most of this story thread, literature study will become pleasurable and bring splendid response from the children. It requires effort and preparation, but it pays. It is worth much to the teacher who loves good literature, to look back over the years and think of the children she has led to appreciate and enjoy it. It is a tremendous satisfaction to have boys come back long after leaving her schoolroom and seek her out, because through her they learned to know something of the comfort that is to be found in good old books. One teacher, speaking of her experience, said: “It made all the effort seem richly worth while, when a broad-shouldered, sun-burned man went three hundred miles out of his way to see me on a home visit to America, and thank me for having led him to enjoy poetry.” As a boy he became intensely interested in _The Lady of the Lake_ because his teacher gave the stories of Fitz-James and Roderick Dhu and of the clan life of the Highlands, and a pocket edition of Scott was a source of comfort to him during a surveying expedition in the wilds of West Australia, and took away the loneliness of nights spent by a camp fire with no companions save the native woodmen. He had learned to know Scott during his boyhood, and the capacity for enjoyment acquired through that association was a priceless possession to the man. If more teachers realized that story-telling is a direct road to the understanding of literature, and that it has its place in grammar and high-school grades as much as in the kindergarten, there would be less drudgery for them and more satisfying results.

SOME AUTHORS AND SELECTIONS THAT CAN BE PRESENTED THROUGH THE STORY-TELLING METHOD

BROWNING: Hervé Riel (Give picture of life of sailors on the Breton coast. Hervé Riel was so accustomed to taking fishing boats through the passage that the piloting of the ship did not seem any feat to him); How They Brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix; An Incident of the French Camp; The Pied Piper of Hamelin (Tell how the poet came to write this work—to entertain a child who was visiting him).

BRYANT: The White-footed Deer; The Woodman and the Sandal Tree; The Donkey and the Mocking Bird, and other poems from the Spanish.

DICKENS: Little Nell (_Old Curiosity Shop_); Tiny Tim (_Christmas Carol_); Nicholas Nickleby; David Copperfield, and other child characters of Dickens.

GEORGE ELIOT: Maggie Tulliver Cutting her Hair, Maggie Running Away to Live with the Gypsies, Tom and the Ferrets (_The Mill on the Floss_); Silas Marner and Little Eppie (_Silas Marner_).

IRVING: Legend of Sleepy Hollow (_The Sketch Book_); The Governor and the Notary (Other stories from _Tales from the Alhambra_); The Life and Voyages of Christopher Columbus (Many chapters in this contain fascinating stories, which if told to the children will lead them to read the work); Rip Van Winkle (_The Sketch Book_) (Tell also the German story of Peter Claus, from which Irving drew his inspiration to write this tale; also the Chinese story, “The Feast of Lanterns,” the hero of which is an oriental Rip Van Winkle).

KINGSLEY: How They Took the Gold Train (_Westward Ho!_); Water Babies; Hypatia.

LONGFELLOW: Evangeline; Courtship of Miles Standish; Hiawatha; King Robert of Sicily; St. Francis’ Sermon to the Birds (Tell story of St. Francis of Assisi); Paul Revere’s Ride; The Emperor’s Bird’s Nest; Walther von der Vogelweide (In this connection tell story of Walther and the Minnesingers. Story can be found in _Pan and His Pipes, and Other Stories_, Victor Talking Machine Company).

SOUTHEY: Inchcape Rock; Bishop Hatto and the Mouse Tower; The Well of St. Keyne.

STEVENSON: Treasure Island; Kidnapped; Island Nights’ Entertainment.

TENNYSON: The Holy Grail (This poem is beyond the understanding of boys and girls of grammar grades, or even early high-school years, but they may be familiarized with portions of it, and the Grail story is a wonderful one to give them. It should include also the tale of “Parsifal” and “Lohengrin,” as related by Wolfram von Eschenbach and Wagner).

This list is in no way comprehensive, but the wide-awake teacher will find it suggestive of a much longer one, which is as much as the author of a single text-book may hope for.

SOURCES OF MATERIAL TO LEAD TO AN APPRECIATION OF LITERATURE

LAMB, CHARLES and MARY: _Tales from Shakespeare_.

LANG, JEANIE: _Stories from Shakespeare Told to the Children_.

SWEETSER, KATE D.: _Boys and Girls from George Eliot_; _Boys and Girls from Thackeray_; _Ten Boys from Dickens_.

SWINTON, WILLIAM, and CATHCART, GEORGE R.: _Book of Tales from Fine Authors_.