Part 1

Chapter 13,685 wordsPublic domain

STORIES AND STORY-TELLING

BY ANGELA M. KEYES HEAD OF THE DEPARTMENT OF ENGLISH, BROOKLYN TRAINING SCHOOL FOR TEACHERS

NEW YORK AND LONDON D. APPLETON AND COMPANY 1916

Printed in the United States of America

PREFACE

All the stories in this book have been tested with children. Favorites easily available in other collections have been omitted.

The seventy-five or more very short stories, intended to help young children to express their observations, experiences, and fancies, have been included at the request of many teachers.

The writer hopes that by providing the busy teacher with “tellable” stories, she may help to win for story-telling the dignity of established scholastic place.

CONTENTS

PAGE

STORY-TELLING 1

KINDS OF STORIES TO TELL 12

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE ART OF TELLING STORIES 15

GETTING THE STORY 16

TELLING THE STORY 33

THE CHILD’S PART IN STORY-TELLING 62

STORIES 75

THE FAIRY HORSESHOE _A. M. K._ 77

THE MOUSE AND THE SAUSAGE _French Folk Tale_ 79

THE STORY OF THE LITTLE BOY AND THE LITTLE DOG _A. M. K._ 81

THE STORY OF THE TWO CAKES THAT LOVED EACH OTHER IN SILENCE _Hans Christian Andersen_ 84

HOW THE ROOSTER BUILT A HOUSE OF HIS OWN _A. M. K._ 85

THUMBELINA _Hans Christian Andersen_ 88

A VISIT FROM AN ELF _A. M. K._ 101

HOW THE CAT GOT ALL THE GRAIN _Eastern Folk Tale_ 103

THE TABLE AND THE CHAIR _Edward Lear_ 104

THE WONDERFUL SHIP _A. M. K._ 106

THE CLEVER GEESE _A. M. K._ 109

THE HAPPY PRINCE _Oscar Wilde_ 110

THE DWARF ROOTS’ STORY OF THE PUMPKIN SEED _A. M. K._ 121

A HORSE’S STORY _From Anna Sewell_ 126

A BEWITCHED DONKEY _A. M. K._ 130

THE STRAW, THE COAL, AND THE BEAN _Folk Tale_ 136

MOTHER HOLLE _Folk Tale_ 138

TOM THUMB _English Folk Tale_ 143

THE TWO BROTHERS _Folk Tale_ 158

THE WOOING _A. M. K._ 162

JACK-THE-GIANT-KILLER _English Folk Tale_ 165

THE PIXIES’ THANKS _A. M. K._ 167

THE CAT AND THE PARROT _Eastern Folk Tale_ 170

LAMPBLACK _La Ramée_ 174

LAZY JACK _Folk Tale_ 183

THE TIME THAT WILL COME AGAIN _A. M. K._ 188

THE OWL’S ANSWER TO TOMMY _From Mrs. Ewing’s Brownies_ 197

THE STORY OF COQUERICO _Spanish Folk Tale_ 204

THE SCARECROW _A. M. K._ 209

OEYVIND AND MARIT _Björnstjerne Björnson_ 214

BLUNDER _Louise E. Chollet_ 219

THE GOLDEN PEARS _Folk Tale_ 227

SOME VERY SHORT STORIES 237

STORY-TELLING

With high esteem and full of respect I greet a genuine story-teller; with intense gratitude I grasp him by the hand.

—FROEBEL

The school is joining hands with the children for fuller recognition of the story and story-telling.

Note, by the way, that it is with the children. In an elder day grown-ups, too, yielded themselves to the witchery of the story. But printing and the book banished the wandering story-teller; with a little progress in science came recoil from the superstitions and absurdities of the folk tale; the increasing complexity of life bred in the superficial thinker contempt for the unperplexed nursery fable; the intellectual pedant found it distressingly naïve; pressure of affairs robbed the busy man of any leisure for it. So, among peoples advancing in civilization, the grown-ups gradually left the story more and more to the children. And the children, wise youngsters that they are, have never allowed themselves to outgrow it.

Is it not delightful to note that learning is bringing the adult back to the story? The trend of thought to-day, urging him to look to the natural beginnings of things, is taking him back to the story. The historian searches it for early glimpses of fact; the philosopher sees lasting wisdom in it; the literary seer marvels at the truth and beauty of fairy-tale symbols of life; the busy man of affairs accompanies his children to juvenile drama and nonsense opera. The art of story-telling itself is again finding an audience among men and women, as well as children. Best of all, the school, directing its effort toward the natural development of the young child, is pressing the educational properties of the story.

Reiteration of these properties now is timely. Psychology is throwing clearer light on the education of the feelings and the taste; the story should be helpful here. The thoughtful in the community are urging more attention to the spiritualizing and humanizing subjects in the courses of study; the story belongs in this class. Other favorable present conditions will appear as the merits of the story are briefly set forth.

The story and story-telling will

(1) _Give pleasure._

(2) _Stir and direct the imagination._

(3) _Arouse and direct the feelings._

(4) _Cultivate the taste._

(5) _Help to shape thought and language mode._

(6) _Stimulate and direct potential literary creativity._

(7) _Serve as foreword for book-study of literature._

(8) _Give knowledge of life._

(1) _The story will give pleasure._ Educational thought is growing more and more cordial toward this value. Undisturbed by any charge of “soft pedagogy,” it finds wholesome pleasure, not merely relaxing, but constructive, building toward physical health, mental brightness, and moral virtue. Here is the story’s opportunity. Every one admits it is pleasure-giving. The stern-minded among us must realize that this is its deepest educational value. It is from the good pleasure the child gets from the story that will ripen good taste, good will, good effort, and all the other goods some teachers and parents regard as more substantial merit. Besides, joy appears to be here to stay. To attempt to take it out of the plan of things is, to say the least, short-sighted. American civilization is looking hopefully to the school for better national standards of pleasure. The school is under obligation to educate the children to enjoyment of wholesome pleasure.

(2) _The story will stir and direct the imagination._ We do not yet grant in practice the importance of the imagination. We do not purposefully exercise it, as we do, for example, the reason. We say glibly that imagination is at the root of the successful man’s arrival at material profit, of the explorer’s discovery and the practical scientist’s invention, of the poet’s song and the philanthropist’s vision of a state of society in which the kingdom of heaven will be nearer at hand; but we give little or no training to the imagination. Here again is the story’s opportunity. Through the story the interpretative story-teller may give the imagination consistent exercise.

(3) _The story will arouse and direct the pupil’s feelings._ The school to-day is emphasizing the necessity of educating the heart, the climactic third of the three great H’s,—the Head, the Hand, and the Heart. And psychologists are telling us that to educate a child to be kind, unselfish, filial, reverent, gentle, courageous, good-tempered, to educate him to admire goodness, justice, valor, to be sensible of beauty, to aspire and make effort toward excellence, is as practicable as to train him to do or to make something. It calls for more delicate but not different treatment; working not by dictation, but by magnetic suggestion. The story-teller may render a great service to the individual and to the community by helping to form right feeling-habit.

(4) _The well-chosen story will cultivate the taste._ Psychology is urging early direction also of the æsthetic sense. The story-teller, through her own joyous response to beauty, has it in her power to awaken and direct the children’s appreciation of beauty. It is she, too, who must help to lay the foundation for that better taste in novel or play that America eagerly desires, and that publisher and playwright say they stand ready to satisfy as soon as the public arrives at it.

(5) _The story will help to form the child’s thought and language habit._ As this is the value most often acknowledged in classroom practice—though not always by the best methods—it is not necessary to do more at this point than restate it. Mastery in thought and language is far-reaching usefulness, affecting individual growth and social harmony. The story, because of its easy, more or less artless composition and graphic diction, lends itself to starting right thought and language mode.

(6) _Story-telling may help to stimulate and direct potential literary creativity._ In spite of its breadth of view the school appears insensible to the rights of children born creative. The array of geniuses recently marshaled by a Chicago professor, that teachers pronounced hopeless dunces and in some cases drove from their classes, should set the school thinking. It is reaching out helpful hands to the little unfortunate ones, the blind and the deaf and the sick; but it continues to dismiss the divinely commissioned little sister or brother, with the platitude that his genius will survive if it be sufficiently sturdy. This is a specious half-truth unworthy of repetition. It is, besides, discrimination against the individual. The school is not meeting its obligation to _all_ the children of the community. It will not do to lay the blame to the community’s “commercialized” standards. In spite of apparent emphasis on the useful arts, the community would not lose from the varied web of its civilization the bright thread of painting and music and story. Maturing thought is convincing it that the fine arts are finely utilitarian. Here, again, is the story’s opportunity. The simple materials and childlike fancy in it may stimulate gradually and naturally play of the creative imagination.

(7) _Story-telling should be at least foreword for book-study of literature._ The thoughtful teacher of literature to-day finds in the classic story all the elements of her material, and sees in the child listening to it the most promising student of literature. At the freely sympathetic period the child becomes familiar with the inner life of language as used to represent fundamental motive, character, and action. This is precisely the kind of knowledge that he should bring as basis for study of more advanced literature. The printed page will be informed with lively meaning, to which his imagination, feeling, and æsthetic sense can respond. It is largely the school’s neglect of oral foundation in literature, which, by the way, should not be confined to the lowest grades, that is at the root of feeble appreciation in book-study of literature.

(8) The story holds in it a greater value, as much greater as life is than literature; _it will give knowledge of life_. The writer might have said experience of life, because of the child’s strong tendency to be and to do what attracts him. Students of literature, to-day, are urging that it is not a mere “polishing” study, but the substantially useful subject from which we may get clear and inspiring knowledge of life. They would have literature recognized as the reflection of life, idealized, it may be, but therefore stronger reflection. As life is the occupation that all of us, no matter what our special vocation may be, must engage in together, a study that throws light on it is indispensable. Here is a great opportunity for the story. Every genuine story, sense or nonsense, is a glimpse of life, which will early give guiding knowledge and experience.

The story-teller cannot, by the way, afford to ignore the evil in life. You may have read the story of Kipling’s “kid”; how the parents in fond but foolish love for their only son shut away from him all knowledge that evil has come into the world, and how the son, grown to manhood, enters army life, where he meets his first temptation and falls. The moral of the tale is obvious. Though it is wise to keep in the wake of their experience with evil, the story should help to provide the children with knowledge and modes of conduct for the situations of real life. The cunning story-teller, presenting this or that bit of life, from which he has not made the mistake of taking out the evil already within the child’s experience or presently to be met, touches the child into recoil from evil and into admiration and imitation of the triumphant way of virtue.

The story should, however, oftener engage children’s attention with good, rather than evil, as the central, active force in life. And the story told to the growing boy or girl, and to the youth, should prompt him to fine and finer endeavor. It is a fatal error to assume that teachers and parents cannot help to raise the community’s standards, that the best the rising generation may carry out from home and school is negative prudence, readiness to accept questionable social practices and ideals, that they themselves may achieve worldly success. If each generation does not leave the world a little better for its part in it, it has lived in vain, and its “guides, philosophers, and friends,” the parents and teachers of it, have denied their office. The story helping toward this kind of constructivity should lead. It is to the habit formed in its children that society must look for higher standards of living.

The story will widen the child’s outlook on life. On the wings of the word the listener may fly away to the uttermost bounds of the earth. In the story world he, if poor, may be rich; if sad, merry; if inarticulate, he may find expression.

Though it is not exhaustive, this is an imposing array of reasons for admitting the story to unquestioned educational dignity. If the school feel the need of broad, scholarly precedent, it may find it in the work or in the recorded opinions of such seers as the Lambs, Longfellow, Carroll, Hawthorne, Scott, Stevenson, Browning, Ruskin, Froebel, Emerson. As yet story-telling is largely left optional with the teacher. Should it not be made a delightful school requirement? It addresses itself, it is true, mainly to the æsthetic taste and the feelings, it does not guarantee consequent action. But give it place early enough, and, if it must bring it, the other good effect will be added unto it.

The best reason for admitting the story to scholastic dignity still remains the best, its lasting charm for the children.

KINDS OF STORIES TO TELL

We appear to be coming to the agreement that we should tell the children many of the old, old stories and some of the new, many stories from the world of the imagination, some from the real world; stories that will aid them in interpreting their world, themselves, other children, some grown-ups, nature; stories that will direct aright the imagination, the sympathies, and the taste; playful stories and more serious, sensible and nonsensical; short stories and longer; stories to be told over and over again, stories to be told in passing. To meet the child’s and later the girl’s and boy’s changing tastes and interests, and the needs of their developing imagination and sympathies, our choice should embrace, besides a great many others that as yet have eluded classification, fairy tales, fables, myths, legends, romances, tales of adventure, stories of animal life, child life, growing boy and girl life, stories of great men and women.

Some teachers find it hard to see any educational value in play-stories like “The Three Bears,” nonsense stories like “Chicken-Licken,” and drolls, or farce “funny” stories like “Lazy Jack.” They do not get the child’s point of view. They are disturbed by the apparently idle pleasure or extravagance of them. “Chicken-Licken” appears to be nothing but driveling nonsense. The writer has no desire to attempt to turn it into sense nor to press unduly the claim of this particular type of story. But why not let it in as a nonsense tale, an opportunity for giving the mind a frolic? This is advanced by some students of the tale as its possible origin. It may be thought of as a reflection in literature of the naïveté of childhood; it catches capitally its guilelessness in motive, social intercourse, and deed. Its form also is childlike. The child ekes out invention in the manner of the tale, by the open artifice of cumulation and repetition. Or the story may be dignified into literary introduction to that type of classic which records the very common human situation, “much ado about nothing.”

The same teachers are disturbed also by the ethical code of many of the folk tales; they find it crude and fleshly. It deals in large and sense-delighting rewards. But may it not be possible that the child must be allowed time to grow to a more discriminating standard of conduct and a finer kind of satisfaction?

It is to be hoped, however, that even then the child will retain his capacity for laughing at merry play and hearty comedy. Laughter is good for the world. It is a tonic to the emotions, and regeneration to the spirit, spurring it to fresh and better effort; it is a sign, too, of broadening imagination and sympathy. The man that has no laughter in him is like Shakespeare’s man that has no music in him, “fit for treasons, stratagems, and spoils. Let no such man be trusted.” Most stories will give the children a more reserved pleasure, happy mental and æsthetic satisfaction; some a fine gladness and exaltation. But let us not be too narrow to admit the wholesomely “funny” story.

The over-strained, anæmic, goody-good story is likely to breed up a generation of canting hypocrites. The little child is much occupied, it is true, with the task of being good, and he is a great admirer of the good people in the stories. There is room in children’s literature for the rather obviously moral tale, if it be not too often presented and if it be really charming. From this point of view, Constance D’Arcy Mackay’s book of plays called “The House of the Heart and Other Tales” is a suggestive contribution to children’s drama.

For the younger children the story with plenty of action, often with animals as characters, and with happy ending has proved best. The story with less joyous “inevitable ending” is, however, not to be excluded; life is not to be distorted. Besides, not all sad-ending stories are negative in effect, leaving the child knowing only “what not to do” rather than “what to do.” A story like Hans Andersen’s “Daisy,” for example, induces constructive inference and effect.

THE PRINCIPLES OF THE ART OF TELLING STORIES

Story-telling is one of the most spontaneous of the social arts. Yet it is an art, governed by at least partially discerned principles. Analysis of them will be helpful to the story-teller, but only in so far as he grasps the fundamental principle that story telling among the speech arts, like wood-carving among the manual arts, indeed, even to a greater degree, must be kept what it is by nature, apparently without art, naïve and unelaborate.

GETTING THE STORY

The story-teller must wholly take into himself the life of which he speaks, must let it live and operate in himself freely.

—FROEBEL.

The story-teller must himself possess the story before attempting to give it to another. This sounds obvious, but it is not granted in practice. Much poor schoolroom story-telling is evidently “unprepared.” People born with a natural turn for story-telling, and those who in their childhood heard real story-telling, need to make less preparation than others; but all story-tellers need to make preparation. Much of the story-telling masquerading as such is quackery, showing neither genius nor study. Even in the very early days when formal instruction in story-telling was unknown, the wandering story-teller watched constantly to make his performance tell, modifying his method in the light of its effect upon his hearers. Later on, in the Middle Ages, the court story-teller was professionally trained (and also handsomely remunerated and given the place of honor at the banquet). Intellectual study of the story will not, by the way, destroy spontaneity. It may dash it temporarily. Coleridge tells us that his professor in poetics did not hesitate to subject to the scrutiny of the microscope the most delicate flowers and fruits of fancy. (English in the schools has suffered from the results, in its teachers, of the “literary affectation,” which condemns attempt at definite English scholarship.) Let us give all outlet possible to natural ability, and to the inspiration of time and audience; but let us not neglect the forethought of preparation. Shakespeare did not, Sir Henry Irving did not, Duse does not. Some teachers fall back on reading the story; this has its own place, but it cannot take the place of telling. The belief that story-telling should be studied is gaining ground in a most convincing quarter, the home. The office of motherhood is deeply associated with things done instinctively right; but the mother herself at mothers’ clubs and elsewhere is seeking instruction in this chief mother art.

To get the story, relax your imagination and sympathy and let them go out to it. Sit down with it and read and re-read it, or listen to it, and brood upon it until you absorb its life, until you think and feel and move in its being. Conjure up its scene and people and happening.

Some may find imagining difficult. Perhaps it was neglected in their training. Let them not be discouraged; each succeeding attempt to realize scene and person and action will make the task easier.

You may, by the way, study the story in either of two places: a lovely natural spot, where under the lure of century-wisdomed tree, or amid sweet smells, or flash of birds, or beckonings of shadows, you may catch the glamour of the old-world setting in the stories; or in a city street swarming with children, old-faced before their time. The environment in the second studio, far from destroying your effort to grasp the wonder-world of the story, will make special appeal to you. Here you will feel divine compulsion to make child life more abundant: to bring from story land bright hosts of gay fairies and gentle children and brave knights and real as well as fiction heroes as saving company for the little worldlings, to make them chuckle with a child’s hearty glee at trick of goblin or sprite, or quake with delicious tremor at the tread of the terrible giant. You will find that the “toughest,” most crabbed city urchin will succumb to the witchery of the fairy folk, to the charm of beauty and the fair play of kindness and honesty.