Part 3

_Beginning the story._ The story-teller should begin the story with the air of having something interesting and enjoyable to tell. If the contents of the story had not been interesting, they would never have made a story; the story-teller may depend on this intrinsic interest. He should have also the air of leisure; story-telling is one of the social arts of leisure and pleasure; besides, stories record significant occurrences, which should be given the emphasis of time. His initial manner should give hint of the spirit of the particular story he is to tell. The first phrase, “There were five-and-twenty tin soldiers,” sounds the playful martial spirit of Hans Andersen’s “Brave Tin Soldier;” the story-teller echoes it in martial bearing and in martial swing and ring in his speech, in, of course, the playful manner of a story about a little toy soldier. Mother-love broods through the story of “The Wolf and the Seven Kids;” the story-teller suggests, in voice and eyes and fostering posture, its loving pride and anxiety. Should the story-teller begin in rather obvious make-believe-matter-of-fact style, his eyes hinting fun, the children will chuckle in delighted anticipation of a nonsense or a humorous story. The wholly impassive manner adopted by some story-tellers in telling “funny” stories to adult audiences will not do with children. The adult’s enjoyment consists largely in his ability to remake as fun what the teller is representing as sober fact. Children, because of their lack of knowledge and experience, need more leading. Stories like “The Three Bears” correspond in spirit to nursery rhymes like “This little pig went to market;” they should be kept as childlike, mimetic, rhythmic, and playful. Southey gives the key to the spirit of “The Three Bears” in the setting. Every detail shows how well he caught the child-note: interest in wild animals, the bear a favorite; tendency to dramatic mimicry; response to rhythm; pleasure in possessions, this very complete “house of their own,” kept by bears, delights the children. A hero story like “Jack the Giant Killer” calls for a bold spirit. “Snow-White and Rose-Red” sounds the domestic note: cheerful fireside group; mother reading from a “large book,” children spinning, animals lying near. The setting here, though long, may easily be made attractive by the story-teller’s own pleasure in every detail.

The characters also should be introduced with hint of their personality. “Snow-White and Rose-Red were as happy, as busy and cheerful,” says the story-teller, showing cheerful pleasure in them, “as any two children in the world.” “Snow-White,” softening voice and eyes, “was more quiet and gentle; Rose-Red,” adopting a livelier manner, “liked better to run about the fields and pick flowers and chase butterflies.” “There was once a widow who had two daughters; one of them,” says the story-teller, smiling in the pleasure goodness and beauty, whether physical or spiritual, always excite in us, “was pretty and industrious; the other,” voice and face expressing disapproval of her, “was ugly and idle.” “A certain man had a donkey,” says the story-teller, with such suggestion of possibilities in the donkey evident in forward posture, in face and voice, that the listener at once suspects that, as Hans Andersen would put it, that donkey “became worth talking about.”

The story-teller begins then, as both prophet and sibyl, telling yet, especially at this stage, not “giving it away.” He must let the story reveal and the child discover; this is the joy of it.

_Building out the story._ Having laid the foundation upon which he is to build the happening, the story-teller should, as a rule, in building fashion pause. He then enters upon the action, carrying it forward, slowly or rapidly, according as its course demands, arousing suspense and increasing the interest in the outcome. How he does this will be suggested farther on. As the story proceeds he must of course treat character consistently. Sensibility to the nature of the particular character he is interpreting will enable him to voice and conduct it appropriately. Nothing more than suggestion is in place. The story-teller’s fairy voice may be light and tinkling like silver bells, his witch made graphic through pointed, hag-like chin and fingers and stooped body, his fox smooth and sly, his wolf snarling, his giant, as said before, big-voiced and ponderous. He can hardly fail to catch the steely high voice and proud manner Hans Andersen intended for the vain but delightful Darning Needle.

After, as a rule, pausing to give effect to the climax of the action, the story-teller passes in many stories to a brief but clear explanation of enchantment, and winds up the whole happily, leaving the child supremely pleased.

(3) _Controlling canons of the story-teller’s part._ Some of the chief canons governing the story-teller are _directness_, _spontaneity_, _graphicness_, _reserve_, _skill in the use of the voice_, _simplicity_.

_Directness_ is the principle of immediateness, by virtue of which _story_ and _listener_ are brought into contact. It has its roots in the social and magnetic nature of the art. In its fullest sense it is comprehensive of all the other canons.

Directness concerns both the outer and the inner self of the story-teller.

The part played by the outer self is simple. Before beginning his story the story-teller should “go to” and “gather” his listeners. He does this by assuming the physical position and mental attitude of communicator. A person who has anything to tell another that he thinks will move or please him does not stand aloof. The story-teller should not stand aloof. He may place himself in front of his listeners, at such a point as will enable him to command all. Before beginning he will get the listening attention by invitation of posture and direct face to face look, or by the magnetic force of the story now animating his whole person. Some story-tellers then begin to address themselves to someone near by whom they feel to be the most responsive listener, or whom they wish to interest, then address a wider and wider circle until they are reaching everyone. Others project the story into the ears of someone in the middle of the group, making this the radiating point from which to grasp all.

The story-teller through his outer self must observe the principle of directness in another way. In looks and actions his external self must help to convey the spirit of the story: posture, facial expression, gesture, voice must not contradict but declare what the lips are saying. It is in recognition of the relation between the external self of the story-teller and his story that some story-tellers “make up,” or put on appropriate costume. This has its power and charm. But for the “everydayness” of story-telling in home and school it is undesirable, unnecessary, and impracticable. What is necessary is something less troublesome but more important: such domination, or absorption, of the external self by the spirit of the story as will subdue it to the story-teller’s use. This will help to induce the right feeling response. Feeling, as everyone knows, is “catching.” Fun will call out fun; pathos, pathos; gladness at beauty, goodness, or truth, like joy. The whole being of the Ancient Mariner told his story. Simple stories do not demand emotional intensity, but the principle remains. The student will find it helpful to sit opposite Tadema’s “Reading Homer,” to get an idea of the recounter’s abandon.

The principle of directness as it applies through the inner self of the story-teller is as easy to understand. The story-teller must not allow any intruding mental state or circumstance, any intruding “self,” to come between the story and the listener. Such a self may be

(1) The diffident or embarrassed self of the self-conscious story-teller.

(2) The vain or affected self of the insincere story-teller.

(3) The weakening self of the patronizing story-teller.

(4) The non-seeing self of the non-spontaneous story-teller.

(5) The non-sensible, or non-artistic, self of the “sledge hammer” story-teller.

(6) The non-communicating self of the “acting” story-teller.

(7) The misinformed self of the lifeless story-teller.

(1) The self-conscious self is not hard to overcome. Diffidence arises from a false modesty, due to the story-teller’s failure to realize his obligation to the child and to the story. His part now is not to occupy himself with mistrust of his own ability, but to bend all his energies to interpreting the story for the listener. Embarrassment may be due to natural shyness or to lack of ease in the art of story-telling. If due to the first, it should also disappear as the story-teller realizes his obligation; if to the second, time and practice will probably cure it. It is well to throw off embarrassment vigorously at the outset and plunge into the story; it is surprising how easy and complete will be the victory.

(2) Vain insincerity is a more serious intrusion. It shows itself usually in an affected manner and a false ring in the voice. The story-teller is not engaged in telling the story, but in exhibiting himself. The children will at once sense such a fraud. The pity is that they should ever have had the chance to do so; it is often the beginning of insincerity in them. This story-teller also must strive to realize his important office.

(3) A patronizing story-teller is as great an obstruction. His manner is unctuous and “glawming.” It dwarfs the listener, belittling him and undermining his frankness. Hear how the great queen did in Morris’s tale:

“Then she held him a little season on her weary and happy breast, And she told him of Sigmund and Volsung and the best sprung from the best; _She spake to the new-born baby as one who might understand_.”

The spirit of the italicized words should be the story-teller’s guide. Watch the child the first time he comes under the sway of the patronizing story-teller, how he eyes the babying smile meant to be engaging, how he holds aloof. The story-teller must trust the child and trust the story. He chooses the story for its suitability in arousing and directing the child’s imagination, sympathies, or æsthetic sense. Having made the selection on this basis, his part now is to be, not officious meddler, no matter how well meaning, but communicator.

The patronizing story-teller is inclined to “thin out” the story. There is a proper kind of remaking allowable in telling a story or in fitting it to younger or older audiences. If too much is necessary, the story is probably not in any degree suitable; it might better be left until the children are older. There are for the meantime plenty of stories more nearly available. Some modes of simplification of the content allowable are: omission of details in description and omission of minor characters and incidents, in some cases to be added later; preparatory talk or explanation, reduced to its very lowest terms; conversation or explanation after the telling, to be followed soon by another telling. The form may be made easier by simplification of the complicated sentences or unchildlike modes of speech, by very sparing use of running explanation, by use of roundabout easier phrase to be replaced by the directly descriptive word.

The power and the glory for the listening child are more surely in the message as the _seer_, yourself or another story inventor, saw and delivered it, than in any garbled paraphrase of it, all that many attempting story-telling can manage. Their opportunity lies in the field of interpretation, unless they are genuinely engaged in changing the story or in themselves telling a different story or in truly artistic simplification. Have faith in the little child: in his sensibility to artistic fitness, in his intelligence, in his ready sympathy. Have faith in the story.

Best of all modes, the story may be simplified, not by making it over into something else, but by making it into itself through interpretation.

(4) Some story-tellers bring an uninformed self to the story. The root of their difficulty is failure to see and feel the child world. So important is the principle of insight that it will be taken up at length, under the heading _spontaneity_.

(5) A story-teller lacking in artistic sensibility does not discern the story as a form of art, though a naïve form. He intrudes between the story and the child what, for lack of a better term, the writer called a “sledge-hammer” self, or a didactic self. It resorts to pedagogical pounding, dealing largely in stress on words and in the falling inflection. It vainly attempts to force the story and the child into contact through the intellect, or sometimes the bugaboo of conscience, instead of by the open pathway made by freeing the spirit of the story.

One example, by the way, of the tendency to force the didactic note is the made over version of Southey’s “Three Bears,” in which the story begins with Silver Locks (the little wee woman of the older version is coming back) and makes much of her naughtiness, left in Southey’s story to indirect playful condemnation. This puts her at once in the emphatic position, robbing the three bears of their rank, and the story and the children of the play spirit.

(6) The story-teller who confounds dramatization (not dramatic suggestion) with narration substitutes a detached exhibiting self for the story-teller’s intimate, communicating self. He fails to tell the story. This also will be considered at length under another canon.

(7) Finally, an intruding self is the misinformed self of the lifeless story-teller. It makes story-telling nothing but colorless word-calling. It arises from a false psychology, resting on the assumption that the child’s imaginative and emotional life differs in kind from the adult’s (sound in so far as it condemns strain on the imagination and the emotions); a false ethics, mistrusting attention to oral form, or to beauty of speech; wrong habit in speech. Whatever its source, it prevents the contact of child and story.

The canon of directness, then, requires that both the outer and the inner self lend themselves to telling the story to the listener without obstruction.

_Spontaneity_ is the canon of naturalness, by virtue of which the story has genuine life. It creates the illusion that the story-teller is spinning his tale from within out, its life having become part and parcel of his imaginative and emotional experience. It depends upon insight. The story-teller of childlike tales must “live with our children,” as Froebel said; he must cultivate sensibility to the child’s world, catch its spirit of play and happiness and activity, respect its serious moods, note its affectionate intimacy with animals, cats and dogs and hens and horses, respond to its humor, feel above all its emotional sincerity and simplicity. The child carries himself unaffectedly. It is easy to detect the story-teller who fails of insight into the child’s world. He is either wholly insensible to its characteristics, or he grotesquely exaggerates everything. The first method leaves the child unmoved, the second undermines his sincerity.

The story-teller need not, however, be afraid to give full value to story materials: to idealize its people and happenings; to make its heroines frankly good and beautiful, its supernatural properties adequate, its “great huge bears” satisfyingly huge; to give its seven-leagued giants voice possibilities that will cause half-quaking, half-chuckling listeners to shake in their shoes in whole-hearted enjoyment; to make its porridge pots, that cooked or stopped the minute a certain good little girl said so, magical. Story art, like all art, idealizes its materials the moment it selects them; the story-teller in turn holds them up to view of the imagination. Nor need the adult story-teller be afraid of illumining the view more fully than might a child teller, by the light of the adult’s richer knowledge and experience. No, the story-teller is not to impoverish nor dull the story; but he is to guard against giving the listener the impression of unsuccessful pretense at it, and against urging him to strained imagining and feeling. Until, alas, custom stales him to its false ring, a child condemns the unseeing story-teller, not recognizing him as kith nor kin.

To satisfy the canon of spontaneity, then, the story-teller must see and feel the tale he attempts to tell, that he may re-create its spirit.

By _graphicness_ is meant vividness, by virtue of which the story is made plain to the imagination and quick to the feelings. It is secured by the various means of oral interpretation (to be considered under another heading), helped out by facial expression, and sometimes by gesture or by dramatic suggestion. It is governed by the imperative complementary canon of _reserve_. _Reserve_ is the canon of artistic restraint; as applied here, it keeps story-telling the art of communicating, not allowing it to pass beyond the limits of dramatic suggestion into dramatization.

It is the greater degree of artistic reserve that divides story-telling sharply from dramatization and gives it its special magnetic charm and enduring strength. The essence of dramatization is sensible actualization, the essence of story-telling is imaginative suggestion. The story tells, yet leaves to the listener exhaustless discovery. At each re-telling the story allures the listener’s imagination to catch added import. The listener maturing into the adult may penetrate a specific detail in the childlike allegory and uncover a symbol of everlasting life, eternal youth or truth or beauty, and having found it, he can never with listening exhaust the depths of it. Is it fanciful to conjecture whether it be some response to this imperishable integrity that urges children to demand the same tale over and over again? Psychology has discerned in them wiseacres learning the realities of life through play. Why not also through story?

Dramatic suggestion as an aid to language and subordinate to it is, however, in place. It was indulged in freely by primitive story-tellers. Children use it instinctively. Hint of happening, by show of action; or glimpse of character, by posture, facial expression, suggestion in tone, is sufficient. Such hint at once makes the situation or character plain to the imagination. The queen in Hans Andersen’s “Princess on the Pea,” for example, is well brought into the story by the story-teller’s taking on a look of shrewdness, with perhaps shaking of the head, before he tells what the queen thinks of this “real” princess who presents herself thus bedraggled. In doing this the story-teller must preserve the appearance and intention of narration. As soon as some students of story-telling attempt dramatic suggestion they lose the listener and lapse into playing rather than telling. Even when dialogue or monologue demands a degree of impersonation the story-teller must keep in mind that it is for the purpose of _telling_ the story to the listener. He _shows_, or _illustrates_, looking back to insure that the listener is following, or to make communication. After the story-teller’s pantomime of surprise and delight at finding the shoes, in “The Elves and the Shoemaker,” for example, he looks at his listeners to communicate his feeling to them and invite their corresponding emotion, then makes verbal communication to them.

Suggestive gesture may also be used to make language graphic. (Beginners often neglect to keep the hands free for gesture they may be impelled to use.) For the sake of the child we must recover, if we have lost it, the speaking face, animated body, and eloquent hand of our childhood. As the word gains in meaning, we resort to gesture more sparingly. Gesture should precede the word. Watch the unconscious child in his use of gesture; he tells with the hand and body before he tells with the word. Some beginners drop a gesture so quickly that they might as well have done without it, others sustain it too long. Gesture is used, as a rule, for one of two chief purposes, demonstration or appeal to the imagination or feelings. When the story-teller is using it to show shape or size or place, he does not need it any longer after he has done this. If he is using it to send the imagination of his listeners out or to appeal to their emotions, he must sustain it until it has accomplished its effect. Sometimes a quick strong gesture makes powerful appeal to the imagination; sometimes sustained gesture serves as aftermath, still telling to the imagination. Gesture must not appear detached from the story-teller, that is, put on from the outside; it should come from within, in the story-teller’s effort to tell. It is helpful, too, to note that gesture partakes of the imitativeness of art,—thus we speak of _kingly_ gesture, _commanding_ gesture, _witchlike_ gesture. When dealing with things that address themselves to the expanding imagination, gesture should be indefinite and broadly suggestive rather than definitive. Too prescriptive an indication of the size of the bears in “The Three Bears,” for example, dwarfs for some generous imaginations the delightful hugeness of the great huge bear and the irresistible littleness of the little small wee bear. Free sweeping gesture is in place in the heroic legend.

Suggestive posture is another means of giving vividness. The story-teller might learn much from the painter and the sculptor about the eloquence of pose. The Pre-Raphaelite school of painting was no doubt guilty of extravagance, but in pose and facial expression it caught some of the secrets of artistic suggestion. We know how the sculptor, too, represents listening, or surprise, or courage. The sculptor is, of course, very much more dependent on posture than is the speaker. But posture should help the story-teller, just as do tone and quality and rate of voice. It will not do, for example, to settle back heavily in the seat while telling, “Out popped the gingerbread boy and—” It must not be forgotten, however, that pose also is under the imperative restriction of reserve; narration is not the static art of posing. Constant or violent change in posture, too, except in particular stories demanding it, is out of place; story-telling is the quiet if animated and graphic art of communication. Posture and facial expression, like gesture, should precede the word, prophesying of it, and sometimes be sustained during pause for effect.

Before leaving this canon, the story-teller should understand that graphicness should sometimes be veiled under a pervading elusiveness. Some stories should be wrapped about with the charm of impalpability; the mystery of them is the secret of their appeal. This is the atmosphere for the romantic fairy tale, like “The Sleeping Beauty,” and for many of the legends and romances.

We are now ready to sum up the canon of graphicness. We have defined it as the dynamic principle of vividness by virtue of which the story is made plain to the imagination. It is secured by the supreme agency of speech, aided sometimes, in greater or less degree, by posture, gesture, facial expression, and dramatic suggestion. It is under the imperative restriction of the canon of reserve.