Stories to Tell to Children.

by Sara Cone Bryant.

SOME SUGGESTIONS FOR THE STORY-TELLER

Concerning the fundamental points of method in telling a story, I have little to add to the principles which I have already stated as necessary, in my opinion, in the book of which this is, in a way, the continuation. But in the two years which have pa.s.sed since that book was written, I have had the happiness of working on stories and the telling of them, among teachers and students all over this country, and in that experience certain secondary points of method have come to seem more important, or at least more in need of emphasis, than they did before. As so often happens, I had a.s.sumed that "those things are taken for granted;" whereas, to the beginner or the teacher not naturally a story-teller, the secondary or implied technique is often of greater difficulty than the mastery of underlying principles. The few suggestions which follow are of this practical, obvious kind.

Take your story seriously. No matter how riotously absurd it is, or how full of inane repet.i.tion, remember, if it is good enough to tell, it is a real story, and must be treated with respect. If you cannot feel so toward it, do not tell it. Have faith in the story, and in the att.i.tude of the children toward it and you. If you fail in this, the immediate result will be a touch of shame-facedness, affecting your manner unfavorably, and, probably, influencing your accuracy and imaginative vividness.

Perhaps I can make the point clearer by telling you about one of the girls in a cla.s.s which was studying stories last winter; I feel sure if she or any of her fellow students recognizes the incident, she will not resent being made to serve the good cause, even in the unattractive guise of a warning example.

A few members of the cla.s.s had prepared the story of "The Fisherman and his Wife." The first girl called on was evidently inclined to feel that it was rather a foolish story. She tried to tell it well, but there were parts of it which produced in her the touch of shamefacedness to which I have referred.

When she came to the rhyme,--

"O man of the sea, come, listen to me, For Alice, my wife, the plague of my life, Has sent me to beg a boon of thee,"

she said it rather rapidly. At the first repet.i.tion she said it still more rapidly; the next time she came to the jingle she said it so fast and so low that it was unintelligible; and the next recurrence was too much for her. With a blush and a hesitating smile she said, "And he said that same thing, you know!" Of course everybody laughed, and of course the thread of interest and illusion was hopelessly broken for everybody.

Now, any one who chanced to hear Miss Shedlock tell that same story will remember that the absurd rhyme gave great opportunity for expression, in its very repet.i.tion; each time that the fisherman came to the water's edge his chagrin and unwillingness was greater, and his summons to the magic fish mirrored his feeling. The jingle IS foolish; that is a part of the charm. But if the person who tells it FEELS foolish, there is no charm at all! It is the same principle which applies to any address to any a.s.semblage: if the speaker has the air of finding what he has to say absurd or unworthy of effort, the audience naturally tends to follow his lead, and find it not worth listening to.

Let me urge, then, take your story seriously.

Next, "take your time." This suggestion needs explaining, perhaps. It does not mean license to dawdle. Nothing is much more annoying in a speaker than too great deliberateness, or than hesitation of speech.

But it means a quiet realization of the fact that the floor is yours, everybody wants to hear you, there is time enough for every point and shade of meaning and no one will think the story too long. This mental att.i.tude must underlie proper control of speed. Never hurry. A business-like leisure is the true att.i.tude of the storyteller.

And the result is best attained by concentrating one's attention on the episodes of the story. Pa.s.s lightly, and comparatively swiftly, over the portions between actual episodes, but take all the time you need for the elaboration of those. And above all, do not FEEL hurried.

The next suggestion is eminently plain and practical, if not an all too obvious one. It is this: if all your preparation and confidence fails you at the crucial moment, and memory plays the part of traitor in some particular, if, in short, you blunder on a detail of the story, NEVER ADMIT IT. If it was an unimportant detail which you misstated, pa.s.s right on, accepting whatever you said, and continuing with it; if you have been so unfortunate as to omit a fact which was a necessary link in the chain, put it in, later, as skillfully as you can, and with as deceptive an appearance of its being in the intended order; but never take the children behind the scenes, and let them hear the creaking of your mental machinery. You must be infallible. You must be in the secret of the mystery, and admit your audience on somewhat unequal terms; they should have no creeping doubts as to your complete initiation into the secrets of the happenings you relate.

Plainly, there can be lapses of memory so complete, so all-embracing, that frank failure is the only outcome, but these are so few as not to need consideration, when dealing with so simple material as that of children's stories. There are times, too, before an adult audience, when a speaker can afford to let his hearers be amused with him over a chance mistake. But with children it is most unwise to break the spell of the entertainment in that way. Consider, in the matter of a detail of action or description, how absolutely unimportant the mere accuracy is, compared with the effect of smoothness and the enjoyment of the hearers. They will not remember the detail, for good or evil, half so long as they will remember the fact that you did not know it. So, for their sakes, as well as for the success of your story, cover your slips of memory, and let them be as if they were not.

And now I come to two points in method which have to do especially with humorous stories. The first is the power of initiating the appreciation of the joke. Every natural humorist does this by instinct and the value of the power to story-teller can hardly be overestimated.

To initiate appreciation does not mean that one necessarily gives way to mirth, though even that is sometimes natural and effective; one merely feels the approach of the humorous climax, and subtly suggests to the hearers that it will soon be "time to laugh." The suggestion usually comes in the form of facial expression, and in the tone. And children are so much simpler, and so much more accustomed to following another's lead than their elders, that the expression can be much more outright and unguarded than would be permissible with a mature audience.

Children like to feel the joke coming, in this way; they love the antic.i.p.ation of a laugh, and they will begin to dimple, often, at your first unconscious suggestion of humor. If it is lacking, they are sometimes afraid to follow their own instincts. Especially when you are facing an audience of grown people and children together, you will find that the latter are very hesitant about initiating their own expression of humor. It is more difficult to make them forget their surroundings then, and more desirable to give them a happy lead. Often at the funniest point you will see some small listener in an agony of endeavor to cloak the mirth which he--poor mite--fears to be indecorous. Let him see that it is "the thing" to laugh, and that everybody is going to.

Having so stimulated the appreciation of the humorous climax, it is important to give your hearers time for the full savor of the jest to permeate their consciousness. It is really robbing an audience of its rights, to pa.s.s so quickly from one point to another that the mind must lose a new one if it lingers to take in the old. Every vital point in a tale must be given a certain amount of time: by an antic.i.p.atory pause, by some form of vocal or repet.i.tive emphasis, and by actual time. But even more than other tales does the funny story demand this.

It cannot be funny without it.

Every one who is familiar with the theatre must have noticed how careful all comedians are to give this pause for appreciation and laughter. Often the opportunity is crudely given, or too liberally offered; and that offends. But in a reasonable degree the practice is undoubtedly necessary to any form of humorous expression.

A remarkably good example of the type of humorous story to which these principles of method apply, is the story of "Epaminondas." It will be plain to any reader that all the several funny crises are of the perfectly unmistakable sort children like, and that, moreover, these funny spots are not only easy to see; they are easy to foresee. The teller can hardly help sharing the joke in advance, and the tale is an excellent one with which to practice for power in the points mentioned.

Epaminondas is a valuable little rascal from other points of view, and I mean to return to him, to point a moral. But just here I want s.p.a.ce for a word or two about the matter of variety of subject and style in school stories.

There are two wholly different kinds of story which are equally necessary for children, I believe, and which ought to be given in about the proportion of one to three, in favor of the second kind; I make the ratio uneven because the first kind is more dominating in its effect.

The first kind is represented by such stories as the "Pig Brother,"

which has now grown so familiar to teachers that it will serve for ill.u.s.tration without repet.i.tion here. It is the type of story which specifically teaches a certain ethical or conduct lesson, in the form of a fable or an allegory,--it pa.s.ses on to the child the conclusions as to conduct and character, to which the race has, in general, attained through centuries of experience and moralizing. The story becomes a part of the outfit of received ideas on manners and morals which is an inescapable and necessary possession of the heir of civilization.

Children do not object to these stories in the least, if the stories are good ones. They accept them with the relish which nature seems to maintain for all truly nourishing material. And the little tales are one of the media through which we elders may transmit some very slight share of the benefit received by us, in turn, from actual or transmitted experience.

The second kind has no preconceived moral to offer, makes no attempt to affect judgment or to pa.s.s on a standard. It simply presents a picture of life, usually in fable or poetic image, and says to the hearer, "These things are." The hearer, then, consciously or otherwise, pa.s.ses judgment on the facts. His mind says, "These things are good;" or, "This was good, and that, bad;" or, "This thing is desirable," or the contrary.

The story of "The Little Jackal and the Alligator" is a good ill.u.s.tration of this type. It is a character-story. In the naive form of a folk tale, it doubtless embodies the observations of a seeing eye, in a country and time when the little jackal and the great alligator were even more vivid images of certain human characters than they now are. Again and again, surely, the author or authors of the tales must have seen the weak, small, clever being triumph over the bulky, well-accoutred, stupid adversary. Again and again they had laughed at the discomfiture of the latter, perhaps rejoicing in it the more because it removed fear from their own houses. And probably never had they concerned themselves particularly with the basic ethics of the struggle. It was simply one of the things they saw. It was life. So they made a picture of it.

The folk tale so made, and of such character, comes to the child somewhat as an unprejudiced newspaper account of to-day's happenings comes to us. It pleads no cause, except through its contents; it exercises no intentioned influence on our moral judgment; it is there, as life is there, to be seen and judged. And only through such seeing and judging can the individual perception attain to anything of power or originality. Just as a certain amount of received ideas is necessary to sane development, so is a definite opportunity for first-hand judgments essential to power.

In this epoch of well-trained minds we run some risk of an inundation of accepted ethics. The mind which can make independent judgments, can look at new facts with fresh vision, and reach conclusions with simplicity, is the perennial power in the world. And this is the mind we are not noticeably successful in developing, in our system of schooling. Let us at least have its needs before our consciousness, in our attempts to supplement the regular studies of school by such side-activities as story-telling. Let us give the children a fair proportion of stories which stimulate independent moral and practical decisions.

And now for a brief return to our little black friend. "Epaminondas"

belongs to a very large, very ancient type of funny story: the tale in which the jest depends wholly on an abnormal degree of stupidity on the part of the hero. Every race which produces stories seems to have found this theme a natural outlet for its childlike laughter. The stupidity of Lazy Jack, of Big Claus, of the Good Man, of Clever Alice, all have their counterparts in the folly of the small Epaminondas.

Evidently, such stories have served a purpose in the education of the race. While the exaggeration of familiar attributes easily awakens mirth in a simple mind, it does more: it teaches practical lessons of wisdom and discretion. And possibly the lesson was the original cause of the story.

Not long ago, I happened upon an instance of the teaching power of these nonsense tales, so amusing and convincing that I cannot forbear to share it. A primary teacher who heard me tell "Epaminondas" one evening, told it to her pupils the next morning, with great effect. A young teacher who was observing in the room at the time told me what befell. She said the children laughed very heartily over the story, and evidently liked it much. About an hour later, one of them was sent to the board to do a little problem. It happened that the child made an excessively foolish mistake, and did not notice it. As he glanced at the teacher for the familiar smile of encouragement, she simply raised her hands, and e.j.a.c.u.l.a.t.ed "'For the law's sake!'"

It was sufficient. The child took the cue instantly. He looked hastily at his work, broke into an irrepressible giggle, rubbed the figures out, without a word, and began again. And the whole cla.s.s entered into the joke with the gusto of fellow-fools, for once wise.

It is safe to a.s.sume that the child in question will make fewer needless mistakes for a long time because of the wholesome reminder of his likeness with one who "ain't got the sense he was born with." And what occurred so visibly in his case goes on quietly in the hidden recesses of the mind in many cases. One "Epaminondas" is worth three lectures.

I wish there were more of such funny little tales in the world's literature, all ready, as this one is, for telling to the youngest of our listeners. But masterpieces are few in any line, and stories for telling are no exception; it took generations, probably, to make this one. The demand for new sources of supply comes steadily from teachers and mothers, and is the more insistent because so often met by the disappointing recommendations of books which prove to be for reading only, rather than for telling. It would be a delight to print a list of fifty, twenty-five, even ten books which would be found full of stories to tell without much adapting. But I am grateful to have found even fewer than the ten, to which I am sure the teacher can turn with real profit. The following names are, of course, additional to the list contained in "How to Tell Stories to Children."

ALL ABOUT JOHNNIE JONES. By Carolyn Verhoeff. Milton Bradley Co., Springfield, Ma.s.s. Valuable for kindergartners as a supply of realistic stories with practical lessons in simplest form.

OLD DECCAN DAYS. By Mary Frere. Joseph McDonough, Albany, New York.

A splendid collection of Hindu folk tales, adaptable for all ages.

THE SILVER CROWN. By Laura E. Richards. Little, Brown & Co., Boston.

Poetic fables with beautiful suggestions of ethical truths.

THE CHILDREN'S HOUR. BY Eva March Tappan. Houghton, Mifflin & Co., Boston, New York, and Chicago. A cla.s.sified collection, in ten volumes, of fairy, folk tales, fables, realistic, historical, and poetical stories.

FOR THE CHILDREN'S HOUR. BY Carolyn Bailey and Clara Lewis. Milton Bradley Co., Springfield. A general collection of popular stories, well told.

THE SONS OF CORMAC. By Aldis Dunbar. Longmans, Green & Co., London.

Rather mature but very fine Irish stories.

For the benefit of suggestion to teachers in schools where story-telling is newly or not yet introduced in systematic form, I am glad to append the following list of stories which have been found, on several years' trial, to be especially tellable and likable, in certain grades of the Providence schools, in Rhode Island. The list is not mine, although it embodies some of my suggestions. I offer it merely as a practical result of the effort to equalize and extend the story-hour throughout the schools. Its makers would be the last to claim ideal merit for it, and they are constantly improving and developing it. I am indebted for the privilege of using it to the primary teachers of Providence, and to their supervisor, Miss Ella L.

Sweeney.

STORIES FOR REPRODUCTION