The Art of the Story-Teller Part 4

"We have all this straight from the alderman's newspaper, but it is not to be depended on." From "Jack the Dullard," Hans Christian Andersen.

Or by evading the point:

"Whoever does not believe this must buy shares in the Tanner's yard."

From "A Great Grief," Hans Christian Andersen.

Or by some striking general comment:

"He has never caught up with the three days he missed at the beginning of the world, and he has never learnt how to behave." From "How the Camel got his Hump": "Just So Stories," Rudyard Kipling.

I have only suggested in this chapter a few of the artifices which I have found useful in my own experience, but I am sure that many more might be added.

CHAPTER IV. ELEMENTS TO AVOID IN THE SELECTION OF MATERIAL.

I am confronted in this portion of my work with a great difficulty, because I cannot afford to be as catholic as I could wish (this rejection or selection of material being primarily intended for those story-tellers dealing with normal children); but I do wish from the outset to distinguish between a story told to an individual child in the home circle or by a personal friend, and a story told to a group of children as part of the school curriculum. And if I seem to reiterate this difference, it is because I wish to show very clearly that the recital of parents and friends may be quite separate in content and manner from that offered by the teaching world. In the former case, almost any subject can be treated, because, knowing the individual temperament of the child, a wise parent or friend knows also what can be presented or not presented to the child; but in dealing with a group of normal children in school much has to be eliminated that could be given fearlessly to the abnormal child; I mean the child who, by circ.u.mstances or temperament, is developed beyond his years.

I shall now mention some of the elements which experience has shown me to be unsuitable for cla.s.s stories.

I. _Stories dealing with a.n.a.lysis of motive and feeling_. This warning is specially necessary today, because this is, above all, an age of introspection and a.n.a.lysis. We have only to glance at the princ.i.p.al novels and plays during the last quarter of a century, more especially during the last ten years, to see how this spirit has crept into our literature and life.

Now, this tendency to a.n.a.lyze is obviously more dangerous for children than for adults, because, from lack of experience and knowledge of psychology, the child's a.n.a.lysis is incomplete. It cannot see all the causes of the action, nor can it make that philosophical allowance for mood which brings the adult to truer conclusions.

Therefore, we should discourage the child who shows a tendency to a.n.a.lyze too closely the motives of its action, and refrain from presenting to them in our stories any example which might encourage them to persist in this course.

I remember, on one occasion, when I went to say good night to a little girl of my acquaintance, I found her sitting up in bed, very wide- awake. Her eyes were s.h.i.+ning, her cheeks were flushed, and when I asked her what had excited her so much, she said:

"I _know_ I have done something wrong today, but I cannot quite remember what it was."

I said: "But, Phyllis, if you put your hand, which is really quite small, in front of your eyes, you could not see the shape of anything else, however large it might be. Now, what you have done today appears very large because it is so close, but when it is a little further off, you will be able to see better and know more about it.

So let us wait till tomorrow morning."

I am happy to say that she took my advice. She was soon fast asleep, and the next morning she had forgotten the wrong over which she had been unhealthily brooding the night before.

2. _Stories dealing too much with sarcasm and satire_. These are weapons which are too sharply polished, and therefore too dangerous, to place in the hands of children. For here again, as in the case of a.n.a.lysis, they can only have a very incomplete conception of the case. They do not know the real cause which produces the apparently ridiculous appearance, and it is only the abnormally gifted child or grown-up person who discovers this by instinct. It takes a lifetime to arrive at the position described in Sterne's words: "I would not have let fallen an unseasonable pleasantry in the venerable presence of misery to be ent.i.tled to all the with which Rabelais has ever scattered."

I will hasten to add that I should not wish children to have their sympathy too much drawn out, of their emotions kindled too much to pity, because this would be neither healthy nor helpful to themselves or others. I only want to protect children from the dangerous critical att.i.tude induced by the use of satire which sacrifices too much of the atmosphere of trust and belief in human beings which ought to be an essential of child life. By indulging in satire, the sense of kindness in children would become perverted, their sympathy cramped, and they themselves would be old before their time. We have an excellent example of this in Hans Christian Andersen's "Snow Queen."

When Kay gets the piece of broken mirror into his eye, he no longer sees the world from the normal child's point of view; he can no longer see anything but the foibles of those about him, a condition usually reached by a course of pessimistic experience.

Andersen sums up the unnatural point of view in these words: "When Kay tried to repeat the Lord's Prayer, he could only remember the multiplication table." Now, without taking these words in any literal sense, we can admit that they represent the development of the head at the expense of the heart.

An example of this kind of story to avoid is Andersen's "Story of the b.u.t.terfly." The bitterness of the Anemones, the sentimentality of the Violets, the schoolgirlishness of the Snowdrops, the domesticity of the Sweetpeas--all this tickles the palate of the adult, but does not belong to the place of the normal child. Again, I repeat, that the unusual child may take all this in and even preserve his kindly att.i.tude towards the world, but it is dangerous atmosphere for the ordinary child.

3. _Stories of a sentimental character_. Strange to say, this element of sentimentality appeals more to the young teachers than to the children themselves. It is difficult to define the difference between real sentiment and sentimentality, but the healthy normal boy or girl of, let us say, ten or eleven years old, seems to feel it unconsciously, though the distinction is not so clear a few years later.

Mrs. Elisabeth McCracken contributed an excellent article some years ago to the _Outlook_ on the subject of literature for the young, in which we find a good ill.u.s.tration of this power of discrimination on the part of a child.

A young teacher was telling her pupils the story of the emotional lady who, to put her lover to the test, bade him pick up the glove which she had thrown down into the arena between the tiger and the lion.

The lover does her bidding in order to vindicate his character as a brave knight. One boy after hearing the story at once states his contempt for the knight's acquiescence, which he declares to be unworthy.

"But," says the teacher, "you see he really did it to show the lady how foolish she was." The answer of the boy sums up what I have been trying to show: "There was no sense in _his_ being sillier than _she_ was, to show her _she_ was silly."

If the boy had stopped there, we might have concluded that he was lacking in imagination or romance, but his next remark proves what a balanced and discriminating person he was, for he added: "Now, if _she_ had fallen in, and he had leapt after her to rescue her, that would have been splendid and of some use." Given the character of the lady, we might, as adults, question the last part of the boy's statement, but this is pure cynicism and fortunately does not enter into the child's calculations.

In my own personal experience, and I have told this story often in the German ballad form to girls of ten and twelve in the high schools in England, I have never found one girl who sympathized with the lady or who failed to appreciate the poetic justice meted out to her in the end by the dignified renunciation of the knight.

Chesterton defines sentimentality as "a tame, cold, or small and inadequate manner of speaking about certain matters which demand very large and beautiful expression."

I would strongly urge upon young teachers to revise, by this definition, some of the stories they have included in their repertories, and see whether they would stand the test or not.

4. _Stories containing strong sensational episodes_. The danger of this kind of story is all the greater because many children delight in it and some crave for it in the abstract, but fear it in the concrete.[15]

An affectionate aunt, on one occasion, anxious to curry favor with a four-year-old nephew, was taxing her imagination to find a story suitable for his tender years. She was greatly startled when he suddenly said, in a most imperative tone: "Tell me the story of a bear eating a small boy." This was so remote from her own choice of subject that she hesitated at first, but coming to the conclusion that as the child had chosen the situation he would feel no terror in the working up of its details, she a most thrilling and blood-curdling story, leading up to the final catastrophe. But just as she reached the great dramatic moment, the child raised his hands in terror and said: "Oh! Auntie, don't let the bear really eat the boy!"

"Don't you know," said an impatient boy who had been listening to a mild adventure story considered suitable to his years, "that I don't take any interest in the story until the decks are dripping with gore?" Here we have no opportunity of deciding whether or not the actual description demanded would be more alarming than the listener had realized.

Here is a poem of James Stephens, showing a child's taste for sensational things:

A man was sitting underneath a tree Outside the village, and he asked me What name was upon this place, and said he Was never here before. He told a Lot of stories to me too. His nose was flat.

I asked him how it happened, and he said, The first mate of the _Mary Ann_ done that With a marling-spike one day, but he was dead, And a jolly job too, but he'd have gone a long way to have killed him.

A gold ring in one ear, and the other was bit off by a crocodile, bedad, That's what he said: He taught me how to chew.

He was a real nice man. He liked me too.

The taste that is fed by the sensational contents of the newspapers and the dramatic excitement of street life, and some of the lurid representations of the cinematograph, is so much stimulated that the interest in normal stories is difficult to rouse. I will not here dwell on the deleterious effects of over-dramatic stimulation, which has been known to lead to crime, since I am keener to prevent the telling of too many sensational stories than to suggest a cure when the mischief is done.

Kate Douglas Wiggin has said:

"Let us be realistic, by all means, but beware, O story-teller, of being too realistic. Avoid the shuddering tale of 'the wicked boy who stoned the birds,' lest some hearer should be inspired to try the dreadful experiment and see if it really does kill."

I must emphasize the fact, however, that it is only the excess of this dramatic element which I deplore. A certain amount of excitement is necessary, but this question belongs to the positive side of the subject, and I shall deal with it later on.

5. _Stories presenting matters quite outside the plane of a child's interests, unless they are wrapped in mystery_. Experience with children ought to teach us to avoid stories which contain too much _allusion_ to matters of which the hearers are entirely ignorant.

But judging from the written stories of today, supposed to be for children, it is still a matter of difficulty to realize that this form of allusion to "foreign" matters, or making a joke, the appreciation of which depends solely on a special and "inside" knowledge, is always bewildering and fatal to sustained dramatic interest.

It is a matter of intense regret that so very few people have sufficiently clear remembrance of their own childhood to help them to understand the taste and point of view of the _normal_ child.

There is a pa.s.sage in the "Brownies," by Mrs. Ewing, which ill.u.s.trates the confusion created in the child mind by a facetious allusion in a dramatic moment which needed a more direct treatment. When the nursery toys have all gone astray, one little child exclaims joyfully:

"Why, the old Rocking-Horse's nose has turned up in the oven!"

"It couldn't," remarks a tiresome, facetious doctor, far more anxious to be funny than to sympathized with the child, "it was the purest Grecian, modeled from the Elgin marbles."

Now, for grownup people this is an excellent joke, but for a child has not yet become acquainted with these Grecian masterpieces, the whole remark is pointless and hampering.[16]

6. _Stories which appeal to fear or priggishness_. This is a cla.s.s of story which scarcely counts today and against which the teacher does not need a warning, but I wish to make a pa.s.sing allusion to these stories, partly to round off my subject and partly to show that we have made some improvement in choice of subject.