Stories and Story-telling

(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:

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.

In an art defined as story-telling the skillful use of the voice is the chief technique to be mastered, and, alas, the least regarded. It is, however, gaining ground. Story-tellers are finding it increasingly reasonable to believe there is close connection between what is to be told and how it is told. While it is true that so strong is the vitality of the what that it will usually triumph in some degree over the how, this is no sound argument for abandoning it to that fate. It is also true, because of the social nature of language, that the listener will do much, no matter how dull the how, to inform and transform the what in the light of his own knowledge and experience. This is precisely in just measure what he is to do. But this argument also is weak.

Man tries to utter his meaning, to give sound to the sense of his thought. All students of words appear to agree to this as a primary creative principle. And in the utterance of language he employs instinctively what some story-tellers condemn as the “show” tricks of elocutionists: suggestive quality or pitch of voice; slow or rapid rate of speaking; grouping, inflection, and pause. Mastery of this instinctive use of speech in its fullness and perfection, as a means to an end, is what is meant by mastery of oral technique. Whatever the method of mastery, direct or indirect, surely the end should be granted.

It has taken many people a long time to convince themselves that the speaking voice is in need of proper exercise and training. They have expected too much of the speaker. The living person back of the speech, the personality, is the chief element in speech; without the speaker to utter his meaning, speech would be nothing but empty word mouthing. But they should give the speaker at least as much fair play as has the singer, training in the use of the voice. The set jaw, wrong coördination, the half-open throat, the closed glottis, or “voice box,” the immobile lip (whose remedy, by the way, is not mouthing), the thick tongue,—all these, causing indistinctness, nasality, throatiness, are impediments to speech. So are throat or nasal or dental obstructions. So is incorrect breathing.

The nice art of enunciation and articulation is worth mastery. Phonics appears to some people like a science of very small things. It has not only an æsthetic value, but, if you must separate them, an intellectual value. Masters of enunciation and articulation give not only finish but richer meaning to language. This, again, is no doubt due to the lively connection between sound and sense. Open mouth and throat well to pronounce the vowels in joy, or shine, and confirm the truth of this; note the force of vowels, consonants, or aspirate pronounced accurately in glisten, shimmering, hushed, croaked, scream, harsh. It will be understood of course that the requirements of character suggestion may demand slurring, chopping off, drawling, and all sorts of speech vices; when in place they become virtues.

We are fond of using the expression “as natural as breathing.” How many are breathing as nature would have them? The speaker should be past master of breathing: be able to expand the diaphragm and fill full and deep, to supplement this basal stock, as opening the mouth to enunciate a vowel or to speak a phrase gives easy, unobtrusive opportunity, to expend breath economically.

The story-teller should “find” his particular voice. To do this he may read or speak in his ordinary tone and note where it vibrates. This is his natural, or at least second-nature, voice, working basis for improvement; re-placing, purifying, strengthening, making flexible.

He should be able to place tone, to give it this or that quality, as the needs of interpretation may demand. He should be able to keep feeling out of the voice, and to speak with feeling without violating the principle of reserve.

Understanding, feeling, and æsthetic appreciation are rooted in the story-teller, to be sure, but they must be transmitted by the organs of voice. He will be delighted to find that the physical action of these organs, if easy and responsive, appears to deepen his own understanding and feeling and to send them in greater fullness to the listener.

One of the most important principles of oral technique is perspective, through which the central idea is kept dominant throughout the story. Proper application of this principle gives the whole story unity and increasing interest and point. To give the story perspective the story-teller employs grouping, pause, rate, pitch, and inflection. Space permits of nothing more than this mere enumeration of these means and of pointing out a very limited use of one or two. Beginners often err in grouping. In the story of “The Frog Prince,” for example, they will say “there was a king,” making this a more or less complete and leading idea, instead of “there was a king who had beautiful daughters;” at this point, moreover, by use of the complete falling inflection they destroy the subordinate relation of this idea to the succeeding one, “but the youngest was the most beautiful.” Untrained speakers and badly trained readers overuse the falling inflection. Story-tellers will find it helpful to practice the sustained, or “forward pointing,” voice. It is necessary to the proper building out of units of thought. The story-teller should “make,” for example, the word picture with the voice, bit by bit, much as the painter does the line and color picture with the brush, each added detail going toward the whole.

Mastery of pause is important. In ordinary communication the story-teller, as does everyone else, uses pause a hundred times a day, but he is inclined at first to overlook its part in story-telling. He should learn to pause to make clear not only the divisions of single sentences, but of the whole story, its setting, action, resolution, and close. He should use it also to set off for dramatic emphasis or emotional effect significant or climactic circumstances, persons, or details of action. Pause is one of the simplest and most effective means of emphasis. Of course, like every other means of speech, it is sometimes best ignored.

This bare glance at speech technique shows us that the story-teller should have such command over the agencies of oral transmission as will enable him to convey the story fully to the listener. Let his point of departure be the effort to utter his meaning.

When telling stories to young children the story-teller may do more or less “leading” of the feelings and the taste, thus educating the child to respond to what is playful or brave or humorous or beautiful. If the story-teller will show pleasure in obedience, fun, good-nature, loveliness in nature or art, shape, for example, or color, or sound, or adaptability to use, the imitative listener will respond in like appreciation. Some beginners find it difficult to do this. Sometimes the source of the difficulty is bad habit in reading. This affects story-telling when the story has been prepared from the printed page. The student comes to the story-telling class with the habit formed of suppressing in his reading appreciation of excellence or of beauty. Two students talking together outside of class may do the natural thing; if describing beauty—loveliness of nature, human loveliness, goodness, heroism—they show pleasure in it by smiling lip and softly shining eye; “beauty,” as Wordsworth has it, “makes them glad.” But nine times out of ten the beginner in story-telling who has prepared the story from a book allows no appreciation of beauty to get into voice or self as he tells, for example, “In olden times, when wishing was having, there lived a king who had beautiful daughters, but the youngest was so lovely that even the sun himself, who has seen so much, marveled whenever he shone in her face.” He is not of course to magnify this phrase unduly; he must keep it in proper perspective.

It is astonishing how imperfectly we talk and tell. As indicated before, words as they are uttered represent to the young listener, and, so lively is language, in great degree to the adult also, exactly what the speaker puts into them. If he utters bright dully, he contradicts truth; if he pronounces loved coldly, he robs it of the human warmth of itself; if he mumbles lovely, he dwarfs beauty. To correct wrong habit in speaking, the student of story-telling should cultivate sensibility to the feeling and æsthetic suggestions in language, and during the stage of apprenticeship be content to be conscious until more spontaneous appreciation shall relieve him of watchfulness.

To take another example, in the story of “The Hut in the Wood,” beginners often fairly shout “night was coming on,” “the owl hooted,” “the trees rustled.” The thing to be communicated here through the details is the emotional state of the girl. It is communicated by sympathetic interpretation: lowering of voice, with suggestion in it of the sounds heard, accompanied by shrinking in posture and dawning of fear in the face.

Leading is open to abuse. The more the language of the story tells on its face when interpreted so as to set free the associations bound up in it, the more the story-teller must trust it to carry its own effects.

The story-teller is governed most by the supreme canon of simplicity. His must be a peculiarly unelaborate, apparently artless art. In gesture and facial expression, in dramatic suggestion, in speech, his is that form or degree of the artistic manner that will carry to the listener the unaffected, frank, childlike kind of life with which the child story deals: not intense in manner; not intellectual nor artificial in gesture; not pedantic nor studied in speech—but sincere and simple.

The Child’s Part in Story-Telling

Let us tabulate some of the things the child naturally does as his part in story-telling. The table will be incomplete, but it may be suggestive. What is the child’s part in story-telling?

(1) It is listening. Let us not underrate the child’s quiet part as listener harkening to the story again and again to catch wider and deeper vision of it.

(2) It is remaining silent. When it is the silence of delight, be content; this is result enough. When it is the spiritual silence out of whose brooding may be born reverent awe or insight into justice or cheerful good will or virile endeavor, bring all your wisdom to bear to decide whether you will help or hinder by leaving the child to himself, and in case of doubt give the story the benefit of it, trusting it to deliver its own message in due season.

(3) It is commenting. On the other hand, do not be unmindful of another opportunity. A child, like an adult, is inclined to talk some stories over; meet him halfway. Indeed, in some cases, lead the way; stimulate an inert class to talk over some of the more objective type of stories. It is your opportunity to get and clarify the child’s point of view.

(4) It is joining in. We learn, from the snatches of story-telling history that have come down to us, that it was the custom of the audience to join in at the rhythmic repetitions, as people do at the chorus of a comic song. The children show the same tendency; encourage it. It not only pleases them, but it is an easy and natural beginning in reproduction. The child’s dramatic sense prompts him to come in also when the story-teller reaches dialogue; encourage this also.

(5) It is re-telling. Rightly conducted, reproduction of stories is profitable for shaping the pupil’s thought and language mode. But is the exercise rightly conducted? The children listen in breathless delight as the teacher tells the story; she demands it “back,” the children struggle, interest flags, teacher and children toil on, and joy dies out in story and listener. This is too bad. Story-telling is a legitimate opportunity for unalloyed pleasure; the school is not too lavish of such times. What is the root of the trouble? It lies in one or more sources: the practice of requiring premature reproduction of some types of story not grasped by the children to the definite point of re-telling; the teacher’s unreasonable or wrong standards of achievement; the pupil’s lack of familiarity with the story, due to the teacher’s tendency to turn reproduction into a test or task.

The tendency of the school to require immediate verbal reproduction of all stories is unwise utilitarianism. It is limiting the teacher’s choice of stories undesirably. Feeling compelled to demand reproduction of every story, the teacher confines her choice to stories the children will take hold of easily. We can all testify that we have heard and been moved or delighted by recitals we could not reproduce; their purpose was to accomplish exactly what they did accomplish. The child is capable of responding in æsthetic pleasure or spiritual uplift to stories as yet beyond his re-telling. It is highly desirable that he be given the chance of contact with such material and that its seed be given time to root and flower. To urge him to immediate reproduction is to develop shallow glibness at the sacrifice of something finer. Under the compulsion of reproduction the teacher excludes, also, not only beautiful and spiritualizing stories, but long stories. Long stories are not desirable on the mere ground of length, but even this ground has its claim. The longer stories give sustained exercise to the imagination, and they give the story-teller ampler field to set forth character or action and to let the story yield fuller measure of delight. Short and long and longer and shorter are all in place. And not all need nor should be reproduced.

How much should the teacher expect when she asks pupils to tell back any stories they have heard only once, or at most twice? Exactly what the pupil gives, what he grasped. Many teachers are disturbed, however, by the meager “language training” afforded by this very brief re-telling. Why not let the stories, by reiteration of them on the teacher’s part, impose their thought process and language mode on the forming habit of the child? This does not mean that reproduction must be verbatim repetition, nor that the children’s individuality is to be suppressed. But what a mockery, especially in some quarters, is this prevalent idea in the schools that the child must not be familiarized with the language of the story, but that he should be compelled to “tell it in his own words.” Alas, “his own words”! Would not familiarity with the story’s language bring riches to the thought-starved and language-starved children of some unschooled parents, anxious that their children shall enjoy advantages denied to themselves? Would it not help in foreign sections?

(6) It is partial re-telling. Let the children come into possession of the story naturally and gradually. At each re-telling of it by yourself look for firmer and fuller reproduction. Help to keep the children’s interest centered in the story, not so much by commenting patronizingly, “How well John told the story!” but rather by openly enjoying the story John is telling. Let language come, as it should, with the effort to express the thought. And do not interfere with composition by unnecessary questioning. Your first method of helping the pupils’ reproduction might be by supplying omitted parts rather than by questioning analytically for them, as is so commonly done at present. (Questioning has of course its place: it serves to lift into consciousness the relations existing among the parts of the story.) Try co-operative telling: tell part yourself, then let a child or several in succession tell the next, helping if necessary but not anticipating, and perhaps finish the story yourself. The children will soon be able to manage more. Simple, artistic illustrative picture or blackboard sketches, showing in succession the main divisions of the story, will help to give it uninterrupted sequence. (When divisions are made either orally or pictorially, they should be true portions of the whole.) Presently the children will find themselves telling the whole of some stories without undue feeling of strain, and with great pleasure to themselves and their classmates.

Is it natural, by the way, to reproduce in the same company a story just heard? This is the common school practice. In an adult audience this would of course never be done except on the frank basis of practice in so doing or for some other accepted purpose. The children enjoy dwelling on the story. And they may practice, with the motive of telling the story at home. The teacher need not, therefore, strain at devices to make reproduction more natural, yet she might often take advantage of or contrive more natural occasion for it. The natural occasion is social intercourse and entertainment. There is space only to indicate one or two ways of securing this attractive natural motive. Sometimes let at least a day elapse before asking for the reproduction; you may then let the exercise be an opportunity to enjoy the story again. Tell the same story over and over (if it be a good one) yourself on appropriate occasions, and encourage the children to do the same thing. Let individuals, or groups, or classes, visit and exchange stories.

(7) The child’s part, telling similar stories and (8) inventing stories, should go without saying. Do not neglect the opportunity offered by (8). If you reduce the class to workable groups at a time for this exercise, it should be practicable. Do not press prematurely the creative imagination, but do not neglect it. Give play to the natural working of a little child’s fancy, the boy’s or girl’s, the youth’s imagination. It is wise to follow the lead of the child here, then be at hand, not to deprive the child of the efficiency of independence and of the pleasure of making, but to help when necessary that his attempt may be encouragingly successful.

(9) It is sometimes expressing story images in other media. Here, again, the adult will do well to follow the lead of the child; of course of the most freely expressive child. The inert must be stimulated. Left to himself the child would not commit some of the excesses in sensible representation that adults impose upon children, though objective representation is natural to man at the childlike stage. It is not necessary that the child represent materially every set of language ideas. The teacher should not, on the other hand, stop natural attempt to represent even the more elusive kinds of ideas; there may be a budding Watts or Chase in her class, capable of picturing the highly fanciful and spiritual.

Keep the exercise growing. Its aim is to give constructive outlet to the child. The child’s conception of the story, with expression of it and each re-hearing, is growing. The practice of keeping a child’s first attempts at expression in drawing or modeling or cutting or his attempts at any one stage too long about the classroom, before his eyes, is dwarfing. There is, of course, the other side to the question. To accept nothing as accomplishment is deadening to effort. It is possible, however, is it not, to meet the child on childlike standard of achievement, to acknowledge the day’s accomplishment, yet without disheartening him, or even talking to him about the better things he will do, to keep our own faces turned toward the morrow?

(10) It is playing the stories. This, if not done with every story without discrimination, or without reference to the children’s instinctive selective sense, if kept at least fairly spontaneous and progressive, is a form of constructivity heartily enjoyed by the children. It is wise here again to follow the child’s lead. Let us understand, however, by this the lead of the majority of our most normal children and of the most gifted individuals. Many children meager in imagination, feeble in initiative, inadequate in execution, will need the strong lead of other children or of the teacher, qualified child seer from her experience with more favored children. Let her give to these from her abundance, becoming best playfellow and guide. But let her keep herself in the attitude of playing with the children.

Let us see how playing the story might develop. As soon as the story takes possession of the child he shows a tendency to enter into its persons and its action; to mimic the voices, to ape the manners, to do the doings. Give outlet to this; let the child take on and play out the life of the story, or yourself propose playing the story.

Do not, by the way, clutter up the child’s direct outlet with staging and properties and stage terms. It destroys spontaneity and reality. Let the schoolroom be the place, and, as a rule, the school furnishings any necessary things, and the school children, in their ordinary clothes, the people. The delight of “dressing up” may sometimes be allowed; but a mere suggestion in costume, if it be something distinctive of the character impersonated, is all that is necessary; a gold paper crown, for example, will at once make a queen of any child. Why not with the little children talk simply and naturally: “Let us play” (not act nor dramatize) so and so. Who’ll be so and so? I’ll be so and so. Where will you have your home? And so on. Do not at the beginning press even this simple kind of planning; let the play develop with the playing of it. Help the children, however, gradually to gain in planning.

Playing has a tendency to make the form static; it is a mistake to let this happen too soon. Do not, as is the practice, stop telling the story yourself after the children have once played it. You will find that their intimate experience in playing it will bring a more pointed attention to the next hearing of it, and that their next playing will be richer in detail, or stronger in structure, or truer in characterization, or more appropriate in dialogue. Do not, of course, keep the children on one story either for playing or other form of reproduction until they weary of it.

Far from deploring, by the way, the child’s crudities in dialogue, appreciate the opportunity to let him express himself and to develop his language sense. Keep the language way open to him. He will catch the force of your comment on how some character spoke, himself suggest to another pupil what the person the pupil is impersonating should say, note how you talk when you impersonate, or how you respond in dialogue with him.

Playing the stories is open to educational abuse by being turned into insincere show work. This results, too, in exclusion of pupils who do not excel. Keep playing the stories, at least for the little children, the spontaneous universal thing they make it—play. Their own selective sense guides them in assigning or assuming rôles. It is abused, also, by adult patronage. The teacher laughs at the children rather than with them, or laughs when the true child seer would be serious. The child thoroughly enjoys playing the stories, but this does not mean that he laughs constantly or at his own performance. Encourage him to catch the fun or humor of a situation or of a remark; enjoy the playing openly when it is merry, laugh and laugh heartily, but do not turn his genuine playing into a sham. Do not, on the other hand, take him too seriously; he does not always take himself so. In short, get the child’s point of view here as elsewhere.

The “last’s the best of all the game;” it is (11) growing by the power and grace of the story.

May the child nurtured on the wit and wisdom of the simple story simply told live happy ever after!