Читать книгу The Art of Story-Telling, with nearly half a hundred stories - Julia Darrow Cowles - Страница 5

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The home, the school, and the library have each a distinct purpose in story-telling. These purposes may be more or less complex, they may in some instances coincide, yet the fields are separate, and each has its own fundamental reason for presenting the oral story to the child.

In the home, the chief object in story-telling is to give content, to satisfy. The child, becoming tired of his toys or of his games, comes to his mother and begs for a story. He wants to be taken into her lap, cuddled within her arms, and entertained. Oh, the wonderful, the far-reaching opportunities held by the mother in such moments as these! The child is in a quiet, receptive mood, and the stories told him at such times will never be forgotten; their influence will follow him as long as he lives. Nothing that he can learn in school in the after years will abide and enter into the essence of his being as will the stories which his mother tells him. Strength of character, purity of life, truthfulness, unselfishness, obedience, faith—all may be made beautiful and attractive by means of stories.

Nor is the directly ethical training the greatest good achieved by story-telling in the home. Nothing else so closely links mother and child in a sweet fellowship and communion of thought. Nothing else so intimately binds them together, nor so fully secures the confidence of the child. When they enter together the enchanted realm of story-land, mother and child are in a region apart, a region from which others are excluded. The companionship of story-land belongs only to congenial souls. And so the mother, by means of stories, becomes the intimate companion, the loving and wise guide, the dearest confidant of her child.

Not all the stories of the home need be ethical in their teaching, though all stories worth telling have a foundation of truth. There should be a wise blending of fairy stories, mythological tales, fables, nonsense verses, and true nature stories; and the advantage of story-telling is that it may be carried on in connection with many of the household duties, with no diminishing of the story’s charm. While the mother sews or embroiders or mends, while she stirs a cake, or washes dishes, she can tell a story which will not only entertain or influence the child, but will carry her own thoughts away from the ofttimes dullness of her task into realms of beauty and delight. Then, too, many a childish task may be robbed of its seemingly tedious character by the telling of a story during its progress, or as a reward when the task is completed.

Let me beg of you, mothers, do not think that you cannot tell stories. Try; try; keep on trying; and ease in telling is bound to come. Do not think of yourself in the telling; think of the story and of the child who listens. Nothing else matters.

It takes time to search out and familiarize oneself with just the stories that are best worth telling, but surely no mother can find a more important or more worthy object upon which to expend the time. Librarians and story-tellers within the past few years have prepared lists which make such selection, comparatively easy, mid classified lists are included in the present volume.

The very little child can grasp only the simplest story, but the essential facts of any story which he can comprehend, can be simply told. A story for a little child should have few characters, little if any plot, and a familiarity of action or place. Mother Goose and similar nursery rhymes naturally come first for little children in the home. The kindergarten collections of stories contain good material, and these can be followed by or interspersed with the simplest myths and fairy tales.

Just as children love the companionship of animals, so do they love stories of animals; and when these animals do the things that children do, an element of surprise and new delight is added. Children intuitively want the right to prevail. They love the old tales wherein animals talk, and the crafty old fox is always beaten by the good little hen.

Bible stories should be told to children day by day. They can be made very simple in outline, but they should be told over and over, with a distinction made between them and the fables and folk tales. The latter may teach a true lesson, but the former teach The Truth. And not only should we tell the Old Testament stories of heroes and of great wonders, but the story of Christ’s birth, of his life, his death, and his resurrection, should be made a part of every child’s early teaching in the form of stories reverently told. They will make a lasting impression; an impression deeper than the most eloquent sermon heard in maturer years.

A careful choice of the kind of stories told to little children lays not only a sound moral foundation, but a foundation for good literary taste.

A child brought up from its earliest years on stories from the Bible, Anderson, Aesop, Stevenson, and Field, will instinctively detect and reject trash when he begins to read for himself. But the supply of good literature must be kept at hand, for children will read something.

What sweeter bit of verse can a mother repeat to the child she is hushing to sleep than this:

Sleep, little pigeon, and fold your wings—

Little blue pigeon with velvet eyes;

Sleep to the singing of motherbird swinging—

Swinging her nest where her little one lies.

In through the window a moonbeam comes—

Little gold moonbeam with misty wings;

All silently creeping, it asks: “Is he sleeping—

Sleeping and dreaming while mother sings?”

The stanzas are from “A Japanese Lullaby,” and are selected from a host of similarly dainty verses in Lullaby Land, by Eugene Field (Charles Scribner’s Sons).

Robert Louis Stevenson’s Child’s Garden of Verse is another storehouse of treasure for mothers. Some of his rhymes, such as “Good and Bad Children,” are quite equal to Mother Goose in their good advice administered in quaintly merry form, while his “Foreign Lands” and “My Shadow” teach children to idealize the everyday happenings of the home life.

How could a mother better remind her small boy or girl that it is time to waken than by repeating his lines:

A birdie with a yellow bill

Hopped upon the window-sill,

Cocked his shining eye and said:

“Ain’t you ’shamed, you sleepy-head!”

When a mother habitually repeats to her child stories and verses of the character outlined, she is not only forming his taste in literature along right lines, but she is helping to enlarge his vocabulary.

“What does ‘embark’ mean, Mamma?” is sure to follow the first or second recital of Stevenson’s “My Bed Is a Boat”:

My bed is like a little boat;

Nurse helps me in when I embark;

She girds me in my sailor coat

And starts me in the dark.

And “gird” will also need interpreting. These words will soon become a part of his normal vocabulary. He may not use them in his everyday speech, but he will not need to have them explained to him when he comes upon them in his later reading. Teachers invariably know when a child comes from a home of culture and of good literary taste, by the foundation already laid. The child’s own forms of expression and the range of his vocabulary are unmistakable evidence of the home influence and teaching.

A literary sequence which will give the child a knowledge of literature as a development or a growth—not as a vast accumulation of unrelated parts—can be carried through his reading and study. This subject is taken up in the chapter upon “Systematic Story-Telling,” and while it is essentially the work of a teacher, the foundation for it may be laid by the wise mother who starts her child along right lines through the medium of her story-telling.

It has already been said that all stories worth the telling have a foundation of truth. The story with which this chapter closes is a beautiful example of a nature story which embodies a higher truth. It is found in Mrs. Gatty’s Parables from Nature (The Macmillan Company):