Читать книгу Educating by Story-Telling - Mrs. Katherine Dunlap Cather - Страница 6

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Ever since the beginning of things the story-teller has been a personage of power, an individual welcomed by young and old alike. Hailed as a joy bringer and heeded as an oracle, his tales have been the open sesame to admit him to any throng and his departure has always been attended with regret. During the Middle Ages he was a privileged character, free to wander at will into camp or court. The Piso manuscript in the museum at Budapest tells of the solicitous effort made by Ladislaus of Hungary to secure safe-conduct through Bohemia and Austria for a favorite narrator, and many other old chronicles attest to the fact that in France, Germany, Italy, and the British Isles passports were given to minstrels and raconteurs when no one else could obtain them. Long before this period, during the nomadic existence of the race, the mightiest men of the tribe were the chieftain and the story-teller, the one receiving homage because of his ability to vanquish his adversaries in battle, the other because of his skill in entertaining his fellows as they huddled around the fire at night. Each ability was believed to be evidence of divine gifts, and the possessor of each was revered as being a little higher than a mortal, a little lower than a god.

Primitive man, like civilized man, was fond of power, and realizing that his talents made him mighty, the narrator exercised them in such a manner as to promote their development. Every emotional response on the part of his hearers served as a key to unlock doors into the land of his desire, and as he listened to exclamations of approval, condemnation, or delight, he saw ways of arousing these emotions to even greater degrees of intensity and, possessing an elemental love of the spectacular, made the most of his opportunity. Thus he evolved from a crude declaimer into something of an artist. As the race emerged from a barbaric into a pastoral state, he grew to be more than an entertainer; he imparted knowledge to the young by keeping alive the tribal traditions.

On the Asiatic highlands, before the Aryan migration, it was the story-teller who preserved the tales of the fathers, the nature myths that were primitive man’s explanation of the things he did not understand. The journey of the sun across the heavens, the shifting of clouds from one fantastic form to another, the chromatic skies of sunrise and sunset, and the starry firmament of night aroused his curiosity and awakened his awe. He wondered about them just as children today wonder about them, and just as the twentieth-century child questions his mother, so he questioned one whom he deemed wiser than himself. This consulted oracle gave as an explanation something that out of his own wondering and puzzling had grown into a vague belief, and consequently the clouds that presaged showers came to be regarded as heavenly cows from whose exuberant udders came the rains that refreshed the earth; stormy oceans and rugged mountains with ravines beset with perils held giants that avenged and destroyed; while the sun, a beneficent creature that drove away the monster of darkness, and all the saving forces of nature, were metamorphosed in the fancy of these early men into protecting heroes and divinities.

As generation succeeded generation and the young received their allotment of lore from the old, these stories became fixed so firmly in the minds of the people that they were carried with them at the scattering of the tribes, told and retold in the new-found homes, and modified to suit conditions of life in strange lands the wanderers came to inhabit; and they still survive as present-day fairy tales. There are various theories of how these old beliefs came to be disseminated, how it happened that tales supposed to be indigenous to Finland or Madagascar are found in slightly different dress among the tribes of Central Africa and in other sections of the world remote from each other; but no matter how much folklorists disagree as to the process through which the tales evolved to their present form, they do not differ as to their significance, and whether they accept the Aryan theory promulgated by Max Müller or the totemistic theory of Andrew Lang, they unite in a belief that these ancient tales represent the religion of primitive man, a religion growing out of fear of the unknown.

Always it was by the lips of the story-teller that the legends were kept alive. It was his mission to teach children the tales their fathers knew, and as the race evolved toward civilization he gave them something besides nature myths. He recounted and reiterated the achievements of the heroes of his people until youths who heard were fired with desire to emulate. Because he was deemed a man of supernal powers, his words were believed; consequently he created the ideals of the age in which he lived, and just as his own standards were fine or base, so the ideals for which he was responsible came to be high or low. Fortunately for the world, however, these old-time narrators were wiser than their fellows. They were poets and dreamers who saw life through eyes vision clear. They glorified virtue and deprecated vice, taught that right triumphs over wrong and that sinning brings inevitable punishment, and explained in a crude way the workings of the law of compensation. They fired men to achievement just as they fired boys with desire to emulate the heroes of whom they told, and as centuries passed and they grew in skill and power, their tales came to be the inspiration of some of the most thrilling chapters in the annals of man. Alexander the Great declared that the lays of a wandering bard, Homer, made him thirst for conquest. In Germany, in the twelfth century, the influence of a penniless gleeman, Walther von der Vogelweide, was greater than that of the Pope. There was no more puissant man in Ireland when Ireland was in its golden day and Tara in its glory than the low-born minstrel, Brian of Fermanagh; and the Crusades, which recreated Europe by the introduction of Eastern culture and the breaking down of old traditions, might never have been undertaken but for tales of defilement of holy places from the lips of Peter the Hermit. Storytellers every one of them, swaying their fellows and making history, subjects of kings and nobles, yet often mightier than the masters who held their destinies in their hands.

The power of the narrator did not die with chivalry. As recently as during the middle of the last century the clergy of Scotland united in an effort to suppress story-telling in the Highlands because it kept alive beliefs of pagan origin, beliefs so deep-seated that the combined eloquence of prelates could not eradicate them, and the strength of the church was impaired because of the sheltering of these waifs of the past. To this day there are peasants in Germany who doubt not that every year at harvest time Charlemagne walks beside the Rhine under the midnight moon and blesses the vineyard region of Winkel and Ingelheim. In central Switzerland are hundreds of simple folk who believe that on the summit where they met to take the oath that fired the land against Austria, sleep the immortal “Brothers of the Grütli,” and that they will slumber on until the liberty of Helvetia is imperiled; while in the southern portion of that mountain land the country folk are certain that prosperity will be the lot of every husbandman when the swan-drawn luck boat returns to Lake Geneva. Why? Because their fathers in the far-off days believed these tales; because they have come down to them by the lips of the story-teller, and wherever there is no written language, wherever the people are too unlettered to read what is written, or where they live in isolated communities and mingle little with the outside world, they still believe the legends. They love to hear them told and retold, and nothing brings so much pleasure on a winter night or in a summer gloaming as the complete family circle and the father or uncle or stranger from another community sitting in the midst repeating the old, old tales.

As it is with unlettered peasants today, as it was with tribesmen in primitive times and with the great in medieval castle halls, it still is with the child. He lives over the experience of his fathers on the Asiatic highlands and sits entranced listening to the record of it in stories. The element of suspense, the wondering what will happen next, holds him in a viselike grip, and the story hour is to him a period of joy. The here and now disappears as the narrator lifts his invisible wand, and the listener journeys by roads of never ceasing wonders into lands of enchantment. According to the skill of the raconteur, and the vividness with which he himself sees and feels the pictures he strives to portray, he makes his listeners see and feel them, rejoicing in the good fortune and sympathizing in the sorrows of the just and righteous; and they not only follow along the highroad where he leads them, but roam off into pleasant bypaths where the fancy has free play.

There is no age or racial limit to this story love. Representing, as it does, an emotional hunger that is the human heritage, it is universal. Several years ago at Five Points in New York City, a settlement worker discovered that a very effective means of gaining the confidence of immigrant women was to tell fairy tales, and recently some of the most gratifying results obtained in the Telegraph Hill district of San Francisco were made possible by a leader there gaining the good will of a group of Sicilian hoodlums because she knew the plot of Jerusalem Delivered and told the story magnetically and well. It was like a breeze from their native island, where they had heard it from the lips of the village story-teller and seen it pictured on the market carts, and the fact that she knew something that had fascinated them gained their sympathy and coöperation. Those who have even a limited knowledge of child life know that before the babe can read he delights in listening to a nursery tale, and that even after he journeys into bookland he is more interested in the story told him than in the one he reads for himself. Why? Because the voice and personality of the speaker make it alive and vital. Because, as Seumas MacManus says, “The spoken word is the remembered word.”

The tales heard during childhood become fixed and lasting possessions. They stay with the hearer through the years, and because their ideals become his ideals, do much toward shaping his character. The child who hears many good stories and unconsciously learns to distinguish between the tawdry and the real, reads good stories when a boy and becomes a man for whom sensational best sellers have no charm.

There is much talk about the vicious tastes of the youth of this generation, and unfavorable comparisons between them and their elders at a similar age are frequently made. There is some foundation for this belief, but it is not the fault of the children that it is so. Because of the abundance and cheapness of books, many of them of questionable merit, boys and girls are left to browse unguided, and just as the range man is to blame if his hungry herd strays into a loco patch and eats of noxious weeds when he fails to drive it to the place of wholesome herbage, so it is the fault of parents and teachers if their charges acquire a taste for sensational yarns instead of for good literature. The very hunger that impels them toward that which contaminates, if satisfied in a wholesome manner would make them lovers of the best, and the reason why children become devourers of “yellow” stories is because they have failed to stumble upon a more fascinating and less dangerous highway, and no one has led them to it. There is no surer way of keeping a boy from becoming a devotee of the funny page of the Sunday supplement or a follower of “Nick Carter” than that of studying his tastes and giving him tales from good literature that will satisfy them. There is no more powerful means to use in diverting a child from the undesirable to the desirable than that of throwing a searchlight upon the attractions of the latter and presenting them to him through joyful experience. The narrator’s art is in truth a magic luminary, an unfailing means of bringing hidden beauties to sight and causing them to be loved because they give pleasure.

For a number of years it has been conceded that story-telling is of value in the kindergarten and primary school, but little provision has been made for it in the educational scheme for the older child. Gradually, however, educators in America have come to realize what their European colleagues realized long ago, that the narrator’s art can be a powerful element in the mental, moral, and religious development of the boy and girl and can mean as much to the adolescent child as to the tiny tot. Consequently they are now giving it an honored place. The story period has become a part of the program of every well-regulated library. Teachers of elementary and grammar grades are recognizing its value in the classroom, and in some states story-telling is included in the curriculum. Each year brings new texts and collections from the publishers, until it seems that the art so much honored in the past is coming again into its own.

Yet, with all the interest that is manifested throughout the country, story-telling is not doing its greatest, most vital work, because so little thought is given to the selection of material, so little study to the response of children who hear the tales and the effect upon them. Before even half of its possibilities can be realized, those who tell stories must know the story interests of childhood and must choose materials, not only because they are beautiful in theme and language and embody high ideals, but because they are fitted to the psychological period of the child who is to hear them. They must realize that the purpose of story-telling is not merely to entertain, although it does entertain, but that in addition to delighting young listeners there must be a higher aim, of which the narrator never loses sight. Every tale selected must contribute something definite toward the mental, moral, or spiritual growth of the child, just as each pigment chosen by an artist must blend into the picture to help make a beautiful and perfect whole. The golden age of childhood will come and fear that young people’s tastes are being vitiated will die out when parents and teachers realize that much of the noblest culture of the past has been given through the medium of the story, and that it can be given through this medium now and in the future, because there is almost no type of information the child should receive that he will not receive joyously through this means, and with deep, lasting results. Story-telling planned and carried out to fit conditions will help to solve many of the problems that confront educators today. Besides developing the emotional nature and giving moral and religious instruction, it will intensify the interest in history, geography, nature study, manual training, and domestic science, awaken an appreciation of literature, art, and music, enrich the child’s powers of discrimination, and teach him to distinguish between the cheap and ephemeral and the great and lasting. It will help to eliminate much of what he considers the drudgery of school life and give him information that will fit him for broad, sympathetic, useful living.

This does not mean that the teacher is to do all the work, thereby fixing children in habits of idleness, nor does it mean the addition of an extra subject to an already overcrowded curriculum. It simply means leading the child to do things for himself because of the incentive that interest gives. It means illuminating the formal subjects and sending pupils to them with greater eagerness.

In order to accomplish these ends, story-telling must be unmarred by creaking machinery, and it must be sympathetic. The narrator must rise above the level of a mere lesson giver and approach the plane of the artist, which he can do only by giving an artist’s preparation to his work. The old-time raconteur swayed the destiny of nations because he was an artist, because he himself believed in the message he brought. He put heart and labor into his work, which gave his words a sincerity that never failed to convince. So too must the present-day narrator believe in the power of the story and in the dignity of his work, and he must choose material with thought and judgment instead of snatching it up indifferently, thinking that any story will do if only it holds the interest. The racial tales should be given freely in the psychological period to which they belong, but not the racial tales only. There is much modern material close to present-day life and conditions, without which the child’s education is not complete, and it must be classified and graded. This entails reference work for which the non-professional has neither time nor opportunity, and to this fact is due much of the valueless story-telling of today. Experience with hundreds of parents, teachers, and workers with children has brought conviction that a belief in the value of story-telling as an educational tool is sincere and general, but that sources of classified material are not available to the average child leader. It is partly to meet this need that the present work is planned.