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