How To Tell Children Stories | Page 5

who knows children well has felt the difference. With few
exceptions, children listen twice as eagerly to a story told as to one read,
and even a "recitation" or a so-called "reading" has not the charm for
them that the person wields who can "tell a story." And there are sound
reasons for their preference.
The great difference, including lesser ones, between telling and reading
is that the teller is free; the reader is bound. The book in hand, or the
wording of it in mind, binds the reader. The story-teller is bound by
nothing; he stands or sits, free to watch his audience, free to follow or
lead every changing mood, free to use body, eyes, voice, as aids in
expression. Even his mind is unbound, because he lets the story come
in the words of the moment, being so full of what he has to say. For this
reason, a story told is more spontaneous than one read, however well
read. And, consequently, the connection with the audience is closer,
more electric, than is possible when the book or its wording intervenes.
Beyond this advantage, is the added charm of the personal element in
story-telling. When you make a story your own and tell it, the listener
gets the story, PLUS YOUR APPRECIATION OF IT. It comes to him
filtered through your own enjoyment. That is what makes the funny
story thrice funnier on the lips of a jolly raconteur than in the pages of a
memoir. It is the filter of personality. Everybody has something of the
curiosity of the primitive man concerning his neighbour; what another

has in his own person felt and done has an especial hold on each one of
us. The most cultured of audiences will listen to the personal
reminiscences of an explorer with a different tingle of interest from that
which it feels for a scientific lecture on the results of the exploration.
The longing for the personal in experience is a very human longing.
And this instinct or longing is especially strong in children. It finds
expression in their delight in tales of what father or mother did when
they were little, of what happened to grandmother when she went on a
journey, and so on, but it also extends to stories which are not in
themselves personal: which take their personal savour merely from the
fact that they flow from the lips in spontaneous, homely phrases, with
an appreciative gusto which suggests participation.
The greater ease in holding the attention of children is, for teachers, a
sufficient practical reason for telling stories rather than reading them. It
is incomparably easier to make the necessary exertion of "magnetism,"
or whatever it may be called, when nothing else distracts the attention.
One's eyes meet the children's gaze naturally and constantly; one's
expression responds to and initiates theirs without effort; the
connection is immediate. For the ease of the teacher, then, no less than
for the joy of the children, may the art of story- telling be urged as
pre-eminent over the art of reading.
It is a very old, a very beautiful art. Merely to think of it carries one's
imaginary vision to scenes of glorious and touching antiquity. The
tellers of the stories of which Homer's Iliad was compounded; the
transmitters of the legend and history which make up the Gesta
Romanorum; the travelling raconteurs whose brief heroic tales are
woven into our own national epic; the grannies of age-old tradition
whose stories are parts of Celtic folk-lore, of Germanic myth, of
Asiatio wonder-tales,-- these are but younger brothers and sisters to the
generations of story-tellers whose inventions are but vaguely outlined
in resultant forms of ancient literatures, and the names of whose tribes
are no longer even guessed. There was a time when story-telling was
the chiefest of the arts of entertainment; kings and warriors could ask
for nothing better; serfs and children were satisfied with nothing less.
In all times there have been occasional revivals of this pastime, and in
no time has the art died out in the simple human realms of which
mothers are queens. But perhaps never, since the really old days, has

story-telling so nearly reached a recognised level of dignity as a
legitimate and general art of entertainment as now.
Its present popularity seems in a way to be an outgrowth of the
recognition of its educational value which was given impetus by the
German pedagogues of Froebel's school. That recognition has, at all
events, been a noticeable factor in educational conferences of late. The
function of the story is no longer considered solely in the light of its
place in the kindergarten; it is being sought in the first, the second, and
indeed in every standard where the children are still children.
Sometimes the