How to Tell Stories to Children, And Some Stories to Tell | Page 9

are children.
Every little body is released from the conscious control school imposes
on it, and huddles into restful comfort or responds gaily to the joke.
More than this, humour teaches children, as it does their grown-up
brethren, some of the facts and proportions of life. What keener teacher
is there than the kindly satire? What more penetrating and suggestive
than the humour of exaggerated statement of familiar tendency? Is
there one of us who has not laughed himself out of some absurd
complexity of over-anxiety with a sudden recollection of "clever Alice"
and her fate? In our household clever Alice is an old habituee, and her
timely arrival has saved many a situation which was twining itself
about more "ifs" than it could comfortably support. The wisdom which
lies behind true humour is found in the nonsense tale of infancy as truly
as in mature humour, but in its own kind and degree. "Just for fun" is
the first reason for the humorous story; the wisdom in the fun is the
second.

And now we come to
THE NATURE STORY
No other type of fiction is more familiar to the teacher, and probably no
other kind is the source of so much uncertainty of feeling. The nature
story is much used, as I have noticed above, to illustrate or to teach the
habits of animals and the laws of plant-growth; to stimulate scientific
interest as well as to increase culture in scientific fact. This is an
entirely legitimate object. In view of its present preponderance, it is
certainly a pity, however, that so few stories are available, the accuracy
of which, from this point of view, can be vouched for. The carefully
prepared book of to-day is refuted and scoffed at to-morrow. The
teacher who wishes to use story-telling chiefly as an element in nature
study must at least limit herself to a small amount of absolutely
unquestioned material, or else subject every new story to the judgment
of an authority in the line dealt with. This is not easy for the teacher at
a distance from the great libraries, and for those who have access to
well-equipped libraries it is a matter of time and thought.
It does not so greatly trouble the teacher who uses the nature story as a
story, rather than as a test-book, for she will not be so keenly attracted
toward the books prepared with a didactic purpose. She will find a
good gift for the child in nature stories which ARE stories, over and
above any stimulus to his curiosity about fact. That good gift is a
certain possession of all good fiction.
One of the best things good fiction does for any of us is to broaden our
comprehension of other lots than our own. The average man or woman
has little opportunity actually to live more than one kind of life. The
chances of birth, occupation, family ties, determine for most of us a
line of experience not very inclusive and but little varied; and this is a
natural barrier to our complete understanding of others, whose life-line
is set at a different angle. It is not possible wholly to sympathise with
emotions engendered by experience which one has never had. Yet we
all long to be broad in sympathy and inclusive in appreciation; we long,
greatly, to know the experience of others. This yearning is probably one
of the good but misconceived appetites so injudiciously fed by the

gossip of the daily press. There is a hope, in the reader, of getting for
the moment into the lives of people who move in wholly different sets
of circumstances. But the relation of dry facts in newspapers, however
tinged with journalistic colour, helps very little to enter such other life.
The entrance has to be by the door of the imagination, and the
journalist is rarely able to open it for us. But there is a genius who can
open it. The author who can write fiction of the right sort can do it; his
is the gift of seeing inner realities, and of showing them to those who
cannot see them for themselves. Sharing the imaginative vision of the
story-writer, we can truly follow out many other roads of life than our
own. The girl on a lone country farm is made to understand how a girl
in a city sweating- den feels and lives; the London exquisite realises the
life of a Californian ranchman; royalty and tenement dwellers become
acquainted, through the power of the imagination working on
experience shown in the light of a human basis common to both.
Fiction supplies an element of culture,--that of the sympathies, which is
invaluable. And the beginnings of this culture, this widening and
clearing of the avenues of human sympathy, are especially