The Art of the Story-Teller | Page 2

it still survives, and it is not
an uncommon thing to see a crowd at a street corner held by the simple
narration of a story. There are signs in the West of a growing interest in
this ancient art, and we may yet live to see the renaissance of the
troubadours and the minstrels whose appeal will then rival that of the
mob orator or itinerant politician. One of the surest signs of a belief in
the educational power of the story is its introduction into the

curriculum of the training-college and the classes of the elementary and
secondary schools. It is just at the time when the imagination is most
keen, the mind being unhampered by accumulation of facts, that stories
appeal most vividly and are retained for all time.
It is to be hoped that some day stories will be told to school groups
only by experts who have devoted special time and preparation to the
art of telling them. It is a great fallacy to suppose that the systematic
study of story-telling destroys the spontaneity of narrative. After a long
experience, I find the exact converse to be true, namely, that it is only
when one has overcome the mechanical difficulties that one can "let
one's self go" in the dramatic interest of the story.
By the expert story-teller I do not mean the professional elocutionist.
The name, wrongly enough, has become associated in the mind of the
public with persons who beat their breast, tear their hair, and declaim
blood-curdling episodes. A decade or more ago, the drawing-room
reciter was of this type, and was rapidly becoming the bugbear of social
gatherings. The difference between the stilted reciter and the simple
story-teller is perhaps best illustrated by an episode in Hans Christian
Andersen's immortal "Story of the Nightingale." The real Nightingale
and the artificial Nightingale have been bidden by the Emperor to unite
their forces and to sing a duet at a Court function. The duet turns out
most disastrously, and while the artificial Nightingale is singing his one
solo for the thirty-third time, the real Nightingale flies out of the
window back to the green wood--a true artist, instinctively choosing his
right atmosphere. But the bandmaster--symbol of the pompous
pedagogue--in trying to soothe the outraged feelings of the courtiers,
says, "Because, you see, Ladies and Gentlemen, and above all, Your
Imperial Majesty, with the real nightingale you never can tell what you
will hear, but in the artificial nightingale everything is decided
beforehand. So it is, and so it must remain. It cannot be otherwise."
And as in the case of the two nightingales, so it is with the stilted
reciter and the simple narrator: one is busy displaying the machinery,
showing "how the tunes go"; the other is anxious to conceal the art.
Simplicity should be the keynote of story-telling, but (and her the

comparison with the nightingale breaks down) it is a simplicity which
comes after much training in self-control, and much hard work in
overcoming the difficulties which beset the presentation.
I do not mean that there are not born story-tellers who could hold an
audience without preparation, but they are so rare in number that we
can afford to neglect them in our general consideration, for this work is
dedicated to the average story-tellers anxious to make the best use of
their dramatic ability, and it is to them that I present my plea for special
study and preparation before telling a story to a group of children--that
is, if they wish for the far-reaching effects I shall speak of later on.
Only the preparation must be of a much less stereotyped nature than
that by which the ordinary reciters are trained for their career.
Some years ago, when I was in America, I was asked to put into the
form of lectures my views as to the educational value of telling stories.
A sudden inspiration seized me. I began to cherish a dream of long
hours to be spent in the British Museum, the Congressional Library in
Washington and the Public Library in Boston--and this is the only
portion of the dream which has been realized. I planned an elaborate
scheme of research work which was to result in a magnificent (if musty)
philological treatise. I thought of trying to discover by long and patient
researches what species of lullaby were crooned by Egyptian mothers
to their babes, and what were the elementary dramatic poems in vogue
among Assyrian nursemaids which were the prototypes of "Little Jack
Horner," "Dickory, Dickory Dock" and other nursery classics. I
intended to follow up the study of these ancient documents by making
an appendix of modern variants, showing what progress we had
made--if any--among modern nations.
But there came to me suddenly one day the