A manual of stories

Part I How To Tell Stories

I The Value of Story-Telling— Responsiveness of the Child; Physical Value; Educational Value; Emotional Value; Stories in Character-Building; How Stories Assist in the Development of Character; Social Helps;' Moral Value; Limitations of Story-Telling; It Takes Both Work and Friendship to Make a Life; Why Tell

Stories 3

II Various Kinds of Stories — The Primitive Story; Myths; Fairy Stories; Epic Stories; Biography and Purposive Stories; Story-Telling Poems 17

III Stories That Children Like — Stories with a Sense

Appeal; Fairy Stories; Hero Tales; Differing Tastes of Boys and Girls; Story-Tastes Are Defined by Experience ; Funny Stories and Sad Stories 21

IV How TO Tell Stories to Children— Plot ot the

Story; A Good Beginning; Action and Sense Appeal;

Climax; Method; Results Are in the Future 28

V Story-Telling Devices — Getting the Attention; Direct Discourse; Details; Repetition; Retouching; One's Self and the Story; Leisure; Story-Telling with Chalk; Shall One Memorize? Spontaneity; The Child's Part

in Story-Telling 39

VI Continued Stories — The Continued Story as a Drama;

Serial Stories Classified by Ages 50

VII Picture Story-Telling— Picture-Interests of Children; Suggestions for Picture Study; Studying Pictures through the Story; Choice of Pictures for Children; Methods of Story-Telling through Pictures; Two Picture Stories: "Boy and Rabbit" — "The Age of Innocence"; Permanent Value of Pictures; Moral Education through Picture Stories; A List of Story Pictures 55 VIII Relation of Stories to Play — The Story Game; Story-Playing on Sunday; A List of Stories and Playthings 74

Contents

PAGE

IX Dramatizing Stories — Dramatizing Stories in School; Stories that Are Easily Acted; The Puppet Theater;

Children's Dramatics 8 1

X The Story in Character-Building: Imaginative Stories — How to Grade Such Stories; Stories with a Sense Appeal :-" Monday " — "The Wee Hare and the Red Fire" — Fairy Stories: "The Fairy Who Came to Our House" — "Little Blue Gown and the Butterfly"; Myths and Legends: "The Knight with the Ill-Fitting Coat"; Parables and Allegories: "The Magic Shirt" — "The Closing Door" 87

XI The Story in Character-Building: Realistic Stories — Realistic Stories and Biography: "Jimmy and the Sharper" — Plutarch's Stories; One of Lincoln's Stories ; Suggestions as to Telling Moral Stories ... 1 1 1

XII How TO Tell Bible Stories — Why the Bible Is the Best Story Book; The Manner of Bible Story -Telling; The Method of Bible Story-Telling; Method of Subtraction; Changing the Order of Incidents; Methods of Reality; Bringing the Bible People into Present Day Life; Selection of Bible Stories 122

XIII Stories and School— ^The Story as a Help to Attention;

The Story as a Help to Interest; The Story as a Help to Thinking and Expression; The Story as a Help to Literature; The Story as a Help to Writing and History; The Story as a Help to Nature Study; The Story as a Social Unifier ; The Story as a Help to Morals . . 135

XIV Stories in the Home — The Comfort and Contentment

of Stories; The Companionship of Stories; Imaginativeness of Stories; The Story Helps More at Home Than in School; The Story and Home Reading; The Story and Home Handicraft; The Story and Home Discipline; The Naturalness of Home Story-Telling;

Stories at Bed-Time 143

XV Organized Story-Telling — The Story-Hour in Libraries; The Story- Hour on the Playground; The Story- Hour in the Club for Street Boys; Suggestions for the Story-Hour; The Program in the Story-Hour; The Story-Tellers' League; The Story-Class 152

Contents

Part II The Bottle Story-people Page

XVI The Bottle Story-People — Who the Bottle People Are; The Advantages of Bottles; The Relation to Handicraft ; A New Way of Developing the Imagination 175 XVII The Bottle Characters — The Kingdom of Love; the Kingdom of Law; The People Who Live in the Enchanted Land; Changing Names Does not Change Characters 179

XVIII The Enchanted Land — How the Characters Move About; Uses for the Sand Table; Allegory of the Enchanted Land 184

XIX How to Enter the Enchanted Land — Introductory Suggestion for the Story-Teller; How the Story-Teller Begins; Introducing the People — "Frank Enters the Enchanted Land" 189

XX Mary Lowe's Philosophy — The Importance of the Education of the Heart; The Naturalness of Moral Reflection to Children; Childhood's Need of a Mimic World to Practice In; The Meaning of this Mimic World; Significance of Some of the Characters; "The Brew" ; "The Potion and the Lovely Lady " ; The Influence of the Plan in Will-Training 199

XXI Some Bottle-Doll Stories — "When Ruth and Frank Visited the Enchanted Land"; "The Fox and the Farmer"; Some Other Stories 212

XXII How to Make the Bottle People 226

XXIII How TO Make the Scenery and Arrange the Acces-

sories 228

XXIV Rules for Moving the Bottle People 231

XXV What They Mean to the Children — ^How to Make Children Originative; A Story Told by a Child of Nine; A Story Told by a Seven- Year-Old; Som.e of Mary Lowe's Experiences; Harn/'s Story; Mary Lowe's Stor>^; Some Moral Results from Bottle-Doll Story-Telling 233

Contents APPENDIXES

PAGE

I A List of Stories that Children Like, Selected by the

Best Story-Tellers 245

To Accompany Chapter III

II A List of Books on Story-Telling 252

To Accompany Chapter IV

III A List of Books Containing Picture-Stories or Descrip-

tions 253

To Accompany Chapter VII

IV A List of Books on Dramatics and of Story-Plays for

Children 257

To Accompany Chapter IX

V A List of Character-Building Stories 263

To Accompany Chapter X

^VI A List of Bible Stories and of Bible Story-Books . . 278 To Accompany Chapter XII

VII A List of Story-Books Connected with School Subjects. 284 To Accompany Chapter XIII

VIII A Season's Program of Stories 288

To Accompany Chapter XV

IX A Program of Bottle-Doll Stories 291

To Accompany Chapter XXI

X A General List of Story-Books 293

PUBLISHER'S NOTE

There could be no good reason for adding another to the many good books upon story-telling, unless a new book should prove to have something that has not been said before. This manual is distinctive in several ways.

It is the most comprehensive book that has yet been written. It covers all the aspects of the subject: the value of stories ; the kinds of stories children like at different ages ; devices for making stories effective ; picture-stories ; dramatized stories ; the relations of stories to play ; the use of stories in building character; stories in the home, the school and the church ; professional story-telling, etc.

Part II is devoted to the first detailed description yet printed of the remarkable system of bottle-doll story-telling.

The list of sources for stories is the most extensive yet compiled.

The first classified list of stories for character-building ever prepared is here.

The fullest list of story-plays for children is given.

Several helpful programs and special lists are furnished. The most unique of these is a set of a dozen lists of stories, especially prepared for the author by the best story-tellers in America, which in their own experience were most liked by children and were favorites of themselves.

It is of special value that the book is written from the masculine standpoint.

The volume is enriched by the thoughts of the earlier writers in this field, which are carefully acknowledged and gratefully used.

PART I

HOW TO TELL STORIES

With many Story Devices

A MANUAL OF STORIES

"Here are Hesperldes more fair, Here lovelier vales than Avalon."

— Thomas Walsh.

Of late we have come to take story-telling seriously. It is one of the oldest of arts and one of the most valuable. It is everywhere and in all ages an art that is favored and enjoyed by children. All over the world and in all races, listening to stories has been one of childhood's choicest occupations, and the telling of stories has been one of childhood's earliest crafts. It has always been to children one of the most effective doorways unto life and knowledge.

So natural is the story to children that it has made them masters in fields wherein the knowledge obtained by adults with painstaking reading and study cannot surpass them. *'The boy Coleridge," says Stephani Schiitze, ''sitting in his father's library, watching, half fearfully, the advancing sunlight, till it should touch the back of the 'Arabian Nights,' when he would dare at last to take the enchanted volume from the shelf and read, probably had a greater appreciation of the immortal book, bountiful and w^anton as the outpourings of nature, natural and humorous as unperverted mankind, and as beautiful as the courts of dreamland, than unimaginative men with all their stores of knowledge."

THE RESPONSIVENESS OF THE CHILD

This is true because the child gives, during the telling, all the intensity of his attention, which is inimitable. In two realms, play and stories, a child becomes completely immersed in the present. Charles Murray, in his charming verse, "The Whistle," pictures a little Scotch dreamer set to watch the cattle, who attained such self-absorption, in his boy playcraft.

"He cut a sappy sucker from the muckle rodden tree, He trimmed it, an' he wet it, an' he thumped it on his knee; He never heard the teuchat when the harrow broke her eggs, He missed the craggit herons nabbin' puddocks in the seggs, He forgot to hound the collie at the cattle when they strayed. But you should have seen the whistle that the wee herd made !"

A like absorption goes with the story, and this absorption is all the more potent because it is an absorption in joy. The lesson which the Greeks teach us is the art of making education joyous. Instead of regarding with aversion the different subjects which they had studied in school, the Greeks loved them and practiced and improved themselves in them joyously throughout their lives. The story is such a subject, and its place in the school as well as in the home is one of dignified and valuable educational import.

THE PHYSICAL VALUE

Story-telling has its physical value. At the end of the day in the home or in the midst of confusion in the school, it charms the mind, rests the perturbed spirit and even helps prepare the body either for sleep or for renewed activity.

THE EDUCATIONAL VALUE

The story is of educational value. It is the very language of childhood. It is childhood's most characteristic form of expression and our most direct and successful means of conveying to it our ideas. It is the most concrete method of teaching. Stories are pictures of life — moving pictures, talking pictures, colored pictures. Their meaning lies on the surface. They reveal every phase and principle of life. The story, not less than the drama, holds a mirror up to nature.

The story reveals life broadly. Most of us, as a skilled story-teller has remarked, live only one kind of life, and have but little opportunity to come into contact with lives spent under totally different surroundings. "Put yourself in his place" has been said to be the most needed attitude in the world to-day. The reason why the child is incapable of putting himself in the place of others is because he has not had a wide experience with personal suffering, privation and adventure. Real experiences of such sorts can come to him only gradually, some of them not until maturity. Vicarious experience in the lives of others may be offered him through stories. There is no more potent method of broadening social imagination and thus developing the spirit of generosity than through stories of other races and of other lands.

Stories reveal not only the natural world but they interpret the world of fancy. We are coming to recognize the important value of imagination in education. The imaginative man is the joyous man, and, as we have been saying, the joyous man is the strong man. Says Seumas McManus, the famous Irish story-teller, *'Story-telling will make the child father to a more kindhearted, a more enthusiastic, a more idealistic rnan than the one taught to scorn story-telling. The story-telling nations of the world are the cheerful, social, enthusiastic, idealistic nations, and this because story-telling to the child brings out all the better qualities, — sympathy, imagination, warm-heartedness, sociability."

A story is of great value in training the memory. We find this when we hear young children demanding the repetition of familiar phrases or expressions. Later they Hke to hear stories retold, even if the element of repetition is not present. It has been noted that the child who has been accustomed all his life to hearing good stories well told has a larger vocabulary and a wider range of intelligence and recollection than the child whose story-telling has been neglected.

THE EMOTIONAL VALUE

The story as an emotional influence either stimulates or satisfies the feelings. It awakens and educates real and natural feelings, or it may satisfy feelings which are already familiar. An instance of the education of feelings would be a story in which a story-teller endeavored to excite sympathy toward living creatures. An instance of satisfying feeling would be a story in which a sympathy which he knew to be already present was fully expressed by himself. Some years ago, Rufus Stanley, now director of the Omega Club for boys in Elmira, New York, was asked by Mr. Z. T. Brockway, then superintendent of the Elmira reformatory, to take charge for a few Sundays of a group of about 300 young men and older boys in the institution who were somewhat defective mentally. The problem of addressing them successfully was naturally a very difficult one. Mr. Stanley decided to tell them a story. In order to do this effectively, it was necessary that he should secure a live wild bird. Being himself in charge of the grounds, he had opportunity to secure the co-operation of a large force of inmates, but it seemed as if birds never were so scarce upon the grounds as they were on that particular afternoon when he wanted one. About an hour before the talk was to be given, a boy from the city brought him a little blackbird which had flown through an open window into his mother's kitchen. Attaching the little bird to his hand, Mr. Stanley brought it into the hall where the young fellows were gathered. He attracted their attention by holding it in plain view, and then he told them its story. He pictured its migration to the north in summer and imagined its numerous adventures, the perils in its flight, its home-making and its return. He made the suggestion that the little bright bird would be an attractive companion for them in a cage. He brought his story to a close with this question: "Shall we keep the little bird or shall we let it go free?" With one hoarse shout, the company responded with the one word, "Free!" Mr. Stanley smiled and, releasing the bird, it flew out through a window which he had cleverly left open for the purpose, into the sunlight. By means of this story, Mr. Stanley had both educated their feelings and satisfied them. He recognized their love for wild life and he expressed their own native desire for freedom.

STORIES IN CHARACTER BUILDING

In answer to the query. Does story-telling help in building character? the one obvious answer is. Men have always thought so. I believe it is Partridge who says that the very origin of story-telling was in the instinct to teach. It is an interesting fact that the method of the story is still very generally used among primitive peoples in the training of their children. Spencer, in his book "The Education of the Pueblo Child," tell us that Pueblo children do not receive commands to do or to refrain from doing without a reason for the command being given. "This reason is given in the form of a story in which a given action is portrayed with the good or evil resulting to the doer. These legends, or folk-tales, are very numerous, so that one may be found illustrating almost any case that may arise." He also says that the Pueblos take story-telling as a form of training so seriously that they often select impressive times and methods by which to lend force to these lessons. "In the evening, when the fire burns low and the room is dimly lighted, is a favorite time for the repeating of those tales, and the solemn, hushed tones in which they are told, together with the striking postures accompanying them, give them a weirdly dramatic effect." His testimony is that the method is most effective. 'They exercise a profound influence upon the children, and the moral laws they prescribe are seldom transgressed."

''The assertion that it is impossible to teach morals, except by example or implication," says Professor Howard Moore, "is an assertion that has been made by somebody in the past and has been passed around ever since without ever having been challenged or investigated, like a great many of our other so-called truths. Kindness, honesty, humanity, truthfulness, and moral courage can be taught to young minds just as easily and effectively as Latin or arithmetic. All that is necessary is to begin early enough, use ingenuity, and keep at it. It is not possible to teach morality to all with complete success. There are also boys and girls who cannot learn geometry to save their lives. Yet we go on teaching it for 200 hours every year, even though our teaching often lands in stony places. As a general rule, anything can be taught to the young mind. A child is a tinpail sitting out under the drip. It catches everything that comes along. The power to choose, the power to accept some things and reject others, is acquired later in life, if at all. We have never tried to teach morals and humanity. We have been content to preach them, which is a very different thing from teaching them. Everything else that has ever been done or thought of, in the heavens above or in the earth beneath, has been taught, and with the most brilliant and appealing success. And with the same science and persistence we can teach those truths and ways of acting which are the very vitals of order and civilization."

KOW STORIES ASSIST IN THE DEVELOP- MENT OF CHARACTER

It has been customary to consider that the mental life of man has three phases, thinking, feeling and willing. Story-telling makes each of these factors of the child mind active.

The story is helpful, in the first place, because it helps the child to know what is good. It encourages moral thoughtfulness. Children are not born with a knowledge of the Ten Commandments, and even if they were, this ^'knowledge" would not be especially effective. Everything the child really knows, he knows in terms of life. Truth, to him, must always be concrete. To the child, "Every boy's a fairy prince and every tale is true." The value of dragons is that they make evil concrete and horrible and the value of fairies is that they make goodness concrete and beautiful. Fairy godmothers are ministers of justice, and through the moral contests in the children's stories which he hears the child visualizes his own struggles.

"There the sword Excalibur is thrust into the dragon's throat;

Evil there is evil, black is black and white is white; There the child triumphant hurls the villain spluttering in the moat;

There the captive princess only waits the peerless knight."

Many a moral victory, like many a victory upon the battlefield, is won or lost before the actual struggle has begun. The battle is decided in the preliminary skirmish of contending mental images. If the child is stocked up with virtuous and inspiring mental images, through stories, his imagination already is captured by goodness.

Stories not only help the child to know what is good, but they help him to want to know what is good. The child himself is morally alert, but stories make him even more alert. They help him, as Prof. Frank C. Sharp has said, to "try to develop the habit of asking and the power of answering the question, What is the right course of action?'* As he brightly says, "They reduce the amount of moral illiteracy."

The story is helpful, in the second place, because it helps the child to feel what is good. The child is by nature prepared to feel strongly in response to stories. The child is essentially sympathetic. Innately, he seems to hate a task and to love a story. As Partridge says, "the Sleeping Beauty awakes, the Prince comes, the Fairy Godmother prevails over the witch, at the earnest and urgent demand of the heart of the child." And then he puts in italics the following statement : ''To make the child feel intensely the strivings of others, and to make him feel the light and shades of feeling in many a live situation is to give him an opportunity for moral training and an exhortation to he good." When the story is told in such a way that goodness triumphs and the child wishes goodness to triumph, he is receiving a vivid experience of the value of goodness. He believes that life and goodness are worth while. Just as it is true, as Charles Eliot Norton used to say, that "A book is dangerous if it makes life seem uninteresting," so a story is dangerous if it makes life seem less worth while. On the contrary, if a story to a child adds to his valuation of goodness in life, it has manifestly enriched his experience. When we do this, we do not appeal merely to the child's sensitive feelings, but also to something deeper in his nature. We touch his most deeply rooted admirations, his love of fair play, his love of loyalty, the unselfish impulses of his nature, and when we recognize and bring these to the surface, we are like the skilled musician who opens an instrument and touches to beautiful harmony strings that are already in tune. We are doing the very important thing of educating the child's desires.

The very mood in which a child listens to stories is helpful to our end. A good story makes the child happy ; and joy is strength. A tale which has touched his better feelings and given him a vicarious experience of being good himself sends him out with greater courage actually to do good. Even the sweet sadness of the pathetic tale, if it be not mawkish in its sentimentality, strengthens rather than subdues the spirit. Brushing away the happy tears that come in response to a tale of injured virtue or of dramatic self-sacrifice, the child turns back to life invigorated and cheered.

It is still true, as the old Hebrew sage told us, that "out of the heart are the issues of life." It is really the heart rather than the intellect that must be convinced if the human being is to be changed. It is not only much more encouraging, but it is much more effective to be able, through a story, to persuade a child that such and such things have been done rather than through command to tell him that such and such things should he done.

The story is helpful, in the third place, because it helps the child to zvill ivhat is good. No child listens to a story passively. He instantly personalizes himself as the hero of the tale to which he is listening. In imagination, what the hero does he does. Thus he really reacts to a moral situation. This means that he is unconsciously taking sides, choosing. If this be true in a single story, how much more effectively is it true when the child has been in the habit of listening to many inspiring stories. If it is a fact, as psychologists tell us, that the mind works through grooves of ideas furnished, and that, while it still has a certain freedom in choosing a lot of new grooves and in leaving out a lot of old things, it chiefly runs along the rails of the ideas which have already been laid down, then it is apparent that to furnish the child a series of good stories is building a road-way along which the will, as it develops, may most easily run. So the battlefield of life may be used, through stories, to show the child how to summon to his assistance allies which will assist him in sweeping opposition from his path. When he listens to such stories he signals his allies to his side.

THE SOCIAL HELPS THE MORAL VALUE

The influence of story-telling upon the will is not only in what the story incites the child to do, but in the relation between the story-teller herself and the child. Miss Sara Cone Bryant gives a very pretty little incident of her successful endeavor by means of stories to win the confidence and affections of a shy young niece. The evening effort did not seem to succeed, but it was different in the morning, after she had assisted at the little girl's toilet, with some more stories. ''When the curls were all curled and the last little button buttoned, my baby niece climbed hastily down from her chair, and deliberately up in my lap. With a caress rare to her habit, she spoke my name, slowly and tentatively, * An-ty Sai-ry ?' Then, in an assured tone, ' Anty Sairy, I love you so much I don't know what to do !' And presently, tucking a confiding hand in mine to lead me to breakfast, she exclaimed sweetly, T didn' know you when you comed las' night, but now I know you all th' time !' " The child, through the story, is brought sympathetically near, not only to the virtue of which the story tells, but to the story-teller herself. In discipline, a story is better than scolding and clearer than a command. The personality of the story-teller, not only kindly and good, but also strong and wise, remains after the story is over to co-operate and thus to help strengthen the will to make an effort toward virtuous activities.

William T. Hornaday gives a beautiful reminiscence in his "American Natural History" of this combined influence of motherly teaching and fellowship upon conduct in later life.

"To me the mourning-dove has always seemed a sacred bird," says he, "and although I could have killed thousands of them, I have never taken the life of one. When a very small boy at my mother's knee she related to me the story of the winged messenger sent out by Noah to look for real estate. She told me that doves were innocent and harmless birds, and that I must never wrong one in the least. Had my good mother issued an injunction covering the whole animal kingdom, I think I would have grown up as harmless to animals as any Hindoo; for her solemn charge regarding mourning-doves has always seemed as binding as the Ten Commandments. I mention this in order to point out to parents and teachers the vast influence they may easily wield in behalf of our wild creatures, which are in sore need of protection."

THE LIMITATIONS OF STORY-TELLING

There is no such thing as virtue per se. Character is altogether a matter of a human being's relation to society. What we are trying to develop is not abstract qualities of will but real and living relationships. If we are not careful we shall be doing what so many have done in the past, teaching the 'Virtues" instead of bringing the children face to face with concrete duties. ''Let us," insists Prof. George A. Coe, "stop studying the 'virtues' and study instead what men do and why they do it." J. Lewis Paton, a successful English schoolmaster, criticizes the method of moral instruction which has been made famous by F. J. Gould of the British Moral Education League. "He tells the story of the taming of Bucephalus, and draws out most skilfully the appropriate moral: the pill with Mr. Gould tastes almost as nice as the jam. But suppose you brought me a boy lacking in self-control and asked me how he was to learn self-control — I should not dream of suggesting Mr. Gould's book. I should say: Let him play football with the other boys, and see that he plays hard. When he has, with the ball in his hands, broken through the opposing lines, receiving in the process a whack on the head and a kick on the shins, and then, triumphantly crossing the line, and touching down the ball between the enemy's goal posts, is recalled by the referee's whistle and his try is disallowed, because the referee had thought he had run on to the touchline — that not being the case — then, I say, if the boy bears all that without mentioning any towns in Holland, but smiles genially at the referee and the full-back who hacked him, and starts off again to play up and play the game as hard as ever — then, I say, however ignorant that boy may be of Bucephalus, he has learned in practice the lesson of self-control; and I don't myself see how he could learn it better."

IT TAKES BOTH WORK AND FRIENDSHIP TO MAKE A LIFE

Stories cannot take the place of life. Recognize this clearly and remember this lesson — that no story is of value that does not relate the child directly to life, and we shall continue to endeavor to tell stories skilfully and also endeavor to help children to live actively. "Let us agree at once," Mrs. Ella Lyman Cabot concedes, ''that stories are not substitutes for right-doing, but only one among the reinforcements of right-doing. Character grows mainly in tv/o ways : through work well done, and through the contagious example of people whom we love and admire. These two influences, work and friendship, will always be the greatest spurs to right-doing. Yet I believe that ethical teaching can supplement them and can help to bring out their meaning. A lover of birds haunts their favorite woods and meadows ; but does he not also find it wise now and again to enter a natural-history museum where, ranged in rows, a little stiffly, are all his woodland friends? There he can study thoroughly and quietly their characteristics ; there he can compare one with another, noticing the variations in color and distinguishing members of the same species. When he goes back to the fields, it will be with keener eyes. Ethical lessons may well bring this help. They will help us to see quietly, before temptation arises, what is the right act. Many acts of dishonesty, discourtesy, cruelty, and self-deceit are due primarily to lack of clear thought and quickened imagination. I believe that ethical teaching at its best is a quickening spirit, a call to the soul, a Hfe creating life. Among the greatest citizens of my state, I number one who from boyhood has saturated himself with all that he can learn of Abraham Lincoln. That life is no biography to him, nor is it a good example. It is a voice calling. He has answered it. Every year he is finding new ways of responding to it. I cannot conceive his life without that of Lincoln his master, whom he never saw. If by any lessons about the leaders of men, we can give a single child such a sense of the presence of Lincoln as my friend bears about with him, years of toil will not be too much."