Part 26 (2/2)
Story-telling in playgrounds, settlements and libraries as it is carried on in various communities, is described in the following comprehensive report which was made by the Committee on story-telling, Miss Annie Carroll Moore, Chairman, at the Fourth Annual Congress of the Playground a.s.sociation of America. It was printed in the Playground, August, 1910, and an abridgement appeared in the Library Journal (September, 1910). A sketch of Miss Moore appears on page 113.
”Is she a Fairy, or just a Lady?”
A little Scotch girl asked the question after a story hour in a children's library. ”She made me see fairies awful plain.”
”She made me see fairies, too,” answered the children's librarian with whom the child had shared her doubt. ”Let's go and find her and make sure.”
On the way they spoke of the story they had both liked best. It was about an old woman who lived long ago in Devons.h.i.+re, who loved tulips and planted her garden full of them, and tended them with great care because they seemed to her so beautiful. After the old woman died some extremely practical persons came to live in her house and they considered it very foolish to grow tulips for their beauty when the garden might be turned to practical account. So they dug up the garden and a.n.a.lyzed the soil, and planted carrots and turnips and parsnips and just such vegetables as promised to yield speedy and profitable returns.
By and by a wonderful thing happened. Tulips no longer grew in the garden; there was no room for them and n.o.body had time to look after such useless things. But on the spot where the old woman was buried the most beautiful tulips sprang up of themselves, and every night in the Springtime the faries may be seen bringing their babies to rock them to sleep in the tulip bells.
The little Scotch girl wondered whether there was ”a book in the library with the tulip story in.” She wanted to read it to her grandmother, she said, because her grandmother was ”always speaking about her garden in Scotland,” and she wondered if the tulips in Scotland had fairies asleep in them.
The storyteller, who was Miss Marie L. Shedlock, looked wonderfully happy when asked whether she was a ”Fairy” or ”just a Lady.” She said she supposed she was really ”just a Lady,” but she had become so intimate with fairies through listening to stories about them, and thinking about them, and telling fairy tales to children and grown people in England and America, that she felt almost like a fairy at times, and she had come to believe with Hans Christian Andersen, whose stories she loved best of all, that life itself is a beautiful fairy tale.
Then she told the little girl that the tulip story was not in a book, and that she must tell it to her grandmother just as she remembered hearing it, and that having seen the fairies while she listened would help her to remember the story better. She could see pictures all the time she was telling stories, she said. The little girl had never thought of making pictures for herself before. She had only seen them in books and hanging on walls.
This unconscious tribute to the art of the storyteller made a lasting impression on the children's librarian. If a child of less than eight years, and of no exceptional parts, could so clearly discriminate between the fairy tale she had heard at school and the tale that made her ”see the fairies,” there was little truth in the statement that children do not appreciate artistic storytelling. She went back to her children's room feeling that something worth while had happened. The children who had listened to the stories now crowded about the book shelves, eager for ”any book about fairies,” ”a funny book,” or ”a book about animals.”
The little girl who had seen the fairies was not the only one who had fallen under the spell of the storyteller. ”I always knew Pandora was a nice story, but she never seemed like a live girl before,” said one of the older girls. ”I liked the Brahmin, the Jackal and the Tiger best,” exclaimed a boy. ”Gee! but couldn't you just see that tiger pace when she was saying the words?” ”I just love The Little Tin Soldier,” said a small boy who hated to read, but was always begging the children's librarian to tell him stories about the pictures he found in books. ”Didn't she make him march fine!”
Before the end of the day the children's librarian had decided that even if there could be but one such story hour in the lifetime of an individual or an inst.i.tution it would pay in immediate and far-off results. But why stop with one; why not have more story hours in children's libraries? Other children's librarians were asking themselves the same question, and then they asked their librarians, and those who recognized in the story hour a powerful ally in stimulating a love of good literature and a civilizing influence wherever the gang spirit prevailed, gave ready a.s.sent.
Ten years have pa.s.sed and the story hour is now an established feature in the work of children's libraries. Miss Shedlock came to America to tell stories to children and to their fathers and mothers. She returned year after year to remind the schools and colleges, the training schools and the kindergartens, as well as the public libraries, of the great possibilities in what she so aptly called ”the oldest and the newest of the arts.”
In her lectures upon ”The Art of Storytelling;” ”The Fun and the Philosophy; The Poetry and the Pathos of Hans Christian Andersen,” and in the stories she told to ill.u.s.trate them, Miss Shedlock exemplified that teaching of Socrates, which represents him as saying: ”All my good is magnetic, and I educate not by lessons but by going about my daily business.” The story as a mere beast of burden for conveying information or so-called moral or ethical instruction was relieved of its load. The play spirit in literature which is the birthright of every child of every nation was set free. Her interpretation of the delicate satire and the wealth of imagery revealed in the tales of that great child in literature, Hans Christian Andersen, has been at once an inspiration and a restraining influence to many who are now telling stories to children, and to others who have aided in the establis.h.i.+ng of storytelling. It is now three years since Miss Shedlock was recalled to England by the London County Council to bring back to the teachers of London the inspirational value of literature she had taken over to America.
Interest in storytelling has become widespread, reaching a civic development beyond the dreams of its most ardent advocates when a professional storyteller and teacher of literature was engaged to tell stories to children in the field houses of the public recreation centers of Chicago. Mrs. Gudrun Thorne- Thomsen has been known for some years in this country as a storyteller of great power in the field of her inheritance, Scandinavian literature. It is very largely due to her work that the city of Chicago has been roused to claim the public library privileges so long denied to her children, and to make the claim from a point that plants the love of literature in the midst of the recreational life of a great city.
No one who was present at those meetings of the New York Playground Congress, conducted by Miss Maud Summers, will ever forget her eloquent appeal for a full recognition of the value of storytelling as a definite activity of the playground. She saw its kins.h.i.+p to the folk dance and the folk song in the effort to preserve the traditions of his country to the foreign-born child.
And she saw the relation of the story to the games, the athletics, and the dramatics. More clearly than anything else, perhaps, she saw the value of the story in its direct appeal to the spiritual nature of the child. Miss Summers' interest and enthusiasm made the work of the present committee possible. As one of her a.s.sociates, its chairman pays grateful tribute to her memory and links her name with a work to which she gave herself so freely in life, that her death seems but the opening of another door through which we look with full hope and confidence upon childhood as ”a real and indestructible part of human life.”
There is a line of Juvenal that bids the old remember the respect due to the young. It is in that att.i.tude, and with some appreciation of what it means to be a growing boy or girl of the present time, that the subject of this report has been approached and is now presented for the consideration of the Playground a.s.sociation of America. We know only too well that we cannot give to childhood in great cities the simple and lovely ways we a.s.sociate with childhood. We CAN give to it a wonderful fortification against the materialism and the sensationalism of daily life on the streets, against the deadly monotony of the struggle for existence, by a revival of the folk spirit in story, as well as in song and in dance, that will not spend its strength in mere pageantry, but will sink deep into our national consciousness.
It should be clearly stated that the field of storytelling, investigated, relates to children above the kindergarten age and to boys and girls in their teens. The investigation lays no claim to completeness and has not included storytelling in public nor in private schools.
An outline covering the main points of this report was sent to representative workers in thirteen different cities, to several persons professionally engaged in storytelling, and to other persons whose critical judgment was valued in such connection.
The outline called--First, for a statement of the extent to which storytelling is being carried on in playgrounds, public libraries, settlements, and such other inst.i.tutions, exclusive of schools, as might come to the notice of the members of the committee. Second, for information concerning the persons who are telling stories, whether their entire time is given to storytelling and preparation for it; whether it forms a part of the regular duties of a director or an a.s.sistant; and, finally, whether volunteer workers are engaged in storytelling.
Replies to these inquiries with a brief statement of results have been grouped by cities,[3] as follows:
[3] Owing to s.p.a.ce limitations, in general the formal reports from cities represented in the discussion are omitted in the body of the report.
BOSTON
Storytelling in the playgrounds is under the direction of a special teacher appointed in 1909. The teacher of storytelling works in co-operation with the teachers of dramatics and of folk dancing. The visits of the special teacher added interest and novelty, but it is felt that every playground teacher should be able to tell stories effectively. Storytelling, therefore, is considered a part of the daily work of the playground a.s.sistant.
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