Here and Now Story Book Part 3

When we look at the forms which have been presented to children with these their spontaneous patterns fresh in mind, we can see, I think, why Mother Goose has been taken as a child's own and Eugene Field and even Stevenson rejected as unintelligible. I do not believe there is anything in the content of Mother Goose to win the child. I believe it is the form that makes the appeal. Vachel Lindsay, whose daring play with words has made him an object of suspicion to the reluctant of mind, has given us one poem in pattern singularly like the children's own and in content full of interest and charm. Again I give examples as the quickest of arguments. And I give them in verse where the form is more obvious and can be shown in briefer s.p.a.ce than in stories.

Jack and Jill Went up the hill To fetch a pail of water.

Jack fell down And broke his crown And Jill came tumbling after.

TIME TO RISE

A birdie with a yellow bill Hopped upon the window sill, c.o.c.ked his shining eye and said: "Ain't you shamed, you sleepy head?"

--_Stevenson._

THE LITTLE TURTLE

(A recitation for Martha Wakefield, three years old)

There was a little turtle.

He lived in a box.

He swam in a puddle.

He climbed on the rocks.

He snapped at a musquito.

He snapped at a flea.

He snapped at a minnow.

And he snapped at me.

He caught the musquito.

He caught the flea.

He caught the minnow.

But he didn't catch me.

--_Vachel Lindsay._

From THE d.i.n.kEY-BIRD

So when the children shout and scamper And make merry all the day, When there's naught to put a damper To the ardor of their play; When I hear their laughter ringing, Then I'm sure as sure can be That the d.i.n.key-bird is singing In the amfalula tree.

--_Eugene Field._

Of the two "Jack and Jill" and "Birdie with the Yellow Bill," surely Stevenson's is the more charming to the adult ear. But when I have read it to three-year-olds, I have felt that they were lost. They could not sustain the long grammatical suspense, could not carry over "A birdie"

from the first line to the conclusion and so actually did not know who was saying "Ain't you shamed, you sleepy-head!" Mother Goose repeats her subject. The span to carry is two phrases in Mother Goose as against four in Stevenson. The Vachel Lindsay I have found is as easily remembered and as much enjoyed as Mother Goose, though it is a pity it is about an unfamiliar animal. As for the d.i.n.key-bird even a seven-year-old can hardly _hear_ the rhyme even if intellectually he could follow the adult vocabulary and the complicated sentence with its long postponed subject.

It is the same with stories. The cla.s.sic tales which have held small children,--"The Gingerbread Man," "The Three Little Pigs,"

"Goldylocks,"--have patterns so obvious and so simple that they cannot be missed. In "The Gingerbread Man" the pattern is one of increasing additions. It belongs to the aptly called "c.u.mulative" tales. The refrains act like sign-posts to help the child to mark the progress.

This is simply a skilful way of making the continuity close, of showing the ladder rungs for the child's feet. I venture to say that any good story-teller consciously or unconsciously puts up sign-posts to help the children. If he is skilful, he makes a pattern of them so that they are not merely intellectually helpful but charming as well. So Kipling in his "Just So Stories" uses his sign-posts,--which are sometimes words, sometimes phrases, sometimes situations,--in such a way that they ring musically and give a pleasant sense of pattern even to children too young to find them intellectually helpful.

In other words, the little child is not equipped psychologically to hear complicated units. I wish some one could determine how the average four-year-old hears the harmony of a chord on the piano. Is it much except confusion? In the same way, he is not equipped to leap a span between units. I wish some one would determine the four-year-old's memory span for rhymes, for instance. The involutions, the suggestiveness so attractive to adult ears, he cannot hear. Even an adult ear, untutored, can scarcely hear the intermingling rhythms and overlapping rhymes which blend like overtones of a chord in such verse as Patmore's Ode "The Toys." I feel sure the small child cannot hear complexities; he cannot leap gaps. And so he cannot understand when even simple ideas are given in complex and discontinuous form. This explains his notorious love of repet.i.tion. Repet.i.tion is the simplest of patterns, simple enough to be enjoyed as pattern. I have found that almost any simple phrase of music or words repeated slowly and with a kind of ceremonious attention, enthralls a year-old child. If the unit is simple enough to be remembered he will inevitably enjoy recognizing it as it recurs and recurs. This is the embryonic pattern sense.

This pattern enjoyment too is motor in its basis. His early repet.i.tions of sounds are probably largely pleasure in muscle patterns. We all know that a child uses first his large muscles,--arm, leg and back,--and that he early enjoys any regular recurrent use of these muscles. So at the time when the vocal muscles tend to become his means of expression, he enjoys repeating the same sounds over and over. And soon he gets enjoyment from listening to repet.i.tions or rhythmic language,--a vicarious motor enjoyment. Surely it is important that stories should furnish him this exercise and pleasure. Three- and four-year-olds will enjoy a positively astounding amount of repet.i.tion. In the Arabella and Araminta stories a large proportion of the sentences are given in duplicate by the simple device of having twins who do and say the same things and by telling the remarks and actions of each. The selection quoted is repeated entire four times, the variation being only in the flower picked:

And Arabella picked a poppy, and Araminta picked a poppy, and Arabella picked a poppy, and Araminta picked a poppy, and Arabella picked a poppy, and Araminta picked a poppy, and Arabella picked a poppy, and Araminta picked a poppy, and Arabella picked a poppy, and Araminta picked a poppy, until they each had a great big bunch (I should say a very large bunch), and then they ran back to the house.

Arabella got a gla.s.s and put her poppies in it, and Araminta got a gla.s.s and put her poppies in it.

And Arabella clapped her hands and danced around the table. And Araminta clapped her hands and danced around the table.

Adult ears repudiate anything as obvious as this; they still, however, enjoy a ballad refrain.

Just as small children cannot hear complications, so they cannot grasp details if the movement is swift. We must give time for a child's slow reactions. We usually fail to do this in ordinary social situations and are often surprised to hear our three-year-old say "good-bye" long after the front door is closed and our guest well on his way down the street.

In stories we must take a leisurely pace. We must also read very slowly allowing ample time for a child to give the full motor expression to his thought for the art of abbreviation he has not yet learned.

It is not enough to recognize that since a child attends to but one thing at a time the units must be simple. Here in the form as in the content, must the motor quality of a child's thinking be held constantly in mind. In trying to find the general subject matter appropriate for little children I said that they think through their muscles. This motor expression of small children has its direct application in the concrete method of telling of any happening. The story child who is experiencing, should go through the essential muscular performances which the real listening child would go through if he were actually experiencing himself. For he thinks through these muscular expressions. As an example, when a group of four-year-olds heard a story about a little boy who saw the elevated train approach and pa.s.s above him, they thought the child might have been run over. The words "up" and "above" and "overhead" had been used but the children failed to get the idea of "upness." Unquestionably they would have understood if I had made the little boy _throw back his head and look up_. Small children act with big gestures and with big muscles. And they think through the same mechanisms.

These two principles, simplicity and continuity, apply concretely to sentence and phrase structure as well. The effort to obtain continuity for the child explains the colloquial "The little boy who lived in this house, _he_ did so and so----" You help your child back to the subject, "the little boy" by the grammatically redundant "he" after his mind has gone off on "this house." This same need for continuity also explains why a child's own stories are characteristically one continuous sentence strung together with "ands" and "thens" and "buts." He sees and hears and consequently thinks in a simple, rhythmic, continuous flow. If we would have him see and hear and think with us, we must give him his stories and verse in simple units closely and obviously linked together.

But after all is said and done, why should we give children stories at all? Is it to instruct and so should we pay attention to the content? Is it to delight and so should we pay attention to the form? Both things, information and relish, have their place in justifying stories for children. But both to my mind are of minor importance compared to a third and quite different thing,--and this is to get children to create stories of their own, to play with words. "To get" is an unhappy phrase for it suggests that children must be coaxed to the task. This I do not believe though I cannot prove it. I do believe that children play with words naturally and spontaneously just as they play with any material that comes to their creative hands. And further I believe,--though this too I cannot prove,--that we adults kill this play with words just as we kill their creative play with most things. Most of us have forgotten how to play with anything, most of all with words. We are utilitarian, we are executive, we are didactic, we are earth-tied, we are hopelessly adult! Actually children use their ears and noses and fingers much more than do we adults. Our stories rely mainly upon visual recalls. We forget to listen even to birds whose message is pure melody. And how many of us _hear_ the city sounds which surround us, the characteristic whirr of revolving wheels, the vibrating rhythm of horses' feet, the crunch of footsteps in the snow? Noises we hear, the warning shriek of the fire engine or the honk! honk! of the automobile. But the subtler, finer reverberations we are not sensitive to. Yet little children love to listen and develop another method of sensing and appreciating their world by this pleasurable use of their hearing. It surely is an unused opportunity for story-tellers. I have tried to use it in "Pedro's Feet"

which is an attempt to give them an ordinary story by means of sounds.

And even less than to city sounds do we listen for the cadences in language. We listen only for the _meaning_ and forget the sensuous delight of sound.

But happily children are not so determined to wring a meaning out of every sight and every sound. Children play. Play is a child's own technique. Through it he seizes the strange unknown world around him and fashions it into his very own. He recreates through play. And through creating, he learns and he enjoys.

There is no better play material in the world than words. They surround us, go with us through our work-a-day tasks, their sound is always in our ears, their rhythms on our tongue. Why do we leave it to special occasions and to special people to use these common things as precious play material? Because we are grown-ups and have closed our ears and our eyes that we may not be distracted from our plodding ways! But when we turn to the children, to hearing and seeing children, to whom all the world is as play material, who think and feel through play, can we not then drop our adult utilitarian speech and listen and watch for the patterns of words and ideas? Can we not care for the _way_ we say things to them and not merely _what_ we say? Can we not speak in rhythm, in pleasing sounds, even in song for the mere sensuous delight it gives us and them, even though it adds nothing to the content of our remark? If we can, I feel sure children will not lose their native use of words: more, I think those of six and seven and eight who have lost it in part,--and their stories show they have,--will win back to their spontaneous joy in the play of words. This is the ultimate test of stories and verse,--whether they help children to retain their native gift of play with language and with thought.

In the City and Country School where my experiments in language have been carried on, we have not gone far enough to offer convincing proof along these lines. But I submit two stories told by a six-year-old cla.s.s which are at least suggestive. The first is the best story told to me by any member of the cla.s.s before any effort had been made to get the children to listen to the sound of their words or to think of their ideas as all pointing in one direction and giving a single impression.

The second was told by the cla.s.s as a whole while looking at Willebeek Le Mair's ill.u.s.tration of "Twinkle, twinkle, little star." They said the picture made them feel sleepy and that they would say only things that made them sleepy and use only words that made them sleepy. Between the two stories I had met with them seven times. I had read them sounding and rhythmic verse. They had become interested in the sound of language apart from its meaning. They had become interested in the sound of the rain and the fire. They were thinking through their ears. Am I mistaken in believing this shows in their language and in their thought?

STORY BY A SIX-YEAR-OLD

Once upon a time there was a little boy named Peter and a little boy named Boris. And Peter took him out for a walk and took him all around school. Then I took him out to my house and saw all my play things. And then I took him to Central Park and showed him sea lions and the giraffe and the elephant and I showed how they eat by their trunks. And he thought it was queer. And he said he was afraid of animals and so I took him home. I told him to tell his mother about it and his mother said, "You want to go for another walk?" and he said, "Yes, but not where the wild animals are." I said, "Do you want to go to Central Park?" and he said, "Yes." You see he got fooled! He didn't know about the wild animals.

JOINT STORY BY SIX-YEAR-OLD CLa.s.s

I like it when the boy and the girl look at the sky. They look at the trees and they are sleepy. It is dark outside. It is night and the sky is dark blue. And it is kind of whitish and the trees are next to the blue sky. The bright evening star is out. The star is so far up in the sky that you can hardly see it. The children are looking at the sky before they go to bed and they are praying to G.o.d. They have their nightgowns on. The bed is all nice so they couldn't have just got up. The clothes are hanging on the bed. They sleep in their own bed together. When they go to bed they have their door closed.

"The Leaf Story" and "The Wind Story" I have incorporated with my stories, though they are almost entirely the work of children. In both cases the organization is beyond the children. But the content and the phraseology bear their unmistakable imprint. The same is true of "The Sea Gull."

Because of the pattern, the play aspect of language, I believe in written stories even for very little ones. If we loved our language better and played with its sound in our ordinary speech, perhaps stories for two- and three-year-olds would not be needed. But as it is, we need to present them with something more intentional, more thought out than is possible with most of us in a story told. If the patterns of our ideas or of our speech are to have charm, if they are to fit the occasion with nicety, if they are to flow easily and are to be continuous enough to be comprehended by little children, they will need careful attention,--attention that cannot be given under the emergency of telling a story, not, at least, by the uninspired of us. Inevitably, with our utilitarian tendencies, we shall be drawn off to an undue regard of the content to the neglect of the expression. And yet, for very little children, there is unquestionably something lost by the formality and fixity of a written story. A story told has more spontaneity, allows more leeway to include the chance happenings or remarks of the children; it can be more intimately personal, more adapted to the particular occasion and to the particular child. Perhaps some time we shall achieve a fortunate compromise, a stepping stone between the story told and the story read. Perhaps we shall work out happy or characteristic phrases about familiar things,--little personal things about the clothes and habits of each child, general familiar things like autos and wagons and horses on the street, coal going down the hole in the sidewalk, the squabbling of sparrows in the dirt, the drift of snow on the roofs,--perhaps we shall learn to use such thought-out phrases or refrains like blocks for building many stories.

If we could work out some such technique as this, we could keep the intimacy, the flexibility, the waywardness of the spoken story and still give the children the charm of careful thinking and careful phrasing.

Many such phrases have been fashioned by people sensitive to the quality of sound. Every nursery has had its rooster crow:

"c.o.c.k-a-doodle-doo!"

But few have given its children that delightful epitome of the songs of spring birds which has piped with irrepressible freshness now for nearly four centuries: