STORY
Story is, in general, the narrative of a succession of incidents or
events. It is a large, general form or device, useful, indeed
inevitable, in all subjects. Like language itself, story is a universal
medium, conveying the facts of history, of science, of life. Whenever we
have the steps of any experience arranged according to any of the laws
of subsequence or consequence, we have story; such as the story of the
dandelion seed, the story of the life of Mary Stuart, the story of the
invention of the steam engine, the story of a day in the city. Now, the
narration of the events in mere chronological sequence is _story_. As
soon as they are arranged in the order of cause and effect--or in any
other chosen order; as soon as the narrative leads up to an end or a
signal event; as soon as it shows that there has been for any purpose a
selection and ordered arrangement of the steps or incidents, we have _a
story_. The literary story--the story which is art--differs from other
stories in the fact that in it the principle of selection and
arrangement operates more thoroughly than in the others. A narrative
detailing for technical purposes the steps of an occurrence in nature or
in history must follow closely either the sequence of time or the order
of cause and effect; and such a report cannot choose among the steps or
incidents, but must as a matter of mere fairness, suppress nothing and
heighten nothing. It is otherwise with the literary story. Here the
incidents may be selected at the discretion of the author and arranged
in whatever order may best serve to produce his effect; insignificant
steps may be eliminated, certain steps may be elaborated and brought
into higher light. The will of the artist and his artistic effect
constitute a force which may abrogate the laws of cause and effect, or
of precedence and subsequence in time.
The interest in story is instinctive and universal; the merest string of
incidents will attract and hold attention. Interest and attention
naturally increase and deepen with the greater organization of the
material. It is this principle of organization that gives to literary
stories some of their unique and distinctive values in education. No
method of organization but that of story keeps the younger child's
attention long enough and closely enough to carry him undistracted
through a large whole. He cannot follow, as can his elders, the flow of
emotion which constitutes the thread of continuity in a lyric; he
cannot follow a train of thinking through an essay; but he can follow
the run of a narrative through even a long story. This fact enables us
to put him satisfactorily and pleasantly into the presence of a large
organized bit of material, in which he can discriminate the parts, yet
which he can grasp as a whole; which he can see as an entity beginning
somewhere, proceeding in order, reaching an end.
The temptation to amplify the statement of the influence in the child's
whole mental experience of this fostering and disciplining of his powers
of attention is difficult to resist. But we will leave it with these few
words in order to speak of the specifically artistic and literary
results of this matter of structure in the story. It is a thing hard to
insist upon as a matter of general theory, because written down in cold
black and white it seems to convey the impression that emphasis is
placed upon mere colorless organization; as if one obliged his children
to make an analytical syllabus of their pleasant tale before he regarded
it as taught. But it is no such dull thing. Beauty and economy of
structure lie upon the very surface of the best bits of literature, and
need but the most unobtrusive reinforcement from the teacher to work
their effect of pleasure and discipline. This pleasure is an artistic
product which should expand and develop with the child's reading,
until, when he is a mature student, the formal structure of poem or
story gives him the same aesthetic and moral satisfaction that he gets
from a picture well composed, a monument well balanced. It is not a
fancy or a mere pretty theory that a good story, taught as a structure,
becomes a norm, a model, a clue to the child in the preservation of his
own material, and in the arrangement of it economically and effectively.
His attention is trained, his patience is rewarded, his taste refined,
his judgment exercised and steadied, his imagination guided and
channeled by his contact with a complete, beautiful, and logical
creation, whose elements he can see and handle as he can those of the
story.
From the point of view of the larger structure of the story its elements
are the incidents. This term is employed in this chapter rather
arbitrarily to designate those smallest separable units of progress by
which a story goes forward. It does not necessarily designate a section
of the story which records a happening; the introductory and explanatory
paragraph we call an incident; a paragraph of description is an
incident; the separable sections of the story as it moves are its
incidents. A new incident begins when a certain aspect of the action
closes, when a new day opens, a new person enters, a change of scene
occurs, or even a shift from dialogue to narration; any of these and
many other things may cause or signalize a new incident. Study for
example, Grimm's _Briar-Rose_, which divides naturally and inevitably
into ten separable incidents, and which exhibits a beautiful and
artistic organization.
A teacher should master this aspect of every story he proposes to teach.
He should know it intimately as a series of incidents; for these are the
things he can manipulate as he uses the story--in case he must shorten
it or dramatize it, or otherwise modify it to suit his needs. If he
knows how to handle incidents, he may often by a little editing
eliminate superfluous matter and convert a loose, overburdened, or
merely long story into a usable bit of art.
Practically every story that has the length and dignity to justify its
use for a class, gathers its incidents into movements that correspond to
the three or five acts of a drama. There is something almost
biologically necessary in at least three parts or movements in every
organized narrative--Aristotle's obvious beginning, middle, and end. In
a story it is but natural that we should have (1) a section presenting
the people and their surroundings, the circumstances which call for or
dictate the action; (2) the central event, the essential adventure; (3)
the denouement, conclusion, reconciliation, adjustment, or what not.
These three movements are beautifully distinct in the _Briar-Rose_. It
helps to impress upon the children the structure of the story if in the
study of it these movements are brought to notice--quietly and
unobtrusively, perhaps indicated by a mere pause in the telling, or on
occasion, more deliberately by some other means. The story should not be
so handled as to make the impression that there are abrupt gaps between
the movements; rather these movements should be treated as essential
parts of a larger composition. In the stories of the dramas the children
may study, and in all such stories as they themselves dramatize, they
will inevitably see that these stages or movements are essential and
vital, dictating the organization of the material into acts.
Within the arrangement of the story as incidents and movements lies a
deeper kind of organization which exhibits many kinds and degrees of
complexity. A story may be a run of incidents that report mere activity.
So deep and eager is the hunger for story, so unfailing is the primitive
epic interest, that almost anybody's attention may be held for a long
while by the recital of the merely juxtaposed incidents that constitute
this story of activity. But there is no art in this; it is mere
story-stuff, not _a story_. Under the manipulation of the literary
artist, the tale-teller, it takes shape, shifts its incidents about,
arranges its stages and emerges a created and organic thing, telling now
of action, not of activity. It may be a long narrative, or it may be a
mere anecdote. But it has a purpose and a plan, and it reaches an end.
This straightforward, single-minded tale does not, however, give
complete and final satisfaction. In the first place, it does not
represent life, which never proceeds far by single, uninterrupted
threads; events are interlinked and complicated, modified and diverted
in many directions. In the second place, it does not satisfy the
instinct of workmanship in the artist. Even the most primitive artist,
the very folk itself, has this instinct of craftsmanship which expresses
itself in the elaboration and enrichment of its product. In story this
instinct displays itself in the more skilful arrangement of the
incidents, looking ever to the heightening and deepening of effect, in
the enrichment of the presentation by weaving together more than one
action into a more and more complex whole. Such increased elaboration,
and more conscious organization either in the arrangement of the
incidents of a single action, or in the interweaving of two or more
actions, gives the story _a plot_.
It is from the use of stories elaborate enough and developed enough to
have a plot that genuine disciplinary value may be expected. The merely
chaotic or haphazard run of incidents may amuse and interest the
children, but it yields nothing of artistic training. Two very simple
specimens (useful for so many purposes) will illustrate the point. Take
the story adumbrated in _The House That Jack Built_. This is a series of
incidents linked together in the accumulative fashion, but proceeding in
a straight line and stopping short off without issue or event. Compare
it with the equally primitive accumulative tale of _The Old Woman Who
Found the Sixpence_, from which invaluable tale one can exemplify all
the main devices of successful plot-making; the incidents are arranged
in a charming pattern, so that the action rises to a summit, descends to
an end, and produces an effect; there is the proper proportion of
involution (save the mark!), of the making of difficulties, stating the
problem, awakening our sympathies; this is followed by the due process
of resolution, unraveling the difficulties, with the final restoration
of the action to the normal level with the purpose of the story
achieved. It is this kind of story that adds to interest and amusement
that additional charm of artistic structure which distinguishes
literature from mere writing.
Now, while it is true that a symmetrical plot constitutes in part the
educational value of a story, it is quite obvious to those who know both
children and stories that intricate and elaborate plots should not be
given to folks in the elementary classes. A story in which the threads
of the plot are many or disparate, or one in which the actions must be
often, or for any long while, kept separate, confuses rather than trains
the young children. Better for them are those stories whose plots are
open and simple, where the actions of the interlinked threads coincide
as much as possible. Certain traditional plot devices are out of place
in a story chosen for these children; suspense and mystification, for
example, those devices so dear in their myriad forms to the cheap and
sensational novelist, and so indispensable to the interest of the
uncultivated reader, are not desirable in the children's class. Their
interest needs no such stimulus; their attention should not be subjected
to the strain, nor their nerves to the shock, of a sustained suspense
with its consequent surprise. Rather, their story should move openly and
directly, depending for its power upon the skilful interrelation of its
interests, yielding the pleasure of recognition and sympathy, so much
more artistic and disciplinary than the pleasure of surprise. For this
reason plots of the type of Shakespeare's great plots, of the type of
Perrault's _Cinderella_, in which the reader is in the confidence of the
author from the beginning, are to be desired for the little people. If
for any reason it seems well to tell to the younger children a long
story built upon suspense and surprise, it is generally well to let them
know very soon the issue of affairs--the ultimate disaster or
reconciliation--so that they may be free from anxiety and able to attend
to the more real matter of the story as it proceeds. This teaching
applies to the younger children; as they grow older, they become able to
get desirable intellectual experience out of a good detective story, or
one with a fairly deep mystification in it, like _Treasure Island_. The
older children, too, may profitably handle a more intricate
plot--_Ivanhoe_ with its four threads of interest and activity, _The
Merchant of Venice_ with the action shifting about from scene to scene
among its various groups.
By handling a plot as a matter of literary study we mean, examining it
from these points of view.
1. What are the difficulties set up?
2. By what devices are the difficulties constituted--conspiracy,
intrigue, disguise, quarrel blood-feud, race-hatred, etc., etc.?
3. How are the difficulties removed?
4. How many threads of interest has the plot?
5. How are they linked together or interwoven?
6. How logical and how fair is the outcome?
Other questions to be considered in studying the plot will arise in the
study of an actual story with an actual class.
Of fundamental interest in the story are the persons or characters, and
it is of prime importance that teachers--be they mothers or
masters--should know how to educate the children in this matter.
From one point of view--that of the activities of the story, in which
the younger children are mainly interested--there are two kinds of
persons: those who do things; those who receive things, or for whose
sake, or merely in whose presence, things are done. The former are the
agents--the pushing, active adventurous persons, who, good or ill, make
things happen; the latter are often mere figures, important and perhaps
beautiful, put into the story to represent institutions or ideas--like
the father of Cinderella, who is merely an institutional father; or they
are devices for getting on with the plot, like the fairy godmother; or
they are the rewards of endeavor, like the King's daughter given in
marriage in many a folk-tale. From another point of view, which regards
the actors in the story, not as persons, but as characters, they may be
divided into two types; those who are fixed, static, from the
beginning--who come into the story fully equipped, and do not change at
all within its limits; those who change or develop under the influence
of others and of their experiences.
In the study of characters more than in any other aspect of story, we
must allow for the growth of the children within the elementary period.
The youngest children are prepared to appreciate the activities of
people, and are interested in the active persons, and by transfer of
sympathy, in the persons for whose sake the deeds are done. Their
typical readiness in reading character does not fail them when the
character has been transferred to literature. They are quick to
discriminate the main lines and the distinguishing traits of
personality. They need only a few facts and signs. The merest nursery
child will be found to have settled views of the general character of
Little Boy Blue and Jack Horner, built upon the slender but significant
data of the rhymes. But the children I have known have not, up to the
sixth grade, followed with much interest or profit any but the
slightest and simplest character progression or modification. They are
satisfied that the wicked should become more and more wicked, to their
final undoing; that the stupid become stupider, to their ultimate
extinction; but any evolution of character other than this cumulative
one, any transformation more subtle than the conversion of Cinderella's
sisters, or more delicate than the degeneration of Struwelpeter, finds
them languid.
From these facts the wise teacher takes his hints and builds his plans.
He will give these younger children very little of what is known in
mature classes as _character-study_--which so easily in these same older
classes, degenerates into gossip and the merely idle or pernicious
attributing of motives. He will help the child, on the whole, to judge
from his deeds whether a man is good or bad, helpful or hindering. But
no deed is all mere activity; back of it lie motives and passions, and
beyond it lie moral and social results. There is a name for Little Boy
Blue's failure in duty, and for Jack Horner's self-approval; and these
qualities have manifestations in forms and circumstances other than
those of these two heroes. To these simple deed-inspiring motives and
passions, and to their effects on the persons themselves, the teacher
must see that the children's attention is directed; so that, as he
builds up stroke by stroke the image of his hero and model, the features
that he gets from literature at least may be supported by his judgment.
Of course, as they advance the children awaken, or should be awakened,
to some of the more delicate discriminations of motive and action--to
the conception of a man who is mixed good and bad; and to a realization
of a character changed under our eyes by some experience or by the
influence of another person; to some estimate of the farther-reaching
consequences of the deeds we witness in our story. And before they have
finally passed out of the elementary grades, we may expect them to be
able to consider the problems and contradictions that lie, for example,
in the character of Shylock; they could see his fundamental
passions--race-hatred, avarice; they could estimate his
motives--personal dislike of the merchant, revenge of his own wrongs and
loneliness; they could try to estimate the effect of his character and
conduct on the fortunes and characters of the whole group, and finally
upon his own fortunes. They might, in the same general and simple way,
follow the spiritual struggles of Brutus: his great underlying
passions--patriotism and love of friend; his immediate motives to save
his country; the effect of his deed; the telling contrasts between him
and Cassius, him and Mark Antony.
The study of character in these broader lines--the fundamental qualities
or passions, the motives that bring about the action, the obvious
results in personal and social ways of these actions--constitutes the
utmost we should try to do in this direction, leaving for a later
period, when the children's social interests are broadened, and when
they have developed from within a deeper sense of moral experience, the
more delicate and difficult matters of the evolution and interplay of
character.
Of equal importance in a story with the run of events or plot, and with
the persons or characters, is this third thing--the outcome or issue. It
is surely wise to follow, for the younger children, the hint given by
their own tastes and by the primitive story-tellers, to the extent of
giving them prevailingly such stories as have a distinct and signal
outcome, leaving the uncertainties and inconclusions of a thoroughgoing
realism for a much later period. It is best, on the whole, that the
children see the issues of their story settled, the actions passing on
to accomplishment--this for the artistic as well as for the moral effect
of the tale. It enables them to regard it as a finished whole, having
unity and completeness; and it throws light on all the events and
persons in the story, to see how things come out in the end.
The outcome or issue can be looked at from one or the other, sometimes
from both, of two points of view; as a denouement or round-up of the
particular story in hand; or as a solution of a human problem, a
universal situation. The entirely satisfying denouement of _The Old
Woman Who Found the Sixpence_, the removal of her many difficulties,
goes no farther than getting her home that night; though, of course, a
mature mind of mystic tendencies may see in it a triumph of social
co-operation. It will be enough for the third grade to feel a certain
luxurious physical well-being, arising from the final safe arrival of
the old woman and the pig that night. But in the exquisite little
novella of _Beauty and the Beast_ the outcome of the story is not only a
settlement of the affairs of the persons in whom we are interested, but
it is also a comment on life of universal application--that in a world
where things go as they should, good, gentle, and pretty persons are
rewarded with their hearts' desire, while rude, haughty, and cruel
persons are either punished or left entirely out in the award of good
things.
This sort of ending, conclusive and fortunate, the children and the
primitive story-makers always prefer; any other kind of ending must be
prepared for and defended. The younger children will not accept
tragedies; the older ones accept them with difficulty. Death and failure
are not realizable to them. It may be true, as Wordsworth undoubtedly
meant us to see in his little cottage-girl in "We Are Seven," that this
refusal to believe in death is due to some supernal truth of vision
which we, their elders, seeing only by the light of common day, have
lost.
But we all know that tragedy is sometimes the way of life, and often the
way of art, being ineradicably written in the events of many of the
world's great stories. It would be an ethical and artistic folly to
substitute a fortunate ending in these stories--quite as unpardonable in
the tragic folk tale as in _King Lear_ or in one of the Greek tragedies.
It is well to study with the children occasionally a tragic tale, to
give them that sort of artistic experience and to secure the exercise of
the tender sides of sympathy and pity. But because they are not provided
by their experience with reasons for expecting and accepting tragedy
they should be prepared for the calamity and led to justify and accept
it--not as a visitation of justice, for a true tragedy is never of that
kind--but as a beautiful pathos or grief. To this end one would choose
his tragic tale among those which have disaster inwoven from the
beginning, so that the class may not have the shock of surprise and the
feeling of resentment that come of an unexpected and avoidable
catastrophe. Take for example, the folk-tale of _Little Red
Riding-Hood_, a poor story for a class in any form, but poor as a
tragedy because there is nothing in the events to warn them of the
tragic end. To be sure there is the treacherous wolf, but he is stupid
and should by rights be defeated and outwitted; it is simply
preposterous, in the code of childhood, that he should triumph. This
lack of the inevitable and necessary element in the disaster is
doubtless what tempted the folk themselves to divert it by a denouement,
possibly reminiscent of certain mythical stories--the recovery of the
maiden from the wolf's stomach, which by its improbability and
grotesquerie tempts the skepticism of the class, however young. As an
example of the other sort, consider the old ballad long ago adopted as a
nursery tale--_The Babes in the Wood_, which carries in its very nature
and in every incident the prophecy of tragedy; so that, however grievous
the calamity may be, it does not come upon us with the additional shock
of surprise and the additional injury of unreasonableness. This kind of
story accomplishes the result of discharging the tender emotions
without complicating them too deeply with anger and revenge.
But, on the whole, the stories taught the elementary class should be
those that end conclusively and fortunately. This principle not only
matches and satisfies the child's taste, but it is in entire consonance
with the principles of his procedure in other things--it grows out of
the method of affirmation and inclusion, regarding elimination and
denial as useful in a much later period of his education.
As to the way in which the conclusion is brought to pass, there is to
the child and to the childlike mind, in literature as in life, something
eminently satisfying in poetic justice. Legal justice is cold and formal
to them, except indeed in those frequent cases in which it is a vehicle
of vengeance. Besides, it seems to produce an effect really alien to the
cause; as in the penalties of the sufferers in the _Inferno_, the
inevitableness of the effect is obscured by the many complex stages that
intervene between it and the cause. Logical justice--the natural,
uninterrupted working of the forces and motives to a conclusion, or to
their absorption into a new combination--is both too slow and not
striking enough. Besides, logical justice, working in its impersonal,
undiscriminating way, is too likely to hurt someone in the piece whom
we love, or to spare somebody we hate. In short, your elementary class
demands poetic justice--demands it strong and desires it quick. Now,
poetic justice is, on the whole, the way of art, until we come
practically to the realistic art of our own generation. It tends to
secure completeness and unity. As a matter of fact, in practically every
short and completed story of the kind we choose for children the end is
precipitated and adjusted by the operation of poetic justice.
One would be blind indeed who was unaware of the fact that precisely
here lies one of the dangers of the training in literature. It is this
that tends to give the mind that has had too large a diet of literature,
or to which literature has been unwisely administered, a distorted view
of life, obscuring its vision with sentimentality and unreality. To
guard against these effects we should see to it that the children do not
have an unduly large amount of literature; and we should select those
stories in which the operation of poetic justice is as little misleading
as possible. Poetic justice may be, and usually is, an ideal, an
artistic distribution of rewards and punishments; but it need not be a
haphazard and lawless distribution. There is an artistic flaw in a story
in which the rewards go to a person who has not legitimately awakened
our sympathies; it is not safe to say that the reward should go to him
who has deserved it, for in some of the most acceptable children's
stories sympathy sets aside deserving--_The Musicians of Bremen_, for
example. We are satisfied with the success of the musicians, because,
being innocent and persecuted, they have gained our sympathy, and are
therefore in the line for reward. But the youngest child whom I have
tested on this point disapproves the outcome of the folk-tale of "Lazy
Jack" (Joseph Jacob's _English Fairy Tales_), in which a noodle whose
stupidity has caused a king's daughter, previously dumb, to laugh, and
so to gain her voice, is rewarded by being married to the restored
princess. It is not difficult to avoid those stories in which poetic
justice is perverted justice.
And then, in the long run, when we have studied many stories and fitted
the literary stories in with history and the observation of life, we can
counteract any effect of unreality we may suspect, by placing the
rewards and punishments in their proper places and classes--translating
them, as it were, into terms of experience. The fairy-tale may say in
effect: "Be good and gentle and pretty, and you will marry a prince,"
or, "If you are mean and spiteful, you will be transformed into a toad;"
but it is not so difficult to convert these propositions into terms that
have a reality for the third grade, so that marrying a prince and being
turned into a toad take their places as typical or symbolistic rewards
and punishments.