The same mistake was made by a professional story-teller who gave a coyote tale to a group of Italian children. They never had met this “outcast in gray,” never had shivered as he howled in the night, and the story brought no pictures before their eyes. They were inattentive and disorderly throughout its rendition, and the narrator declared them an impossible group. Yet that same afternoon a college girl with no special training in story-telling told them of a lost nanny goat, and they sat fascinated. In the first instance the trouble was not with the children but with the narrator. She knew much of technique but little of psychology and could not hold the children’s attention, while the other girl, possessed of far less native ability, entertained them because she understood the story interests of childhood. The narrator must have, not only an understanding of the psychological periods and interests of childhood, but a knowledge of the environment of the children with whom she works.
There is a wealth of sources from which to draw for this early period. Often it is necessary to adapt material, because many a tale whose framework is suited to little people is told in language beyond their understanding. “David and Jonathan,” by Elizabeth Stuart Phelps, is a good example. Written for adults, yet it is so universal in its appeal that the lad of six listens to it with as much sympathy as his father or mother. The account of the affection of dog and master for each other, the pathos of the separation and the joy of the reunion, touch him as much as they touch his parents, and to receive it from the lips of one who feels and loves the tale will make him kinder to dumb animals and gentler to the aged.
This is true of many another story that is the creation of an artist. I mention particularly Ouida’s “Dog of Flanders,” John Muir’s “Stickeen,” and Ernest Thompson Seton’s “Monarch, the Big Bear of Tallac,” each of which I have used with children of all ages. The characters in them are living, breathing creatures, the kind that if met in real life would arouse affection and awaken both laughter and tears, and whether these stories are told in monosyllabic language or colored by fine rhetorical effects, they strike the tender places and appeal to the best. When the child meets Nello before the altar of the cathedral in Antwerp, kneeling in front of a painting by Rubens and fondling his dog, he instinctively feels that this boy is not a stranger living in a far-away land and speaking a foreign language, but that he represents all the orphaned children in the world, and that his affection for his dog is the same tie that binds every other child to the pet he loves. So too with Monarch, the majestic captive of Golden Gate Park. He is not just a bear, a creature larger and more ferocious than many other animals. He typifies wild life caged, and the boy who has pitied him in listening to the account of his tramp, tramp, tramp about the pit, never quite forgets that proud but eternal unrest, the ever present longing for the white peaks and the pines.