Telling Stories
Colum, Padraic
IT HAS been discovered that there is still a place in the world for an oral art—for story-telling. Those who have charge of children's reading-rooms in American libraries have had to rediscover...
...I am persuaded both children and the lower class of readers hate books which are written down to their capacity," Walter Scott noted on an occasion...
...The story-teller whom I listened to when I was young had many advantages over the modern and metropolitan story-teller in one of our public libraries...
...It has to be in sentences that can be easily and pleasantly carried over by the human voice...
...There were shadows upon the walls...
...And so we have the most ancient of the arts taking its place in modern surroundings...
...the little birds were taking their rest at the butts of bushes and the tops of the trees, but if they were, he was not...
...Children love language for its own sake...
...They are in a formal series for the story must have distinct pattern, but the story-teller has to relate them as if he had just discovered them as something going on...
...they gave relief in the method of delivery, too, for the "run" was always spoken with a quicker rhythm, as if it were a piece of free verse...
...The story-teller must respect the child's mind, the child's conception of the world, knowing it for a complete mind and a complete conception...
...This is true of traditional stories, and true also of the stories for children which writers like Hans Andersen and Rudyard Kipling have made up...
...And the value that the story told has over the story that one reads to oneself is that it holds and carries over feelings that belong to something deeper in us than our external consciousness...
...To be able to use such a possession in a story is to be able to give another gleam, another interest to it...
...Th« art of story-telling consists in giving spontaneity to a formal series of happenings...
...He had few gestures, this particular story-teller: sometimes he beat his hands together...
...The pattern of the story has to be a familiar one...
...It has nothing to say about states of mind...
...He set off, and there was blackening on his soles, and holing in his shoes...
...By such descriptions he was able to get, what everyone who undertakes to tell a story of some length has to get, relief and points of rest...
...In its description it has to be free of generalities— not a catalogue of a poet's sensations with the sea by way of description, let us say, but the flash of the wave...
...He was free to make all sorts of rhymes and chimes with them, and to use words that were meaningless except for the overtone of meaning their sounds had...
...the grand and interesting consists in ideas, not words...
...They love those that are more composed for their elders and betters...
...The language of a story that is to be told to children should be simple, of course, but it should not be childish...
...Nothing that he told us had to be visualized in the glare of day or in the glare of electric light...
...sometimes he raised a stick that was by him to give solemnity to some happening...
...the description of a castle or of a lonely waste...
...It is worth while noting that In American schools, where the children are used to only a standardized language, they are particularly attracted to poetry in dialect...
...If a story-teller have that respect he need not be childish in his language in telling stories to children...
...When he set his ship sailing upon the sea, when he set his hero wandering through a wilderness, the audience rested and the story-teller rested, for the passage that came was known and expected...
...they treasure words as they treasure keepsakes...
...Strange words, outofthe-way words, do not bewilder children if there is order in the action and in thd sentences...
...His was a language that had not been written down...
...And outside was the silence of the night and the silence of the countryside...
...And they must be the kind of human beings that the human voice can shepherd—and the voice cannot shepherd divided, many-mooded, complicated people...
...In the story told by the professional story-teller, or by that amateur of story-telling, the nurse in old countries, there are certain possessions of the hero or heroine—a sword, a helmet, a dress, a comb—that have to be made memorable...
...And from him I learned that a story that is to be told has to be about happenings...
...How often a "run" like this, and "runs" that were much longer occurred in the recital of a story of some quest...
...It would be well if the modern story-teller could do what that story-teller's art permitted him to do— make certain descriptions in his story purely conventional : the description of a ship sailing the sea, for instance...
...Children who come to borrow books remain to have stories told them...
...his words had not been made colorless by constant use in books and newspapers...
...He told his stories in the evening...
...I will make, if possible, a book that a child will understand, yet a man will feel some temptation to peruse should he chance to take it up...
...They have reveries behind them, these stories that possess such patterns, such series of happenings, such simplicity of character-drawing, as make it possible to deliver them orally to an unselected audience...
...If the action is clear and the sentences clear one can use a mature language...
...He could make his hero start from the hilltop that was known to all his audience, and have his battle fought upon the strand that they all had stood upon...
...Surely he was right...
...he told them by the light of a candle and a peat fire—often by the light of the peat fire alone...
...And it is this quality of reverie, this dramatizing of something different from what is in our external consciousness, that makes the story told distinct from the story that is written to' be read by a single reader...
...he makes them, not so much possessions as attributes of his hero or heroine: the mention of them recalls or foreshadows a happening...
...And such "runs" gave a more definite pattern to the story, for they were woven into it at regular intervals...
...These conventionalized descriptions ("runs" he called them) were so placed in the story that they gave rests at the right places...
...sometimes it was spoken to the beating of his hands...
...His audience was small—no more than a score of people—so he could be intimate in voice and manner...
...the characters in it must have such simplicity that they can be presented directly and understood immediately...
...The story-teller shows his delight In such possessions...
...Those who have charge of children's reading-rooms in American libraries have had to rediscover and exercise that art...
...Its characters should be explicable at every moment, even though they do odd and unpredictable things...
...The telling of stories in the libraries necessitates the selection of a distinctive type of story and the development of a distinctive method of communication with the children...
Vol. 6 • June 1927 • No. 8
