It is perhaps neither quite possible nor in all respects desirable to make education easy but it is both possible and necessary to make teaching interesting. Dull teaching makes the dull pupil more dull and the bright pupil less bright. Dull teaching also makes the teacher progressively dull. The temper of teaching is important because the pupils take it from the teacher. Teaching like life is serious enough in all conscience but life has its laughters interpersed on the whole unstintingly with its grave moods. The habitually serious and the habitually smiling teacher are both abnormal. It is because teaching for some unknown reason inclines to a sombre visage that the smiling teacher is so often sighed for.
There are several ways by which teaching could be made interesting. A judicious use of stories is one of the best known.
No good teacher either of the young or of the adult ever discarded the services of the story. No prophet striving to be honoured in his own country was above their aid. The Buddha, Jesus and Mohammed treated their inspired wisdoms with similes and parables before they offered them to their countrymen. The mother and the child sail the seas of fancy and dream like Wynken, Blynken and Nod on Fable's flying craft. The preacher adorns his ethics with an ancient tale. The speaker strives to uplift the falling eyelids without losing heart until he has improvised the story of a man that burned down his house to secure relief from its alien population of rats. Incipient Rome averted a division by the stratagem of a single story in which the silent stomach vindicated its selfishness. The old schoolmaster mitigated his stick with an occasional does of story. The fool in the play finds his daily bread in saucy yarn. The lingering grandmother assuages her age and embellishes the home by putting on a general show of green memories. The forgotten old man sets up as a raconteur and recovers his lost place in the sun. Should an Englishman come to a remote Indian village and tell the children a story they listen to him never minding the little inconvenience interposed by their total ignorance of the English language. It is perhaps not a mere story that stories were one of the chief causes of the emergence of man from his first savage condition. The teacher of the present day need not be ashamed if he should happen to tell a story or even more than one story to his yearning young chelas.
In the hands of discerning teacher, on the other hand, the story wisely chosen and well told is a powerful weapon of education. It gives the sugar-coating to unamiable knowledge the window dressing or the market touch which is also the human touch to morality the frosty shoulder to fatigue or languor, the hospitable hearth to interest and to those intimate personal relations between teacher and pupil without which the humanity of the teacher cannot come under full play in the expansion and elevation of the class. A story artistically rendered braces up the teacher even sooner than it does the class. It is twice blest in a more immediate sense than mercy directly blessing him that gives and him that takes. And because it is twice blest its employment often tends to become too frequent by those who have enjoyed its graces. Appetite grows with eating and all story and no stern instruction is apt to make the pupils soft and even dull.
The elements that help to make the teacher a story-teller are a gift of narration, a sense of sympathy and humour a measure of imagination, a ready power of analysis of swift and brief assembling of incidents and of leading the divisions with a skilful disposition of emphasis and harmony. The difference between reading a story and telling it is the difference between building a house and buying one. You build a house after your own heart. You buy one to cajole yourself into appreciation of certain architectural ideas which you probably do not share and even if you should you cannot instinctively applaud for the simple reason that you have had no hand in their expression. The teller of the story must live a story to tell it well. He must give the gestures of his mind to it the flavour of his personality something of the savour of his own fancies to it so that the story might be given not merely a rehearsal but life. It is essential that although the story is borrowed feathers he must not hesitate to shine in them.
In this connection, if the reader could pardon a personal note may I tell the story of my experience of telling stories? The first mistake I committed in life was to become a teacher. The second mistake I committed was to become proud of my first mistake. I cannot blame anybody for the first. I can blame anybody but myself for the second. To be fairly honest with myself I must remember my first Headmaster in the allocation of the charge. Impressively squat and enjoying a name for inaccessibility and even ferocity he was one of the kindliest and gentlest of men that ever sat in a Headmaster's chair against their will. He is unhappily no longer alive but I remember him. Do I not remember how he once upbraidingly asked me to destroy a dictionary in which in one of our eternal bickerings, which preserved us from hating each other I told him was a word whose non-existence in the English language he was upholding? Although the unoffending dictionary was not actually burned he never flagged in his deep affection for me. He gave me new things to do every new day books to read exercise to be valued to act the understudy in his hours and even my watch to be set right so that the school might not suffer and thus the early days when there was none larger in size than myself sped in bright panorama. One day he remembered the story of two frogs that once lived in his well and discussed him every day. The two held extreme views and as neither would give in to the other a breeze used continually to come up from that subterranean chamber and disturb the tranquillity of the house. It was enough to vex a saint. In the end, therefore, he sentenced the two disinterested disputants to transportation for life. The sentence was executed with the grave circumstance appropriate to an acute political offence the culprits being made over to the tender mercies of a neighbouring loch there to sustain their differences with all the resources of their lungs. A few days later people said that the ancient dispute was ended the favourable frog having joined the other in holding the same view.
The recollection of the story made him think. Stories he thought were interesting. He told me this in a born manner. The next day he asked me if I would specialize in story-telling. Without waiting for an answer, he wrote to a bookseller in Madras. The result was the arrival of half a dozen books of stories and how to tell them. He solemnly handed them to me asking me at the same time to go forth and conquer. Sometimes the story vein so overpowered him that on several occasions he actually caught me in my leisure time and showed me the way. These examples were so artless that I still wonder whether they became a part of me or evanished as soon as they were given. He used often and often to impress it upon me that I must tell my stories to myself, always more than once, before I told them to my pupils, and on the few occasions I happened to be tame enough to honour the advice I am constrained to say at my own expense that I came off with flying colours. Sometimes also he used to hide himself behind my back to see how I actually fared in the class and whenever I become conscious of his presence in my sphere of influence which I did not less number of times than he played the trick my story in furious progress would stop short for pure funk and fly the next moment. And my never to be forgotten chief would then unseal himself from his ephemeral dwelling place and roll pontifically back to his office in glee.
But the story would return as soon as that commanding presence had glided out of sight and I would foolishly kill the fatted calf for the coward. Whatever happened to my heart when the Headmaster was in concealment near about me I never seriously swerved from the story-method for many years. The kit was always strapped to my back and often held some sure talismans. Be the subject that it was a story or an anecdotal always put in its snout and the boys would rattle their teeth at the appearance. At one time I became alarmingly funny at the appearance. At one time I became alarmingly funny an errant rambler from reality, almost an exclamation mark. Gradually I descended learning to mix the rough and the smooth.
The only excuse for exposing these personal incidents is my faith that every teacher could become a good enough story teller if he would. My intellectual equipment was certainly short of satisfactory but even then, when I left the school, my more complex than complaisant chief found it possible to give me the farewell honour that he thought I could sometimes tell a story. And again to be strictly honest with myself I was not so very eager at any time to annex the heart of story-telling for myself. Industry is, perhaps, the only element to achieve the art. Narration comes to wooing. Feeling comes when the story and the teller more or less become one, an adjustment for which only sympathy is required. And if action were necessary, that too comes on the heels of feeling. To the spirit that is willing a good many things are possible.
Thorough preparation is undoubtedly the secret of the successful story-teller. The story is most effective when it appears most extemporary. It does not make much difference to the story-teller's purpose that the extemporaneousness is only an affectation. A blatantly `set' story must defeat its own end. But what appears most extemporary is often the fruit of anxious premeditation, and the more anxious the premeditation the more spontaneous, though not always, the production appears. The story itself more often than otherwise is an illusion and over-scrupulosity to inform it with some additional illusion on the letter's own account is perhaps unnecessary.
In telling a story the teacher can remember certain `rules' to advantage. The narration must be slow; swift and natural. The substance must increase at a quicker pace than the telling. The telling must also be natural so that as the narrative is uncovered it might lose its character as a story to become an experience. The dramatic element is part and parcel of the story-telling art. It does not mean that the teller has got to away and dance and press into service all the mad gestures of which he is incapable. The dramatic element is not often theatrical. The `play' often brings down the house with the least `acting' heaving on the boards. The soul of the drama is contained in its emotional quality. Its success is conditioned by the amount of delicate representation of this quality the actor is able to save from his activities. And the hidden art being the best art the expression of the feelings must be subtle, elusive and unsubstantial. It is, therefore, highly important that the teller not only enters into the spirit of the story and loses himself in it but also remembers himself all the time, in which case he will not easily tip himself over the edge of the dramatic element into inelodrama. It is for the for the hearers to be flamboyant in their feelings, for they can do no harm.
The selection of the story of tell calls for thought. The choice must become the standard, the time and the mood. Fun is apt to become overbold and sorrow to steep itself too much in tears. I remember an unhappy selection. Every teacher knows the famous fight between the lion and the gnat and how the gnat established its claims to sovereignty by invading the great lion's nostril bearing `fire and sword'. I once began this story before a care-free battalion of hefty young men who also possessed the additional charm of conscious wisdom. "There was once a lion." I said and a promiscuous giggle greeted the shy communication. Such incuriosity is very often a blessing in disguise, but on this occasion I had to dissolve the last grain of my resources in the `performance' to take the jolly fellows to the end of my fable and leave them there with something like without their knowledge. Such `scrapes' could be avoided by considering the audience, the hour and the auspices beforehand and by replenishing one's store from time to time. Stories piled on stories lie all round and some of the finest things men and women have ever made are stories to spell-bind young folks. If one feels like it one may also spin a yarn on one's own account. This will give one the nameless joy that comes from being both maker and giver. Be this as it may, there is no cause why every teacher should not have a good store from which to select and tell stories to his pupils. One good story well told often brings the teacher their real affection. By all standards it is an excellent bargain. For it cannot too clearly be borne in mind that we cannot educate the young to any profit without their consent.
It is wrong to suppose as it is often done that only the established laughters in human experience have a place in the class-story and that the teacher should tickle his pupils by telling them stories. Stingless laughters are good but the value of noble sorrow is not any the less if not any the more. The story is the evoker of feelings and the teller has only to take care that he does not call up the bad feelings. Glad feelings and sad feelings are equal in the eyes not only of the story-tellers but also of the story-hearers. It is absurd to think as it is generally done that the deep emotions arising from deep human sorrows are above the very young. Boys and girls are better than that and `The Darning Neede' is not more fancied by them than `King Lear'. If one asked them which they wanted they would probably say they wanted both refusing to be denied. They want joy and sorrow, laughter and tears, beauty and truth, foolishness and failure, adventure and wisdom. They want life not only life but life as it has been seen by the great and the gifted. The teller of stories must beware lest he should become a secondhand vendor of wit.
The right stories, sombre of bright are essentially entertainment but are not without use great use one must say simply because they are essentially entertainment. Far from being useless stories are the most helpful of things in the education of the emotions. Stories are mostly men and women even when they are birds and beasts as they are and were as they could be if they would as they should be if they would strive enough as they ought to be by whatsoever means. Stories are humanity in the lump, men and women of all ranks of all times of all ages. They are the unofficial history of human beings and therefore their human value is much greater than histories of nations and countries. In the infinite variety of life and its changing problems they are the one eternal common factor. They speak of one and all in language understanded of one and all. They fascinate the lowest savages and inform the most superior men. They delight the children and brighten the extreme old. They read lessons to all. The persuade men and women to love men and women, to help and be happy while they may. They are human nature elevating human nature telling the feelings to be good the passions to behave the desires to be wise the aspirations to be true the ideals to be beautiful.
But I must stop. The holiday is over. The black Monday threatens a sluggish spirit both within and out in the school. The slumbrous boys can easily be told to stand as sleep is happily a dwarf unable to reach their upper storeys when they stand erect and high but I must tell them a story to find myself and there is hardly time to fetch a good one and teach it to become mine body and soul.