By Professor John Adams,
Chair of Education, University of London.
Those who do not love schoolmasters tell us that the man who can do something supremely well contents himself with doing it, while the man who cannot do it very well must needs set about showing other people how it should be done. The masters in any craft are prone to magnify their gifts by maintaining that the poet—or the stove-pipe maker—is born, not made. Teachers will accordingly be gratified to find in the following pages the work of a lady who is at the same time a brilliant executant and an admirable expositor. Miss Shedlock stands in the very first rank of story-tellers. No one can claim with greater justice that the gift of Scheherazade is hers by birthright. Yet she has recognised that even the highest natural gifts may be well or ill manipulated: that in short the poet, not to speak of the stove-pipe maker, must take a little more trouble than to be merely born.
It is well when the master of a craft begins to take thought and to discover what underlies his method. It does not, of course, happen that every master is able to analyse the processes that secure him success in his art. For after all the expositor has to be born as well as the executant; and it is perhaps one of the main causes of the popularity of the born-not-made theory that so few people are born both good artists
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and good expositors. Miss Shedlock has had this rare good fortune, as all those who have both read her book and heard her exemplify her principles on the platform will readily admit.
Let no one who lacks the gift of story-telling hope that the following pages will confer it. Like Comenius and like the schoolmaster in Shakespeare, Miss Shedlock is entitled to claim a certain capacity or ingenuity in her pupils, before she can promise effective help. But on the other hand let no successful story-teller form the impression that he has nothing to learn from the exposition here given. The best craftsmen are those who are not only most able but most willing to learn from a fellow master. The most inexperienced story-teller who has the love of the art in his soul will gather a full harvest from Miss Shedlock's teaching, while the most experienced and skilful will not go empty away.
The reader will discover that the authoress is first and last an artist. “Dramatic joy” is put in the forefront when she is enumerating the aims of the story-teller. But her innate gifts as a teacher will not be suppressed. She objects to “didactic emphasis” and yet cannot say too much in favour of the moral effect that may be produced by the use of the story. She raises here the whole problem of direct versus indirect moral instruction, and decides in no uncertain sound in favour of the indirect form. There is a great deal to be said on the other side, but this is not the place to say it. On the wide question Miss Shedlock has on her side the great body of public opinion among professional teachers. The orthodox master proclaims that he is, of course, a moral instructor, but adds that in the schoolroom the less said about the matter the better. Like the authoress, the orthodox
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teacher has much greater faith in example than in precept: so much faith indeed that in many schools precept does not get the place it deserves. But in the matter of story-telling the artistic element introduces something that is not necessarily involved in ordinary school work. For better or for worse modern opinion is against the explicitly stated lesson to be drawn from any tale that is told. Most people agree with Mark Twain's condemnation of “the moral that wags its crippled tail at the end of most school-girls' essays.”
The justification of the old-fashioned “moral” was not artistic but didactic. It embodied the determination of the story-teller to see that his pupils got the full benefit of the lesson involved. If the moral is to be cut out, the story-teller must be sure that the lesson is so clearly conveyed in the text that any further elaboration would be felt as an impertinent addition. Whately assures us that men prefer metaphors to similes because in the simile the point is baldly stated, whereas in the metaphor the reader or hearer has to be his own interpreter. All education is in the last resort self-education, and Miss Shedlock sees to it that her stories compel her hearers to make the application she desires.
In two other points modern opinion is prepared to give our authoress rein where our forefathers would have been inclined to restrain her. The sense of humour has come to its proper place in our schoolrooms—pupils' humour, be it understood, for there always was scope enough claimed for the humour of the teacher. So with the imagination. The time is past when this “mode of being conscious” was looked at askance in school. Parents and teachers no longer speak contemptuously about “the busy faculty,” and quote Genesis in its condemnation.
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Miss Shedlock has been well advised to keep to her legitimate subject instead of wandering afield in a Teutonic excursion into the realms of folk-lore. What parents and teachers want is the story as here and now existing and an account of how best to manipulate it. This want the book now before us admirably meets.
JOHN ADAMS.