There is no age or racial limit to this story love. Representing, as it does, an emotional hunger that is the human heritage, it is universal. Several years ago at Five Points in New York City, a settlement worker discovered that a very effective means of gaining the confidence of immigrant women was to tell fairy tales, and recently some of the most gratifying results obtained in the Telegraph Hill district of San Francisco were made possible by a leader there gaining the good will of a group of Sicilian hoodlums because she knew the plot of _Jerusalem Delivered_ and told the story magnetically and well. It was like a breeze from their native island, where they had heard it from the lips of the village story-teller and seen it pictured on the market carts, and the fact that she knew something that had fascinated them gained their sympathy and coöperation. Those who have even a limited knowledge of child life know that before the babe can read he delights in listening to a nursery tale, and that even after he journeys into bookland he is more interested in the story told him than in the one he reads for himself. Why? Because the voice and personality of the speaker make it alive and vital. Because, as Seumas MacManus says, “The spoken word is the remembered word.”
The tales heard during childhood become fixed and lasting possessions. They stay with the hearer through the years, and because their ideals become his ideals, do much toward shaping his character. The child who hears many good stories and unconsciously learns to distinguish between the tawdry and the real, reads good stories when a boy and becomes a man for whom sensational best sellers have no charm.
There is much talk about the vicious tastes of the youth of this generation, and unfavorable comparisons between them and their elders at a similar age are frequently made. There is some foundation for this belief, but it is not the fault of the children that it is so. Because of the abundance and cheapness of books, many of them of questionable merit, boys and girls are left to browse unguided, and just as the range man is to blame if his hungry herd strays into a loco patch and eats of noxious weeds when he fails to drive it to the place of wholesome herbage, so it is the fault of parents and teachers if their charges acquire a taste for sensational yarns instead of for good literature. The very hunger that impels them toward that which contaminates, if satisfied in a wholesome manner would make them lovers of the best, and the reason why children become devourers of “yellow” stories is because they have failed to stumble upon a more fascinating and less dangerous highway, and no one has led them to it. There is no surer way of keeping a boy from becoming a devotee of the funny page of the Sunday supplement or a follower of “Nick Carter” than that of studying his tastes and giving him tales from good literature that will satisfy them. There is no more powerful means to use in diverting a child from the undesirable to the desirable than that of throwing a searchlight upon the attractions of the latter and presenting them to him through joyful experience. The narrator’s art is in truth a magic luminary, an unfailing means of bringing hidden beauties to sight and causing them to be loved because they give pleasure.