The Art of Story-Telling
Editor’s Note, by Art Middlekauff
Last week we shared Arthur Burrell’s “Recitation: The Children’s Art,” the ground-breaking 1890 article that paved the way for his 1891 book Recitation: A Handbook for Teachers. In this book, which was heartily endorsed and recommended by Charlotte Mason in Home Education, Burrell carefully explained the differences between reading aloud, recitation, and acting:
Reading aloud is a term which needs no definition. You take the book and you read, and your audience hears the words, or some of the words…
It is different with recitation. That much maligned and very guilty person, the reciter, is not a reader at all. In the first place, he has his book in his head; and his eyes are fixed upon no written or printed words. He is thus set free from many of the trammels by which the reader is bound, and is able to fall into many of the errors which the reader escapes…
If again it be objected that recitation is then mere acting, the answer is that the actor is dependent on others, while the reciter is not; that the actor’s words are but snatches of a play, while the reciter uses the monologue; that the actor is compelled to enter and go out of doors, and to hurry here and there, while the reciter is comparatively still; that the actor is transformed into another man, and translated into another place, before he sets foot upon the stage, by the aid of dress and scenery; and finally, that the reciter’s legitimate province is literary thought, description, or narration, while the actor’s province is drama alone, the monologue which occasionally falls to his share being interwoven with the preceding and following words of those with whom his action is carried on.
There is therefore a distinct place in arts concerned with the spoken delivery of thought which is only to be filled by recitation.
But given that recitation is not reading, and is not acting, given that it may be cultivated as an art, and that it must be guided by certain rules and obey certain principles, there are still objections to it, which make themselves heard again and again.[1]
In 1900, Burrell became Principal of the Borough Road Training College for teachers.[2] While serving in this role, he took a break in November 1906 to attend the 10th annual PNEU Conference in Brighton. There he gave a talk on the art of story-telling. He explained that this art was “a branch of recitation” that “involved a great deal of memorising.” An account of his talk was printed in the December 1906 Parents’ Review.
Burrell continued as Principal of Borough Road until 1912 when he resigned in order “to do missionary work to revive the art of story-telling.”[3] In spite of Burrell’s sustained efforts, this branch of recitation is rarely discussed in the Charlotte Mason community today. Nevertheless, Burrell’s passionate presentation of it further illuminates the distinctive role of recitation in Miss Mason’s philosophy and method. Today we present our third and final piece by Arthur Burrell, his 1906 talk on story-telling.
By A. Burrell, Esq.
The Parents’ Review, 1906, pp. 908-910
Mr. Burrell began by accusing all parents of being story-tellers. But as they had in their time told so many stories, they would doubtless like to hear one or two. His stories were not all stories for children; they were for grown-up people, and therefore belonged to that rarer order which were not so often heard. His views on story-telling were entirely at variance with those held by the Education authorities in England. He believed in reading aloud as the best and quickest means of studying, appreciating, realising, and interpreting the message of literature; and story-telling formed an admirable forerunner to reading aloud. But by story-telling he did not necessarily mean recitation; for story-telling was only a branch of recitation of which he thought a good deal. In every town and every village to-day this art of story-telling was practised, but nobody noticed it; no painter ever drew inspiration from it, no sculptor had ever taken its evanescence and fixed it in immortal stone. It was too ordinary for the student to have anything to do with, and he had been searching for years in the British Museum to find a single book on an art which was of such great importance and which was so widely dispersed as story-telling was to-day. Nowadays people looked askance if asked to learn stories of a thousand lines. They were forgetting how to use their memories.
The antiquity of the short story was interestingly traced, and the lecturer pointed out that Jesus employed the short story, represented by the parables. These stories had been annotated, edited, and preached to death, yet their beauty remained. What must they have been to the crowds who heard them for the first time? He narrated many stories with striking effectiveness. Children he urged were born story-tellers, and before people taught them to recite, they should encourage them to retell the stories they knew themselves. He drew an amusing contrast between the child, unobserved and untrained, telling a tale to his fellows, and the same child a few years later reciting before a crowd—supremely unhappy—a piece that everybody knew, and to which they listened only to see if he performed the gestures as he had been taught. Possibly the boy would hear some of the comments, “Quite a man,” “Just like an actor”; nobody said “Poor child,” or asked was it good for him to be there repeating a teacher’s version of a piece?
The lecturer was still more amusing in his criticism of a class of twenty girls reciting, putting out the right arm together, and the left arm together, pointing as one person to the “long fields of barley and rye,” and sitting down together with a “plump.” Instead of those girls repeating the poem together, their individuality should have been encouraged.
Resuming his argument, Mr. Burrell said he claimed for story-telling that it was one of the best ways known of teaching and training the young. He claimed for it that it discouraged all sham passion and exaggeration and taut expression, and encouraged simplicity, and the cultivation of the voice. He claimed for it that it was the best preparation for the teaching of ordinary subjects he could possibly imagine. It fostered a real interest and enthusiasm, and interpreted literature; therefore it led to a real love of it. It developed the beautiful and artistic side of a child’s life, and was in deadly opposition to all that was blatant, coarse, and vulgar. The art of story-telling involved a great deal of memorising, which could not but be a perpetual pressure, and could not but have a good effect. As to how the teacher who wished to study the art might proceed, he would suggest the keeping of a common-place book. It was a perpetual cheap library. The time spent on filling it was time excellently spent. His own book was always out on loan, which he thought more than justified its existence.
In acknowledging an enthusiastic vote of thanks, Mr. Burrell, replying to a question, said he did not think the imagination of children was apt to “run riot” owing to fairy tales in the nursery. Children were not encouraged as they should be to tell stories and to revel in the imagination which he believed all or nearly all of them possessed. He pleaded not so much for the telling of stories for children, but for the encouragement of children to tell stories. Children should be encouraged to use this art which they nearly all possessed, and to continue the practice of it. Was it necessary that children should cease to practise the art at a certain age? Why should they not become story-tellers when they grew up? He would say quite seriously that it was not a hard thing to tell a story. There were more really good story-tellers in every town than they had any inkling of. He would urge them to form story-telling clubs. Two or three were quite enough to form the nucleus of a club. He had known such clubs having been formed in answer to his request, and they were nearly always successful.
Editor’s Note: The formatting of the above article was optimized for online viewing. To access a version which is formatted more similarly to the original, and which includes the original page numbers, please click here.
Endnotes for the Editor’s Note
[1] Burrell, A. (1891). Recitation: A Handbook for Teachers in Public Elementary Schools, London: Griffith, Farran, Okeden & Welsh, pp. 2–4.
[2] https://bura.brunel.ac.uk/bitstream/2438/11435/1/FullText.pdf
[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Arthur_Burrell#cite_ref-17
Subscribe: Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon Music