- stance D'Arcy Mackay's book of plays called "The
House of the Heart and Other Tales" is a suggestive contribution to children's drama.
For the younger children the story with plenty of action, often with animals as characters, and with happy ending has proved best. The story with less joyous "inevitable ending" is, however, not to be excluded; life is not to be distorted. Besides, not all sad-ending stories are negative in effect, leaving the child knowing only "what not to do" rather than "what to do." A story like Hans Andersen's "Daisy," for example, induces constructive inference and effect.
The Principles of the Art of Telling Stories
Story-telling is one of the most spontaneous of the social arts. Yet it is an art, governed by at least partially discerned principles. Analysis of them will be helpful to the story-teller, but only in so far as he grasps the fundamental principle that story telling among the speech arts, like wood-carving among the manual arts, indeed, even to a greater degree, must be kept what it is by nature, apparently without art, naïve and unelaborate.
