Page:A Study of Fairy Tales.djvu/145

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THE TELLING OF FAIRY TALES
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will be great art when you, the teacher, have worked up into your own character a portion of life which is of value, so that the child coming in touch with you knows an influence more powerful than anything you can do or say. Teaching will then awaken in the child a social relation of abiding confidence, of secure trust, of faith unshakable. And this relation will then create for the teacher the obligation to keep this trust inviolable, to practice daily, noblesse oblige. Teaching will be great art when with the subject-matter the artist gives love, a great universal kindness that thinks not of itself but, being no respecter of persons, looks upon each child in the light of that child's own best realization. This penetrating sympathy, this great understanding, will call forth from the child an answering love, which grows daily into a larger humanity of soul until the child, in time too, comes to have a universal sympathy. This is the true greatness of teaching. This it is which brings the child into harmony with the Divine love which speaks in all God's handiwork and brings him into that unity with God which is the mystery of Froebel's teaching.

During the story-telling one must ask, "In all this what is the part the child has to play?" In the telling the teacher has aimed to give what there is in the tale. The child's part is to receive what there is in the tale, the emotion, the imagination, the truth, and the form embodied in the tale. The content of feeling, of portrayal, of truth, and of language he receives, he will