r
metamorphosis, and should be protected from it. They are for telling
only.

Another point on which it is necessary to exercise reserve is in the
degree to which any story can be acted. In the justifiable desire to
bring a large number of children into the action one must not lose sight
of the sanity and propriety of the presentation. For example, one must
not make a ridiculous caricature, where a picture, however crude, is the
intention. Personally represent only such things as are definitely and
dramatically personified in the story. If a natural force, the wind, for
example, is represented as talking and acting like a human being in the
story, it can be imaged by a person in the play; but if it remains a
part of the picture in the story, performing only its natural motions,
it is a caricature to enact it as a role. The most powerful instance of
a mistake of this kind which I have ever seen will doubtless make my
meaning clear. In playing a pretty story about animals and children,
some children in an elementary school were made by the teacher to take
the part of the sea. In the story, the sea was said to "beat upon the
shore," as a sea would, without doubt. In the play the children were
allowed to thump the floor lustily, as a presentation of their watery
functions! It was unconscionably funny. Fancy presenting even the
crudest image of the mighty sea, surging up on the shore, by a row of
infants squatted on the floor and pounding with their fists! Such
pitfalls can be avoided by the simple rule of personifying only
characters that actually behave like human beings.

A caution which directly concerns the art of story-telling itself, must
be added here. There is a definite distinction between the arts of
narration and dramatisation which must never be overlooked. Do not,
yourself, half tell and half act the story; and do not let the children
do it. It is done in very good schools, sometimes, because an enthusiasm
for realistic and lively presentation momentarily obscures the faculty
of discrimination. A much loved and respected teacher whom I recently
listened to, and who will laugh if she recognises her blunder here,
offers a good "bad example" in this particular. She said to an attentive
audience of students that she had at last, with much difficulty, brought
herself to the point where she could forget herself in her story: where
she could, for instance, hop, like the fox, when she told the story of
the "sour grap