Closely related to, sometimes identical with, the fairy tale is the old,
old source of children's love and laughter,
THE NONSENSE TALE
Under this head I wish to include all the merely funny tales of childhood,
embracing the cumulative stories like that of the old woman and the pig
which would not go over the stile. They all have a specific use and
benefit, and are worth the repetition children demand for them. Their
value lies, of course, in the tonic and relaxing properties of humour.
Nowhere is that property more welcome or needed than in the schoolroom. It
does us all good to laugh, if there is no sneer nor smirch in the laugh;
fun sets the blood flowing more freely in the veins, and loosens the
strained cords of feeling and thought; the delicious shock of surprise at
every "funny spot" is a kind of electric treatment for the nerves. But it
especially does us good to laugh when we are children. Every little body
is released from the conscious control school imposes on it, and huddles
into restful comfort or responds gaily to the joke.
More than this, humour teaches children, as it does their grown-up
brethren, some of the facts and proportions of life. What keener teacher
is there than the kindly satire? What more penetrating and suggestive than
the humour of exaggerated statement of familiar tendency? Is there one of
us who has not laughed himself out of some absurd complexity of
over-anxiety with a sudden recollection of "clever Alice" and her fate? In
our household clever Alice is an old _habituee_, and her timely arrival
has saved many a situation which was twining itself about more "ifs" than
it could comfortably support.
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