But their provinces must not be confused or overestimated. I trust I may
be pardoned for offering a caution or two to the enthusiastic advocate
of these methods,--cautions the need of which has been forced upon me,
in experience with schools.

A teacher who uses the oral story as an English feature with little
children must never lose sight of the fact that it is an aid in
unconscious development; not a factor in studied, conscious improvement.
This truth cannot be too strongly realised. Other exercises, in
sufficiency, give the opportunity for regulated effort for definite
results, but the story is one of the play-forces. Its use in English
teaching is most valuable when the teacher has a keen appreciation of
the natural order of growth in the art of expression: that art requires,
as the old rhetorics used often to put it, "a natural facility,
succeeded by an acquired difficulty." In other words, the power of
expression depends, first, on something more fundamental than the
art-element; the basis of it is something to say, _accompanied by an
urgent desire to say it_, and _yielded to with freedom_; only after this
stage is reached can the art-phase be of any use. The "why" and "how,"
the analytical and constructive phases, have no natural place in this
first vital epoch.

Precisely here, however, does the dramatising of stories and the
paper-cutting, etc., become useful. A fine and thoughtful principal of a
great school asked me, recently, with real concern, about the growing
use of such devices. He said, "Paper-cutting is good, but what has it
to do with English?" And then he added, "The children use abominable
language when they play the stories; can that directly aid them to speak
good English?" His observation was close and correct, and his