The Story of My Life by Helen Keller (books to read for self improvement .TXT) 📕

between original composition and reproduction. She did not know the meaning of the word “plagiarism” until quite recently, when it was explained to her. She is absolutely truthful. Veracity is the strongest element of her character. She was very much surprised and grieved when she was told that her composition was an adaptation of Miss Canby’s story of “Frost Fairies.” She could not keep back her tears, and the chief cause of her pain seemed to be the fear lest people should doubt her truthfulness. She said, with great intensity of feeling, “I love the beautiful truth.” A most rigid examination of the child of about two hours’ duration, at which eight persons were present and asked all sorts of questions with perfect freedom, failed to elicit in the least any testimony convicting either her teacher or anyone else of the intention or attempt to practice deception.

In view of these facts I cannot but think that Helen, while writing “The Frost King,” was entirely unconscious of ever having had the story of “Frost Fairies” read to her, and that her memory has been accompanied by such a loss of associations that she herself honestly believed her composition to be original. This theory is shared by many persons who are perfectly well acquainted with the child and who are able to rise above the clouds of a narrow prejudice.

Very sincerely yours,

M. Anagnos.
Director of the Perkins Institution and Massachusetts School for the Blind.

The episode had a deadening effect on Helen Keller and on Miss Sullivan, who feared that she had allowed the habit of imitation, which has in truth made Miss Keller a writer, to go too far. Even today, when Miss Keller strikes off a fine phrase, Miss Sullivan says in humorous despair, “I wonder where she got that?” But she knows now, since she has studied with her pupil in college the problems of composition, under the wise advice of Mr. Charles T. Copeland, that the style of every writer and indeed, of every human being, illiterate or cultivated, is a composite reminiscence of all that he has read and heard. Of the sources of his vocabulary he is, for the most part, as unaware as he is of the moment when he ate the food which makes a bit of his thumbnail. With most of us the contributions from different sources are blended, crossed and confused. A child with but few sources may keep distinct what he draws from each. In this case Helen Keller held almost intact in her mind, unmixed with other ideas, the words of a story which at the time it was read to her she did not fully understand. The importance of this cannot be overestimated. It shows how the child-mind gathers into itself words it has heard, and how they lurk there ready to come out when the key that releases the spring is touched. The reason that we do not observe this process in ordinary children is, because we seldom observe them at all, and because they are fed from so many sources that the memories are confused and mutually destructive. The story of “The Frost King” did not, however, come from Helen Keller’s mind intact, but had taken to itself the mould of the child’s temperament and had drawn on a vocabulary that to some extent had been supplied in other ways. The style of her version is in some respects even better than the style of Miss Canby’s story. It has the imaginative credulity of a primitive folktale; whereas Miss Canby’s story is evidently told for children by an older person, who adopts the manner of a fairy tale and cannot conceal the mature mood which allows such didactic phrases as “Jack Frost as he is sometimes called,” “Noon, at which time Mr. Sun is strongest.” Most people will feel the superior imaginative quality of Helen Keller’s opening paragraph. Surely the writer must become as a little child to see things like that. “Twelve soldierly-looking white bears” is a stroke of genius, and there is beauty of rhythm throughout the child’s narrative. It is original in the same way that a poet’s version of an old story is original.

This little story calls into life all the questions of language and the philosophy of style. Some conclusions may be briefly suggested.

All use of language is imitative, and one’s style is made up of all other styles that one has met.

The way to write good English is to read it and hear it. Thus it is that any child may be taught to use correct English by not being allowed to read or hear any other kind. In a child, the selection of the better from the worse is not conscious; he is the servant of his word experience.

The ordinary man will never be rid of the fallacy that words obey thought, that one thinks first and phrases afterward. There must first, it is true, be the intention, the desire to utter something, but the idea does not often become specific, does not take shape until it is phrased; certainly an idea is a different thing by virtue of being phrased. Words often make the thought, and the master of words will say things greater than are in him. A remarkable example is a paragraph from Miss Keller’s sketch in the Youth’s Companion. Writing of the moment when she learned that everything has a name, she says: “We met the nurse carrying my little cousin; and teacher spelled ‘baby.’ And for the first time I was impressed with the smallness and helplessness of a little baby, and mingled with the thought there was another one of myself, and I was glad I was myself, and not a baby.” It was a word that created these thoughts in her mind. So the master of words is master of thoughts which the words create, and says things greater than he could otherwise know. Helen Keller writing “