The Story of My Life
palace. She said that one autumn day her teacher told her as they were
walking together in the woods, about the many beautiful colours of
the leaves, and she had thought that such beauty must make people very
happy, and very grateful to King Frost. I asked Helen what stories she
had read about Jack Frost. In answer to my question she recited a part
of the poem called 'Freaks of the Frost,' and she referred to a little
piece about winter, in one of the school readers. She could not remember
that any one had ever read to her any stories about King Frost, but
said she had talked with her teacher about Jack Frost and the wonderful
things he did."
The only person that we supposed might possibly have read the story to
Helen was her friend, Mrs. Hopkins, whom she was visiting at the time
in Brewster. I asked Miss Sullivan to go at once to see Mrs. Hopkins and
ascertain the facts in the matter. The result of her investigation
is embodied in the printed note herewith enclosed. [This note is a
statement of the bare facts and an apology, which Mr. Anagnos inserted
in his report of the Perkins Institute.]
I have scarcely any doubt that Miss Canby's little book was read to
Helen, by Mrs. Hopkins, in the summer of 1888. But the child has
no recollection whatever of this fact. On Miss Sullivan's return to
Brewster, she read to Helen the story of "Little Lord Fauntleroy,"
which she had purchased in Boston for the purpose. The child was at once
fascinated and absorbed with the charming story, which evidently made a
deeper impression upon her mind than any previously read to her, as
was shown in the frequent reference to it, both in her conversation and
letters, for many months afterward. Her intense interest in Fauntleroy
must have buried all remembrance of "Frost Fairies," and when, more
than three years later, she had acquired a fuller knowledge and use
of language, and was told of Jack Frost and his work, the seed so long
buried sprang up into new thoughts and fancies. This may explain the
reason why Helen claims persistently that "The Frost King" is her own
story. She seems to have some idea of the difference 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 any one 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 to-day, 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 "The Frost King" was building better than she
knew and saying more than she meant.
Whoever makes a sentence of words utters not his wisdom, but the wisdom
of the race whose life is in the words, though they have never been
so grouped before. The man who can write stories thinks of stories to
write. The medium calls forth the thing it conveys, and the greater the
medium the deeper the thoughts.
The educated man is the man whose expression is educated. The substance
of thought is language, and language is the one thing to teach the deaf
child and every other child. Let him get language and he gets the very
stuff that language is made of, the thought and the experience of his
race. The language must be one used by a nation, not an artificial
thing. Volapük is a paradox, unless one has French or English or German
or some other language that has grown up in a nation. The deaf child who
has only the sign language of De l'Epee is an intellectual Philip Nolan,
an alien from all races, and his thoughts are not the thoughts of an
Englishman, or a Frenchman, or a Spaniard. The Lord's prayer in signs is
not the Lord's prayer in English.
In his essay on style De Quincey says that the best English is to be
found in the letters of the cultivated gentlewoman, because she has
read only a few good books and has not been corrupted by the style of
newspapers and the jargon of street, market-place, and assembly hall.
Precisely these outward circumstances account for Helen Keller's use of
English. In the early years of her education she had only good things to
read; some were, indeed, trivial and not excellent in style, but not
one was positively bad in manner or substance. This happy condition
has obtained throughout her life. She has been nurtured on imaginative
literature, and she has gathered from it into her vigorous and tenacious
memory the style of great writers. "A new word opens its heart to me,"
she writes in a letter; and when she uses the word its heart is still
open. When she was twelve years old, she was asked what book she would
take on a long railroad journey. "Paradise Lost," she answered, and she
read it on the train.
Until the last year or two she has not been master of her style,
rather has her style been master of her. It is only since she has made
composition a more conscious study that she has ceased to be the victim
of the phrase; the lucky victim, fortunately, of the good phrase.
When in 1892, she was encouraged to write a sketch of her life for the
Youth's Companion, in the hope that it would reassure her and help her
to recover from the effect of "The Frost King," she produced a piece
of composition which is much more remarkable and in itself more
entertaining at some points than the corresponding part of her story in
this book. When she came to retell the story in a fuller form, the echo
was still in her mind of the phrases she had written nine years before.
Yet she had not seen her sketch in the Youth's Companion since she wrote
it, except two passages which Miss Sullivan read to her to remind her of
things she should say in this autobiography, and to show her, when her
phrasing troubled her, how much better she did as a little girl.
From the early sketch I take a few passages which seem to me, without
making very much allowance for difference in time, almost as good as
anything she has written since:
I discovered the true way to walk when I was a year old, and during the
radiant summer days that followed I was never still a minute....
Then when my father came in the evening, I would run to the gate to meet
him, and he would take me up in his strong arms and put back the tangled
curls from my face and kiss me many times, saying, "What has my Little
Woman been doing to-day?"
But the brightest summer has winter behind it. In the cold, dreary month
of February, when I was nineteen months old, I had a serious illness.
I still have confused memories of that illness. My mother sat beside my
little bed and tried to soothe my feverish moans while in her troubled