up with the words
that other words would fail to tell the real story. If an interjection
has seemed an insignificant part of speech, note the vision of
tropical setting opened up by the exclamation, "O Bananas! Where did
you learn that trick?" This is indeed a tale where the form is the
matter, the form and the message are one complete whole that cannot be
separated. But it is a proof that where any form is of sufficient
perfection to be a classic form, you may give a modified tale by
changing it, but you do not give the real complete tale. You cannot
tell Andersen's _Tin Soldier_ in your own words; for its sentences,
its phrases, its sounds, its suggestive language, its humor, its
imagination, its emotion, and its message, are so intricately woven
together that you could not duplicate them.

When the fairy tale does not possess a settled classic form, select,
as was mentioned, that version in which the language best conveys the
life of the story, improving it yourself, if you can, in harmony with
the standards of literature, until the day in the future when the tale
may be fortunate enough to receive a settled form at the hands of a
literary artist. Sometimes a slight change may improve greatly an old
tale. In Grimm's _Briar Rose_[1] the episode of the Prince and the old
Man contains irrelevant material. The two paragraphs following, "after
the lapse of many years there came a king's son into the country,"
easily may be re-written to preserve the same unity and simplicity
which mark the rest of the tale. This individual retelling of an old
tale demands a careful distinction between what is essential and
internal and what may have been added, what is accidental and
external. The clock-case in _The Wolf and Seven Kids_ evidently is not
a part of the original story, which arose before clocks were in use,
and is a feature added in some German telling of the tale. It may be
retained but it is not essential to the tale that it should be. Exact
conversations and bits of dialogue, repetitive phrases, rhymes,
concrete words which visualize, brief expressions, and Anglo-Saxon
words--these are all bits of detail which need to be mastered in a
complete acquirement of the story's form, because these are
characteristics of the form which time has settled upon the old tales.
Any literary form bestowed upon the tales worthy of the name
literature, will have to preserve these essentials.

II. THE PRESENTATION OF THE TALE

In