em.

These are direct and somewhat clearly discernible results, comfortably
placed in a near future. There are other aims, reaching on into the far,
slow modes of psychological growth, which must equally determine the
choice of the story-teller's material and inform the spirit of her work.
These other, less immediately attainable ends, I wish now to consider in
relation to the different types of story by which they are severally best
served.

First, unbidden claimant of attention, comes

THE FAIRY STORY

No one can think of a child and a story, without thinking of the fairy
tale. Is this, as some would have us believe, a bad habit of an ignorant
old world? Or can the Fairy Tale justify her popularity with truly
edifying and educational results? Is she a proper person to introduce
here, and what are her titles to merit?

Oh dear, yes! Dame Fairy Tale comes bearing a magic wand in her wrinkled
old fingers, with one wave of which she summons up that very spirit of joy
which it is our chief effort to invoke. She raps smartly on the door, and
open sesames echo to every imagination. Her red-heeled shoes twinkle down
an endless lane of adventures, and every real child's footsteps quicken
after. She is the natural, own great-grandmother of every child in the
world, and her pocketfuls of treasures are his by right of inheritance.
Shut her out, and you truly rob the children of something which is theirs;
something marking their constant kinship with the race-children of the
past, and adapted to their needs as it was to those of the generation of
long ago! If there were no other criterion at all, it would be enough that
the children love the fairy tale; we give them fairy stories, first,
because they like them. But that by no means lessens the importance of the
fact that fairy tales are also good for them.

How good? In various ways. First, perhaps, in their supreme power of
presenting truth through the guise of images. This is the way the
race-child took toward wisdom, and it is the way each child's individual
instinct takes, after him. Elemental truths of moral law and general types
of human experience are presented in the fairy tale, in the poetry of
their images, and although the child is aware only of the image at the
time, the truth enters with it and becomes a part of his individual
experience, to be recognised in its relations at a later stage. Every
truth and type so given broadens and deepens the capacity of the ch