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 the oral presentation of the tale new elements of the teacher’s preparation enter, for here the voice is the medium and the teacher must use the voice as the organist his keys.  The aim of the oral presentation is to give the spiritual effect.  This requires certain conditions of effectiveness—­to speak with distinctness, to give the sense, and to cause to understand; and certain intellectual requirements—­to articulate with perfection, to present successive thoughts in clear outline, and to preserve relative values of importance.