Page:Stories and story-telling (1915).djvu/45

 make live more abundantly by perfecting matter and form produced by another, or make new life. The question cannot be answered offhand. If it were true that the text form, the composition and diction, in which you found the story, were the perfect reflection of its life and that the story suffered no change in your comprehension of it, and that it were your intention to pass it on without modification or loss to the child, and that he could receive it without change in form, then the answer appears to follow: you are to be faithful to the text. In some cases the form in which the folk tale is found has suffered through translation, in others it may be intrinsically faulty; in many texts of "The Frog Prince," for example, the Iron John incident is too detached and very much out of perspective. The story-teller who can make it better should do so, or who feels prompted to give the children another product from old materials will use them, though the folklorists will forbid him to palm off his product as old-world lore. Any training in story-telling that does not give outlet and direction to such ability and to originality neglects an important obligation to the student. It is notable, by the way, that it is the student with the literary artist's instinct who is surest to "get" the style of any good original he may be reproducing. Proper simplifi