Page:A Study of Fairy Tales.djvu/252

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A STUDY OF FAIRY TALES

same message. The common and customary became uncommon and unusual with extraordinary life, feeling, and lively movement.

Other romantic tales with a large realistic element are The Three Bears, The Three Pigs, and The Three Billy-Goats, animal tales which of necessity must be largely realistic, for their foundation is in the facts of the nature, habits, and traits of the animal characters they portray.


V. The Romantic Tale

The romantic tale reflects emotion and it contains adventure and the picturesque; it deals with dreams, distant places, the sea, the sky, and objects of wonder touched with beauty and strangeness. The purpose of the romantic is to arouse emotion, pity, or the sense of the heroic; and it often exaggerates character and incidents beyond the normal. The test of the romantic tale as well as of the realistic tale is in the reality it possesses. This reality it will possess, not only because it is true, but because it is also true to life. And it is to be remembered that because of the unusual setting in a romantic tale the truth it presents stands out very clearly with much impressiveness. Red Riding Hood is a more impressive tale than The Three Bears.

Cinderella is a good type of the old romantic tale.It has a never-ending attraction for children just as it has had for all peoples of the world; for this tale has as many as three hundred and forty-five variants, which