"By all means. Change the garden. It's a pretty enough idea in romance. But a realist who has worked in one, knows that a garden's no paradise. Genesis got it just wrong. Adam should have been exiled from town as a punishment, and put to slave in a garden."
"But town isn't paradise either. We've got to start him in paradise."
"Dear me," said the editor. "There's only one place left to put the fellow, and that's on the wall. 'Adam sat on a wall.' Begin that way."
Cinderella
"I'm calling him Humpty-Dumpty," the author said. "It makes it less tragic. It suggests that the fall didn't hurt Man so much after all."
"Which is true," said the editor.
I wish I had known that author. He had a kind heart. He has changed even the unforgiving cherubim in the Genesis story to those King's men who try in such a friendly way to restore Humpty-Dumpty. But the story can't let them. That would leave the hero back on his wall again—like some Greek philosopher. This other way, we think of him as starting out to conquer the world.
Humpty-Dumpty is a story for boys. Cinderella for girls. In Cinderella five able females, two old and three young, contend most resourcefully to capture one stupid young man. It is a terrible story. The beautiful surface barely masks the hungry wiles underneath. But it's true. It depicts the exact situation a marrying girl has to face; and, even while she's a tot in the nursery, it reminds her to plan.
But these are examples of stories that live, and last for more than one age. The mortality is heavier in other fields. For instance, philosophy. Great philosophical works of past eras are still alive in a sense, but they dwell among us as foreigners do, while Mother Goose has been naturalized.