Ring-a-ding-dill, ring-a-ding-dill,
The Hop-About-Man comes over the hill.
Why is he coming, and what will he see?
Rickety, rackety,—one, two, three.
The story then describes Wee Wun's troubles with the Hop-About-Man, who remained an unwelcome inhabitant of the house where Wee Wun liked to sit all alone. The Hop-About-Man made everything keep hopping about until Wee Wun would put all careless things straight, and until he would give back to him his blue-and-silver shoes. One day, Wee Wun became a careful housekeeper and weeded out of the dandelion garden all the blue blow-away plants that grew from the seeds he had scattered there in the Stir-About-Wife's garden, and when he came home his troubles were over, and the Hop-About-Man was gone.
Perhaps one reason for the frequent failure of the modern fairy tale is that it fails to keep in harmony with the times. Just as the modern novel has progressed from the romanticism of Hawthorne, the realism of Thackeray, through the psychology of George Eliot, and the philosophy of George Meredith, so the little child's story—which like the adult story is an expression of the spirit of the times—must recognize these modern tendencies. It must learn, from Alice in Wonderland and from A Child's Garden of Verses, that the modern fairy tale is not a Cinderella or Sleeping Beauty, but the modern fairy tale is the child's mind. The real fairy world is the strangeness and beauty of the child mind's point of view. It is the duty and privilege of the modern fairy tale to interpret the child's psychology and to present the child's philosophy of life.
REFERENCES
Century Co.: St. Nicholas Magazine, 1915; St. Nicholas Fairy
Stories Re-told.
Gates, Josephine: "And Piped Those Children Back Again," (Pied
Piper) St. Nicholas, Nov., 1914.
Hays, Ruth: "Greencap," St. Nicholas, June, 1915.
Hazlitt, William; Essays. ("Wit and Humor.") Camelot Series.
Scott.
Hooker, B.: "Narrative and the Fairy Tale," Bookman, 33: June
and July, 1911, pp. 389-93, pp. 501-05.
Ibid: "Types of Fairy Tales," Forum, 40: Oct., 1908, pp.
375-84.