A child who has once been pleased with tale likes, as a rule, to have it retold in identically the same words, but this should not led parents to treat printed fairy stories as sacred texts. It is always much better to tell a story than read it {{U}}(41) {{/U}} of a book, and, if a parent can produce {{U}}(42) {{/U}} in the actual circumstances of the time and the individual child, is an improvement on the printed text, so much the better.
A charge made against fairy tales is that they harm the child by frightening him or arousing his sadistic impulses. To prove the {{U}}(43) {{/U}}, one would have to show in a controlled experiment that children who have read fairy stories were more often guilty of cruelty than those who had not. Aggressive, destructive, sadistic impulses every child has and, {{U}}(44) {{/U}} the whole, their symbolic verbal discharge deems to be rather a safety valve than an incitement to overt action. As to fears, there are, I think, well-authenticated cases of children {{U}}(45) {{/U}} dangerously terrified by some fairy story. Often, however, this arises from the child having heard the story once. Familiarity with the story by repetition turns the pain of fear {{U}}(46) {{/U}} the pleasure of a fear face and mastered.
There are also people who object to fairy stories on the grounds {{U}}(47) {{/U}} they are not objectively true, that giants, witches, two-headed dragons, magic carpets, etc, do not exist, and that, instead of indulging, his fantasies {{U}}(48) {{/U}} fairy tales, the child should be taught how to adapt to reality by studying history and mechanics. I find such people, I must confess, so unsympathetic and peculiar that I do not know how to argue with them. If their cases {{U}}(49) {{/U}} sound there should be full of madmen attempting to fly from New York to Philadelphia on broomstick {{U}}(50) {{/U}} covering a telephone with kissed in the belief that it was their enchanted girl- friend. No fairy story ever claimed to be a description of the external world and no such child ever believed that it was.