The _Märchen_ or child's story, is a form of literature primevally old,
but with infinite capacity of renewing its youth. Old wives' fables,
tales about a lad and a lass, and a cruel step-mother, about three
adventurous brothers, about friendly or enchanted beasts, about magical
weapons and rings, about giants and cannibals, are the most ancient form
of romantic fiction. The civilised peoples have elaborated these
childlike legends into the chief romantic myths, as of the Ship Argo,
and the sagas of Heracles and Odysseus. Uncivilised races, Ojibbeways,
Eskimo, Samoans, retain the old wives' fables in a form far less
cultivated,--probably far nearer the originals. European peasants keep
them in shapes more akin to the savage than to the Greek forms, and,
finally, men of letters have adopted the _genre_ from popular narrative,
as they have also adopted the Fable.
_Little Johannes_, here translated from the Dutch of Dr. Frederik van
Eeden, is the latest of these essays, in which the man's fancy
consciously plays with the data and the forms of the child's
imagination. It is not my purpose here to criticise _Little Johannes, an
Allegory of a Poet's Soul_, nor to try to forestall the reader's own
conclusions. One prefers rather to glance at the history of the Fairy
Tale in modern literature.
It might, of course, be said with truth that the Odyssey, and parts of
most of the world's Epics are literary expansions of the _Märchen_. But
these, we may be confident, were not made of set literary purpose.
Neither Homer, nor any poet of the French _Chansons de Geste_, cried,
'Here is a good plot in a child's legend, let me amplify and ennoble
it.' The real process was probably this: adventures that from time
immemorial had been attributed to the vague heroes of _Märchen_
gradually clustered round some half divine or heroic name, as of
Heracles or Odysseus, won a way into national traditions, and were
finally sung of by some heroic poet. This slow evolution of romance is
all unlike what occurs when a poet chooses some wild-flower of popular
lore, and cultivates it in his garden, when La Fontaine, for example,
selects the Fable; when the anecdote is developed into the _fabliau_ or
the _conte_, when Apuleius makes prize of _Cupid and Psyche_ (a
_Märchen_ of world-wide renown), when Fénelon moralises the fairy tale,
or Madame d'Aulnoy touches it with courtly wit and happy humour, or when
Thackeray burlesques it, with a kindly mockery, or when Dr. Frederik van
Eeden, or Dr. Macdonald, allegorises the nursery narratives. To moralise
the tale in a very ancient fashion: Indian literature was busy to this
end in the Buddhist Jatakas or Birth-stories, and in the _Ocean of the
Stream of Stories_. Mediæval preachers employed old tales as texts and
as illustrations of religious and moral precepts. But the ancient
popular fairy tale, the salt of primitive fancy, the drop of the water
of the Fountain of Youth in modern fiction, began its great invasion of
literature in France, and in the reign of Louis XIV. When the survivors
of the _Précieuses_, when the literary court ladies were some deal weary
of madrigals, maxims, _bouts-rimés_, 'portraits,' and their other
graceful bookish toys, they took to telling each other fairy tales.[1]
On August 6, 1676, Madame de Sévigné tells her daughter that at
Versailles the ladies _mitonnent,_ or narrate fairy tales, concerning
the Green Isle, and its Princess and her lover, the Prince of Pleasure,
and a flying hall of glass in which the hero and heroine make their
voyages. It is not certain whether these exercises of fancy were based
on memories of the _Pentamerone_, and other semi-literary Italian
collections of Folk-Tales, or whether the witty ladies embroidered on
the data of their own nurses. As early as 1691, Charles Perrault,
inventing a new _genre_ of minor literature, did some Folk-Tales into
verse, and, in 1696, he began to publish his famous _Sleeping Beauty_,
and _Puss in Boots_, in Moetjens's miscellany, printed at the Hague. In
1696 Mlle. L'Héritière put forth a long and highly embroidered fairy
tale, _Les Enchantements de l'Eloquence_, in her _Bizarrures
Ingénieuses_ (Guignard), while Perrault's own collected _Contes de ma
Mère l'Oye_ were given to the world in 1697 (Barbin, Paris).
The work of Mlle. L'Héritière was thoroughly artificial, while the
immortal stories of Perrault have but a few touches of conscious courtly
wit, and closely adhere to the old nursery versions. Perrault, in fact,
is rather the ancestor of the Grimms and the other scholarly collectors,
than of the literary letters of fairy tales. The Fairy Godmothers of
modern _contes_ play quite a small part in Perrault's works (though a
larger part than in purely popular narrative) compared with their _rôle_
in Madame d'Aulnoy, and all her successors. Much more truly than la
Comtesse de M---- (Murat), author of _Contes des Fées_(1698), Madame
d'Aulnoy is the true mother of the modern fairy tale, and the true Queen
of the _Cabinet des Fées_.[2] To this witty lady of all work, author of
_Mémoires de la Cour d'Espagne_, and of many novels, a mere hint from
tradition was enough. From such hints she developed her stories, such as
_Le Mouton, Le Nain jaune, Finette Cendron, Le Bon petit Souris_, and
very many others. She invented the modern Court of Fairyland, with its
manners, its fairies--who, once a year, take the forms of animals, its
Queens, its amorous, its cruel, its good, its evil, its odious and its
friendly _fées_; illustrious beings, the counsellors of kings, who are
now treated with religious respect, and now are propitiated with
ribbons, scissors, and sweetmeats.
The Fairies are as old as the Hathors of Egypt, the Moerae who came to
the birth of Meleager, the Norns of Scandinavian myth. But Madame
d'Aulnoy first developed them into our familiar _fées_ of fairy tale.
Her _contes_ are brilliant little novels, gay, satirical, full of hits
at courts and kings. Yet they have won a way into true popularity:
translated and condensed, they circulate as penny scrap-books, and
furnish themes for pantomime.[3] It is from Madame d'Aulnoy that the
_Rose and the Ring_ of Thackeray derives its illustrious lineage. The
banter is only an exaggeration of her charming manner. It is a pity that
Sainte-Beuve, in his long gallery of portraits, found no space for
Madame d'Aulnoy. The grave Fénelon follows her in his _Rosimond et
Braminte_, by no means the worst effort of the author of _Télémaque_.[4]
From Madame d'Aulnoy, then, descend the many artificial stories of the
_Cabinet des Fées_, and among these the very prolix novel out of which
_Beauty and the Beast_ has been condensed takes a high place. The tales
of the Comte de Caylus have also humour, wit, and a pleasant
invention.[5]
The artificial fairy tale was in the eighteenth century a regular
literary _genre_, a vehicle, now for satire, now for moralities. The old
courtly method has died out, naturally, but the modern _Märchen_ has
taken a hundred shapes, like its own enchanters. We have Kingsley's
_Water Babies_, a fairy tale much too full of science, and of satire
not very intelligible to children, and not always entertaining to older
people, but rich in tenderness, poetry, and love of nature. We have the
delightful _Rose and the Ring_, full of characters as real to us,
almost, as Captain Costigan, or Becky Sharpe. Angelica is a child's
Blanche Amory; Betsinda is a child's Laura Bell, Bulbo is the Foker of
the nursery, and King Valoroso a potentate never to be thought of
without respectful gratitude. How noble is his blank verse.
--'He laid his hands on an anointed king,
--Hedzoff! and floored me with a warming pan!'
Then we have the _Phantastes_ of Dr. Macdonald, which the abundant
mysticism does not spoil, a book of poetic adventure perhaps too
unfamiliar to children. To speak of Andersen is superfluous, of Andersen
so akin in imagination to the primeval popular fancy; so near the
secret of the heart of childhood. The _Tin Soldier,_ the _Ugly Duckling_
and the rest, are true _Märchen_, and Andersen is the Perrault of the
North, more grave, more tender, if less witty, than the kind Academician
who kept open for children the gardens of the Louvre. Of other modern
_Märchen_, the delightful, inimitable, irresponsible nonsense of _Alice
in Wonderland_ marks it the foremost. There has been, of course, a vast
array of imitative failures: tales where boisterousness does duty for
wit, and cheap sentiment for tenderness, and preaching for that
half-conscious moral motive, which, as Perrault correctly said, does
inform very many of the true primeval _Märchen_. As an inveterate reader
of good fairy tales, I find the annual Christmas harvest of them, in
general, dull, imitative,--_Alice_ is always being imitated,--and, in
brief, impossible. Mere vagaries of absurdity, mere floods of floral
eloquence, do not make a fairy tale. We can never quite recover the old
simplicity, energy, and romance, the qualities which, as Charles Nodier
said, make Hop o' my Thumb, Puss in Boots, and Blue Beard 'the Ulysses,
the Figaro and the Othello of children.' There may possibly be critics
or rather there are certain to be critics, who will deny that the modern
and literary fairy tale is a legitimate _genre_, or a proper theme of
discussion. The Folklorist is not unnaturally jealous of what, in some
degree, looks like Folk-Lore. He apprehends that purely literary stories
may 'win their way,' pruned of their excrescences, 'to the fabulous,'
and may confuse the speculations of later mycologists. There is very
little real danger of this result. I speak, however, not without
sympathy; there was a time when I regarded all _contes_ except _contes
populaires_ as frivolous and vexatious. This, however, is the fanaticism
of pedantry. The French _conteurs_ of the last century, following in
the track of Hop o' my Thumb, made and narrated many pleasing
discoveries, if they also wrote much that was feeble and is faded. To
admit this is but common fairness; literary fairy tales may legitimately
amuse both old and young, though 'it needs heaven-sent moments for this
skill.' The _conteurs_, like every one who does not always stretch the
bow of Apollo till it breaks, had, of course, their severe censors. To
listen to some persons, one might think that gaiety was a crime. You
scribble light verses, and you are solemnly told that this is not high
poetry, told it by worthy creatures whose rhymes could be uncommonly
elevated, if mere owl-like solemnity could make poetry and secure
elevation. You make a fairy tale, and you are told that the incidents
border on the impossible, that analysis of character, and the discussion
of grave social and theological problems are conspicuously absent. The
old _conteurs_ were met by those ponderous objections. Madame d'Aulnoy,
in _Ponce de Léon_, makes one of her characters defend the literary
_Märchen_ in its place. 'I am persuaded that, in spite of serious
critics, there is an art in the simplicity of the stories, and I have
known persons of taste who sometimes found in them an hour's
amusement.... He would be ridiculous who wanted to hear and read nothing
but such legends, and he who should write them in a pompous and inflated
style, would rob them of their proper character, but I am persuaded
that, after some serious occupation, _l'on peut badiner avec_.' 'I
hold,' said Melanie, 'that such stories should be neither trivial nor
bombastic, that they should hold a middle course, rather gay than
serious, not without a shade of moral, above all, they should be offered
as trifles, which the listener alone has a right to put his price upon.'
This is very just criticism of literary fairy tales, made in an age
when we read of a professional _faiseur des contes des fées vieux et
modernes_.
_Little Johannes_ is very modern, and, as Juana says in _Ponce de Léon_:
'Vous y mettrez le prix qu'il vous plaira, mais je ne peux m'empêcher de
dire que celui qui le compose est capable de choses plus importantes,
quand il veut s'en donner la peine.'