FAIRY TALES AND EASTERN STORIES
Unwritten fairy tales—“Child Rowland”—Traditional matter and
printed books—_The History of Thomas Hickathrift_—Giants
and Dwarfs—Logic and Realism in _Tom Thumb_—Lack of Magic
in English Folk-tales—Whittington and his Cat—Perrault’s
_Contes_—The partnership between Youth and Age—English
versions—“Court” adaptations and “moral” fairy
tales—Eastern stories—The “little yellow canvas-covered
book”—Nursery criticism—Aladdin and Sinbad—The “Oriental
Moralist”—Traditional tales moralised: _Tom Thumb_ and _Robin
Goodfellow_—_The Two Children in the Wood_—_The Enchanted
Castle_.
Fairies were not altogether unknown in the Age of Reason, though the
Royal Society kept no record of their delicate transactions. The little
Betty of Steele’s paper, who terrified the maids with her accounts of
“Fairies and Sprights”, must have learned them, as children do, from the
“Grasshoppers’ Library”; for the pedlar had no such tales in print.
They were sometimes told as a mixture of ballad and fairy tale—a story
with snatches of ballad rhyme. Children guarded them jealously, passing
them on word for word, with none of the slips that a printer would have
made.
Such a tale was “Child Rowland”, first set down by Jamieson in 1814,[18]
as an old country tailor told it to him when he was seven or eight years
old. But that old tailor had heard it in his own childhood, and so,
doubtless had his great-grandfathers in theirs; for this tale of the
three brothers seeking their lost sister, of her being stolen by the
King of Elfland and kept under a spell, is the same that Shakespeare
quoted in _King Lear_:
“Child Rowland to the dark tower came,
His word was still ‘Fie, foh and fum,
I smell the blood of a British man’.”
A child would remember the giant-formula, though he forgot every word
of that “easy pleasant Book, suited to his Capacity” which Mr. Locke
prescribed for him; he would remember the whole exquisite story: how the
youngest brother found his sister, and what passed between them (most of
it in rhyme) and how he fought with the Elf-King and broke the spell.
If Child Rowland had been the only story of its kind, Mr. Locke had yet
to reckon with the fancies that a child might weave for himself out of
common experience: the moving tree that casts the shadow of a pursuing
giant, the wind that wears an invisible cloak, the enchanter sun who can
pave any road with gold. These baffled all his efforts to drive fairies
out of the nursery.
But printed tales, before Perrault, were few enough: in prose, the
giant killers, “Hickathrift” and “Jack”; in rhyme, “Catskin” and “Tom
Thumb” and “Whittington”. Like printed ballads, they favoured themes of
action and reality. Catskin, the English Cinderella, did without a fairy
godmother; Tom Thumb, although he tilted with the knights of the Round
Table, never saw Fairyland till he died, and Whittington’s cat was a mere
mouser, a poor relation of Puss in Boots.
The truth is that a child never asks himself whether a tale belongs to
the dream world or to the world of reality, because either will serve his
turn, and either may be true. Any setting convinces him if the adventure
hold; and a tale that lost its imaginative colouring in the chap-books
might regain it in a winter night.
Between 1690 and 1790, there is little change in “The Pleasant History
of Thomas Hickathrift”,[19] and not a trace in print of the “astonishing
image” that Coleridge remembered: the “whole rookery that flew out
of the giant’s beard, scared by the tremendous voice with which this
monster answered the challenge of the heroic Tom Hickathrift”.[20] The
nearest thing to it (in a chap-book of 1780) is the likening of the
giant’s head, when it was off, to “the root of a mighty Oak.” But this
image of the monstrous beard, a piece of pure myth, if it were not
the addition of some imaginative teller, came down from a time when
childlike men invented it to explain the giant shapes of trees. A child,
recognizing the analogy, feels the same shock of surprise and pleasure
as his forest-dwelling ancestors, and finds in this play of likeness and
contrast, the source and sustaining interest of all giant tales. For
there never was a giant without dwarfs to measure him, nor a dwarf that
had not his giant; nor indeed is Jack’s fight with Blunderbore a more
engrossing spectacle than Tom Thumb dancing a Galliard on the Queen’s
left hand.[21]
Yet there is little of the fairy about Tom Thumb. He is a real child,
mischievous, even thievish,—taking advantage of his size to creep into
other boys’ cherry-bags and steal. His one poor trick of magic is to
hang pots upon a sunbeam, his one adventure into romance, a mock-heroic
episode at King Arthur’s court.
When Dr. Johnson “withdrew his attention” from the great man who bored
him and “thought about Tom Thumb”, the escape was not from dull facts
into a world of dreams, but from the pedantry of words into a simple
realism.
Given a little creature in a land of giants, Tom’s experiences are
strictly logical. He stands on the edge of a bowl in which his mother
is mixing batter, and falls in. When his mother goes milking, she ties
him to a thistle, and he is swallowed by a cow. A raven that spies him
walking in a furrow carries him off “even like a grain of corn”.
As for his life at Court, there is example for it, “Tom being a dwarf”;
nor was he the first mischief-maker to find his way there, nor the first
poor man’s son that overcame his betters. But his method of attack was
new; no champion in the annals of romance had beaten Sir Launcelot, Sir
Tristram and Sir Guy with no other weapon than a laugh.
At Court, Tom bears himself as to the manner born; wears the King’s
signet for a girdle, creeps nimbly into the royal button-hole, and finds
a place, sooner than most courtiers, “near his Highness heart”. At home,
he is still the gentle scapegrace beloved of village folk. If he craves a
boon of the King, it is to relieve the wants of his parents: and the boon,
“as much of silver coin
As well his arms could hold”,
amounts to the great sum of _threepence_,
“A heavy burden which did make
His weary limbs to crack.”
There is a kind of natural magic in all this that a child can grasp
without the help of a magician. Tom Thumb although he is wingless, can
wear a fairy dress: an oak-leaf hat, a spider-woven shirt, hose and
doublet of thistle-down and
“shoes made of a mouse’s skin
And tann’d most curiously”.
Small creatures that creep among grass-blades seem to have furnished the
rhymer with analogies. Tom’s house is but half a mile from the court,
yet he takes two days and nights to make the journey; he sleeps in a
walnut-shell, and his parents feast him three days upon a hazel-nut,
“that was sufficient for a month
For this great man to eat”.
“A few moist April drops” are enough to delay his return, till his
“careful father” takes a “birding trunk” and with a single blast, blows
him back to court.
Last comes the notable account of his death, which tells how the doctors
examined him through “a fine perspective glass” and found—
“His face no bigger than _an ant’s_,
Which hardly could be seen”.
The rhyme is a dwarf epic, perhaps begun by some child that had found an
ant-hill, or a thistle taller than himself; carried on, with a phrase
here and a picture there from older tales, by the “careful father”, who
set it to the unequal beat of little feet at his side.
But no child could endure the unhappy end. A second part and a third
(both sorry imitations of the first) brought the “little knight” back to
fresh adventures; and even the printers of instructive books understood
the value of his name on a title-page.
Catskin,[22] long forgotten through the more glorious transformations of
her French sister, could hold Dr. Primrose’s children with the old theme
of disguise and changing fortune. Five parts in verse gave her whole
history: how she was banished, like Cordelia, by an angry father; how
she disguised herself in a hood of Catskin, and took service in a great
house; how (following here the very print of the Glass Slipper) she went
to the ball and danced with a Knight; and how, one day when she forgot
her Catskin hood, the Knight, discovering her “in rich attire”, fell in
love with her and married her.
English folk-tales, compared with others more magical, are like the
toys that a child will make for himself out of a stick, beside the fine
inventions of a conjurer; they appeal chiefly to practical interests,
and leave much to the imagination. Jack killed Cormoran and Blunderbore
and the giant with two heads before anybody thought of giving him a cap
of knowledge, or shoes of swiftness, or even a magic sword. These things
were the addition of a Second Part.
Indeed, a tale never was so plain that it gathered no colour in the
telling. There was an old story of Whittington without a Cat,[23] and how
the cat got into the story was more than the whole Society of Antiquaries
could tell, though it met together in 1771 expressly to discuss the
problem. In our own time, most antiquaries are agreed that the Cat found
its way from Genoa or Persia or Portugal,—no matter whence,—and that it
is a piece of folk-lore grafted upon authentic biography. Try as they
will, they can get little nearer to the heart of the matter than Mr.
Pepys, when he watched the puppet-show of Whittington at Southwark Fair,
“which was pretty to see”, and remarked “how that idle thing do work upon
people that see it, and even myself too”.
The very truth underlying the modest fable of the Cat and the song of Bow
Bells, had more power than the Wishing Hat of Fortunatus, and would have
carried more fanciful embellishments; but it is never safe to lose sight
of the double paradox of childish imagination—that reality is romance,
romance, reality. If “_Cendrillon_” had never been done into English,
Catskin or Cap o’ Rushes might have worn the Glass Slipper and ridden in
a Pumpkin Coach. As it fell out, the little kitchen-maid surpassed them
both,—the girl whose ragged dress was transformed at a touch into “_drap
d’or et d’argent, tout charmarez de pierreries_.”
Cinderella’s biographer was no less a person than Charles Perrault, a
member of the French Academy, and a friend of La Fontaine. He also wrote
the famous “histories” of little Red Riding Hood and the Sleeping Beauty,
of Hop o’ my Thumb (a distant kinsman of Tom Thumb), Puss in Boots, and
others who have lived so long in English nurseries that their French
names are forgotten.
In his youth, Perrault had rebelled against the formal education of his
day, and when he was little short of seventy, he turned from his serious
works and produced a children’s book by which he is still remembered.
Fairy tales, indeed, were already popular in France, but they had become
a part of that fantastic world into which the Court of Louis XIV had been
transformed: a world of courtly shepherds and shepherdesses, who told
“_Contes des fées_” (“_mitonner_”, Madame de Sévigné says they called it)
to prove that they had gone back to the Golden Age.
Perrault knew better than to copy them. He wrote for a public at once
more appreciative and more critical: the nursery society of which, in the
introduction to his rhymed tales (1695) he wrote: “_On les voit dans la
tristesse et dans l’abbattement tant que le héros ou l’héroine du conte
sont dans le malheur, et s’écrie de joie quand le temps de leur bonheur
arrive_”.
His knowledge of children alone might have carried him through, but
his choice of a collaborator was an act of genius. When in 1697, the
_Contes_ were collected and published,[24] it was not to M. Perrault
of the Academy that the “_privelège du roy_” was granted, but to his
ten-years-old son, Perrault Darmancour. The device of anonymity was
common among the early writers of children’s books, and some critics
have suggested that it was beneath the dignity of an Academician to
acknowledge the authorship of fairy-tales; but Mlle. L’Héritier,
Perrault’s niece, who contributed one tale to the book, declared, before
it was published, that little Darmancour could write fairy-tales “with
much charm”; and Mr. Andrew Lang, following M. Lacroix, believed that
the boy had a real share in the book. He detected the actual note of a
child’s voice in the dialogue:
“_Toc, toc, qui est là? C’est voire fille, le petit chaperon rouge—qui
vous apporte une galette et un petit pot de beurre que ma mère vous
envoye ... tira la chevillette, la bobinette chera_”. But this, after
all, is the language of fairy-tales. Here it is again, when the little
princess finds the old woman spinning: “_Que faites-vous là, ma bonne
femme—je file, ma belle enfant.... Ha! que cela est joli ... comment
faites-vous? Donnez-moy que je voye si j’en ferois bien autant_”.
It is the language of fairy-tales; and that, of course, is child’s talk.
But the father’s part is clear in the artistic handling of the tales, in
the addition of “_Moralités_” after the manner of Æsop, and in asides of
laughter or comment intended for grown-up ears,—a sly dig at the lawyers
in “_Le Maître Chat_”, or at women, through the Ogre’s wife in “_Le Petit
Poucet_”.
Some such partnership between youth and age there must be in all real
children’s books; whether it be arranged between them is another matter.
The wise writer will always take hints from the child, will remember
the way he turns his phrases, the tones of his voice, the things that
interest him; but if he remember his own childhood, it may serve as well.
These stories are all memories of childhood. As their more intimate
title, “_Contes de ma Mère Loye_”, suggests, they were handed down for
centuries, gathering new features by the way, till this boy of Perrault’s
had them from his nurse. But no child could have written them as Perrault
wrote. “Cinderella”—the “story of stories”: the boy could repeat it word
for word; but if he had tried to set it down, he would have lost the
thread at the point of transformation. Those dramatic strokes of the
clock would have been forgotten in the music of the ball. This balance,
this art of simplicity is the work of a man,—an academician, the writer
who, in a French “Battle of the Books”, took up the cause of the Moderns
against the Classics, and yet lived in the kindly reasonable humour that
belongs to the Augustan Age.
Perrault’s _Contes_ are essentially romantic; the Sleeping Beauty gives
place only to Persephone,—she and her sleeping household, shut in by the
great hedge of thorns; but every tale has quaint human touches which puts
it precisely at the right angle to life: the little girl, her basket of
goodies, and the sick grandmother, all things of experience; and then,
with a quick turn of the “World Upside Down”—_the Grandmother that was
really a Wolf_ in bed. A nurse might have told it well enough; but the
artist knew the true colours, the just economy of lines, and the point
where one could turn from the pictures and listen for talk.
Perrault must have followed every footstep in the tales with the eager
sympathy of the boy at his side. Together they hid with Little Thumb
under his father’s stool, and heard the poor parents’ desperate shift to
be rid of their children. They were with the tiny hero when he filled his
pockets full of small white pebbles, and made the trail by which he and
his six brothers found their way home; and they joined in the hopeless
search of the second adventure, when Little Thumb dropped crumbs instead
of pebbles, and the birds ate them. That brings the story to the very
heart of interest: when the hungry boys, lost in the forest at nightfall,
fancied they heard on every side of them the howling of wolves coming
to eat them up. For then Little Thumb, the youngest and smallest and
cleverest of them all “climbed up to the top of a tree, to see if he
could discover anything; and having turned his head about on every side,
he saw at last a glimmering light, like that of a candle, but a long way
from the forest.” This is matter of romance, though there is nothing in
it beyond Nature. But—that “glimmering light” threw its beams from _an
Ogre’s window_, and there was yet to come the Adventure of the Seven
League Boots: those boots that would fit a foot of any size, from the
Ogre’s to Little Thumb’s; in which either Perrault _père_ or Perrault
_fils_ could go seven leagues at a step.
No copy remains of the first translation of Perrault’s tales by Samber
(1729),[25] nor of John Newbery’s edition; but a seventh edition appeared
in 1777, under the title of “Mother Goose’s Tales”, and an eighth in
1780. At the close of the century, Harris printed another, “Englished by
G. M. Gent”, of which copies are still found. The book fits a very small
hand, and though every trace of gold be rubbed off the covers, the Dutch
paper pattern can still be seen through diamond patches of colour. The
frontispiece shows an old woman with her distaff, seated by the fire,
telling stories to a group of children; and there are quaint woodcuts in
the text.
The welcome given in court circles to fairy-tales marked the beginning,
or rather, a special phase of romantic interest; but this had little
to do with children. Such tales, originally simple, caught the
elaborate grace of their new setting, and borrowing variations from the
newly-translated eastern stories, ran into an endless series in the
_Cabinet des Fées_. In English they were represented chiefly by the
_Contes_ of Madame la Comtesse D’Aulnoy, which were translated before
Perrault’s.[26] These were common as nursery chap-books in the second
half of the century.
Nothing could be more unlike the simplicity of Perrault. Madame
D’Aulnoy’s stories are rich in embroideries of the folk-tale themes.
She makes something very like a novel of her “_L’Oiseau Bleu_”; but the
adventures of the bird-lover are well known in such ballads as “the
Earl of Mar’s Daughter”, and no artifice can hide the traces of an old
“_cante-fable_”. The wicked step-mother of all fairy-tales transforms the
prince into a bird; but the spy set to watch the princess at last falls
asleep, and then the princess opens her little window and sings:
“_Oiseau bleu, couleur de temps,_
_Vole à moi, promptement_”.
“These,” explains Madame la Comtesse, “are her own words, which it has
been thought best to keep unchanged”. Elsewhere she is less concerned for
her originals. Her “_Finette Cendron_” (the English “Finetta”) is an
odd mixture of Perrault’s “Cinderella” and “Little Thumb”, in which both
stories are spoilt.
Gold and silver are the meanest ornaments in these fairy novels; they
have much of the glitter of a transformation scene. When the colours
fade, there is only a confused memory of the setting; but fairies and
talking animals remain. Children are not likely to forget “The White
Cat”, “The Hind in the Wood”, or that lurker in dark corners of the
nursery, “The Yellow Dwarf”.
As the century advanced, grown-up persons from time to time ventured
into the unknown regions of romance; and it is odd to find that the more
thrilling their discoveries in poetry and fiction, the more determined
they were to hide them from children, or to cloak them with moral
applications.
The rhymed “_Moralités_” which Perrault added to his tales were a tactful
concession to public opinion. No moralist ever succeeded in reforming
Puss in Boots, though one, early in the nineteenth century, claimed him
as the ancestor of a _Moral Cat_. It is clear, however, that Perrault,
left to himself, would have trusted his readers to find their own morals;
for in the dedication to his _Contes_ he says: “they all contain a very
obvious moral, and one that shows itself more or less according to the
insight of the reader.”
The task of reconciling parents and children upon the vexed question of
the supernatural was achieved by Madame le Prince de Beaumont, with her
educational or moral fairy-tales.
Allegorical persons often appeared in the court adaptations with names
and images drawn from classical authority. Mlle. L’Héritier had already
foisted into the old folk-tale of “Diamonds and Toads” a fairy called
“_Eloquentia Nativa_”; but Madame de Beaumont’s tales were simpler
and more convincing. From the parental point of view she had undoubted
advantages over her predecessors in the fairy-tale, for, in the words of
an editor of the _Cabinet des Fées_, she “devoted herself entirely to the
education of children”.
Born in 1711, six years after the death of Madame D’Aulnoy, she spent a
great part of her life in London. Her _Magasin des Enfans_, published in
1757,[27] properly belongs to the type of moral miscellany introduced
by Sarah Fielding’s Governess[28]; but the schoolroom setting could
not spoil fairy-tales which, however obvious their moral purposes, had
refreshing touches of humour. In her intercourse with English children,
Madame de Beaumont had somehow acquired a belief in the educational value
of nonsense.
Charles Lamb’s rhyme of “Prince Dorus” is simply an adaptation of Madame
de Beaumont’s “_Prince Désir_”; her story of “The Three Wishes” found
in so many chap-books, is a well-known “droll”, and there are playful
touches in her most serious tales.
Yet a child might venture a protest on discovering that the little white
rabbit in “_Prince Chéri_”, that leaps into the King’s arms as he rides
hunting, is an educational fairy in disguise; and it is impossible not to
sympathise with the prince who, in spite of a ring that pricks whenever
he is naughty, becomes a scapegrace, and has to undergo a Circeian
transformation ere he is reformed.
Like all successful _gouvernantes_, Madame de Beaumont can be severe. Her
fairy in “_Fatal et Fortune_” deserves a place in Spartan folklore; this
is how she answers the mother who pleads for a son doomed to misfortune:
“_Vous ne savez pas ce que vous demandez. S’il n’est pas malheureux, il
sera méchant!_”
One at least of Madame de Beaumont’s tales is worthy of Perrault. “Beauty
and the Beast” would decide her title to nursery fame, if she had written
nothing else. In 1740, Madame de Villeneuve had spun out the same theme
at extraordinary length; but the story as children know it first appeared
in the _Magasin des Enfans_, and it bears all the marks of a genuine
folk-tale.
It was late in the century before the Arabian tales,[29] translated from
the French of M. Galland in 1708, appeared in English children’s books.
In France, they received a welcome surpassing that of the fairy-tales,
and produced a fantastic literature of supposed translations, in
which Eastern imagery and the incidents of Western folk-lore were
curiously mixed. Yet the new pattern was not altogether incongruous.
Dwarfs and magicians were the stock figures of romance; the Quest of
the Talking Bird, Singing Tree and Yellow Water was but a variant of
the Fortune-Seeker’s adventures; the Magic Mirror a commonplace of
fairy-tales; and there were old ballads, like “The Heir of Linne”, with
Arabian, Persian and Turkish variants.
Eastern stories, nevertheless, had more in common with Court fairy-tales
than with those of natural growth. They were woven, like oriental
carpets, for Kings’ palaces, and the “Folk” elements were simply repeated
as a part of the design. Children as yet knew nothing of these visions
of splendour and terror, which turned the French Court from its pose of
simplicity, and coloured the whole fabric of the _Cabinet des Fées_.
But the British tendency to moralise was never stronger than in the
eighteenth century, and eastern fables and aphorisms were rich in
illustrations of philosophy. Thus, for the greater part of the century,
the English oriental tale was moralised, and if children came into any
part of their legacy, it was either by courtesy of the moralist, or
through illicit traffic with the pedlar.
Neither Steele nor Johnson mentions these tales among children’s books;
but the “precious treasure” of Wordsworth’s childhood, a “little yellow
canvas-covered book”,[30] although it was but “a slender abstract of the
Arabian tales,” was within the reach of other children. Wordsworth tells
how he and another boy hoarded their savings for many months to buy the
“four large volumes” of “kindred matter”. Failing in resolution, they
never got beyond the smaller book; yet this, if it had only the tales
of the Merchant and the Ginni, the Fisherman, the Sleeper Awakened and
the Magic Horse, would build them a city of dreams. Whereas it almost
certainly contained the Voyages of Sinbad,[31] and the two apocryphal
tales, never doubted by children, “Aladdin” and “The Forty Thieves”.
Such a book was a maker of magicians. The child that possessed it found
himself richer than Ali Baba, for he knew the magic formula that would
open all the treasure-caves of the East. He was the shipmate of Sinbad,
that sailor of enchanted seas; the fellow of Aladdin, possessing the
ring and lamp that gave him mastery over slaves “terrible in aspect,
vast in stature as the giants”, who could carry him a thousand leagues
while he slept, or build in a single night a palace “more splendid than
imagination can conceive”.
The tastes of Wordsworth and his schoolfellows were probably more
catholic than those of the little De Quinceys, who discussed in
the nursery the relative merits of the _Arabian Nights_, and dared
to question the judgment of Mrs. Barbauld, “the queen of all the
bluestockings”, because she preferred “Aladdin” and “Sinbad” to all the
rest.[32] Most children would agree with her, for even the cave where
they measured gold like grain lacks the splendour of the garden in which
the trees “were all covered with precious stones instead of fruit, and
each tree was of a different kind, and had different jewels of all
colours, green and white and yellow and red.”
The palace, though all its storeys were of jasper and alabaster and
porphyry and mosaics, was not half so dazzling as this garden of jewels.
As to “Sinbad”, it may be, as De Quincey judged, “a mere succession of
adventures”; to a child, it is a second Odyssey. The giant that throws
masses of rock at Sinbad’s raft is a brother of the Cyclops; Proteus
is one with the Old Man of the Sea. But the adventures of Odysseus are
plain and straight compared with the extravagant splendours of this
merchant-adventurer. He walks by a river of dreams (which is yet a real
river) till he finds the tall vessel that pleases him; but once afloat
with black slaves and pages and bales of merchandise, he cares less for
the occupation of traffic than for “the pleasure of seeing the countries
and islands of the world”.
This is the very desire of the child; nor did dream-islands ever yield
romance in greater profusion. One, indeed, is no island, but a great
fish, on whose back the sand has been heaped up till trees have grown
upon it; no sooner is the sailors’ fire alight than the solid ground
sinks under their feet. In another, Sinbad descries from the top of a
tree a “white object of enormous size”, the egg of a Roc, that gigantic
bird whose wings obscure the sun.
Sir John Mandeville might have set down the adventures of the rhinoceros
and the elephant, the valley of diamonds or the river of jacinths and
pearls; but his account could never compare with this for reality.
These voyages among the islands, from El-Basrah to Sarandib, though they
are set down in the language of myth, are as easy to trace upon a map as
the wanderings of Odysseus between Troy and Ithaca. Nor is the Eastern
story-teller without a Homeric interest in things seen and discovered,
both great and small: a thousand horsemen clad in gold and silk, or a
letter sent by the King of Sarandib to Harun Er-Rashid, written “on
the skin of the Khawi, which is finer than parchment”, in writing of
ultramarine.
The quality of realism is indeed one of the distinguishing features
of Eastern romance. Sinbad’s account of the building of his raft from
the planks and ropes of the wrecked ship almost reads like an entry
in Crusoe’s journal, and there is the characteristic opening which
simulates a narrative of fact: “In the time of the Khalifeh, the Prince
of the Faithful Harun Er-Rashid, in the city of Baghdad”. All the sounds
and colours of the East are in the setting of these tales, all the
details of life and traffic; and yet it is never out of keeping with
the supernatural. Wizards and fairies simply move among the natural
inhabitants of bazaars or palaces,—a thing in no way surprising to a
child; and forms of enchantment surpassing the illusions of a dream rise
up in existing cities.
In a realistic age, such a setting would atone for the elements of
unreality; yet the authors of the _Tatler_ and _Spectator_ (those gentle
schoolmasters of grown-up children) held it of less account than the
aptness of the stories to “reflection” and philosophy. For this they
could forgive “that Oriental extravagance which is mixed with it”; but
the more philosophical the tale, the less it needed a real background
and moving figures. Vague allusions took the place of description, and
incidents were turned to illustrate particular virtues or to point the
arguments of Mr. Locke. Thus treated, the stories were said to be “writ
after the Eastern manner, but _somewhat more correct_.”
Johnson followed the same method, but with more profound philosophy, in
the _Rambler_; and it was in this “moralised” form that Eastern tales
came, straight from the pages of the _Spectator_ and the _Rambler_,
into the first books which John Newbery devised “for the Amusement and
Instruction” of children.
Thus the story of Alnascar, the Persian Glassman,[33] is printed in
the last section (“Letters, Poems, Tales and Fables”) of _A Museum for
Young Gentlemen and Ladies_: or, _a Private Tutor for little Masters and
Misses_ (1763); and the _Twelfth Day Gift_ (1767) has Johnson’s tale of
Obidah and the Hermit,[34] here called “The Progress of Life”.
Nor was there any attempt to choose the lighter and more entertaining
stories for children. Such a tale, for example, as Will Honeycomb’s
of Pug’s adventures (_Spectator_, 343), which Addison borrowed from
the _Chinese Tales_, never found its way into the early children’s
miscellanies, though Mrs. Barbauld, at the close of the century, produced
a somewhat similar series of adventures in _Evenings at Home_.
In France, as in England, there were Eastern tales which came half way
between the romance of pure adventure and the “Moral Tale”. Marmontel
chose an Eastern setting for two of his stories; but English writers
for children not unnaturally preferred Johnson’s “oriental” examples
of conduct and duty, and were willing to sacrifice interest to moral
significance.
Johnson himself would have advised them better. “Babies do not want to
hear about babies,” he told Mrs. Thrale; “they like to be told of giants
and castles, and of somewhat which can stretch and stimulate their little
minds.”[35]
He expressly warned her against the nursery editions which contained, as
a substitute for genuine romance, his own moralised “Eastern tales”. But
the Great Cham’s remarks upon children’s books were not published with
his works, and parents went on buying the books which he declared that
children never read.
Mrs. Sheridan’s _Nourjahad_ (1767) appeared as a nursery chap-book in
1808, and Miss Edgeworth, in her tale of “Murad the Unlucky” (one of the
_Popular Tales_), gives similar contrasted examples of wisdom and folly.
Minor moralists were unnumbered. Mr. Cooper, the author of _Blossoms of
Morality_, having by his own account “accidentally met with a French
edition of the Arabian Nights during a trip on the Continent”, and being
“induced to wade through it, having no other book at hand”, was so far
moved by the entertainment as to select and adapt some of the tales “for
Youth”, under the title of _The Oriental Moralist_.[36]
A remark at the close of “Prince Agib and the Adamantine Mountain”
gives a fair example of his treatment: “It may not be amiss to remind
my youthful readers that an unwarrantable curiosity, and a degree of
obstinacy too natural to young people, were the causes of the third
Calender losing his eye”.
The author of _The Governess_; or, _Evening Amusements at a Boarding
School_, though she allows Persian stories, admits that whenever she
found “a sentiment that would answer her purpose”, she did not hesitate
to “make it breathe from the lips of the Eastern Sage”.
_The Grateful Turk_, one of Thomas Day’s moral tales, appeared in the
same year as Mrs. Pilkington’s _Asiatic Princess_, and Miss Porter
followed with _The Two Princes of Persia_, “adapted to youth”. Alluring
titles, such as “The Ruby Heart” and “The Enchanted Mirror” were another
means of recommending improving histories.
Yet the oriental tale suffered less than native romance and folk-lore,
by this sort of adaptation. Perhaps the Jinn, being “the slaves of him
who held the lamp”, or “of him on whose hand was the ring”, were more
helpless than other spirits in the power of the Moralist.
English fairies were not so submissive; indeed they played strange tricks
with the little didactic works that bore their names.
Already (in 1746) Tom Thumb had turned pedagogue and published his
“Travels”,[37] a barefaced introduction to Topography. _Tom Thumb’s
Folio_ (1768) was followed in 1780 by _Tom Thumb’s Exhibition_, “being
an account of many valuable and surprising curiosities which he had
collected in the course of his travels, for the instruction and amusement
of the British Youths”.
This is somewhat more entertaining than the “Travels”, having an odd
humour of its own; but the Tom Thumb of the Exhibition has changed his
fairy dress for a schoolmaster’s gown, and lies in wait for pupils “in a
large commodious room at Mr. Lovegood’s, number 3 in Wiseman’s Buildings,
at the upper end of Education Road”.
Here he examines, under the lens of an “Intellectual Perspective Glass”,
the unreasonable things which please a child. For example, unripe apples
or gooseberries thus scrutinized, “instantly appear to be changed into a
swarm of worms and other devouring reptiles”.
From this it is tempting to infer that the same merciless glass had
discovered, instead of the traditional wren or robin, that “little
feathered songster called the _Advice Bird_” which a child might see
at the Exhibition. Such a lens, focussed upon Whittington’s Cat, would
doubtless prove it a figment, or applied to a magic sword, might
instantly change it to a piece of rusty iron.
Old ballads suffered the same transforming process. Robin Goodfellow,[38]
dragged from his haunts to show “a virtuous little mortal” the way to
Fairyland, took on the likeness of a Philosopher, the better to fool his
victims.
Fairyland, he asserts, is “neither a continent nor an island, and yet it
is both or either. It exists in the air, at a distance of about five feet
and a half or six feet at most from the surface of the Earth”.
The solution of this pleasing riddle is found in a diagram of the human
frame, whereon the Fairyland of Philosophy is shown to exist nowhere but
in a man’s head, hard by those notable tracts, the “Land of Courage” and
the “Land of Dumplins”.
A knavish sprite, this, who can find matter for jests in a fairy
revolution; for by his account, “the reigning Monarch Fancy, and Whim,
his royal Consort” have usurped the throne of Oberon; and Imagination is
their eldest son.
In such an age, the boldest outlaw would have much ado to rescue
Robin Hood; and since Robin could point but a one-sided moral, the
writer of little books forgot his virtues and published his “Life”
as a “Warning-piece”. He, forsooth, “did not know how to work”, had
“neglected to learn a trade”, and being justly outlawed, skulked with
his “gang” in Sherwood Forest, living “_what they called_ a merry life”.
_The Two Children in the Wood_ afforded ampler scope for moral contrasts.
Addison’s praise had included even the pretty fiction of the robins, on
the authority of Horace and his doves; but the makers of toy-books were
not satisfied with this. They expunged the robins and prepared two prose
versions of the ballad, one expanding the story into a novel of domestic
life, and the other marring it with a happy ending.[39]
The novel, an amusing medley, deals in an underplot with the adventures
of the wicked Uncle at sea, laying bare a past about which the ballad was
silent; the rest is concerned with the home life of the two children,
and contains a chapter of stories told for their benefit. At the end (by
way of reparation, perhaps) the ballad itself is printed. The novelist
carries enough moral ballast to float it all, and anticipates its effect
in rhyme:
“The tender Tale must surely please.
If told with sympathetic ease;
Read, then, the Children in the Wood,
And you’ll be virtuous and good.”
But of all these “restorations”, none was a greater outrage than the
attempt of a nursery moralist to rebuild the Enchanted Castle of Romance.
“The History of the Enchanted Castle; or, The Prettiest Book for
Children” appeared in Francis Newbery’s list in 1777, and was reprinted
for Harris early in the nineteenth century. On the title page it is
further described as “the Enchanted Castle, situated in one of the
Fortunate Isles and governed by the _Giant Instruction_. Written for
the Entertainment of little Masters and Misses by Don Stephano Bunyano,
Under-Secretary to the aforesaid Giant”.
The wheel has come full circle: folk-tales, ballads, romances, not one
of the forms of popular literature has escaped. Here at last is the
giant himself surrendering his stronghold to the moralist, delivering up
captives and stolen, treasure, engaging Secretaries, and parcelling out
the Enchanted Castle into a Picture Gallery, Museum and Library.
The parallel between the Giant Instruction and Giant Despair is
sufficiently obvious; but the giant’s under-secretary, with official
sagacity, turns it to account. He boldly proclaims himself “a distant
relation of the famous John Bunyan, the pious and admired author of the
_Pilgrim’s Progress_”, and proceeds to explain the symbolic pictures and
curiosities in the Castle, after the manner of Mr. Interpreter.
Yet there is one rare thing among the oddities of this little book; a
statement of aim which involves direct criticism of existing children’s
books. This betrays the Giant’s intention to make children “as capable
of thinking and understanding what is what (according to their years) as
their Papas and Mammas, or as the greatest Philosophers and Divines in
the whole Country”.
To this end it is forbidden to present even “very little Masters and
Misses” with “idle nonsensical stories” and “silly unmeaning rhymes”.
It is little wonder that Wordsworth, remembering
“A race of real children; not too wise,
Too learned, or too good....”,
denounced moralist and pedagogue, and cried in vain for the old nursery
tales:
“Oh! give us once again the wishing-cap
Of Fortunatus, and the invisible coat
Of Jack the Giant-killer, Robin Hood
And Sabra in the forest with St. George!”