That we have in English no word corresponding to the German _Mährchen_,
drives us to use the word _Fairytale_, regardless of the fact that the
tale may have nothing to do with any sort of fairy. The old use of the
word _Fairy_, by Spenser at least, might, however, well be adduced, were
justification or excuse necessary where _need must_.
Were I asked, what is a fairytale? I should reply, _Read Undine: that
is a fairytale; then read this and that as well, and you will see what
is a fairytale_. Were I further begged to describe the _fairytale_, or
define what it is, I would make answer, that I should as soon think of
describing the abstract human face, or stating what must go to
constitute a human being. A fairytale is just a fairytale, as a face is
just a face; and of all fairytales I know, I think _Undine_ the most
beautiful.
Many a man, however, who would not attempt to define _a man_, might
venture to say something as to what a man ought to be: even so much I
will not in this place venture with regard to the fairytale, for my long
past work in that kind might but poorly instance or illustrate my now
more matured judgment. I will but say some things helpful to the
reading, in right-minded fashion, of such fairytales as I would wish to
write, or care to read.
Some thinkers would feel sorely hampered if at liberty to use no forms
but such as existed in nature, or to invent nothing save in accordance
with the laws of the world of the senses; but it must not therefore be
imagined that they desire escape from the region of law. Nothing lawless
can show the least reason why it should exist, or could at best have
more than an appearance of life.
The natural world has its laws, and no man must interfere with them in
the way of presentment any more than in the way of use; but they
themselves may suggest laws of other kinds, and man may, if he pleases,
invent a little world of his own, with its own laws; for there is that
in him which delights in calling up new forms--which is the nearest,
perhaps, he can come to creation. When such forms are new embodiments of
old truths, we call them products of the Imagination; when they are mere
inventions, however lovely, I should call them the work of the Fancy: in
either case, Law has been diligently at work.
His world once invented, the highest law that comes next into play is,
that there shall be harmony between the laws by which the new world has
begun to exist; and in the process of his creation, the inventor must
hold by those laws. The moment he forgets one of them, he makes the
story, by its own postulates, incredible. To be able to live a moment in
an imagined world, we must see the laws of its existence obeyed. Those
broken, we fall out of it. The imagination in us, whose exercise is
essential to the most temporary submission to the imagination of
another, immediately, with the disappearance, of Law, ceases to act.
Suppose the gracious creatures of some childlike region of Fairyland
talking either cockney or Gascon! Would not the tale, however lovelily
begun, sink at once to the level of the Burlesque--of all forms of
literature the least worthy? A man’s inventions may be stupid or clever,
but if he do not hold by the laws of them, or if he make one law jar
with another, he contradicts himself as an inventor, he is no artist. He
does not rightly consort his instruments, or he tunes them in different
keys. The mind of man is the product of live Law; it thinks by law, it
dwells in the midst of law, it gathers from law its growth; with law,
therefore, can it alone work to any result. Inharmonious, unconsorting
ideas will come to a man, but if he try to use one of such, his work
will grow dull, and he will drop it from mere lack of interest. Law is
the soil in which alone beauty will grow; beauty is the only stuff in
which Truth can be clothed; and you may, if you will, call Imagination
the tailor that cuts her garments to fit her, and Fancy his journeyman
that puts the pieces of them together, or perhaps at most embroiders
their button-holes. Obeying law, the maker works like his creator; not
obeying law, he is such a fool as heaps a pile of stones and calls it a
church.
In the moral world it is different: there a man may clothe in new forms,
and for this employ his imagination freely, but he must invent nothing.
He may not, for any purpose, turn its laws upside down. He must not
meddle with the relations of live souls. The laws of the spirit of man
must hold, alike in this world and in any world he may invent. It were
no offence to suppose a world in which everything repelled instead of
attracted the things around it; it would be wicked to write a tale
representing a man it called good as always doing bad things, or a man
it called bad as always doing good things: the notion itself is
absolutely lawless. In physical things a man may invent; in moral things
he must obey--and take their laws with him into his invented world as
well.
“You write as if a fairytale were a thing of importance: must it have a
meaning?”
It cannot help having some meaning; if it have proportion and harmony it
has vitality, and vitality is truth. The beauty may be plainer in it
than the truth, but without the truth the beauty could not be, and the
fairytale would give no delight. Everyone, however, who feels the story,
will read its meaning after his own nature and development: one man will
read one meaning in it, another will read another.
“If so, how am I to assure myself that I am not reading my own meaning
into it, but yours out of it?”
Why should you be so assured? It may be better that you should read your
meaning into it. That may be a higher operation of your intellect than
the mere reading of mine out of it: your meaning may be superior to
mine.
“Suppose my child ask me what the fairytale means, what am I to say?”
If you do not know what it means, what is easier than to say so? If you
do see a meaning in it, there it is for you to give him. A genuine work
of art must mean many things; the truer its art, the more things it will
mean. If my drawing, on the other hand, is so far from being a work of
art that it needs THIS IS A HORSE written under it, what can it matter
that neither you nor your child should know what it means? It is there
not so much to convey a meaning as to wake a meaning. If it do not even
wake an interest, throw it aside. A meaning may be there, but it is not
for you. If, again, you do not know a horse when you see it, the name
written under it will not serve you much. At all events, the business of
the painter is not to teach zoology.
But indeed your children are not likely to trouble you about the
meaning. They find what they are capable of finding, and more would be
too much. For my part, I do not write for children, but for the
childlike, whether of five, or fifty, or seventy-five.
A fairytale is not an allegory. There may be allegory in it, but it is
not an allegory. He must be an artist indeed who can, in any mode,
produce a strict allegory that is not a weariness to the spirit. An
allegory must be Mastery or Moorditch.
A fairytale, like a butterfly or a bee, helps itself on all sides, sips
at every wholesome flower, and spoils not one. The true fairytale is, to
my mind, very like the sonata. We all know that a sonata means
something; and where there is the faculty of talking with suitable
vagueness, and choosing metaphor sufficiently loose, mind may approach
mind, in the interpretation of a sonata, with the result of a more or
less contenting consciousness of sympathy. But if two or three men sat
down to write each what the sonata meant to him, what approximation to
definite idea would be the result? Little enough--and that little more
than needful. We should find it had roused related, if not identical,
feelings, but probably not one common thought. Has the sonata therefore
failed? Had it undertaken to convey, or ought it to be expected to
impart anything defined, anything notionally recognizable?
“But words are not music; words at least are meant and fitted to carry a
precise meaning!”
It is very seldom indeed that they carry the exact meaning of any user
of them! And if they can be so used as to convey definite meaning, it
does not follow that they ought never to carry anything else. Words are
live things that may be variously employed to various ends. They can
convey a scientific fact, or throw a shadow of her child’s dream on the
heart of a mother. They are things to put together like the pieces of a
dissected map, or to arrange like the notes on a stave. Is the music in
them to go for nothing? It can hardly help the definiteness of a
meaning: is it therefore to be disregarded? They have length, and
breadth, and outline: have they nothing to do with depth? Have they only
to describe, never to impress? Has nothing any claim to their use but
the definite? The cause of a child’s tears may be altogether
undefinable: has the mother therefore no antidote for his vague misery?
That may be strong in colour which has no evident outline. A fairytale,
a sonata, a gathering storm, a limitless night, seizes you and sweeps
you away: do you begin at once to wrestle with it and ask whence its
power over you, whither it is carrying you? The law of each is in the
mind of its composer; that law makes one man feel this way, another man
feel that way. To one the sonata is a world of odour and beauty, to
another of soothing only and sweetness. To one, the cloudy rendezvous is
a wild dance, with a terror at its heart; to another, a majestic march
of heavenly hosts, with Truth in their centre pointing their course, but
as yet restraining her voice. The greatest forces lie in the region of
the uncomprehended.
I will go farther.--The best thing you can do for your fellow, next to
rousing his conscience, is--not to give him things to think about, but
to wake things up that are in him; or say, to make him think things for
himself. The best Nature does for us is to work in us such moods in
which thoughts of high import arise. Does any aspect of Nature wake but
one thought? Does she ever suggest only one definite thing? Does she
make any two men in the same place at the same moment think the same
thing? Is she therefore a failure, because she is not definite? Is it
nothing that she rouses the something deeper than the understanding--the
power that underlies thoughts? Does she not set feeling, and so thinking
at work? Would it be better that she did this after one fashion and not
after many fashions? Nature is mood-engendering, thought-provoking: such
ought the sonata, such ought the fairytale to be.
“But a man may then imagine in your work what he pleases, what you never
meant!”
Not what he pleases, but what he can. If he be not a true man, he will
draw evil out of the best; we need not mind how he treats any work of
art! If he be a true man, he will imagine true things; what matter
whether I meant them or not? They are there none the less that I cannot
claim putting them there! One difference between God’s work and man’s
is, that, while God’s work cannot mean more than he meant, man’s must
mean more than he meant. For in everything that God has made, there is
layer upon layer of ascending significance; also he expresses the same
thought in higher and higher kinds of that thought: it is God’s things,
his embodied thoughts, which alone a man has to use, modified and
adapted to his own purposes, for the expression of his thoughts;
therefore he cannot help his words and figures falling into such
combinations in the mind of another as he had himself not foreseen, so
many are the thoughts allied to every other thought, so many are the
relations involved in every figure, so many the facts hinted in every
symbol. A man may well himself discover truth in what he wrote; for he
was dealing all the time with things that came from thoughts beyond his
own.
“But surely you would explain your idea to one who asked you?”
I say again, if I cannot draw a horse, I will not write THIS IS A HORSE
under what I foolishly meant for one. Any key to a work of imagination
would be nearly, if not quite, as absurd. The tale is there, not to
hide, but to show: if it show nothing at your window, do not open your
door to it; leave it out in the cold. To ask me to explain, is to say,
“Roses! Boil them, or we won’t have them!” My tales may not be roses,
but I will not boil them.
So long as I think my dog can bark, I will not sit up to bark for him.
If a writer’s aim be logical conviction, he must spare no logical pains,
not merely to be understood, but to escape being misunderstood; where
his object is to move by suggestion, to cause to imagine, then let him
assail the soul of his reader as the wind assails an aeolian harp. If
there be music in my reader, I would gladly wake it. Let fairytale of
mine go for a firefly that now flashes, now is dark, but may flash
again. Caught in a hand which does not love its kind, it will turn to an
insignificant, ugly thing, that can neither flash nor fly.
The best way with music, I imagine, is not to bring the forces of our
intellect to bear upon it, but to be still and let it work on that part
of us for whose sake it exists. We spoil countless precious things by
intellectual greed. He who will be a man, and will not be a child,
must--he cannot help himself--become a little man, that is, a dwarf. He
will, however, need no consolation, for he is sure to think himself a
very large creature indeed.
If any strain of my “broken music” make a child’s eyes flash, or his
mother’s grow for a moment dim, my labour will not have been in vain.