Undaunted Treads

Grimm's Fairy Tales. Retold by Amabel Williams- Ellis. (Blackie, 18s.)

WHAT children like to read, and at what age they like to read.it, is a hard question : a graduated course in Enid Blyton, from Noddy to the Famous Five is, luckily, not every child's cup of tea, though one is sometimes persuaded that it is. The bookish child, the very young highbrow, presumably moves imperceptibly from William Mayne at fourteen to Ivy Compton-Burnett ht fifteen. Where such a child is likely to start is with A Child's Garden of Verses.

The ideal reader of these poems would be, like Stevenson, an only child, Scottish, delicate, and slightly priggish. For all their talk of faraway places, the atmosphere is restricted in an almost microscopic way, with that same feverish sense of tiny joys hugged close which one finds in Denton Welch's stories of his childhood. The joy is there —'happy' and 'pleasant' seem, along with 'little,' to have been Stevenson's automatic words for resurrecting the child's world—but the general flavour is curiously melancholy: sometimes, indeed, there is a pre-echo of a poet whom one hardly associates with childhood at all— Housman : Must we to bed indeed? Well then,

Let us arise and go like men,

And face with an undaunted tread The long black passage up to bed. 'The Land of Counterpane' is the very world of these poems, whether in sickness or simply in sleep:

My bed is like a little boat;

Nurse helps me in when I embark; She girds me in my sailor's coat • And starts me in the dark.

And this 'dark' is a place full of real horrors, not to be brushed away with adult whimsy or forced jollity—a world of night-lights, bogies and no child psychology :

The shadow of the balusters, the shadow of the lamp, The shadow of the child that goes to bed—

And the wicked shadows coming, tramp, tramp, tramp, With the black night overhead.

It is, in fact, a world very different from that revealed in the illustrations by Gyo Fujikawa to this (originally American) new edition. These tow- headed, pudgy, clean-limbed and cute little folk seem to have their origin in the later Walt Disney : Sweet enough at first sight, but in the end slick and meretricious. The flickering gas, the coal fire in the overcrowded parlour, a world where nature (so often mentioned) is the more wonderful for being a treat beyond the sickbed—these are the real pictures in Stevenson's poems, and they have a poignancy which defies exploitation.

Stevenson generally, though not always, avoided the ,more twee forms of whimsy; there is a tough Scottishness somewhere. Miss Aileen Fisher, an American writer of children's verses and cutter- out of silhouettes, does not. If Stevenson had his occasional pre-echo of Housman, Miss Fisher has a much commoner post-echo of Emily Dickinson: but WHO can mix up all that paint to paint a sunset red?

Such apercus tend to pall after a time, unless they have a stiffening of firm belief : pure fancy doesn't last very long. It was Death and Eternity—themes which Miss Fisher wisely avoids—that made Emily Dickinson a considerable poet. And the artless way in which a child makes his odd observations —odd to us—is very different from Miss Fisher's arch and hypothetical re-creations.

Poems and Pictures is a healthier piece of work, but not wildly original. Stevenson is represented, and I was glad to find The common cormorant or shag,' as well as a pleasant and cryptic little poem called 'Snail,' by Drinkwater.

With the Grimm brothers, we enter a world beyond, or before, whimsy : here, life has the dictated, inevitable nature of a dream, because these stories are in our blood. There will always be three daughters, or three sons, or three golden hairs, or seven dwarfs and—in Amabel Williams- Ellis's excellent versions—things start happening in the first sentence or two, with little pause for reflection or any embellishment which is not neces- sary to the unfolding of the story. There used to be, and perhaps still is, a feeling about that Grimm's tales were bad for children, that they encouraged nightmares and obsessions and what not. Possibly they do: but the most inexplicable things can terrify children—a quite innocuous Punch cartoon haunted me between the ages of about two and eight—and, come to that, there is a good deal in Auden's slogan from 'Letter to Lord Byron' : Let each child have that's in our care As much neurosis as the child can bear.

Certainly the horrors of Grimm are no worse than a perceptive child can see about him in the world. And they have, too, the pleasant distancing, of 'Once upon a time.'

ANTHONY THWAITR