FAIRY TALES OF THE OLD AND NEW SCHOOL.* AN ago
which has ceased to believe in fairies has the greatest diffi- culty in creating good Fairy Tales. The attempt is something like that to create a Religion of the Future, though made in the reverse direction. The imagination of the producer of new fairy tales, puzzled by its own want of faith in the marvellous, and haunted by a secret reverence for the science and logic of the day, seeks a sort of clue in the allegorical, and tries to clothe moral or scien- tific truths in the shining garb of wonder. In short the writers of new fairy tales almost always attempt something nearer to those beautiful myths with which Plato endeavours to paint for the eye the truth lie has been teaching to the intellect or the conscience, than to proper fairy tales. Nay, yon sometimes hear this wicked imposition on children's faith defended, and meet with moralists who will profess that there is more ground for wonder in the locomotive tearing at sixty miles an hour over its track, or the instantaneous transmission of messages by electricity, than in the greatest achievements of seven-league boots or of the magic mirror in which you see at a wish all that is happening at a distance. The true answer to these prosers is to ask them whether they actually feel the same surprise at "break- fasting in London and dining in Edinburgh " by the well-paid help of the North-Western Railway Company, as they would feel if they had walked the distance in twenty steps of twenty-one miles each. The child knows well that the possessor of the seven-league boots needs to take no ticket for the journey, and will he brought up short by no gentleman in uniform for being without one. Then why try to palm off' on a child (who is usually wide awake to the deception) this "fine confused feeding' as fairy lore, this juggle between food for scientific admi- ration and for imaginative surprise ? It is all very well at the right time of life to go into raptures over the wonders of science, the "miraculous chemistry of nature," and so forth ; but to try to smuggle that kind of thing into a fairy tale is a wicked deception, a breach of moral con- tract which no child ought to forgive. When you tell a fairy tale you virtually engage to delight a child's imagination by summoning up a world in which the chief agencies are not at the command of painstaking industry and knowledge at all; where, if you are fortunate, you may get a cloak which renders you in- visible by giving a portion of your breakfast to an old woman who does not want it but only appeals dramatically to your pity, or, if you are unlucky, hit upon an apple which makes your nose grow at every bite, or be placed under the dismal necessity of expectorating toads with every word you speak. If instead of inventing such wonders you make an allegory of the influence of the sun upon the dewdrop, or of the wonderful power of self-sacrifice, or of the mighty force of steam, or something of that sort, you are palming off spurious coin,—trying to make a child receive truth and knowledge under the disguise of the marvellous, putting medicinal powder into his jams, 'destroying at once his faith in fiction and in truth,— his faith that fiction is fiction, and that truth is truth. How can you expect children to grow up fit for anything unless they have at some time of their life looked earnestly beneath their pillow in the morning for a piece of gold, or rubbed seri- ously, with sand-paper, rings or lamps found in old store-rooms in the hope that some magic 'slave' of those products of industry would immediately present himself? And what can tend more directly to paralyze this state of mind than legends in which gold perhaps is treated emblematically as a measure of value,' while the slave of the lamp is intellectual light,' or some such rub- bish? You might as well impersonate the Bank Rate of Discount at once in a fairy tale, and introduce the various rays from the violet to the red as so many distinct slaves of the lamp, varying in height in proportion to the scientific measure of their length.
Now, here aretwo books—both of them clever in their way--which represent these dangerous tendencies in the modern fairy tales Mr. Mark Lemon has translated from Musmus the tales concern- ing the Spirit of the Giant Mountains. These tales have perhaps
* L Legends of Number Nip. By Mark Lemon. Illustrated by Charles Keene. London and Cambridge: Macnullxu. 1864.
2. MUM Wet/Merlin and Cambridge: Maemillan. Other Fairy Tales. By Anna and M. Keary. London and 1865.
less humour in them than most of the German popular tales collected by the brothers Grimm ; but, except where MusEeus has interspersed them with a touch of "chaff" very little suited to his audience, and destroying the atmosphere of earnest wonder belonging to a true fairy tale, they are admirable specimens of the serious tone of popular belief. Mr. Mark Lemon, in his edition, should certainly have left out these blots dropped on popular tradition by the philosophical pen of a thinker who sought to introduce hits at modern psychology while telling the legends of the peasantry. This sort of thing, for example, has an intellectual scoff in it, and nothing is more opposed to the true spirit of the fairy tale than an intellectual scoff. The tale is speaking of the Gnome of the Riesengebirge (Giant Mountains) :—
"He, however, resolved to make ono other excursion for the purpose of studying mankind. He now glided invisible into the vale, and lay concealed among the trees and bushes ; there, as he kept a sharp look- out, he perceived reposing the form of a damsel, lovely to behold as the Medicean Venus. Grouped around her upon the grass, beside a water- fall that gushed from the rocks, and was received into a natural basin, her companions were sporting and chatting with their mistress in the gaiety of innocence. This scene affected the Spirit of the Rocks so powerfully, that he was willing once again to share the uncertain lot of humanity. But the essences of spirits are too delica■.e to be susceptible of any firm and lasting impression, and the Gnome felt that he required a body properly to appreciate the beauty which he saw before him. He therefore transmuted himself into a jet-black raven, but his expedient did not answer ; he beheld everything with the eyes of a raven, and his feelings were those of a raven, and a nest of field mice had now more attraction for him than the fairest maiden ; so he concluded that the soul in its thoughts and desires acts in correspond- ence with the body that incloses it. This psychological remark was no sooner made than the mistake was corrected ; the raven flew into the thicket, and put on the shape of a youth in the prime of life. New sentiments arose in his breast, of which he had never dreamed during all the ages of his existence. An irresistible impulse drew him mechanically towards the group of maidens, and at the same time he felt an equally powerful repugnance to approach them."
Even the dullest child would discover a false note here, something meant more than meets the ear, something of philosophy thrust into the fairy tale. It is a great defect in art, and quite out of keeping with the essence of these legends. It is the trail of the modern scepticism, of the 'essayist and reviewer' telling fairy tales, and certainly ought to have been omitted. But for a few such literary touches these legends are admirable of their kind. There is just that amount of arbitrary limitation on the Gnome's magic powers which realizes them for children's imagination. It is delightful to know that he can pro- vide his beautiful Princess with a perfect court in spring-time by transforming turnips into human beings, but that as the winter comes round and according to natural law the untransformed tur- nips would die, the beautiful beings who are really turnips in disguise shrivel and die too, and the Gnome has no other mode of replacing them but forcing a new lot of turnip seeds by getting up a hot-bed under his turnip field. That is the sort of limit to magic powers which impresses a true child deeply. Mr. Lemon has wasted something of the proper impressiveness of the legends by translating so capriciously the word ' Riibezahl ' (Tur- nip-Counter), the nick-name of the Gnome, (given him in con- sequence of a trick played upon the good, clumsy creature by a mortal,) into "Number-Nip,"—which is, we suppose, short for "Number-Turnip," but of course does not suggest that idea. The Princess with whom the Gnome had fallen in love promises to marry him when he shall have counted for her carefully the num- ber or the turnips in his forcing field, and shall be quite sure that there is no errer (for she intends them all to be turned into witnesses of the marriage, says Musmus, again no doubt in- dulging his misplaced irony). While he is doing so she escapes on a swift horse (transformed from a turnip), and gets out of the Gnome's dominions just before he discovers the trick. Hence he is nicknamed by the country people "Turnip-Counter," and it is on the wrath with which this nickname inspires him that several of the subsequent stories turn. To translate it " Num- ber-Nip " is wilfully to lose the drift.
In the other book of fairy tales we have, instead of old tales modernized by an ironical philosophy, quite new fairy tales,— some of them very prettily and poetically conceived, but most of them "hovering on the skirts of edification," and some of them boldly and wickedly allegorical. The alloy of coffee with chicory, or of sugar with sand, is nothing to the moral swindling of mixing up such a story as "Dewdrop and Sunbeam" with proper fairy stories :—
" Come and live in the sunbeam with me,' said the Spirit to Dewdrop, and be a Beam Spirit too.' But the Sunbeam dazzled hsr eyes, and besides she was afraid it would burn her, so Dewdrop answered, 'No; but we will go together to the cool sanded cave by the Sea.' The Beam
Spirit was sorry when she said this, for he knew it could never be," &o., &o.
That is the sort of thing a well-disposed child should loathe as at once treesherous and sentimental. And it is not as if the Miss Kearys could not do better,—much better. They knew in their hearts that they were trifling with everything that is pure, upright, and of good report when they wrote that down for children to read as a fairy tale. They have indeed a very good conception of what a fairy tale should be, if their moral nature were elevated enough to eschew all allegory and all teaching in disguise. There is a very fair tale in many respects about Prince Victor who slays the Monster of the Fountain. It opens badly indeed, with an imitation of the abominably inflated fun of the Decanzerone about a King of the United Kingdom of "Bubble and Squeak" who didn't come down to dinner one day because he had lost his crown, and the high-flown rubbish all the courtiers said about it,—the Miss Kearys should never be funny, it is not in them, and besides, it does not belong to fairy tales unless it is real humour ;—but after the tale has ceased to be funny it goes on in a very serious spirit to describe Prince Victor's education in the severe fairy's castle, and though it cannot refrain from a little discreditable allegory,—such as his always seeing himself in the magic mirror while his vanity and egotism last, and his getting his magic gifts from " Time " instead of from a proper fairy,—yet it is not by any means a bad tale till we are told at the end that the Monster who desolated his father's kingdom was called Sham, and would assume almost any shape. There the honest child feels immediately how terrible a swindle the tale has been. He has been duped into listening to a moral lesson. The tale itself is both a monster and a sham,—a monster because it tries to be of two opposite natures at once, and a sham because there was the medicine all the time inside the jam. This is the sort of thing that shakes children's faith in human nature, as the floating bottles in which the Spanish sailors hoped to find sherry or rum, and which turned out to be "tracts," destroyed their faith in human nature. To be decoyed by a fairy story into the lesson that Sham can only be put an end to by one who has been truthfully brought up is humiliating and fatal to self-respect. It is a falsehood ventriloquizing truth. Yet there are some really good conceptions in this book,—so wonder- fully mixed is human nature of the best and worst elements. Little Wanderlin *ould not be bad, if there were not such a wonderful amount of fibbing in it for a moral purpose. It is a sad falsehood that all the lower animal creation is industrious, as the Miss Kearys want to persuade us in Little Wanderlin. Dogs,—about the highest form of lower animal crea- tion,—have a great prerogative of idleness, except when, like the sheep dog or sporting dog, they are trained to an art. Nothing could persuade a sound-minded child that butterflies have anything useful to do beyond feeding themselves and laying eggs. Little Wanderlin will be felt to be an attempt to impose on children a false reason for industry. " Gladhome " and "Mrs. Calkill's Wonderful Underground House" are much better. They are didactic, but we do not object to plain-sailing didacticism in a fairy story, if there is no disposition to palm off false marvels on us. It is quite right intrinsically that the bad-hearted girl should expectorate toads and the good one pearls,—though we confess we should think even the latter process punitive,—and we have no objection to idle boys going through a retributive process, if it is only a genuine marvel, and not allegorical. The Miss Kearys have a very good idea of an enchanted castle, as the story of "Felix and Gemma" shows, but even there they show a disposi- tion to become scientific when they get down into Vesuvius and find Earthquake there. There is some such alloy in almost all the stories. But they have a poetical feeling which is very good in its way if it would but sedulously eschew allegory, and a feel- ing for the marvellous which is still better if it would earnestly avoid falling into natural science. But we would respectfully impress upon them that they cannot serve two masters, and if they want to sentimentalize or philosophize under the form of fairy tales, they will inspire as much righteous disgust as if a lecture on the Great Globe or recitations from Mrs. Hemans were intro- duced into the middle of a Christmas pantomime.
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