THE GREEN FAIRY BOOK.*
MR. LANG has exhausted the available colours, for this is to be the last of the "fairy-books." Perhaps he does well to
stay his hand ; we can see, indeed, no sign of falling-off, and no serious repetition ; but it is as well to leave off before there is any pretence for complaining. This time the tales have not been gathered from so wide a range as usual. Most of the longer ones have been taken from the French, and are of modern origin. These are so good as almost to disprove Mr.
Lang's dictum that people now do not " write really good fairy-tales because they do not believe enough in their own stories." M. le Comte de Caylus certainly did not believe in dwarfs, and giants, and enchanted princesses. The editor's second reason is more to the point ; it is " because they want to be wittier than it has pleased Heaven to make *hem." Writers, nowadays, are far too self-conscious ; they try to be satirical, they contrive points, or they make the most fatal of all mistakes,—they try to be allegorical. The true fairy- story will have none of these things ; if there is a moral, it is of the most rudimentary kind; often it does not go beyond the lesson that it is a good thing to be a youngest son,—an immemorial protest, we may call it, against the privileges of primogeniture. Somehow the French writers have caught the true spirit of the thing. One can see, indeed, the national style—it is eminently French ; for instance, when the en- chanter is said to laugh "like a pack of wolves quarrelling"; so, too, is this : " The little soldier tried to console himself by looking at his bouquet, which was of immortelles. 'It is the flower of remembrance,' thought he, forgetting that it is also the flower of the dead ;" but the story-teller is never guilty of an arriere-pensee, the satirical or didactic second intention, which now, perhaps because we are so much in earnest, we find it so hard to avoid. " The Little Soldier," " Prince Feather- head," and " The Princess Celandine," and "Heart of Ice " are, perhaps, the best. A few come from Russia; one of these, "The Biter Bit," is, for the most part, a variant of " Little Hans." Its very doubtful morality, as when the simple-minded shepherd is beguiled into taking Simon's place in the sack, is, perhaps, a proof of its extreme antiquity. China contributes " The Story of Hok Lee and the Dwarfs." Here, again, the moral is conspicuously absent. No modern writer would venture to allow the villainous Hok Lee to end his days in prosperity and peace. One claims an English parentage, none other than our very familiar friend, " The Story of the Three Bears ; " but it is not in its best form. The heroine should be a little girl, not an old woman, and to be told that she may have been " taken up by a constable, and sent to the House of Correc- tion," we are inclined to resent as an impertinence. From "Little One-Eye, Little Two-Eyes, and Little Three-Eyes," to the end, seventeen stories in all, come from the Grim ms' col- lection. After all, the Teutonic medium seems to have been the best for preserving the old-world thought which is the essence of the fairy-story.
• The Green Fairy Book. Edited by Andrew Lang. London ; Longman, Green, and Co. 1892.
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