Children's Books
Fairy gold
A. L. Rowse
The Classic Fairy Tales Iona and Peter Opie (Oxford University Press £4.95) Cap O'Rushes and other Folk Tales Winifred Finlay (Kaye and Ward £1.60) In a Certain Kingdom. Twelve Russian Fairy Tales Thomas P. Whitney (Evans Brothers £1.95) Fairy Tales from Many Lands Illustrated by Arthur Rackham (Heinemann £2.75) I have been an aficionado of the Opies from their wonderful Oxford Dictionary of Nursery Rhymes onwards. I love their work for its unique combination of charm, scholarliness, the freshness of children's vision, and their exploration of (rather) virgin territory, schoolchildren's language, street games, rhymes. Theirs is the poetry of scholarship. Are they Cornish? Opie is a Cornish surname; and they tell us that we say "The Land's End" where the rest of the country says "Land's End". I never noticed that just like, them: they are always noticing things that escape ordinary folk. Now again they have produced a peach of a book. They give us two dozen of the finest fairy tales, but in the language of the earliest text therefore with the bloom of their naivety unblemished and in the better days of the language. Each tale is put in the perspective of its provenance, telling us where it came from, noting its parallels in various countries, the authors who gave these traditional stories their classic form, and satisfying or further titillating our curiosity about the strange points that arise in this realm of fancy and enchantment. All is not so simple as it looks as Robert Louis Stevenson well understood. Such stories plumb strange depths in the subconscious, are sometimes starkly suggestive; occasionally they have a moral; at other times they are quite amoral. As the Opies observe, they offer an extraordinary mixture of the realist with the magical, and are, in their best and original versions, without sentimentality. So here we have life-long and world-wide favourites, like 'Cinderella', 'Jack the Giant Killer', 'Tom, Thumb', The Sleeping Beauty', 'Bluebear.d 'Little Red Ridinghood', etc., lit up for us with love and learning; treated, but lightly and exquisitely, as literature. 0, what a contrast with the dolts and dunderheads who go in for "explication" in lit. crit.! What is the source of the undying appeal 0f these stories to people of all ages and all over the world?
Of course they appeal to writers of genius. Superciliousness is the occupational disease of the third-rate like Mary Russell Mitford wh° wrote, "I foresee that the Andersen and FairY Tale fashion will not last; none of these things away from general nature do." When Walter Scott contemplated a work on fairy literature, some ass thought it beneath the notice of a "great man of letters". Shakespeare is full of fairy lore; and Dr Johnson was engrossed by 'Jack the Giant Killer': he hoped that "so noble a narrative" would incite his sluggish soul to enterprise. Sothe fairy tale appeals not only to Romantics no one could be more classical than Dr Johnson; its appeal is universal. A strong source of their appeal is that they transcend the boring bounds of reality, lift us up into a world beyond ourselves, the dailY round, the common task. How wrong Miss Mitford was! A far better writer, perhaps the finest short-story writer of the century :Flannery O'Connor says specifically that it Is the strange, the extraordinary, that really excites the true creative artist's imagination. That puts paid to the boring "from the kitchen-sink to the WC" school in contemporary theatre and literature, From SaturdaY Night to Monday Morning, and Getting to the Top in Bradford, of all places. Myself, I would much rather have been the author of Haas Andersen's works than George Eliot's. Who wouldn't wish to be invisible, for example; skim over land and sea on one's own steam; marry a fairy prince or princess, as the case might be; be rewarded for very little effort with a peck of diamonds? When I was a child the idea of being invisible very much excited me, the thought of seeing and hearing what mysterious adults were really . up to, what others said and did a closed book. A double dose of curiosity has served me well throug,11 life, led me in the end to discover Shakespeare s Dark Lady. Everybody knows what a voyeur Henry James was, how much he was inspired by just that motivation; while H. G. Wells's The Invisible Man and Saki's 'Tobermory' are among their most appealing works for the same reason. The Queen of the Fairies gave ToM Thumb an enchanted hat, by which he should know what was going on in all parts of the world (how desirable for Kremlinologists, what they are all panting for); a girdle, which would enable him to change his shape (without all the trouble Jan Morris has undergone), and a ring which would make him invisible at will.
It is all very different from the programme of Socialist Realism in literature and the arts; but how inferior its products are, and how little likely to last! Where fairy-tales and fairy-lore have provided a prodigious creative impulse in literature and the arts — not only in music, ballet, pantomime. It is really the stuff out of Which came A Midsummer Night's Dream; how richly the Elizabethans drew upon it, Spenser for The Faery Queen, Peele for The Old Wives' Tale, Drayton for Nymphidia. Pushkin drew strongly upon Russian folkand fairy-tale. Arnold's The Forsaken Merman' is inspired and alive where 'Merope' is totally, classically, dead. I do not know whether the suggestion has ever been made but it seems to me that the ever-popular Tom Thumb' must have been at the back of Swift's inventions of Lilliput and Brobdingnag.
All kinds of things strike one in the Opies' wonder-working book — the excellence of the Style in these earlier prose narratives, the Closeness of King Arthur in the popular imagination: he appears several times in these tales. But if I dare say Bo to my benefactors at one point — they do not need to make a curtsy to contemporary democratic humbug: in fairy tales the lowly are exalted, the poor peasant marries the princess or even — shocking to relate — makes a fortune.
After the Opies the next two books are small beer. But I am grateful to Miss Finlay for enlightening me as to the real nature of the Lambton Worm. It is not what you might think, after recent events in the family, but any serpent-like figure, for example a dragon. The story begins with the Lambton heir, who was very much spoiled, "he was so used to having his own way, to saying what he liked and doing What .he wanted." At last he came to the conclusion that "all my life I have been selfish and thoughtless; now the time has come when I roust have a care for others." He goes on a crusading rampage, while the Lambton Worm 'before the milkmaids were stirring would suck the cows' milk so that not a drop was left; no egg in a nest was ever safe," etc. It all reads like a modern morality — was there no arrierePensee in the writing? I find Mr Whitney's Russian fairy tales informative as to the Russian mind, but unamusing; the best thing about the book is its dedication to a Siberian cat. One can never have too much about cats. The illustrations of the Opies' book are superb, from original editions land chapbooks; and of Miss Finlay's hook, attractive. I cannot say the same for Mr Whitney's: I find the Teutonic drawings of Dieter Lange coarse in texture and line, the subjects unappetising.
Arthur Rackham was the best loved illustrator of children's books in his time — though there appears to be no notice of him in the Dictionary of National Biography (too many clerics and unimportant dons). Rackham's drawings were really imaginative, free-flowing and delicate of line; this book has twelve full-colour plates, as well as silhouettes and line-drawings. It is a re-issue of a book that aPpeared in the first world-war, as The Allies' Fairy Book; so it has stories from all our then gallant. allies, including Italy, Belgium, Serbia and Japan. It originally had an introduction by the ubiquitous Gosse; even without him it is very welcome.
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