[Sidenote: The book generally.]
This episode is, in many ways, so curious and characteristic, that it seemed worth while to dwell on it for a little; but the account itself must have shown how impossible it is to repeat the process of general abstract. There are, I think, in the book (which took twelve years to publish and fills as many volumes in French, while the English translation is an immense folio of nearly a thousand pages in double column, also ent.i.tled _Hymen"s Praeludia_[202]) fewer separate _Histoires_, though there are a good many, than in the _Cyrus_, but the intertwined love-plots are almost more complicated. For instance, the Herod-and-Mariamne tragedy is brought in with a strictly "proper" lover, Tiridates, whom Salome uses to provoke Herod"s patience, and who has, at the very opening of the book, proved himself both a natural philosopher of no mean order by seeing a fire at sea, and "judging with much likelihood that it comes from a ship," and a brave fellow by rescuing from the billows no less a person than the above-mentioned Queen Candace. From her, however, he exacts immediate, and, as some moderns might think, excessive, payment by making her listen to his own _Histoire_.
Not the least attractive part of _Cleopatre_ to some people will be that very "Phebus," or amatory conceit, which made the next ages scorn it.
When one of the numerous "unknowns" of both s.e.xes (in this case a girl) is discovered (rather prettily) lying on a river bank and playing with the surface of the water, "the earth which sustained this fair body seemed to produce new gra.s.s to receive her more agreeably"--a phrase which would have shocked good Bishop Vida many years before, as much as it would have provoked the greater scorn of Mr. Addison about as many after. There are many "ecphrases" or set descriptions of this kind, and they show a good deal of stock convention. For instance, the wind is always "most discreetly, most discreetly" ready, as indeed it was in Mlle. de Scudery"s own chaste stories, to blow up sleeves or skirts a little, and achieve the distraction of the beholders by what it reveals.
But on the whole, as was hinted above, Gauthier de Costes de La Calprenede is the most natural creature of the heroic band.
[Sidenote: _Ca.s.sandre._]
His earlier _Ca.s.sandre_ is not much inferior to _Cleopatre_, and has a little more eccentricity about it. The author begins his Second Part by making the ghost of Ca.s.sandra herself (who is not the Trojan Ca.s.sandra at all) address a certain Calista, whom she mildly accuses of "dragging her from her grave two thousand years after date," adding, as a boast of his own in a Preface, that the very name "Ca.s.sandre" has never occurred in the _First_ Part--a huge cantle of the work. The fact is that it is an _alias_ for Statira, the daughter of Darius and wife of Alexander, and is kept by her during the whole of her later married life with her lover Oroondates, King of Scythia, who has vainly wooed her in early days before her union with the great Emathian conqueror. Here, again, the mere student of "unmixed" history may start up and say, "Why! this Statira, who was also called Barsine [an independent personage here] was murdered by Roxana after Alexander"s death!" But, as was also said, these romancers exercise the privilege of mercy freely; and though La Calprenede"s Roxana is naughty enough for anything (she makes, of course, the most shameless love to Oroondates), she is not allowed to kill her rival, who is made happy, after another series of endless adventures of her own, her lover"s, and other people"s. The book opens with a lively interest to students of the English novel; for the famous two cavaliers of G. P. R. James appear, though they are not actually riding at the moment, but have been, and, after resting, see two others in mortal combat. Throughout there is any amount of good fighting, as, for the matter of that, there is in _Cleopatre_ also; and there is less duplication of detail here than in some other respects, for La Calprenede is rather apt to repeat his characters and situations. For instance, the fight between Lysimachus and Thalestris (La Calprenede is fond of Amazons), though _not_ in the details, is of course in the idea a replica of that between Alcamenes and Menalippe in _Cleopatre_; and names recur freely. Moreover, in the less famous story, the whole situation of hero and heroine is exactly duplicated in respect of the above-mentioned Lysimachus and Parisatis, Ca.s.sandra"s younger sister, who is made to marry Hephaestion at first, and only awarded, in the same fashion as her elder sister, at last to her true lover.
By the way, the already-mentioned "harmonising" is in few places more oddly shown than by the remark that Plutarch"s error in representing Statira as killed was due to the fact that he did not recognise her under her later name of Ca.s.sandra--a piece of Gascon half-navete, half-jest which Mlle. de Scudery"s Norman shrewdness[203] would hardly have allowed. There is also much more of the supernatural in these books than in hers, and the characters are much less prim. Roxana, who, of course, is meant to be naughty, actually sends a bracelet of her hair to Oroondates! which, however, that faithful lover of another instantly returns.
[Sidenote: _Faramond._]
La Calprenede"s third novel, _Faramond_, is unfinished as his work, and the continuation seems to have more than one claimant to its authorship.
If the "eminent hand" was one Vaumoriere, who independently accomplished a minor "heroic" in _Le Grand Scipion_, he was not likely to infuse much fire into the ashes of his predecessor. As it stands in La Calprenede"s own part, _Faramond_ is a much duller book than _Ca.s.sandre_ or _Cleopatre_. It must, of course, be remembered that, though patriotism has again and again prompted the French to attack these misty Merovingian times (the _Astree_ itself deals with them in the liberal fashion in which it deals with everything), the result has rarely, if ever, been a success. Indeed I can hardly think of any one--except our own "Twin Brethren" in _Thierry and Theodoret_--who has made anything good out of French history before Charlemagne.[204] The reader, therefore, unless he be a very thorough and conscientious student, had better let _Faramond_ alone; but its elder sisters are much pleasanter company. Indeed the impolite thought will occur that it is much more like the Scudery novels, part of which it succeeded, and may possibly have been the result--not by any means the only one in literature--of an unlucky attempt to beat a rival by copying him or her.
[Sidenote: Gomberville--_La Caritee_.]
If any one, seeking acquaintance with the works of Marin le Roy, Seigneur de Gomberville, begins at the beginning with his earliest work, and one of the earliest of the whole cla.s.s, _La Caritee_ (not "Carit_ie_," as in some reference books), he may not be greatly appetised by the addition to the t.i.tle, "contenant, sous des temps, des personnes, et des noms supposes, plusieurs rares et veritables histoires de notre temps." For this is a proclamation, as Urfe had _not_ proclaimed it,[205] of the wearisome "key" system, which, though undoubtedly it has had its partisans at all times, is loathsome as well as wearisome to true lovers of true literature. To such persons every lovable heroine of romance is, more or less, suggestive of more or fewer women of history, other romance, or experience; every hero, more or less, though to a smaller extent, recognisable or realisable in the same way; and every event, one in which such readers have been, might have been, or would have liked to be engaged themselves; but they do not care the sc.r.a.pe of a match whether the author originally intended her for the Princess of Kennaquhair or for Polly Jones, him and it for corresponding realities. Nor is the sequel particularly ravishing, though it is dedicated to "all fair and virtuous shepherdesses, all generous and perfect shepherds." Perhaps it is because one is not a generous and perfect shepherd that one finds the "Great Pan is Dead" story less impressive in Gomberville"s prose than in Milton"s verse at no distant period; is not much refreshed by getting to Rome about the death of Germanicus, and hearing a great deal about his life; or later still by Egyptian _bergeries_--things in which somehow one does not see a concatenation accordingly; and is not consoled by having the Phoenix business done--oh! so differently from the fashion of Shakespeare or even of Darley. And when it finishes with a solemn function for the rise of the Nile, the least exclusively modern of readers may prefer Moore or Gautier.
[Sidenote: _Polexandre._]
But if any one, deeming not unjustly that he had drunk enough of _Caritee_, were to conclude that he would drink no more of any of the waters of Gomberville, he would make a mistake. _Cytheree_[1] I cannot yet myself judge of, except at second-hand; but the first part of _Polexandre_, if not also the continuation, _Le Jeune Alcidiane_,[206]
may be very well spoken of. It, that is to say the first part of it, was translated into English by no less a person than William Browne, just at the close of his life; and, perhaps for this reason, the British Museum does not contain the French original; but those who cannot attain to this lose the less, because the substance of the book is the princ.i.p.al thing. This makes it one of the liveliest of the whole group, and one does not feel it an idle vaunt when at the end the author observes cheerfully of his at last united hero and heroine, "Since we have so long enjoyed _them_, let us have so much justice as to think it fitting now that _they_ should likewise enjoy each other." Yet the unresting and unerring spirit of criticism may observe that even here the verbosity which is the fault of the whole division makes its appearance. For why not suppress most of the words after "them," and merely add, "let them now enjoy each other"?
The book is, in fact, rather like a modernised "number" of the _Amadis_ series,[207], and the author has had the will and the audacity to exchange the stale old Greeks and Romans--not the real Greeks, who can never be stale, or the real Romans, who can stand a good deal of staling, but the conventional cla.s.sics--as well as the impossible shadows of the Dark Ages, for Lepanto and the Western Main, Turks and Spaniards and Mexicans, and a Prince of Scotland. Here also we find in the hero something more like Almanzor than Artamene, if not than Artaban: and of the whole one may say vulgarly that "the pot boils."
Now, with the usual Heroic it too often fails to attain even a gentle simmer.
[Sidenote: Camus--_Palombe_, etc.]
Jean Camus [de Pontcarre?],[208] Bishop of Belley and of Arras--friend of St. Francis of Sales and of Honore d"Urfe; author of many "Christian"
romances to counteract the bad effects of the others, of a famous _Esprit de Saint Francois de S._, and of a very great number of miscellaneous works,--seems to have been a rather remarkable person, and, with less power and more eccentricity, a sort of Fenelon of the first half of the century. His best known novel, _Palombe_, stands practically alone in its group as having had the honour of a modern reprint in the middle of the nineteenth century.[209] The t.i.tle-giver is a female, not a male, human dove, and of course a married one. Camus was a divine of views which one does not call "liberal," because the word has been almost more sullied by ign.o.ble use in this connection than in any other--but unconventional and independent; and he provoked great wrath among his brethren by reflecting on the abuses of the conventual system. _Palombe_ appears to be not uninteresting, but after all it is but one of those parasitic exercises which have rarely been great except in the hands of very great genius. Historically, perhaps, the much less famous _Evenemens Singuliers_ (2 vols., 1628) are more important, though they cannot be said to be very amusing. For (to the surprise, perhaps, of a reader who comes to the book without knowing anything about it) it is composed of pure Marmontel-and-Miss-Edgeworth Moral Tales about _L"Ami Desloyal_, _La Prudente Mere_, _L"Amour et la Mort_, _L"Imprecation Maternelle_, and the like. Of course, as one would expect from the time, and the profession of the author, the meal of the morality is a little above the malt of the tale; but the very t.i.tles are "germinal."
[Sidenote: Hedelin d"Aubignac--_Macarise._]
Francois Hedelin, Abbe d"Aubignac, is one of those unfortunate but rarely quite guiltless persons who live in literary history much more by the fact of their having attacked or lectured greater men than themselves, and by witticisms directed against them, than by their own actual work, which is sometimes not wholly contemptible. He concerns us here only as the author of a philosophical-heroic romance, rather agreeably ent.i.tled _Macarise ou La Reine des Iles Fortunees_, where the bland navete of the pedantry would almost disarm the present members of that Critical Regiment, of which the Abbe, in his turn, was not so much a chaplain as a most combatant officer. The very t.i.tle goes on to neutralise its attractiveness by explaining--with that benignant condescension which is natural to at least some of its author"s cla.s.s--that it "contains the Moral Philosophy of the Stoics under the veil of several agreeable adventures in the form of a Romance"; and that we may not forget this, various side-notes refer to pa.s.sages in an _Abrege_ of that philosophy. The net is thus quite frankly set in the sight of the bird, and if he chooses to walk into it, he has only himself to blame. The opening is a fine example of that plunge into the middle of things which Hedelin had learnt from his cla.s.sical masters to think proper: "Les cruels persecuteurs d"Arianax l"ayant reduit a la necessite de se precipiter[210] dans les eaux de la Sennatele avec son frere Dinazel...." The fact that the presupposed gentle reader knows nothing of the persons or the places mentioned is supposed to arouse in him an inextinguishable desire to find out. That he should be at once gratified is, of course, unthinkable. In fact his attention will soon be diverted from Arianax and Dinazel and the banks of the Sennatele altogether by the very tragical adventures of a certain Clearte. He, with a company of friends, visits the country of a tyrant, who is accustomed to welcome strangers and heap them with benefits, till a time comes (the allegory is something obvious) when he demands it all back, with their lives, through a cruel minister (again something "speakingly"
named) "Thanate." The head of this company, Clearte, on receiving the sentence, talks Stoicism for many pages, and when he is exhausted, somebody else takes up the running in such a fascinating manner that it "seemed as if he had only to go on talking to make the victims immortal!" But the atrocious Thanate cuts, at the same moment, the thread of the discourse and the throat of Clearte--who is, however, transported to the dominions of Macarise,--and _histoires_ and "ecphrases" and interspersions of verse follow as usual. But the Abbe is nowise infirm of purpose; and the book ends with the strangest mixture of love-letters and not very short discourses on the various schools of philosophy, together with a Glossary or Onomasticon interpreting the proper names which have been used after the following fashion: "Alcarinte. _La Crainte_, du mot francais par anagramme sans aucun changement," though how you can have an anagram without a change is not explained.
[Sidenote: Gombauld--_Endimion._]
Perhaps one may cla.s.s, if, indeed, cla.s.sification is necessary, with the religious romances of Camus and the philosophical romance of Hedelin d"Aubignac, the earlier allegorical ones of the poet Gombauld, _Endimion_ and _Amaranthe_. The latter I have not yet seen. _Endimion_ is rather interesting; there was an early English translation of it; and I have always been of those who believe that Keats, somehow or other, was more directly acquainted with seventeenth-century literature than has generally been allowed.[211] The wanderings of the hero are as different as possible in detail; but the fact that there _are_ wanderings at all is remarkable, and there are other coincidences with Keats and differences from any cla.s.sical form, which it might be out of place to dwell on here. Endymion is waked from his Latmian sleep by the infernal clatter of the dwellers at the base of the mountain, who use all the loudest instruments they possess to dispel an eclipse of the moon: and is discovered by his friend Pyzandre, to whom he tells the vicissitudes of his love and sleep. The early revealings of herself by Diana are told with considerable grace, and the whole, which is not too long, is readable. But there are many of the _navetes_ and awkwardnesses of expression which attracted to the writers of this time the scorn of Boileau and others down to La Harpe. The Dedication to the Queen may perhaps be excused for a.s.serting, in its first words, that as Endymion was put to sleep by the Moon, so he has been reawakened by the Sun,[212] _i.e._ her Majesty. But a Nemesis of this Phebus follows. For, later, it is laid down that "La Lune doit _toujours_ sa lumiere au Soleil." From which it will follow that Diana owed her splendour to Anne of Austria, or was it Marie de Medicis?[213] It was fortunate for Gombauld that he did not live under the older dispensation. Artemis was not a forgiving G.o.ddess like Aphrodite.
Again, when Diana has disappeared after one of her graciousnesses, her lover makes the following reflection--that the G.o.ds apparently can depart _sans etre en peine de porter necessairement les pieds l"un devant l"autre_--an observation proper enough in burlesque, for the idea of a divine goose-step or marking time, instead of the _incessus_, is ludicrous enough. But there is not the slightest sign of humour anywhere in the book. Yet, again, this is a thing one would rather not have said, "Diane cessant de m"etre favorable, Ismene[214] _me pouvait tenir lieu de Deesse_." Now it is sadly true that the human race does occasionally entertain, and act upon, reflections of this kind: and persons like Mr.
Thomas Moore and Gombauld"s own younger contemporary, Sir John Suckling, have put the idea into light and lively verse. But you do not expect it in a serious romance.
Nevertheless it may be repeated that _Endimion_ is one of the most readable of the two cla.s.ses of books--the smaller sentimental and the longer heroic--between which it stands in scope and character. The author"s practice in the "other harmony" makes the obligatory verse-insertions rather less clumsy than usual; and it may be permitted to add that the ill.u.s.trations of the original edition, which are unusually numerous and elaborate, are also rather unusually effective.
"Peggy"s face" is too often as "wretched" as Thackeray confessed his own attempts were; but the compositions are not, as such, despicable--even in the case of the immortal and immortalising kiss-scene itself. The "delicious event," to quote the same author in another pa.s.sage, is not actually coming off--but it is very near. But it was perhaps a pity that either Gombauld or Keats ever _waked_ Endymion.
[Sidenote: Mme. de Villedieu.]
The most recent book[215] but one about Mme. de Villedieu contains (and, oddly enough, confesses itself to contain) very little about her novels, which the plain man might have thought the only reason for writing about her at all. It tells (partly after Tallemant) the little that is known about her (adding a great deal more about other people, things, and places, and a vast amount of conjecture), and not only takes the very dubious "letters" published by herself for gospel, but attributes to her, on the slightest evidence, if any, the anonymous _Memoires sur la Vie de Henriette Sylvie de Moliere_, and, what is more, accepts them as autobiographic; quotes a good deal of her very valueless verse and that of others, and relates the whole in a most marvellous style, the smallest and most modest effervescences of which are things like this: "La religion arrose son ame d"une eau parfumee, et les fleurs noirs du repentir eclosent" or "Soixante ans pesaient sur son crane ennuage d"une perruque."[216] A good bibliography of the actual work, and not a little useful information about books and MS. relating to the period, may reconcile one cla.s.s of readers to it, and a great deal of scandal another; but as far as the subject of this history goes no one will be much wiser when he closes the volume than he was when he opened it.
The novelist-heroine"s actual name was Marie Catherine Hortense des Jardins, and she never was really Mme. de Villedieu at all, though there was a real M. de Villedieu whom she loved, went through a marriage ceremony and lived with, left, according to some, or was left by, according to others. But he was already married, and this marriage was never dissolved. Very late in life she seems actually to have married a Marquis de Chaste, who died soon. But most of the time was spent in rather scandalous adventures, wherein Fouquet"s friend Gourville, the minister Lyonne, and others figure. In fact she seems to have been a counterpart as well as a contemporary of our own Afra, though she never came near Mrs. Behn in poetry or perhaps in fiction. Her first novel, _Alcidamie_, not to be confounded with the earlier _Alcidiane_, was a scarcely concealed utilising of the famous scandal about Tancrede de Rohan (Mlle. des Jardins" mother had been a dependant on the Rohan family, and she herself was much befriended by that formidable and sombre-fated enchantress, Mme. de Montbazon). In fact, common as is the real or imputed "key"-interest in these romances from the _Astree_ onwards, none seems to have borrowed more from at least gossip than this. Her later performances, _Les Annales Galantes de la Grece_ (said to be very rare), _Carmente_, _Les Amours des Grands Hommes_, _Les Desordres de l"Amour_, and some smaller pieces, all rely more or less on this or that kind of scandal. Collections appeared three or four times in the earlier eighteenth century.
[Sidenote: _Le Grand Alcandre Frustre._]
Since M. Magne wrote (and it is fair to say that the main purpose of his book was frankly avowed by its appearance as a member of a series ent.i.tled _Femmes Galantes_), a somewhat more sober account, definitely devoted in part to the novels, has appeared.[217] But even this is not exhaustive from our point of view. The collected editions (of which that of 1702, in 10 vols., said to be the best, is the one I have used) must be consulted if one really wishes to attain a fair knowledge of what "this questionable Hortense" (as Mr. Carlyle would probably have called her) really did in literature; and no one, even of these, appears to contain the whole of her ascribed compositions. What used sometimes to be quoted as her princ.i.p.al work, _Le Grand Alcandre Frustre_ (the last word being often omitted), is, in fact, a very small book, containing a bit of scandal about the Grand Monarque, of the same kind as those which myriad anonyms of the time printed in Holland, and of which any one who wants them may find specimens enough in the _Bibliotheque Elzevirienne_ edition of Bussy-Rabutin. Its chief--if not its only--attraction is an exceedingly quaint frontispiece--a cavalier and lady standing with joined hands under a chandelier, the torches of which are held by a ring of seven Cupids, so that the lower one hangs downwards, and the disengaged hand of the cavalier, which is raised, seems to be grabbing at him.
[Sidenote: The collected love-stories.]
Most of the rest, putting aside the doubtful _Henriette de Moliere_ already referred to, are collections of love-stories, which their t.i.tles, rather than their contents, would seem to have represented to the ordinary commentator as loose. There is really very little impropriety, except of the mildest kind, in any of them,[218] and they chiefly consist of the kind of quasi-historic anecdote (only better told) which is not uncommon in English, as, for instance, in Croxall"s _Novelist_. They are rather well written, but for the most part consist of very "public" material, scarcely made "private" by any striking merit, and distinguished by curious liberties with history, if not with morals.
[Sidenote: Their historic liberties.]
[Sidenote: _Carmente_, etc.]
For instance, in one of her _Amours Galantes_ the Elfrida-Ethelwold-Edgar story is told, not only with "_Edward I._ of England" for the deceived and revengeful king, but with a further and more startling intrusion of Eleanor of Guyenne! That of Inez de Castro is treated in a still more audacious manner. Also (with what previous example I know not, but Hortense was exceedingly apt to have previous examples) the names of the heretic to whom Dante was not merciful and of his beloved Margaret--names to which Charles Kingsley made the atonement of two of the most charming of his neglected poems--appear as "Dulcin"
and "Marguerite," King and Queen of Lombardy, but guilty of more offensive lubricity than the sternest inquisitor ever charged on the historical Dolcino and his sect. For this King and Queen set up, in cold blood, two courts of divorce, in one of which each is judge, with the direct purpose of providing themselves with a supply of temporary wives and husbands. Some have maintained that no less a thing than the _Princesse de Cleves_ itself was suggested by something of Mme. de Villedieu"s; but this seems to me merely the usual plagiarism-hunter"s blunder of forgetting that the treatment, not the subject, is the _crux_ of originality. Of her longer books, _Alcidamie_, the first, has been spoken of. The _Amours des Grandes Hommes_ and _Cleonice ou le Roman Galant_ belong to the "keyed" Heroics; while the _Journal Amoureux_, which runs to nearly five hundred pages, has Diane de Poitiers for its chief heroine. Lastly, _Carmente_ (or, as it was reprinted, _Carmante_) is a sort of mixed pastoral, with Theocritus himself introduced, after a fashion noted more than once before.
[Sidenote: Her value on the whole.]
Her most praised things, recently, have been the story of the loves of Henri IV. and Mme. de Sauve (lightly touched on, perhaps "after" her in both senses, by Dumas) in the _Amours Galantes_, and a doubtful story (also attributed to the obscure M. de Preschac of the _Cabinet des Fees_[219]) ent.i.tled _L"Ill.u.s.tre Parisienne_, over which folk have quarrelled as to whether it is to be labelled "realist" or not. One regrets, however, to have to say that--except for fresh, if not very strong, evidence of that "questing" character which we find all over the subjects of these two chapters--the interest of Mme. de Villedieu"s work can hardly be called great. By a long chapter of accidents, the present writer, who had meant to read her some five-and-thirty years ago, never read her actually till the other day--with all good will, with no extravagant expectation beforehand, but with some disappointment at the result. She is not a bookmaker of the worst kind; she evidently had wits and literary velleities; and she does ill.u.s.trate the blind _nisus_ of the time as already indicated. But beyond the bookmaking cla.s.s she never, I think, gets. Her mere writing is by no means contemptible, and we may end by pointing out two little points of interest in _Carmente_.
One is the appearance of the name "Ardelie," which our own Lady Winchelsea took and anglicised as her coterie t.i.tle. It may occur elsewhere, but I do not recollect it. The other is yet a fresh antic.i.p.ation of that bold figure of speech which has been cited before from d.i.c.kens--one of the characters appearing "in a very clean shepherd"s dress _and a profound melancholy_." Mme. de Villedieu (it is about the only place she has held hitherto, if she has held any, in ordinary Histories of French Literature) has usually been regarded as closing the Heroic school. We may therefore most properly turn from her directly to the last and most cheerful division of the subjects of this chapter--the Fairy Tale.
[Sidenote: The fairy tale.]
One of the greatest solaces of the writer of this book, and, he would fain hope, something of a consolation to its readers, has been the possibility, and indeed advisability, of abstention from certain stock literary controversies, or at worst of dismissing them with very brief mention. This solace recurs in reference to the large, vague, and hotly debated subject of folklore and fairy stories, their connection, and the origin of the latter. It is true that "the pleasure gives way to a savour of sorrow," to adopt a charming phrase of Mr. Dobson"s, when I think of the amiable indignation which the absence of what I shall not say, and perhaps still more the presence of some things that I shall say, would have caused in my friend, and his friend, the late Mr. Andrew Lang.[220] But the irreparable is always with us. Despite the undoubted omnipresence of the folk-story, with its "fairy" character in the general sense, I have always wanted more proof than I have ever received, that the thing is of Western rather than of Eastern origin, and that our Western stories of the kind, in so far as they affected literature before a very recent period, are independent. But I attach no particular value to this opinion, and it will influence nothing that I say here. So with a few more half-words to the wise, as that Mme.
d"Aulnoy had been in Spain, that the Crusades took place in the eleventh century, that, independently thereof, Scandinavians had been "Varangians" very early at Constantinople, etc. etc., let us come to the two great literary facts--the chorus of fairy tale-telling proper at the end of the century (of which the coryphaei are the lady already mentioned and Perrault), and the epoch-making translation of _The Arabian Nights_ by Galland.
[Sidenote: Its _general_ characteristics--the happy ending.]
In a certain sense, no doubt, the fairy tale may be said to be merely a variety of the age-old _fabliau_ and _nouvelle_. But it is, for literary purposes, a distinctly and importantly new variety--new not merely in subject, even in the widest possible sense of that rather disputable (or at least disputed) word, but in that _nescio quid_ between subject and treatment for which I know no better term than the somewhat vague one "atmosphere." It has the priceless quality of what may be called good childishness; it gives not merely Fancy but Imagination the freest play, and, till it has itself created one, it is free from any convention. It continued, indeed, always free from those "previous"
conventions which are so intolerable. For it is constantly forgotten that a convention in its youth is often positively healthy, and a convention in the prime of its life a very tolerable thing. It is the _old_ conventions which, as Mahomet rashly acknowledged about something else (saving himself, however, most dexterously afterwards), cannot be tolerated in Paradise. Moreover, besides creating of necessity a sort of fresh dialect in which it had to be told, and producing a set of personages entirely unhackneyed, it did an immense service by introducing a sort of etiquette, quite different from the conventions above noticed,--a set of manners, as it may almost be called, which had the strongest and most beneficial influence--though, like all strong and good things, it might be perverted--on fiction generally. In this all sorts of nice things, as in the original prescription for what girls are made of, were included--variety, gaiety, colour, surprise, a complete contempt of the contemptible, or of that large part of it which contains priggishness, propriety, "prunes, and prism" generally. Moreover (and here I fear that the above promised abstinence from the contentious must be for a little time waived) it confirmed a great principle of novel and romance alike, that if you can you should "make a good end," as, _teste_ Romance herself, Guinevere did, though the circ.u.mstances were melancholy.
The termination of a fairy tale rarely is, and never should be, anything but happy. For this reason I have always disliked--and though some of the mighty have left their calm seats and endeavoured to annihilate me for it, I still continue to dislike--that old favourite of some part of the public, _The Yellow Dwarf_. That detestable creature (who does not even amuse me) had no business to triumph; and, what is more, I don"t believe he did. Not being an original writer, I cannot tell the true history as it might be told; but I can criticise the false. I do not object to this version because of its violation of poetical justice--in which, again, I don"t believe. But this is neither poetical, nor just, nor amusing. It is a sort of police report, and I have never much cared for police reports. I should like to have set Maimoune at the Yellow Dwarf: and then there would have been some fun.
It is probably unnecessary to offer any translations here, because the matter is so generally known, and because the books edited by that regretted friend of mine above mentioned have spread it (with much other matter of the same kind) more widely than ever. But the points mentioned above, and perhaps some others, can never be put too firmly to the credit of the fairy tale as regards its influence on fiction, and on French fiction particularly. It remains to be seen, in the next chapter, how what a few purists may call its contamination by, but what we may surely be permitted to call its alliance with, "polite literature" was started, or practically started, through the direct agency of no Frenchman, but of a man who can be claimed by England in the larger and national sense, by Scotland and Ireland and England again in the narrower and more parochial--by Anthony Hamilton. His work, however, must be left till that next chapter, though in this we may, after the "blessed originals" just mentioned, take in their sometimes degenerate successors for nearly a hundred years after Perrault"s time.
[Sidenote: Perrault and Mme. d"Aulnoy.]
Well, however, as the simpler and purer fairy-tales may be known to all but twentieth-century children (who are said not to like them), it is doubtful whether many people have considered them in the light in which we have to regard them here, so as to see in them both a link in the somewhat complicated chain of novel development, and also one which is not dead metal, but serves as a medium for introducing powerful currents of influence on the chain itself. We have dwelt on one point--the desirableness, if not necessity, of shortness in them--as specially valuable at the time. No doubt they need not all be as short as Perrault"s, though even among his there are instances (not to mention _L"Adroite Princesse_ for the moment), such as _Peau d"ane_, of more than twenty pages, as against the five of the _Chaperon Rouge_ and the ten of _Barbe Bleue_, _Le Chat Botte_, and _Cendrillon_. Mme. d"Aulnoy"s run longer; but of course the longest[221] of all are mites to the mammoths of the Scudery romance. A fairy story must never "drag,"
and in its better, and indeed all its genuine, forms it never does.
Further (it must be remembered that "Little Red Riding Hood,"