A History of the French Novel Volume I Part 18

in its unadulterated and "_un_happy ending" form, is not a fairy story at all, for talking animals are not peculiar to that), "fairiness,"

the actual presence of these gracious or ungracious but always between-human-and-divine-creatures, is necessary,[222] and their agency must be necessary too. In this and other ways it is interesting to contrast two stories (which are neighbours to each other, with _Peau d'ane_ between them, in the convenient one-volume collection of French Fairy Tale cla.s.sics published by Gamier), Mme. d'Aulnoy's _Gracieuse et Percinet_ and _L'Adroite Princesse ou Les Aventures de Finette_, which appeared with Perrault's, but which I can hardly believe to be his. They are about the same length, but the one is one of the best and the other one of the worst examples of its author and of the general style. It may be worth while to a.n.a.lyse both very briefly. As for Perrault's better work, such a.n.a.lysis should be as unnecessary as it would be irreverent.

[Sidenote: Commented examples--_Gracieuse et Percinet_.]

That _Gracieuse et Percinet_ is of an essentially "stock" character is not in the least against it, for so it ought to be: and the "stock"

company that plays its parts plays them well. The father is perhaps rather excessively foolish and unnatural, but then he almost had to be.

The wicked and ugly stepmother tops, but does not overtop, _her_ part, and her punishment is not commonplace. Gracieuse herself deserves her name, not only "by her comely face and by her fair bodie," but by her good but not oppressive wits, and her amiable but not faultless disposition. She ought not to have looked into the box; but then we should not have liked her nearly as much if she had not done so. She was foolishly good in refusing to stay with Percinet; but we are by no means certain that we should like her better if she had thrown herself into his arms at the first or second time of asking. Besides, where would have been the story? As for Percinet, he escapes in a wonderful fashion, though partly by help of his lady's little wilfulnesses, the dangers of the handsome, amiable, in a small way always successful, and almost omnipotent hero. There is a sort of ironic tenderness, in his letting Gracieuse again and again go her wilful way and show her foolish filiality, which saves him. He is always ready, and does his spiriting in the politest and best manner, particularly when he shepherds all those amusing but rebellious little people into their box again--a feat which some great novelists have achieved but awkwardly in their own cases. There is even pathos in the apparently melancholy statement that the fairy palace is dead, and that Gracieuse will never see it till she is buried. I should like to have been Percinet, and I should particularly like to have married Gracieuse.

Moreover, the thing is full of small additional seasonings of incident and phrase to the solid feast of fairy working which it provides.

Gracieuse's "collation," with its more than twenty pots of different jams, has a delightful realty (which is slightly different from reality) even for those to whom jam has never been the very highest of human delights, because they prefer savouries to sweets. Even the abominable d.u.c.h.ess seems to have had a splendid cellar, before she took to filling the casks with mere gold and jewels to catch the foolish king. It is impossible to imagine a scene more agreeably compounded of politeness and affection than Percinet's first introduction of himself to the Princess: and it is extraordinarily nice to find that they knew all about each other before, though we have had not the slightest previous information as to the acquaintance. I am very much afraid that he made his famous horse kick and plunge when Grognon was on him; but it must be remembered that he had been made to lead that animal against his will.

The description of the hag's flogging Gracieuse with feathers instead of scourges is a quite admirable adaptation of some martyrological stories; and when, in her dilapidated condition, she remarks that she wishes he would go away, because she has always been told that she must not be alone with young gentlemen, one feels that the martyrdom must have been transferred, in no mock sense, to Percinet himself. If she borrows Psyche's trials, what good story is not another good story refreshed?[223]

[Sidenote: _L'Adroite Princesse._]

But if almost everything is good and well managed in _Gracieuse_, it may also be said that almost everything is badly managed in _Finette_.[224]

To begin with, there is that capital error which has been noticed above, that it is not really a fairy tale at all. Except the magic _quenouilles_, which themselves are of the smallest importance in the story, there is nothing in it beyond the ways of an ordinary adventurous _nouvelle_. The touch of _grivoiserie_ by which the Princesses Nonchalante and Babillarde allow the weaknesses ticketed in their names to hand them over as a prey to the cunning and blackguard Prince Riche-Cautele, under pretence of entirely unceremonised and unwitnessed "marriage," is in no way amusing. Finette's escapes from the same fate are a little better, but the whole is told (as its author seems to have felt) at much too great length; and the dragging in of an actual fairy at the end, to communicate to the heroine the exceedingly novel and recondite maxim that "Prudence is the mother of safety," is almost idiotic. If the thing has any value, it is as an example, not of a real fairy tale nor of a satire on fairy tales (for which it is much too much "out of the rules" and much too stupid), but of something which may save an ordinary reader, or even student, from attacking, as I fear we shall have to do, the _Cabinet des Fees_ at large, and discovering, by painful experience, how excessively silly and tedious the corruption of this wise and delightful kind may be.

One might, of course, draw lessons from others of the original batches, but this may suffice for the specimen batch under immediate review.

_Peau d'ane_, one of the most interesting to "folklorists" and origin-hunters, is, of course, also in itself interesting to students of literature. Its combination of the old theme of the incestuous pa.s.sion of a father for his daughter, with the special but not invariable shadow of excuse in the selfish vanity of the mother's dying request, is quite out of the usual way of these things. So is the curious series of fairy failures--things apparently against the whole set of the game--beginning with the unimaginative conception of dresses, weather-, or sky-, moon-, and sun-colour, rendered futile by the success of the artists, and ending in the somewhat ba.n.a.l device of making yourself ugly and running away, with the odd conclusion-contrast of Peau d'ane's squalid appearance in public and her private splendour in the fairy garments.

[Sidenote: The danger of the "moral."]

Still, the lessons of correction, warning, and instruction to be drawn from these gracious little things, for the benefit of their younger and more elaborate successors, are not easily exhausted. They are, on the whole, very moral, and it is well that morality, rightly understood, should animate fiction. But they are occasionally much _too_ moral, and then they warn off instead of cheering on. Take, for instance, two other neighbours in the collection just quoted, _Le Prince Cheri_ and the ever-delightful _La Belle et La Bete_. Both of these are moral; but the latter is just moral enough, while _Cheri_, with one or two alleviations (of which, perhaps, more presently), is hardly anything if _not_ moral, and therefore disgusts, or at any rate bores. On the other hand, "Beauty" is as _bonne_ as she is _belle_; her only fault, that of overstaying her time, is the result of family affection, and her reward and the punishment of the wicked sisters are quite copy-book. But it is not for this part that we love what is perhaps the most engaging of all the tales. It is for Beauty's own charm, which is subtly conveyed; for the brisk and artistic "revolutions and discoveries"; above all, for the far from merely sentimental pathos of the Beast's all but death _for_ love, and the not in the least mawkish bringing of him to life again _by_ love.[225]

[Sidenote: Yet often redeemed.]

One may perhaps also make amends to Prince Cheri for the abuse just bestowed on him. His story has at least one touch which is sovereign for a fiction-fault common in the past, and only too probable in the future, at whatever time one takes the "present" of the story. When he is not unjustly turned into a monster of the most allegorical-composite order of monster architecture--a monster to whom dragons and wyverns and chimaeras dire are as ordinary as kittens--what do they do with him?

They put him "with the other monsters." _Ce n'est pas plus raide que ca._ The present writer need hardly fear to be thought an anti-mediaevalist, but he is very much afraid that an average mediaeval romancer might have thought it necessary to catalogue these other monsters with the aid of a Bestiary. On the other hand, there have been times--no matter which--when this abrupt introduction and dismissal of monsters as common objects (for which any respectable community will have proper stables or cages) would have been disallowed, or explained away, or apologised for, or, worst of all, charged with a sort of wink or sneer to let the reader know that the author knew what he was about.

Here there is nothing of this superfluous or offensive sort. The appropriate and undoubting logic of the style prevails over all too reasonable difficulties. There are monsters, or how could Cheri be made into one? If there are monsters there must, or in the highest probability may, be other monsters. Put him with them, and make no fuss about it. If all novelists had had this _aplomb_, we should have been spared a great deal of tediousness, some positive failures, and the spoiling, or at least the blotting and marring, of many excellent situations. But to praise the good points of fairy stories, from the brief consummateness of _Le Chat Botte_ to the longer drawn but still perfectly golden matter of _La Biche au Bois_, would really be superfluous. One loathes leaving them; but one has to do it, so far as the more unsophisticated part of them is concerned. Yet the duty of the historian will not let him be content with these, and, to vary "The Brave Lord Willoughby" a little, "turning to the [_others_] a thousand more," he must "slay," or at least criticise.

[Sidenote: The main _Cabinet des Fees_--more on Mme. d'Aulnoy.]

He who ventures on the complete _Cabinet des Fees_[226] in its more than forty volumes, will provide himself with "cabin furniture" of nearly as good pastime-quality, at least to my fancy (and yet I may claim to be something of a Balzacian), as the slightly larger shelf-ful which suggested itself to the fancy of Mr. Browning and provoked (_as_ "cabin furniture") the indignation of Mr. Swinburne. But he had better look over the contents before he takes it on board, or he will find himself, if his travelling library is anything like as large as that of the patriarch Photius, in danger of duplication. For the _Cabinet_ holds, not merely the _Arabian Nights_ in the original translation of Galland, but also Hamilton: as well, of course, as much of what we may call the cla.s.sical fairy matter proper on which we have already dwelt, and which is known to all decent people. Still, he will find more of Mme. d'Aulnoy than, unless he is already something of an expert, he already knows, and perhaps he will not be entirely rejoiced at the amplification. She wrote more or less regular heroic romances,[227] which are very inferior to her fairy tales; and though these are not in the _Cabinet_, she sometimes "mixes the kinds" rather disastrously in shorter pieces. The framework of _Don Gabriel Ponce de Leon_, which enshrines the sad but charming "Golden Sheep," and a variant of _Cendrillon_, is poor stuff; and _Les Chevaliers Errans_ only shows what we knew before, that the junction of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries is not the time or the place in which to find the loved one, if that loved one is mediaeval. Still, this invaluable lady does generally reck and exemplify her own immortal rede. "Il me semble," says Prince Marca.s.sin to the fairies, "a vous entendre, qu'il ne faut pas meme croire ce qu'on voit."

And they reply, "La regle n'est pas toujours generale; _mais il est indubitable que l'on doit suspendre son jugement sur bien des choses, et penser qu'il peut entrer quelque chose de Feerie dans ce que nous paroit de plus certain_."

[Sidenote: Warning against disappointment.]

Alas! it was precisely this _quelque chose de Feerie_ which is wanting in the majority of the minor fairy-tale writers. That they should attain the wonderful simplicity, freshness, and charm of Perrault at his best was not to be expected; hardly that they should reach the more sophisticated grace of Hamilton; but it might have been hoped that some would come more or less near the lower, and much more unequal, but occasionally very successful art or luck of Mme. d'Aulnoy herself.

Unfortunately very few of them do. It was easy enough to begin _Il etait autrefois un roi et une reine_, to put in a Prince Charming and a Princess Graciosa, and good fairies and bad fairies, and magicians and ogres and talking beasts, and the like. It was not so easy to make all these things work together to produce the peculiar spell which belongs to the true land of Faery, and to that land alone. Still more unfortunately, wrong ways of attempting the object (or some other object) were as easy as the right ways were difficult. They cannot avoid muddling the fairy tale with the heroic romance: and with the half-historical sub-variety of this latter which Mme. de La Fayette introduced. The worst enchanter that ever fairies had to fight with is not such an enemy of theirs as History and Geography--two most respectable persons in their proper places, but fatal here. They will make King Richard of England tell fairy tales to Blondel out of the Austrian tower, and muddle up things about his wicked brother the Count of Mortagne. They will talk of Lemnos and Memphis and other _patatis_ and _patatas_ of the cla.s.sical dictionary and the _Grand Cyrus_. In a fashion not perhaps so instantly suicidal, but in a sufficiently annoying fashion, they will invent clumsy "speaking" names, or dog-Latin and cat-Greek ones. And, perhaps worst of all, they prost.i.tute the delicate charms of the fairy tale to clumsy adulation of the reigning monarch, and tedious half-veiled flattery or satire of less exalted persons, or, if "prost.i.tute" be too harsh a word here, attempt to force a marriage between these charms and the dullest moralising. In fact, it is scarcely extravagant to say that, in regard to too many of them--to some of them at least--everything that ought not to be, such as the things just mentioned and others, is there, and everything that ought to be--lightness, brightness, the sense of the impossible in which it is delightful to believe, the dream-feeling, the magic of gratified wish and realised ideal--is not.

[Sidenote: Mlle. de la Force and others.]

Of course, in these other and minor writers that the _Cabinet_ has to give, all these disappointments do not always occur, and the crop is mixed. Mlle. de la Force[228] was one of those _dames_ or _demoiselles de compagnie_ who figure so largely in the literary history of the French eighteenth century, and whose group is ill.u.s.trated by such names as those of Mlle. Delaunay and Mlle. de Lespina.s.se. Her full name was Charlotte Rose de Caumont de la Force, and she was, if not an adventuress, a person of adventures, who also wrote many quasi-historical romances in the _Princesse de Cleves_ manner. Her fairy tales are thin, and marred by weak allegory of the "Carte de Tendre"

kind. A "Pays des Delices," very difficult to reach, and constantly personated by a "Pays des Avances," promises little and performs less.

The eleven (it is an exact eleven) called _Les Ill.u.s.tres Fees_ is scarcely so ill.u.s.trious as the All England and the United were, in the memory of some of us, in another and better played kind of cricket. The stories are not very long; they run to a bare eighteen small pages apiece; but few readers are likely to wish them longer. _Blanche-Belle_ introduces the _sylphes_--an adulteration[229] which generally produces the effect that Thackeray deplored when his misguided friend would have _puree_ mixed with _julienne_. _Le Roi Magicien_ is painfully dest.i.tute of personality; we want names, and pretty names, for a fairy tale. _Le Prince Roger_ is a descendant of Melusine, and one does not think she would be proud of him. _Fortunio_ is better, and _Quiribirini_, one of the numerous stories which turn on remembering or failing to remember an odd name,[230] perhaps better still; but the rest deserve little praise, and the last, _L'Ile Inaccessible_, appears to be, if it is anything but pure dulness, a flat political allegory about England and France.

The style picks up a little in the miscellany called (not without a touch of piquancy) _La Tyrannie des Fees Detruite_, by a Mme.

d'_Auneuil_, whom persons of a sceptical turn might imagine to be a sort of fact.i.tious rival to Mme. d'Aulnoy.[231] It returns to the Greek or pseudo-Greek names of the heroic romance, and to its questionable device of _histoires_ stuck like plums in a pudding. Nor are the _Sans Parangon_ and the _Fee des Fees_ of the Sieur de Preschac utterly bad.

But _Les Aventures d'Abdalla_, besides rashly incurring the danger (to be exemplified and commented on more fully a little later) of vying with the _Arabian Nights_, subst.i.tutes for the genuine local colour and speech the _fade_ jargon of French eighteenth-century "sensibility"--_autels_ and _flammes_ and all the rest of the trumpery.

But it does worse still--it tries to be instructive, and informs us of the difference between male and female _dives_ and _peris_, of the custom of suttee, and of the fact that there are many professional singers and dancers among Indian girls. This is simply intolerable.[232]

[Sidenote: The large proportion of Eastern Tales.]

[Sidenote: _Les Voyages de Zulma._]

The great prominence of the Eastern Tale, indeed, in this collection is likely to be one of the most striking things in it to a new-comer. He would know, of course, that such tales are not uncommon in contemporary English; he would certainly be acquainted with Addison's, Johnson's, Goldsmith's experiments in them, perhaps with those of Hawkesworth and others.[233] He could see for himself that the "accaparation" by France of the peerless _Arabian Nights_ themselves must have led to a still greater fancy for them there; and he might possibly have heard the tradition (which the present writer[234] never traced to its source, or connected with any real evidence either way) that no less a person than Lesage a.s.sisted Galland in his task. But though the _Nights_ themselves form the most considerable single group in the _Cabinet_, the united bulk of their congeners or imitations occupies a still larger s.p.a.ce.

There are the rather pale and "moon-like" but sometimes not uninteresting _Thousand and One Days_, and the obviously and rather foolishly pastiched _Thousand and One Quarters of an Hour_. There are Persian Tales--origin of a famous and characteristic jibe at "Namby Pamby" Philips--and Turkish Tales which are a fragment of one of the numerous versions of the _Seven Sages_ scheme. The just mentioned _Adventures of Abdallah_ betray their source and their nature at once; the h.o.a.ry fables of Bidpai and Lokman are modernised to keep company with these "fakings," and there are more definitely literary attempts to follow. _Les Voyages de Zulma_, again an incomplete thing which actually tails off towards its failure of an end, shows some ingenuity in its conception, but suffers, even in the beginning, from that mixing of kinds which has been pointed out and reprobated. An attempt is made to systematise the fairy idea by representing these gracious creatures as offspring of Destiny and the Earth, with a cruel brother Time, and an offset of mischievous sisters who exactly correspond to the good ones--Disgracieuse to Gracieuse, and so on--and have a queen Laide-des-Laides, who answers to the good fairy princess, Belle-des-Belles. A mortal--Zulma--is, for paternal rather than personal merits, chosen by Destiny to enjoy the privilege of entering and understanding the fairy world, and Gracieuse is the fairy a.s.signed as his guide. The idea is, as has been said, rather ingenious; but it is too systematic, and like other things in other parts of the collection, "loses the grace and liberty of the composition" in system. Moreover, the morality, as is rather the wont of these imitators when they are not (as a few of the partly non-cabinetted ones are) deliberately naughty, is much too scrupulous.[235] It is clear that Zulma is in love with Gracieuse, that she responds to some extent, and that Her Majesty Queen Belle-des-Belles is a little jealous and inclined to cut Gracieuse out.

But nothing in the finished part of the story gives us any of the nice love-making that we want.

[Sidenote: Fenelon.]

Madame le Marchand's _Boca_ is a story which begins in Peru but finishes in an "Isle of Ebony," where the names of Zobeide and Abdelazis seem rather more at home; it is not without merit. As for the fables and stories which Fenelon composed for that imperfect Marcellus, the Duke of Burgundy, they have all the merits of style, sense, and good feeling which they might be expected to have, and it would be absurd to ask of them qualities which, in the circ.u.mstances, they could not display.

The _Chinese Tales_ are about as little Chinese as may be, consisting of accounts of his punitive metempsychoses by the Mandarin Fum Hoam (a name afterwards borrowed in better known work), who seems to have been excluded from the knowledge of anything particularly Celestial.[236] But they are rather smartly told. On the other hand, _Florine ou la Belle Italienne_, which is included in the same volume with the sham _Chinoiseries_, is one of the worst instances of the confusion of kinds noted above. It honestly prepares one for what is coming by a reference in the Preface to Fenelon; but a list of _dramatis_ (or _fabulae_) _personae_, which follows, would have tried the saintliness even of him of Cambrai almost as much as a German occupation of his archiepiscopal see. "Agatonphisie," for a personage who represents, we are told, "Le Bon Sens," might break the heart of Clenardus, if not the head of Priscian.

_The Thousand and One Quarter Hours_, or _Contes Tartares_, have as little of the Tartar as those above mentioned of the Chinese, but if somewhat verbose, they are not wholly devoid of literary quality. The substance is, as in nearly all these cases, _Arabian Nights_ rehashed; but the hashing is not seldom done _secundum artem_, and they have, with the _Les Sultanes de Gujerate_ and _Nouveaux Contes Orientaux_, which follow them, the faculty of letting themselves be read.

The best of these[237] (except the French translation of the so-called Sir Charles Morell's (really James Ridley's) _Tales of the Genii_ (see above)) is perhaps, on the whole, _Les Sultanes de Gujerate_, where not only are some of the separate tales good, but the frame-story is far more artistically worked in and round and out than is usually the case.

But taking them all together, there is one general and obvious, as well as another local and particular objection to them. Although the sub-t.i.tle (_v. sup._ again) lets them in, the main one regards them with, at best, an oblique countenance. The differences between the Western fairy and the Eastern _peri_, _dive_, _djin_, or whatever one chooses to call her, him, or it, though not at all easy to define, are exceedingly easy to feel. The magicians and enchanters of the two kinds are nearer to each other, but still not the same. On the other hand, it is impossible for any one who has once felt the strange charm of the _Arabian Nights_ not to feel the immense inferiority of these rehashes and _croquettes_ and _rissoles_, and so forth, of the n.o.ble old haunch or sirloin. Yet again, from the special point of view of this book, though they cannot be simply pa.s.sed over, they supply practically nothing which marks, or causes, or even promises an advance in the general development of fiction. They may be said to be simply a continuation of, or a relapse upon, the pure romance of adventure, with different dress, manners, and nomenclature. There is hardly a single touch of character in any one; their very morals (and no shame to them) are arch-known; and they do not possess style enough to confer distinction of the kind open to such things. If you take _Les Quatre Facardins_, before most of them, and _Vathek_[238] (itself, remember, originally French in language), after them all, the want of any kind of genius in their composers becomes almost disgustingly apparent. Yet even these masterpieces are masterpieces outside the main run of the novel.

[Sidenote: Caylus.]

Although, therefore, it would be very ungrateful not to acknowledge that they do sometimes comply with the demands of that sensible tyrant already mentioned, Sultan Hudgiadge, and "either amuse us or send us to sleep," it must be admitted to be with some relief that one turns once more, at about the five and twentieth volume, to something like the fairy tale proper, if to a somewhat artificial and sophisticated form of it. The Comte de Caylus was a scholar and a man of unusual brains; Moncrif showed his mixture of Scotch and French blood in a corresponding blend of quaintness and _esprit_; others, such as Voisenon in one s.e.x and Voltaire's pet Mlle. de Lubert in the other, whatever they were, were at any rate not stupid.

[Sidenote: _Prince Courtebotte et Princesse Zibeline._]

To Anne Claude Philippe de Tubieres de Grimoard de Pestels de Levi, Comte de Caylus, one owes particular thanks, at least when one comes to the history of _Le Prince Courtebotte_, after wrestling with the _macedoine_ of orientalities just discussed. It is not, of course, Perrault, and it is not the best Madame D'Aulnoy. But you are never "put out" by it; the hero, if rather a hero of Scott in the uniform propriety of his conduct, or of Virgil in his success, is not like Waverley, partly a simpleton, nor like Aeneas, wholly a cad. One likes the Princess Zibeline both before she had a heart and afterwards; it can be very agreeable to know a nice girl in both states. Perhaps it was not quite cricket of the good fairy to play that trick[239] on the amba.s.sador of King Brandatimor, but it was washed out in fair fight; and King Biby and his people of poodles are delightful. One wonders whether d.i.c.kens, who was better read in this kind of literature than in most, consciously or unconsciously borrowed from Caylus one of his not least known touches.[240]

[Sidenote: _Rosanie._]

In the next of the Caylus stories there is an Idea--the capital seems due because the Count was a man of Science, as science (perhaps better) went then, and because one or his other tales (not the best) is actually called _Le Palais des Idees_. The idea of _Rosanie_ is questionable, though the carrying of it out is all right. Two fairies are fighting for the (fairy) crown, and the test is who shall produce the most perfect specimen of the special fairy art of education of mortals. (I may, as a _ci-devant_ member of this craft, be permitted to regret that the business has been so largely taken over by persons who are neither fairies in one s.e.x, though there may be some exceptions here, nor enchanters in the other, where exceptions are very rare indeed.) The tutoress of the Princess Rosanie pursues her task, and pursues it triumphantly, by dividing the child into twelve _interim_ personalities, each of whom has a special characteristic--beauty, gentleness, vivacity, discretion, and what not. At the close of the prescribed period they are reunited, and their fortunate lover, who has. .h.i.therto been distracted between the twelve _eidola_, is blessed with the compound Rosanie.

Although it is well known to be the rashest of things for a man to say anything about women--although certainly sillier things have been said by men about women than about any other subject, except, of course, education itself--I venture to demur to the fairy method. Both _a priori_ and from experience, I should say that unmixed Beauty would become intolerably vain; that Discretion would grow into a hypocritical and unpleasant prude; that Vivacity would develop into Vulgarity; and that the reincarnation of the twelve would be one of the most intolerable creatures ever known, if it were not that the impossibility of the concentrated essences being united in one person, after separation in several, would save the situation by annihilating her.

[Sidenote: _Prince Muguet et Princesse Zaza._]

Caylus, however, makes up in the third tale, _Le Prince Muguet et la Princesse Zaza_, where, though the princ.i.p.al fairy, she of the _Hetre_, is rather silly for one of the kind, Muguet is a not quite intolerable c.o.xcomb, and Zaza is positively charming. Her sufferings with a wicked old woman are common; but her distress when the fairy makes her seem ugly to the Prince, who has actually fallen in love with her true portrait, and the scenes where the two meet under this spell, are among the best in the whole _Cabinet_--which is a bold word. The others, though naturally unequal, never or very seldom lack charm, for the reason that Caylus knew what one has ventured to call the secret of Fairyland--that it is the land of the attained Wish--and that he has the art of scattering rememberable and generative phrases and fancies.

_Tourlou et Rirette_, one of the lightest of all, may not impossibly--indeed probably--have suggested Jean Ingelow's great single-speech poem of _Divided_; the Princesses Pimprenelle and Lumineuse are the right sort of Princesses; _Nonchalante et Papillon_, _Bleuette et Coquelicot_ come and take their places unpretentiously but certainly; Mignonette and Minutieuse are not "out." Caylus is not Hamilton by a long way; but he has something that Hamilton has not. He is still less Perrault or Madame d'Aulnoy, but he has a sufficient difference from either. With these predecessors he makes the select quartette of the fairy-tale tellers of France.

After him one expects--and meets--a drop. No reasonable person would look for a really great fairy tale from Jean Jacques, because you must forget yourself to write one; and _La Reine Fantasque_, though not bad, is not good. Madame de Villeneuve may, for ought I know, have been an excellent person in other ways, but she deserves one of the worst bolgias in the Inferno of literature for lengthening, muddling, and altogether spoiling the ever-beloved "Beauty and the Beast." Mlle. de Lussan, they say,[241] was too fond of eating, and died of indigestion.

A more indigestible thing than her own _Les Veillees de Thessalie_, which figure here (she wrote a great deal more), the present writer has never come across. And as for _Prince t.i.ti_, which fills a volume and a half, it might have been pa.s.sed without any remark at all if it had not become famous in connection with the Battle of Croker and Macaulay over the body of Boswell's _Johnson_.[242]

A break takes place at the thirtieth volume of the _Cabinet_, and a fresh instalment, later than the first batch, follows, with more particulars about authors. Here we find the attributions of the very large series of imitative Eastern tales already noticed, and to be followed in this new parcel by _Soirees Bretonnes_, to Thomas Simon Gueulette. The thirty-first opens with the _Funestine_ of Beauchamps[243]--an ingenious t.i.tle and heroine-name, for it avoids the unnatural sounds so common, is a quite possible feminine appellation, and though a "speaking" one, is only so to those who understand the learned languages, and so deserve to be spoken to. Moreover, the idea, though not startlingly original or a mark of genius, is good--that of an unlucky child who attracts the malignity of _all_ fairies, and is ugly, stupid, ill-natured, and everything that is detestable. Her reformation by the genie Clair-Obscur would not be bad if it were cut a great deal shorter.

It is followed by a series of short tales, beginning with _The Little Green Frog_, and not of the first cla.s.s, which in turn are succeeded by two (or, as the latter is in two parts, three) longer stories, sometimes attributed to Caylus--_Le Loup Galeux_ and _Bellinette et Belline_. The _Soirees Bretonnes_ themselves, though apparently the earliest, are not the happiest of Gueulette's _pastiches_; the speaking names[244]

especially are irritating. A certain Madame de Lintot, who does not seem to have had anything to do with the hero of Pope's famous "Ride with a Bookseller," is what may be called "neutral," with _Timandre et Bleuette_ and others; nor does a fresh instalment of Moncrif's efforts show the historian of cats at his best. But in vol. x.x.xiii. Mlle. de Lubert, glanced at before, raises the standard. She should have cut her tales down; it is the mischief of these later things that they extend too much. But _Lionnette et Coquerico_ is good; _Le Prince Glace et la Princesse Etincelante_ is not bad; and _La Princesse Camion_ attracts, by dint of extravagance in the literal sense. Fairy trials had gone far; but the necessity of either marrying a beautiful sort of mermaid or else of _flaying_ her, and the subsequent trial, not of flaying, but braying her in a mortar as a shrimp, show at least a lively fancy. Nor is the anonymous _Nourjahad_--an extremely moral but not dull tale, which follows--at all contemptible.

The French Bar, inexhaustible in such things, gave another tale-teller in one Pajon, who, besides the obligatory _polissonneries_, not included in the _Cabinet_, composed not a few harmless things of some merit. The first, _Eritzine et Paretin_, is perhaps the best. Nor is the complement of vol. x.x.xiv., the _Bibliotheque des Fees et des Genies_ (the t.i.tle of which was that of a larger collection, containing much the same matter as the _Cabinet_, and probably in Johnson's mind when he jotted down _Prince t.i.ti_), quite barren. _La Princesse Minon-Minette et le Prince Souci_, _Apranor et Bellanire_, _Grisdelin et Charmante_, are none of them unreadable. The next volume, too, is better as a whole than any we have had for a long time. Mme. f.a.gnan's _Minet Bleu et Louvette_ contains, in its fifteen pages, a good situation by no means ill-treated. The pair are under the same spell--that of being ugly and witty for part of the week, handsome, stupid, and disagreeable for the other part, and of having the times so arranged that each sees the other at his or her most repulsive to her or his actual state. The way in which "Love unconquered in battle" proves, though not without fairy a.s.sistance, victorious here also, is very ingeniously managed.