On the Old Road Volume Ii Part 32

[Footnote 109: The present paper was, however, the last.--ED.]

FAIRY STORIES.[110]

124. Long since, longer ago than the opening of some fairy tales, I was asked by the publisher who has been rash enough, at my request, to reprint these my favorite old stories in their earliest English form, to set down for him my reasons for preferring them to the more polished legends, moral and satiric, which are now, with rich adornment of every page by very admirable art, presented to the acceptance of the Nursery.

But it seemed to me to matter so little to the majestic independence of the child-public, who, beside themselves, liked, or who disliked, what they p.r.o.nounced entertaining, that it is only on strict claims of a promise unwarily given that I venture on the impertinence of eulogy; and my reluctance is the greater, because there is in fact nothing very notable in these tales, unless it be their freedom from faults which for some time have been held to be quite the reverse of faults by the majority of readers.

125. In the best stories recently written for the young, there is a taint which it is not easy to define, but which inevitably follows on the author's addressing himself to children bred in schoolrooms and drawing-rooms, instead of fields and woods--children whose favorite amus.e.m.e.nts are premature imitations of the vanities of elder people, and whose conceptions of beauty are dependent partly on costliness of dress.

The fairies who interfere in the fortunes of these little ones are apt to be resplendent chiefly in millinery and satin slippers, and appalling more by their airs than their enchantments.

The fine satire which, gleaming through every playful word, renders some of these recent stories as attractive to the old as to the young, seems to me no less to unfit them for their proper function. Children should laugh, but not mock; and when they laugh, it should not be at the weaknesses and the faults of others. They should be taught, as far as they are permitted to concern themselves with the characters of those around them, to seek faithfully for good, not to lie in wait maliciously to make themselves merry with evil: they should be too painfully sensitive to wrong to smile at it; and too modest to const.i.tute themselves its judges.

126. With these minor errors a far graver one is involved. As the simplicity of the sense of beauty has been lost in recent tales for children, so also the simplicity of their conception of love. That word which, in the heart of a child, should represent the most constant and vital part of its being; which ought to be the sign of the most solemn thoughts that inform its awakening soul and, in one wide mystery of pure sunrise, should flood the zenith of its heaven, and gleam on the dew at its feet; this word, which should be consecrated on its lips, together with the Name which it may not take in vain, and whose meaning should soften and animate every emotion through which the inferior things and the feeble creatures, set beneath it in its narrow world, are revealed to its curiosity or companionship; this word, in modern child-story, is too often restrained and darkened into the hieroglyph of an evil mystery, troubling the sweet peace of youth with premature gleams of uncomprehended pa.s.sion, and flitting shadows of unrecognized sin.

These great faults in the spirit of recent child-fiction are connected with a parallel folly of purpose. Parents who are too indolent and self-indulgent to form their children's characters by wholesome discipline, or in their own habits and principles of life are conscious of setting before them no faultless example, vainly endeavor to subst.i.tute the persuasive influence of moral precept, intruded in the guise of amus.e.m.e.nt, for the strength of moral habit compelled by righteous authority:--vainly think to inform the heart of infancy with deliberative wisdom, while they abdicate the guardianship of its unquestioning innocence; and warp into the agonies of an immature philosophy of conscience the once fearless strength of its unsullied and unhesitating virtue.

127. A child should not need to choose between right and wrong. It should not be capable of wrong; it should not conceive of wrong.

Obedient, as bark to helm, not by sudden strain or effort, but in the freedom of its bright course of constant life; true, with an undistinguished, praiseless, unboastful truth, in a crystalline household world of truth; gentle, through daily entreatings of gentleness, and honorable trusts, and pretty prides of child-fellowship in offices of good; strong, not in bitter and doubtful contest with temptation, but in peace of heart, and armor of habitual right, from which temptation falls like thawing hail; self-commanding, not in sick restraint of mean appet.i.tes and covetous thoughts, but in vital joy of unluxurious life, and contentment in narrow possession, wisely esteemed.

Children so trained have no need of moral fairy tales; but they will find in the apparently vain and fitful courses of any tradition of old time, honestly delivered to them, a teaching for which no other can be subst.i.tuted, and of which the power cannot be measured; animating for them the material world with inextinguishable life, fortifying them against the glacial cold of selfish science, and preparing them submissively, and with no bitterness of astonishment, to behold, in later years, the mystery--divinely appointed to remain such to all human thought--of the fates that happen alike to the evil and the good.

128. And the effect of the endeavor to make stories moral upon the literary merit of the work itself, is as harmful as the motive of the effort is false. For every fairy tale worth recording at all is the remnant of a tradition possessing true historical value;--historical, at least in so far as it has naturally arisen out of the mind of a people under special circ.u.mstances, and risen not without meaning, nor removed altogether from their sphere of religious faith. It sustains afterwards natural changes from the sincere action of the fear or fancy of successive generations; it takes new color from their manner of life, and new form from their changing moral tempers. As long as these changes are natural and effortless, accidental and inevitable, the story remains essentially true, altering its form, indeed, like a flying cloud, but remaining a sign of the sky; a shadowy image, as truly a part of the great firmament of the human mind as the light of reason which it seems to interrupt. But the fair deceit and innocent error of it cannot be interpreted nor restrained by a willful purpose, and all additions to it by act do but defile, as the shepherd disturbs the flakes of morning mist with smoke from his fire of dead leaves.

129. There is also a deeper collateral mischief in this indulgence of licentious change and retouching of stories to suit particular tastes, or inculcate favorite doctrines. It directly destroys the child's power of rendering any such belief as it would otherwise have been in his nature to give to an imaginative vision. How far it is expedient to occupy his mind with ideal forms at all may be questionable to many, though not to me; but it is quite beyond question that if we do allow of the fict.i.tious representation, that representation should be calm and complete, possessed to the full, and read down its utmost depth. The little reader's attention should never be confused or disturbed, whether he is possessing himself of fairy tale or history. Let him know his fairy tale accurately, and have perfect joy or awe in the conception of it as if it were real; thus he will always be exercising his power of grasping realities: but a confused, careless, or discrediting tenure of the fiction will lead to as confused and careless reading of fact. Let the circ.u.mstances of both be strictly perceived and long dwelt upon, and let the child's own mind develop fruit of thought from both. It is of the greatest importance early to secure this habit of contemplation, and therefore it is a grave error, either to multiply unnecessarily, or to ill.u.s.trate with extravagant richness, the incidents presented to the imagination. It should multiply and ill.u.s.trate them for itself; and, if the intellect is of any real value, there will be a mystery and wonderfulness in its own dreams which would only be thwarted by external ill.u.s.tration. Yet I do not bring forward the text or the etchings in this volume as examples of what either ought to be in works of the kind: they are in many respects common, imperfect, vulgar; but their vulgarity is of a wholesome and harmless kind. It is not, for instance, graceful English, to say that a thought "popped into Catherine's head"; but it nevertheless is far better, as an initiation into literary style, that a child should be told this than that "a subject attracted Catherine's attention." And in genuine forms of minor tradition, a rude and more or less illiterate tone will always be discernible; for all the best fairy tales have owed their birth, and the greater part of their power, to narrowness of social circ.u.mstances; they belonged properly to districts in which walled cities are surrounded by bright and unblemished country, and in which a healthy and bustling town life, not highly refined, is relieved by, and contrasted with, the calm enchantment of pastoral and woodland scenery, either under humble cultivation by peasant masters, or left in its natural solitude. Under conditions of this kind the imagination is enough excited to invent instinctively (and rejoice in the invention of) spiritual forms of wildness and beauty, while yet it is restrained and made cheerful by the familiar accidents and relations of town life, mingling always in its fancy humorous and vulgar circ.u.mstances with pathetic ones, and never so much impressed with its supernatural fantasies as to be in danger of retaining them as any part of its religious faith. The good spirit descends gradually from an angel into a fairy, and the demon shrinks into a playful grotesque of diminutive malevolence, while yet both keep an accredited and vital influence upon the character and mind. But the language in which such ideas will be usually clothed, must necessarily partake of their narrowness; and art is systematically incognizant of them, having only strength under the conditions which awake them to express itself in an irregular and gross grotesque, fit only for external architectural decoration.

130. The ill.u.s.trations of this volume are almost the only exceptions I know to the general rule. They are of quite sterling and admirable art, in a cla.s.s precisely parallel in elevation to the character of the tales which they ill.u.s.trate; and the original etchings, as I have before said in the Appendix to my "Elements of Drawing," were quite unrivaled in masterfulness of touch since Rembrandt (in some qualities of delineation unrivaled even by him). These copies have been so carefully executed, that at first I was deceived by them, and supposed them to be late impressions from the plates (and what is more, I believe the master himself was deceived by them, and supposed them to be his own); and although on careful comparison with the first proofs they will be found no exception to the terrible law that literal repet.i.tion of entirely fine work shall be, even to the hand that produced it,--much more to any other,--forever impossible, they still represent, with sufficient fidelity to be in the highest degree instructive, the harmonious light and shade, the manly simplicity of execution, and the easy, uninc.u.mbered fancy, of designs which belonged to the best period of Cruikshank's genius. To make somewhat enlarged copies of them, looking at them through a magnifying gla.s.s, and never putting two lines where Cruikshank has put only one, would be an exercise in decision and severe drawing which would leave afterwards little to be learnt in schools, I would gladly also say much in their praise as imaginative designs; but the power of genuine imaginative work, and its difference from that which is compounded and patched together from borrowed sources, is of all qualities of art the most difficult to explain; and I must be content with the simple a.s.sertions of it.

And so I trust the good old book, and the honest work that adorns it, to such favor as they may find with children of open hearts and lowly lives.

DENMARK HILL, _Easter_, 1868.

FOOTNOTES:

[Footnote 110: This paper forms the introduction to a volume ent.i.tled "German Popular Stories, with Ill.u.s.trations after the original designs of George Cruikshank, edited by Edgar Taylor, with Introduction by John Ruskin, M.A." London: Chatto and Windus, 1868. The book is a reprint of Mr. Edgar Taylor's original (1823) selections of the "Hausmarchen," or "German Popular Stories" of the Brothers Grimm. The original selections were in two octavo volumes; the reprint in one of smaller size, it being (the publisher states in his preface) "Mr. Ruskin's wish that the new edition should appeal to young readers rather than to adults."--ED.]

ECONOMY.

HOME, AND ITS ECONOMIES.

(_Contemporary Review, May_ 1873.)

USURY. A REPLY AND A REJOINDER.

(_Contemporary Review, February_ 1880.)

USURY. A PREFACE.

(_Pamphlet_, 1885.)

HOME, AND ITS ECONOMIES.[111]

131. In the March number of the _Contemporary Review_ appeared two papers,[112] by writers of reputation, which I cannot but hope their authors will perceive upon reflection to have involved errors only the more grave in that they have become, of late, in the minds of nearly all public men, facile and familiar. I have, therefore, requested the editor's permission to offer some reply to both of these essays, their subjects being intimately connected.

The first of which I speak was Mr. Herbert Spencer's, which appeared under the t.i.tle of "The Bias of Patriotism." But the real subject of the paper (discussed in its special extent, with singular care and equity) was only the bias of National vanity; and the debate was opened by this very curious sentence,--"Patriotism is nationally, that which Egoism is individually."

Mr. Spencer would not, I think, himself accept this statement, if put into the clear form, "What is Egoism in one man, is Patriotism in two or more, and the vice of an individual, the virtue of a mult.i.tude."[113]

But it is strange,--however strictly Mr. Spencer may of late have confined his attention to metaphysical or scientific subjects, disregarding the language of historical or imaginative literature--it is strange, I repeat, that so careful a student should be unaware that the term "patriotism" cannot, in cla.s.sical usage, be extended to the action of a mult.i.tude. No writer of authority ever speaks of a nation as having felt, or acted, patriotically. Patriotism is, by definition, a virtue of individuals; and so far from being in those individuals a mode of egoism, it is precisely in the sacrifice of their egoism that it consists. It is the temper of mind which determines them to defer their own interests to those of their country.

132. Supposing it possible for any parallel sentiment to animate a nation as one body, it could have reference only to the position it held among other families of the world. The name of the emotion would then be properly "Cosmism," and would signify the resolution of such a people to sacrifice its own special interests to those of Mankind. Cosmism hitherto has indeed generally a.s.serted itself only in the desire of the Cosmic nation that all others should adopt its theological opinions, and permit it to adopt their personal property; but Patriotism has truly existed, and even as a dominant feeling, in the minds of many persons who have been greatly influential on the fates of their races, and that one of our leading philosophers should be unconscious of the nature of this sentiment, and ignorant of its political power, is to be noted as painfully characteristic of the present state of England itself.

It does not indeed follow that a feeling of which we are unaware is necessarily extinguished in us; and the faculties of perception and a.n.a.lysis are always so paralyzed by the lingual ingenuities of logic that it is impossible to say, of any professed logician, whether he may not yet be acting under the real force of ideas of which he has lost both the consciousness and conception. No man who has once entangled himself in what Mr. Spencer defines, farther on, as the "science of the relations implied by the conclusions, exclusions, and overlappings of cla.s.ses," can be expected during the rest of his life to perceive more of any one thing than that it is included, excluded, or overlapped by something else; which is in itself a sufficiently confused state of mind, and especially harmful in that it permits us to avoid considering whether our intellectual linen is itself clean, while we concern ourselves only to ascertain whether it is included, excluded, or overlapped by our coat collar. But it is a grave phenomenon of the time that patriotism--of all others--should be the sentiment which an English logician is not only unable to define, but attempts to define as its precise contrary. In every epoch of decline, men even of high intellectual energy have been swept down in the diluvium of public life, and the crystalline edges of their minds worn away by friction with blunted ones; but I had not believed that the whole weight of the depraved mob of modern England, though they have become incapable alike of fidelity to their own country, and alliance with any other, could so far have perplexed one of our exactest students as to make him confuse heroism with conceit, and the loves of country and of home with the iniquities of selfishness. Can it be only a quarter of a century since the Last Minstrel died--and have we already answered his "Lives there a man?" with the calm a.s.sertion that there live no other than such; and that the "wretch concentered all in self "is the "Patriot" of our generation?

133. Be it so. Let it even be admitted that egoism is the only power conceivable by a modern metaphysician to be the spring of mental energy; just as chemical excitement may be the only power traceable by the modern physician as the source of muscular energy. And still Mr.

Spencer's subsequent a.n.a.lysis is inaccurate, and unscholarly. For egoism does not necessarily imply either misapprehension or mismeasurement.

There are modes of the love of our country which are definitely selfish, as a cat's of the hearthrug, yet entirely balanced and calm in judicial faculty; pa.s.sions which determine conduct, but have no influence on opinion. For instance, I have bought for my own exclusive gratification, the cottage in which I am writing, near the lake-beach on which I used to play when I was seven years old. Were I a public-spirited scientific person, or a benevolently pious one, I should doubtless, instead, be surveying the geographical relations of the Mountains of the Moon, or translating the Athanasian Creed into Tartar-Chinese. But I hate the very name of the public, and labor under no oppressive anxiety either for the advancement of science, or the salvation of mankind. I therefore prefer amusing myself with the lake-pebbles, of which I know nothing but that they are pretty; and conversing with people whom I can understand without pains, and who, so far from needing to be converted, seem to me on the whole better than myself. This is moral egoism, but it is not intellectual error. I never form, much less express, any opinion as to the relative beauties of Yewdale crag and the Mountains of the Moon; nor do I please myself by contemplating, in any exaggerated light, the spiritual advantages which I possess in my familiarity with the Thirty-nine Articles. I know the height of my neighboring mountains to a foot; and the extent of my real possessions, theological and material, to an article. Patriotic egoism attaches me to the one; personal egoism satisfies me in the other; and the calm selfishness with which Nature has blessed all her unphilosophical creatures, blinds me to the attractions--as to the faults--of things with which I have no concern, and saves me at once from the folly of contempt, and the discomfort of envy. I might have written, as accurately, "The discomfort of contempt"; for indeed the forms of petulant rivalry and self-a.s.sertion which Mr.

Spencer a.s.sumes to be developments of egoism, are merely its diseases; (taking the word "disease" in its most literal meaning). A man of sense is more an egoist in modesty than a blockhead is in boasting; and it is neither pride nor self-respect, but only ignorance and ill-breeding, that either disguise the facts of life, or violate its courtesies.

134. It will not, I trust, be thought violation of courtesy to a writer of Mr. Spencer's extending influence, if I urge on his attention the danger under which metaphysicians are always placed of supposing that the investigation of the processes of thought will enable them to distinguish its forms. 'As well might the chemist, who had exhaustively examined the conditions of vitreous fusion, imagine himself therefore qualified to number or cla.s.s the vases bent by the breath of Venice. Mr.

Spencer has determined, I believe, to the satisfaction of his readers, in what manner thoughts and feelings are constructed; it is time for him now to observe the results of the construction, whether native to his own mind, or discoverable in other intellectual territories. Patriotism is, however, perhaps the last emotion he can now conveniently study in England, for the temper which crowns the joy of life with the sweetness and decorum of death can scarcely be manifested clearly in a country which is fast rendering herself one whose peace is pollution, and whose battle, crime; within whose confines it is loathsome to live, and in whose cause it is disgraceful to die.

135. The chief causes of her degradation were defended, with delicate apology, in the second paper to which I have above referred; the modification by Mr. W. R. Greg of a letter which he had addressed, on the subject of luxurious expenditure and its economical results, to the _Pall Mall Gazette_; and which Mr. Greg states to have given rise in that journal to a controversy in which four or five combatants took part, the looseness of whose notions induced him to express his own more coherent ones in the _Contemporary Review_.[114]

I am sorry to find that Mr. Greg looked upon my own poor part in that correspondence as controversial. I merely asked him a question which he declared to be insidious and irrelevant (not considering that if it were the one, it could not be the other), and I stated a few facts respecting which no controversy was possible, and which Mr. Greg, in his own terms, "sedulously abstained" from noticing.

But Mr. Greg felt my question to be insidious because it made him partly conscious that he had only examined one half of the subject he was discussing, and even that half without precision.

Mr. Goldwin Smith had spoken of a rich man as consuming the means of living of the poor. Mr. Greg, in reply, pointed out how beneficially the rich man spent what he had got. Upon which I ventured to inquire "how he got it"; which is indeed precisely the first of all questions to be asked when the economical relations of any man with his neighbor are to be examined.

d.i.c.k Turpin is blamed--suppose--by some plain-minded person for consuming the means of other people's living. "Nay," says d.i.c.k to the plain-minded person, "observe how beneficently and pleasantly I spend whatever I get!"

"Yes, d.i.c.k," persists the plain-minded person; "but how do you get it?"