A child would remember the giant-formula, though he forgot every word of that “easy pleasant Book, suited to his Capacity” which Mr. Locke prescribed for him; he would remember the whole exquisite story: how the youngest brother found his sister, and what passed between them (most of it in rhyme) and how he fought with the Elf-King and broke the spell.
If Child Rowland had been the only story of its kind, Mr. Locke had yet to reckon with the fancies that a child might weave for himself out of common experience: the moving tree that casts the shadow of a pursuing giant, the wind that wears an invisible cloak, the enchanter sun who can pave any road with gold. These baffled all his efforts to drive fairies out of the nursery.
But printed tales, before Perrault, were few enough: in prose, the giant killers, “Hickathrift” and “Jack”; in rhyme, “Catskin” and “Tom Thumb” and “Whittington”. Like printed ballads, they favoured themes of action and reality. Catskin, the English Cinderella, did without a fairy godmother; Tom Thumb, although he tilted with the knights of the Round Table, never saw Fairyland till he died, and Whittington’s cat was a mere mouser, a poor relation of Puss in Boots.
The truth is that a child never asks himself whether a tale belongs to the dream world or to the world of reality, because either will serve his turn, and either may be true. Any setting convinces him if the adventure hold; and a tale that lost its imaginative colouring in the chap-books might regain it in a winter night.
Between 1690 and 1790, there is little change in “The Pleasant History of Thomas Hickathrift”,[19] and not a trace in print of the “astonishing image” that Coleridge remembered: the “whole rookery that flew out of the giant’s beard, scared by the tremendous voice with which this monster answered the challenge of the heroic Tom Hickathrift”.[20] The nearest thing to it (in a chap-book of 1780) is the likening of the giant’s head, when it was off, to “the root of a mighty Oak.” But this image of the monstrous beard, a piece of pure myth, if it were not the addition of some imaginative teller, came down from a time when childlike men invented it to explain the giant shapes of trees. A child, recognizing the analogy, feels the same shock of surprise and pleasure as his forest-dwelling ancestors, and finds in this play of likeness and contrast, the source and sustaining interest of all giant tales. For there never was a giant without dwarfs to measure him, nor a dwarf that had not his giant; nor indeed is Jack’s fight with Blunderbore a more engrossing spectacle than Tom Thumb dancing a Galliard on the Queen’s left hand.[21]
Yet there is little of the fairy about Tom Thumb. He is a real child, mischievous, even thievish,—taking advantage of his size to creep into other boys’ cherry-bags and steal. His one poor trick of magic is to hang pots upon a sunbeam, his one adventure into romance, a mock-heroic episode at King Arthur’s court.
When Dr. Johnson “withdrew his attention” from the great man who bored him and “thought about Tom Thumb”, the escape was not from dull facts into a world of dreams, but from the pedantry of words into a simple realism.
Given a little creature in a land of giants, Tom’s experiences are strictly logical. He stands on the edge of a bowl in which his mother is mixing batter, and falls in. When his mother goes milking, she ties him to a thistle, and he is swallowed by a cow. A raven that spies him walking in a furrow carries him off “even like a grain of corn”.
As for his life at Court, there is example for it, “Tom being a dwarf”; nor was he the first mischief-maker to find his way there, nor the first poor man’s son that overcame his betters. But his method of attack was new; no champion in the annals of romance had beaten Sir Launcelot, Sir Tristram and Sir Guy with no other weapon than a laugh.