English folk-tales, compared with others more magical, are like the toys that a child will make for himself out of a stick, beside the fine inventions of a conjurer; they appeal chiefly to practical interests, and leave much to the imagination. Jack killed Cormoran and Blunderbore and the giant with two heads before anybody thought of giving him a cap of knowledge, or shoes of swiftness, or even a magic sword. These things were the addition of a Second Part.
Indeed, a tale never was so plain that it gathered no colour in the telling. There was an old story of Whittington without a Cat,[23] and how the cat got into the story was more than the whole Society of Antiquaries could tell, though it met together in 1771 expressly to discuss the problem. In our own time, most antiquaries are agreed that the Cat found its way from Genoa or Persia or Portugal,—no matter whence,—and that it is a piece of folk-lore grafted upon authentic biography. Try as they will, they can get little nearer to the heart of the matter than Mr. Pepys, when he watched the puppet-show of Whittington at Southwark Fair, “which was pretty to see”, and remarked “how that idle thing do work upon people that see it, and even myself too”.
The very truth underlying the modest fable of the Cat and the song of Bow Bells, had more power than the Wishing Hat of Fortunatus, and would have carried more fanciful embellishments; but it is never safe to lose sight of the double paradox of childish imagination—that reality is romance, romance, reality. If “Cendrillon” had never been done into English, Catskin or Cap o’ Rushes might have worn the Glass Slipper and ridden in a Pumpkin Coach. As it fell out, the little kitchen-maid surpassed them both,—the girl whose ragged dress was transformed at a touch into “drap d’or et d’argent, tout charmarez de pierreries.”
Cinderella’s biographer was no less a person than Charles Perrault, a member of the French Academy, and a friend of La Fontaine. He also wrote the famous “histories” of little Red Riding Hood and the Sleeping Beauty, of Hop o’ my Thumb (a distant kinsman of Tom Thumb), Puss in Boots, and others who have lived so long in English nurseries that their French names are forgotten.
In his youth, Perrault had rebelled against the formal education of his day, and when he was little short of seventy, he turned from his serious works and produced a children’s book by which he is still remembered.
Fairy tales, indeed, were already popular in France, but they had become a part of that fantastic world into which the Court of Louis XIV had been transformed: a world of courtly shepherds and shepherdesses, who told “Contes des fées” (“mitonner”, Madame de Sévigné says they called it) to prove that they had gone back to the Golden Age.
Perrault knew better than to copy them. He wrote for a public at once more appreciative and more critical: the nursery society of which, in the introduction to his rhymed tales (1695) he wrote: “On les voit dans la tristesse et dans l’abbattement tant que le héros ou l’héroine du conte sont dans le malheur, et s’écrie de joie quand le temps de leur bonheur arrive”.
His knowledge of children alone might have carried him through, but his choice of a collaborator was an act of genius. When in 1697, the Contes were collected and published,[24] it was not to M. Perrault of the Academy that the “privelège du roy” was granted, but to his ten-years-old son, Perrault Darmancour. The device of anonymity was common among the early writers of children’s books, and some critics have suggested that it was beneath the dignity of an Academician to acknowledge the authorship of fairy-tales; but Mlle. L’Héritier, Perrault’s niece, who contributed one tale to the book, declared, before it was published, that little Darmancour could write fairy-tales “with much charm”; and Mr. Andrew Lang, following M. Lacroix, believed that the boy had a real share in the book. He detected the actual note of a child’s voice in the dialogue:
“Toc, toc, qui est là? C’est voire fille, le petit chaperon rouge—qui vous apporte une galette et un petit pot de beurre que ma mère vous envoye ... tira la chevillette, la bobinette chera”. But this, after all, is the language of fairy-tales. Here it is again, when the little princess finds the old woman spinning: “Que faites-vous là, ma bonne femme—je file, ma belle enfant.... Ha! que cela est joli ... comment faites-vous? Donnez-moy que je voye si j’en ferois bien autant”.
It is the language of fairy-tales; and that, of course, is child’s talk. But the father’s part is clear in the artistic handling of the tales, in the addition of “Moralités” after the manner of Æsop, and in asides of laughter or comment intended for grown-up ears,—a sly dig at the lawyers in “Le Maître Chat”, or at women, through the Ogre’s wife in “Le Petit Poucet”.