Some such partnership between youth and age there must be in all real children’s books; whether it be arranged between them is another matter. The wise writer will always take hints from the child, will remember the way he turns his phrases, the tones of his voice, the things that interest him; but if he remember his own childhood, it may serve as well.
These stories are all memories of childhood. As their more intimate title, “Contes de ma Mère Loye”, suggests, they were handed down for centuries, gathering new features by the way, till this boy of Perrault’s had them from his nurse. But no child could have written them as Perrault wrote. “Cinderella”—the “story of stories”: the boy could repeat it word for word; but if he had tried to set it down, he would have lost the thread at the point of transformation. Those dramatic strokes of the clock would have been forgotten in the music of the ball. This balance, this art of simplicity is the work of a man,—an academician, the writer who, in a French “Battle of the Books”, took up the cause of the Moderns against the Classics, and yet lived in the kindly reasonable humour that belongs to the Augustan Age.
Perrault’s Contes are essentially romantic; the Sleeping Beauty gives place only to Persephone,—she and her sleeping household, shut in by the great hedge of thorns; but every tale has quaint human touches which puts it precisely at the right angle to life: the little girl, her basket of goodies, and the sick grandmother, all things of experience; and then, with a quick turn of the “World Upside Down”—the Grandmother that was really a Wolf in bed. A nurse might have told it well enough; but the artist knew the true colours, the just economy of lines, and the point where one could turn from the pictures and listen for talk.
Perrault must have followed every footstep in the tales with the eager sympathy of the boy at his side. Together they hid with Little Thumb under his father’s stool, and heard the poor parents’ desperate shift to be rid of their children. They were with the tiny hero when he filled his pockets full of small white pebbles, and made the trail by which he and his six brothers found their way home; and they joined in the hopeless search of the second adventure, when Little Thumb dropped crumbs instead of pebbles, and the birds ate them. That brings the story to the very heart of interest: when the hungry boys, lost in the forest at nightfall, fancied they heard on every side of them the howling of wolves coming to eat them up. For then Little Thumb, the youngest and smallest and cleverest of them all “climbed up to the top of a tree, to see if he could discover anything; and having turned his head about on every side, he saw at last a glimmering light, like that of a candle, but a long way from the forest.” This is matter of romance, though there is nothing in it beyond Nature. But—that “glimmering light” threw its beams from an Ogre’s window, and there was yet to come the Adventure of the Seven League Boots: those boots that would fit a foot of any size, from the Ogre’s to Little Thumb’s; in which either Perrault père or Perrault fils could go seven leagues at a step.
No copy remains of the first translation of Perrault’s tales by Samber (1729),[25] nor of John Newbery’s edition; but a seventh edition appeared in 1777, under the title of “Mother Goose’s Tales”, and an eighth in 1780. At the close of the century, Harris printed another, “Englished by G. M. Gent”, of which copies are still found. The book fits a very small hand, and though every trace of gold be rubbed off the covers, the Dutch paper pattern can still be seen through diamond patches of colour. The frontispiece shows an old woman with her distaff, seated by the fire, telling stories to a group of children; and there are quaint woodcuts in the text.
The welcome given in court circles to fairy-tales marked the beginning, or rather, a special phase of romantic interest; but this had little to do with children. Such tales, originally simple, caught the elaborate grace of their new setting, and borrowing variations from the newly-translated eastern stories, ran into an endless series in the Cabinet des Fées. In English they were represented chiefly by the Contes of Madame la Comtesse D’Aulnoy, which were translated before Perrault’s.[26] These were common as nursery chap-books in the second half of the century.
Nothing could be more unlike the simplicity of Perrault. Madame D’Aulnoy’s stories are rich in embroideries of the folk-tale themes. She makes something very like a novel of her “L’Oiseau Bleu”; but the adventures of the bird-lover are well known in such ballads as “the Earl of Mar’s Daughter”, and no artifice can hide the traces of an old “cante-fable”. The wicked step-mother of all fairy-tales transforms the prince into a bird; but the spy set to watch the princess at last falls asleep, and then the princess opens her little window and sings:
“Oiseau bleu, couleur de temps,
Vole à moi, promptement”.