The main Cabinet des Fées—more on Mme. d'Aulnoy.
He who ventures on the complete Cabinet des Fées[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 classical 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 Marcassin to the fairies, "à vous entendre, qu'il ne faut pas même croire ce qu'on voit." And they reply, "La règle n'est pas toujours générale; mais il est indubitable que l'on doit suspendre son jugement sur bien des choses, et penser qu'il peut entrer quelque chose de Féerie dans ce que nous paroît de plus certain."
Warning against disappointment.
Alas! it was precisely this quelque chose de Féerie 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 était 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 classical 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 prostitute 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 "prostitute" 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.
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 illustrated by such names as those of Mlle. Delaunay and Mlle. de Lespinasse. 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 Clèves manner. Her fairy tales are thin, and marred by weak allegory of the "Carte de Tendre" kind. A "Pays des Délices," 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 Illustres Fées is scarcely so illustrious 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 purée mixed with julienne. Le Roi Magicien is painfully destitute of personality; we want names, and pretty names, for a fairy tale. Le Prince Roger is a descendant of Mélusine, 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 Fées Détruite, by a Mme. d'Auneuil, whom persons of a sceptical turn might imagine to be a sort of factitious 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 Fée des Fées 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, substitutes 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]
The large proportion of Eastern Tales.
Les Voyages de Zulma.