Rosanie.
In the next of the Caylus stories there is an Idea—the capital seems due because the Count was a man of Science, as science (perhaps better) went then, and because one or his other tales (not the best) is actually called Le Palais des Idées. The idea of Rosanie is questionable, though the carrying of it out is all right. Two fairies are fighting for the (fairy) crown, and the test is who shall produce the most perfect specimen of the special fairy art of education of mortals. (I may, as a ci-devant member of this craft, be permitted to regret that the business has been so largely taken over by persons who are neither fairies in one sex, though there may be some exceptions here, nor enchanters in the other, where exceptions are very rare indeed.) The tutoress of the Princess Rosanie pursues her task, and pursues it triumphantly, by dividing the child into twelve interim personalities, each of whom has a special characteristic—beauty, gentleness, vivacity, discretion, and what not. At the close of the prescribed period they are reunited, and their fortunate lover, who has hitherto been distracted between the twelve eidola, is blessed with the compound Rosanie. Although it is well known to be the rashest of things for a man to say anything about women—although certainly sillier things have been said by men about women than about any other subject, except, of course, education itself—I venture to demur to the fairy method. Both a priori and from experience, I should say that unmixed Beauty would become intolerably vain; that Discretion would grow into a hypocritical and unpleasant prude; that Vivacity would develop into Vulgarity; and that the reincarnation of the twelve would be one of the most intolerable creatures ever known, if it were not that the impossibility of the concentrated essences being united in one person, after separation in several, would save the situation by annihilating her.
Prince Muguet et Princesse Zaza.
Caylus, however, makes up in the third tale, Le Prince Muguet et la Princesse Zaza, where, though the principal fairy, she of the Hêtre, is rather silly for one of the kind, Muguet is a not quite intolerable coxcomb, and Zaza is positively charming. Her sufferings with a wicked old woman are common; but her distress when the fairy makes her seem ugly to the Prince, who has actually fallen in love with her true portrait, and the scenes where the two meet under this spell, are among the best in the whole Cabinet—which is a bold word. The others, though naturally unequal, never or very seldom lack charm, for the reason that Caylus knew what one has ventured to call the secret of Fairyland—that it is the land of the attained Wish—and that he has the art of scattering rememberable and generative phrases and fancies. Tourlou et Rirette, one of the lightest of all, may not impossibly—indeed probably—have suggested Jean Ingelow's great single-speech poem of Divided; the Princesses Pimprenelle and Lumineuse are the right sort of Princesses; Nonchalante et Papillon, Bleuette et Coquelicot come and take their places unpretentiously but certainly; Mignonette and Minutieuse are not "out." Caylus is not Hamilton by a long way; but he has something that Hamilton has not. He is still less Perrault or Madame d'Aulnoy, but he has a sufficient difference from either. With these predecessors he makes the select quartette of the fairy-tale tellers of France.
After him one expects—and meets—a drop. No reasonable person would look for a really great fairy tale from Jean Jacques, because you must forget yourself to write one; and La Reine Fantasque, though not bad, is not good. Madame de Villeneuve may, for ought I know, have been an excellent person in other ways, but she deserves one of the worst bolgias in the Inferno of literature for lengthening, muddling, and altogether spoiling the ever-beloved "Beauty and the Beast." Mlle. de Lussan, they say,[241] was too fond of eating, and died of indigestion. A more indigestible thing than her own Les Veillées de Thessalie, which figure here (she wrote a great deal more), the present writer has never come across. And as for Prince Titi, which fills a volume and a half, it might have been passed without any remark at all if it had not become famous in connection with the Battle of Croker and Macaulay over the body of Boswell's Johnson.[242]
A break takes place at the thirtieth volume of the Cabinet, and a fresh instalment, later than the first batch, follows, with more particulars about authors. Here we find the attributions of the very large series of imitative Eastern tales already noticed, and to be followed in this new parcel by Soirées Bretonnes, to Thomas Simon Gueulette. The thirty-first opens with the Funestine of Beauchamps[243]—an ingenious title and heroine-name, for it avoids the unnatural sounds so common, is a quite possible feminine appellation, and though a "speaking" one, is only so to those who understand the learned languages, and so deserve to be spoken to. Moreover, the idea, though not startlingly original or a mark of genius, is good—that of an unlucky child who attracts the malignity of all fairies, and is ugly, stupid, ill-natured, and everything that is detestable. Her reformation by the genie Clair-Obscur would not be bad if it were cut a great deal shorter.
It is followed by a series of short tales, beginning with The Little Green Frog, and not of the first class, which in turn are succeeded by two (or, as the latter is in two parts, three) longer stories, sometimes attributed to Caylus—Le Loup Galeux and Bellinette et Belline. The Soirées Bretonnes themselves, though apparently the earliest, are not the happiest of Gueulette's pastiches; the speaking names[244] especially are irritating. A certain Madame de Lintot, who does not seem to have had anything to do with the hero of Pope's famous "Ride with a Bookseller," is what may be called "neutral," with Timandre et Bleuette and others; nor does a fresh instalment of Moncrif's efforts show the historian of cats at his best. But in vol. xxxiii. Mlle. de Lubert, glanced at before, raises the standard. She should have cut her tales down; it is the mischief of these later things that they extend too much. But Lionnette et Coquérico is good; Le Prince Glacé et la Princesse Etincelante is not bad; and La Princesse Camion attracts, by dint of extravagance in the literal sense. Fairy trials had gone far; but the necessity of either marrying a beautiful sort of mermaid or else of flaying her, and the subsequent trial, not of flaying, but braying her in a mortar as a shrimp, show at least a lively fancy. Nor is the anonymous Nourjahad—an extremely moral but not dull tale, which follows—at all contemptible.
The French Bar, inexhaustible in such things, gave another tale-teller in one Pajon, who, besides the obligatory polissonneries, not included in the Cabinet, composed not a few harmless things of some merit. The first, Eritzine et Paretin, is perhaps the best. Nor is the complement of vol. xxxiv., the Bibliothèque des Fées et des Génies (the title of which was that of a larger collection, containing much the same matter as the Cabinet, and probably in Johnson's mind when he jotted down Prince Titi), quite barren. La Princesse Minon-Minette et le Prince Souci, Apranor et Bellanire, Grisdelin et Charmante, are none of them unreadable. The next volume, too, is better as a whole than any we have had for a long time. Mme. Fagnan's Minet Bleu et Louvette contains, in its fifteen pages, a good situation by no means ill-treated. The pair are under the same spell—that of being ugly and witty for part of the week, handsome, stupid, and disagreeable for the other part, and of having the times so arranged that each sees the other at his or her most repulsive to her or his actual state. The way in which "Love unconquered in battle" proves, though not without fairy assistance, victorious here also, is very ingeniously managed.
One of the cleverest of all the later fairy tales is the Acajou et Zirphile of Duclos, who, indeed, had sufficient wits to do anything well, and was a novelist, though not a very distinguished one, on a larger scale. The tale itself (which is said to have been written "up to" illustrations of Boucher designed for something else) has, indeed, a smatch of vulgarity, but a purely superfluous and easily removable one. It is almost as cleverly written as any thing of Voltaire's: and the final situation, where the hero, who has gone through all the mischiefs and triumphs of one of Crébillon's, recovers his only real love, Zirphile, in a torment and tornado of heads separated from bodies and hands separated from arms, is rather capital.
Not much less so, in the different way of a pretty sentimentality, is the Aglaé ou Naboline of the painter Coypel; while the batch of short stories from Mme. Le Prince de Beaumont's Magasin des Enfants have had a curious fate. They are rather pooh-poohed by French editors and critics, and they are certainly very moral, too much so, in fact, as has been already objected to one of them, Le Prince Chéri. But allowances have been allowed even there, and, somehow or other, Fatal et Fortuné, Le Prince Charmant, Joliette, and the rest have recovered more of the root of the matter than most others, and have established a just popularity in translation.