ONE has been reading a fairy-tale of our own day, which has made a great stir in literary and dramatic circles, and it has given rise to certain ideas as to canons of criticism. Its name, and its author's, do not matter; there will be more freedom if they remain unmentioned.
What a charm is here! Millions of colors that never were in the rainbow nor the sea-shell; a subtle, exquisite loveliness—which yet, in the after-taste—somehow repels. Always mystery; what we call inanimate things waking to life (as they should do, indeed, in any right-minded fairy-tale); a sense of mutable, inconsequent horizons, over which no sun has ever risen or set. And, as there should be in fairy-tales, a kind of esotericism glimmering through; a meaning concealed yet obvious. Yet there is fairy gold and fairy gold. The best kind has the aspect of a petal or a pebble; but with the dawn, lo, some diamond or magical tiara. We are a little doubtful that this moon-wan opalescence will not turn out to be only a good worthy piece of Birmingham-ware. Withal, there are fine notes at the end, that touch deep centers in us; for these one can but be duly and truly thankful.
There are certainly two methods of imagination; and we find them shown forth excellently in fairy literature. By that we mean all mythology; every tale wherein non-human or magical agents play their part. It will include a good part of our poetry; Shakespeare, Keats, Shelley, Coleridge, Poe, and Tennyson all dipped into it at times, or moved habitually among its haunted valleys.
There are two roads running out from our actual world, and they run through two separate Fairy-Lands. You shall go out by your front door when the sun is shining, and come upon the one of them. It leads through a wood of daffodils—Wordsworth's and Shakespeare's daffodils—in whose company you will find yourself strangely exultant: these are they that "take the winds with beauty"; hence their jocundity and infectious mirth. Alive? Why, certainly; and wise also—only perhaps you shall not yet be allowed to pry too curiously into their counsels. All the flowers are alive in this fairyland; and they all have their own secrets, which are sunbright and beneficent. Sunbright, or sundark like the hyacinth—but still beneficent: poppy and mandragora are not allowed to grow here.
As you ride on, you shall still feel the shining of the sun and the vigor of the wind; or perhaps there will be sweet intimate grayness of clouds, or perhaps the sweetness of rain. Rain or wind, you will feel the touch of either on your face, and smell the earth-scent. There is one valley there, where the sky is always clouded and windy; the sedge is withered on the lake there, and no birds sing. But for that, you might mistake it at first for a place in the other fairyland, because of the haggard and woe-begone knight-at-arms you are to meet with, "alone and palely loitering." Keats came to this valley, and heard his whole story from him: it was this knight-at-arms who met La Belle Dame Sans Merci.
Like everything else in this fairy-land, it is true; in this case the beauty of its truth is awful. For you are not to suppose there are no tragedies enacted here: there are as many as there are in the world. There are a thousand wanderers in the valleys and on the mountains, who would lure you away from the sunlight and the rain. Here, often and often, it is written: "Look not behind, or thou art lost." Yet no ruin can come upon you that is not definitely evitable: one holds one's fate in one's own hands, and need fear nothing but himself.
In another hundred of fairyland, your road runs by over windy wolds of rye and barley, and down past the island in the river where dwells the Lady of Shalott. While she weaves her web, finding her whole delight in the pictures, note that the sun or the moon is still shining; afterwards, when she has turned and the curse has come upon her, the low skies are raining ever so heavily. By the presence of the sun and moon and wind and rain, by the earth-smell and the water-song, you shall know that you are in the fairyland of the Right Hand, and that everything about you is true. The story of the Lady of Shalott true? Why, yes; a million and a million times. A tragedy again; fairyland is full of tragedies. Yet she need not have left the web, need not have seen the bloom on the water-lilies, need not ever have looked down to Camelot.
And how nearly a tragedy is this scene too—of Titania, poor lady, falling in love with the Ass! For, if you go far enough, you shall come upon Oberon and his court; you shall find sweet Bully Bottom also, strangely wandered from his own world, and with that queer, inevitable headpiece clapped upon him. What else should he wear, in fairyland? As was said, everything is so desperately true here; and sage and simple are alike to come by their own. Should you stray here, no silk hat has potent enough magic of the modern to protect your respectability: a wandering wind will whisk it away, and you will appear in crown or ass-head, according to your merits; or perchance in a dinted, war-worn helmet, or wearing a garland of oak or laurel or bay. No one may wear any colors but his own in fairyland.
There are innumerable provinces here, reigned over by innumerable potentates; but you are to look for sun and moon and wind and rain in all of them. Perseus and Theseus and Herakles; Roland and the good knight Charlemain; Cuchullain and the Red Branch; the men of the Emperor Arthur, and Oisin and Oscar and Finn—they are all here; here are fought Moytura, Fontarabbia, Camlan. Ulysses flies the Island of Calypso anew; and Odin comes anew into the Hall of the Dwarfs. There is always a feast at Gwalas in Penfro; and the door that looks out towards Aberhenfelen and Cornwall is flung wide by Heilyn again and again—tragedy of tragedies; no one had opened that door until then, from the time the sea and the sky and that old palace were made. But hark! it is the scream of a real seagull that is blown down the hall. Innumerable are the beauties and wonders and sorrows of this region; and they are all true, true, true: you can hear the natural winds and waves always, and taste the salt of natural wind-driven spray.
Yet in a sorrowless Italy here, Saturn still is reigning: and here