The Märchen or child's story, is a form of literature primevally old,but with infinite capacity of renewing its youth. Old wives' fables,tales about a lad and a lass, and a cruel step-mother, about threeadventurous brothers, about friendly or enchanted beasts, about magicalweapons and rings, about giants and cannibals, are the most ancient formof romantic fiction. The civilised peoples have elaborated thesechildlike legends into the chief romantic myths, as of the Ship Argo,and the sagas of Heracles and Odysseus. Uncivilised races, Ojibbeways,Eskimo, Samoans, retain the old wives' fables in a form far lesscultivated,—probably far nearer the originals. European peasants keepthem in shapes more akin to the savage than to the Greek forms, and,finally, men of letters have adopted the genre from popular narrative,as they have also adopted the Fable.
Little Johannes, here translated from the Dutch of Dr. Frederik vanEeden, is the latest of these essays, in which the man's fancyconsciously plays with the data and the forms of the child'simagination. It is not my purpose here to criticise Little Johannes, anAllegory of a Poet's Soul, nor to try to forestall the reader's ownconclusions. One prefers rather to glance at the history of the FairyTale in modern literature.
It might, of course, be said with truth that the Odyssey, and parts ofmost of the world's Epics are literary expansions of the Märchen. Butthese, we may be confident, were not made of set literary purpose.Neither Homer, nor any poet of the French Chansons de Geste, cried,'Here is a good plot in a child's legend, let me amplify and ennobleit.' The real process was probably this: adventures that from timeimmemorial had been attributed to the vague heroes of Märchengradually clustered round some half divine or heroic name, as ofHeracles or Odysseus, won a way into national traditions, and werefinally sung of by some heroic poet. This slow evolution of romance isall unlike what occurs when a poet chooses some wild-flower of popularlore, and cultivates it in his garden, when La Fontaine, for example,selects the Fable; when the anecdote is developed into the fabliau orthe conte, when Apuleius makes prize of Cupid and Psyche (aMärchen of world-wide renown), when Fénelon moralises the fairy tale,or Madame d'Aulnoy touches it with courtly wit and happy humour, or whenThackeray burlesques it, with a kindly mockery, or when Dr. Frederik vanEeden, or Dr. Macdonald, allegorises the nursery narratives. To moralisethe tale in a very ancient fashion: Indian literature was busy to thisend in the Buddhist Jatakas or Birth-stories, and in the Ocean of theStream of Stories. Mediæval preachers employed old tales as texts andas illustrations of religious and moral precepts. But the ancientpopular fairy tale, the salt of primitive fancy, the drop of the waterof the Fountain of Youth in modern fiction, began its great invasion ofliterature in France, and in the reign of Louis XIV. When the survivorsof the Précieuses, when the literary court ladies were some deal wearyof madrigals, maxims, bouts-rimés, 'portraits,' and their othergraceful bookish toys, they took to telling each other fairy tales.[1]
On August 6, 1676, Madame de Sévigné tells her daught