debated subject of folklore and fairy stories, their connection, and the
origin of the latter. It is true that "the pleasure gives way to a
savour of sorrow," to adopt a charming phrase of Mr. Dobson's, when I
think of the amiable indignation which the absence of what I shall not
say, and perhaps still more the presence of some things that I shall
say, would have caused in my friend, and his friend, the late Mr. Andrew
Lang.[220] But the irreparable is always with us. Despite the undoubted
omnipresence of the folk-story, with its "fairy" character in the
general sense, I have always wanted more proof than I have ever
received, that the thing is of Western rather than of Eastern origin,
and that our Western stories of the kind, in so far as they affected
literature before a very recent period, are independent. But I attach no
particular value to this opinion, and it will influence nothing that I
say here. So with a few more half-words to the wise, as that Mme.
d'Aulnoy had been in Spain, that the Crusades took place in the eleventh
century, that, independently thereof, Scandinavians had been
"Varangians" very early at Constantinople, etc. etc., let us come to the
two great literary facts--the chorus of fairy tale-telling proper at the
end of the century (of which the coryphaei are the lady already
mentioned and Perrault), and the epoch-making translation of _The
Arabian Nights_ by Galland.

[Sidenote: Its _general_ characteristics--the happy ending.]

In a certain sense, no doubt, the fairy tale may be said to be merely a
variety of the age-old _fabliau_ and _nouvelle_. But it is, for literary
purposes, a distinctly and importantly new variety--new not merely in
subject, even in the widest possible sense of that rather disputable
(or at least disputed) word, but in that _nescio quid_ between subject
and treatment for which I know no better term than the somewhat vague
one "atmosphere." It has the priceless quality of what may be called
good childishness; it gives not merely Fancy but Imagination the freest
play, and, till it has itself created one, it is free from any
convention. It continued, indeed, always free from those "previous"
conventions which are so intolerable. For it is constantly forgotten
that a convention in its youth is often positively healthy, and a
convention in the prime of its life a very tolerable thing. It is the
_old_ conventions which, as Mahomet rashly acknowledged about something
else (saving