cularly. It remains to be seen, in the next chapter,
how what a few purists may call its contamination by, but what we may
surely be permitted to call its alliance with, "polite literature" was
started, or practically started, through the direct agency of no
Frenchman, but of a man who can be claimed by England in the larger and
national sense, by Scotland and Ireland and England again in the
narrower and more parochial--by Anthony Hamilton. His work, however,
must be left till that next chapter, though in this we may, after the
"blessed originals" just mentioned, take in their sometimes degenerate
successors for nearly a hundred years after Perrault's time.

[Sidenote: Perrault and Mme. d'Aulnoy.]

Well, however, as the simpler and purer fairy-tales may be known to all
but twentieth-century children (who are said not to like them), it is
doubtful whether many people have considered them in the light in which
we have to regard them here, so as to see in them both a link in the
somewhat complicated chain of novel development, and also one which is
not dead metal, but serves as a medium for introducing powerful currents
of influence on the chain itself. We have dwelt on one point--the
desirableness, if not necessity, of shortness in them--as specially
valuable at the time. No doubt they need not all be as short as
Perrault's, though even among his there are instances (not to mention
_L'Adroite Princesse_ for the moment), such as _Peau d'Ane_, of more
than twenty pages, as against the five of the _Chaperon Rouge_ and the
ten of _Barbe Bleue_, _Le Chat Botte_, and _Cendrillon_. Mme. d'Aulnoy's
run longer; but of course the longest[221] of all are mites to the
mammoths of the Scudery romance. A fairy story must never "drag,"
and in its better, and indeed all its genuine, forms it never does.
Further (it must be remembered that "Little Red Riding Hood,"
in its unadulterated and "_un_happy ending" form, is not a fairy
story at all, for talking animals are not peculiar to that), "fairiness,"
the actual presence of these gracious or ungracious but always
between-human-and-divine-creatures, is necessary,[222] and their agency
must be necessary too. In this and other ways it is interesting to
contrast two stories (which are neighbours to each other, with _Peau
d'Ane_ between them, in the convenient one-volume collection of French
Fairy Tale classics published by Gamier), Mme. d'Aulnoy's _Gracieuse et
Percinet_ and _L'Adroite Prin