t is perhaps the most engaging of all
the tales. It is for Beauty's own charm, which is subtly conveyed; for
the brisk and artistic "revolutions and discoveries"; above all, for the
far from merely sentimental pathos of the Beast's all but death _for_
love, and the not in the least mawkish bringing of him to life again
_by_ love.[225]

[Sidenote: Yet often redeemed.]

One may perhaps also make amends to Prince Cheri for the abuse just
bestowed on him. His story has at least one touch which is sovereign for
a fiction-fault common in the past, and only too probable in the future,
at whatever time one takes the "present" of the story. When he is not
unjustly turned into a monster of the most allegorical-composite order
of monster architecture--a monster to whom dragons and wyverns and
chimaeras dire are as ordinary as kittens--what do they do with him?
They put him "with the other monsters." _Ce n'est pas plus raide que
ca._ The present writer need hardly fear to be thought an
anti-mediaevalist, but he is very much afraid that an average mediaeval
romancer might have thought it necessary to catalogue these other
monsters with the aid of a Bestiary. On the other hand, there have been
times--no matter which--when this abrupt introduction and dismissal of
monsters as common objects (for which any respectable community will
have proper stables or cages) would have been disallowed, or explained
away, or apologised for, or, worst of all, charged with a sort of wink
or sneer to let the reader know that the author knew what he was about.
Here there is nothing of this superfluous or offensive sort. The
appropriate and undoubting logic of the style prevails over all too
reasonable difficulties. There are monsters, or how could Cheri be made
into one? If there are monsters there must, or in the highest
probability may, be other monsters. Put him with them, and make no fuss
about it. If all novelists had had this _aplomb_, we should have been
spared a great deal of tediousness, some positive failures, and the
spoiling, or at least the blotting and marring, of many excellent
situations. But to praise the good points of fairy stories, from the
brief consummateness of _Le Chat Botte_ to the longer drawn but still
perfectly golden matter of _La Biche au Bois_, would really be
superfluous. One loathes leaving them; but one has to do it, so far as
the more unsophisticated part of them is concerned. Yet the duty of the
historian will not l