hat they should attain
the wonderful simplicity, freshness, and charm of Perrault at his best
was not to be expected; hardly that they should reach the more
sophisticated grace of Hamilton; but it might have been hoped that some
would come more or less near the lower, and much more unequal, but
occasionally very successful art or luck of Mme. d'Aulnoy herself.
Unfortunately very few of them do. It was easy enough to begin _Il
etait autrefois un roi et une reine_, to put in a Prince Charming and a
Princess Graciosa, and good fairies and bad fairies, and magicians and
ogres and talking beasts, and the like. It was not so easy to make all
these things work together to produce the peculiar spell which belongs
to the true land of Faery, and to that land alone. Still more
unfortunately, wrong ways of attempting the object (or some other
object) were as easy as the right ways were difficult. They cannot avoid
muddling the fairy tale with the heroic romance: and with the
half-historical sub-variety of this latter which Mme. de La Fayette
introduced. The worst enchanter that ever fairies had to fight with is
not such an enemy of theirs as History and Geography--two most
respectable persons in their proper places, but fatal here. They will
make King Richard of England tell fairy tales to Blondel out of the
Austrian tower, and muddle up things about his wicked brother the Count
of Mortagne. They will talk of Lemnos and Memphis and other _patatis_
and _patatas_ of the classical dictionary and the _Grand Cyrus_. In a
fashion not perhaps so instantly suicidal, but in a sufficiently
annoying fashion, they will invent clumsy "speaking" names, or dog-Latin
and cat-Greek ones. And, perhaps worst of all, they prostitute the
delicate charms of the fairy tale to clumsy adulation of the reigning
monarch, and tedious half-veiled flattery or satire of less exalted
persons, or, if "prostitute" be too harsh a word here, attempt to force
a marriage between these charms and the dullest moralising. In fact, it
is scarcely extravagant to say that, in regard to too many of them--to
some of them at least--everything that ought not to be, such as the
things just mentioned and others, is there, and everything that ought to
be--lightness, brightness, the sense of the impossible in which it is
delightful to believe, the dream-feeling, the magic of gratified wish
and realised ideal--is not.

[Sidenote: Mlle. de la Force and others.]

Of course, in these