Читать книгу Types of Prose Narratives. A Text-Book for the Story Writer онлайн

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Fairies, elves, and ariels include all the small creatures who are fair, good, and useful. They have their dwelling-place, it is said, 'in the airy realm of Alf-heim (home of the light-elves), situated between heaven and earth, whence they can flit downwards whenever they please, to attend to the plants and flowers, sport with the birds and butterflies, or dance in the silvery moonlight on the green.' They have golden hair, sweet musical voices, and magic harps. These gentle aerial beings, scholars say, were introduced into Europe by the Crusaders and the Moors of Spain. Before that time the creatures of the North had been cold and ungenial, like their heath-clad mountains, chilly lakes, and piny solitudes; but after the advent of the Peri of the East, who live in the sun or the rainbow and subsist on the odor of flowers, the Northern elves took on more winning attributes and finally became beneficent and beautiful.

Many of the stories in the so-called fairy books are technically not fairy stories but nursery sagas, as we use the term today; for instance, most of those in Miss Mulock's "Fairy Book" and the larger part in the "Blue and the Green Fairy Books." They are English, French, German, and other Märchen retold. Jean Ingelow's "Mopsa the Fairy" has a good-sounding title for a typical fairy book, though the material seems to be literary rather than traditional. Brentano's creatures in translation surely bear literary names, whatever they have in the original. Dream-my-Soul and Sir Skip-and-a-Jump are suggestive of the pen. But Puck of Pook's Hill comes near to being of the solid traditional Northern type—at least in declaration. He says he is the oldest Old Thing in England—very much at your service if you care to have anything to do with him; but, by Oak and Ash and Thorn, he hates the painty-winged, wand-waving, sugar-and-shake-your-head set of imposters! He is for Wayland-Smith and magic and the old days before the Conquest. Charles Kingsley's Madam How and Lady Why are noble fairies without dispute—really goddesses; yet, strange to say, they have revealed themselves to a pedagogue and have permitted their work to be the subject of lectures. Still, they are companionable and wholesome and none the less marvelous than their more common sisters. This is an interesting contamination of genres—the pedagogical narrative combined with the fairy tale. Usually the combination is not so happily made.