GEORGE CRUIKSHANK'S FAIRY LIBRARY.* WHornEn we are indebted to Mr.
Cruikshank or to Messrs. Bell and Daldy for a new edition of the four fairy stories included in this little book, we do not know ; but, at any rate, in the name of the nursery public, we thank the suggester of so advisable a pro- ceeding; for if the present writer can judge from the state of his family copy—purchased or presented some fifteen years ago—it is becoming a pressing necessity in every juvenile library to replace the venerable and venerated, but alas ! also nearly obliterated relic by a copy that has not yet suffered at the hand of time, or at other hands less ancient and pitiful. This is not a book with illustrations, but pictures with explanatory letter-press ; for dearly as we love the old stories, they—thank goodness!—exist in a hundred different forms, and are accessible to the poorest children for almost nominal prices, if coarse paper, wretched type, and flaming daubs are not held to be objections ; but such etchings as these no one but George Cruikshank can give us.
The little, black, sharply-executed woodcuts, from Mr. Cruik- shank's drawings, which illustrated, for the children who are now elderly men, the German popular stories, are too dear to our hearts to allow us a fair and unbiassed judgment of the comparative merits of those and these ; in the former certainly nothing can surpass in droll humour the comic procession with the golden goose, or the sudden incursion of the musicians of Bremen, or the picture—in which pathos also mingles—of the midnight revels of the delighted little elves for whom the cobbler has prepared such a capital fit in breeches and shoes ; but without doubt, though years seem to• have subdued Mr. Cruikshank's humour, they have added grace and beauty to his pencil. It is difficult to say whether fancifulness of conception or delicacy of execution is the more remarkable in these exquisite little etchings, from which it must not be supposed that we by any means believe humour to be absent ; it is here, in the very first picture, with the row of five little heads in the bed, and the tiny owner of the sixth sitting up in a listening attitude ; and in the erect hair and frightened ex- pression of the same little mite while under examination by the ogre as to his ripeness for a pie ; and again, where he presents the seven-league boots to the king. The attitude and expression of Puss-in-Boots in the rabbit-warren is also extremely droll, and so is Cinderella's grotesque little god-mother ; and many of the other pictures have more or less of the comic element in them. There is no caricature, with the exception of the dwarfs and giants—which do not admit of caricature, and which are conceived with more imagi- nation, and executed, it seems to us, with more power of working out the conception than any other illustrator of fairy stories has shown himself to possess. The figures are natural and graceful, though, with a covert irony, betraying Radical principles, Mr. Cruikshank's kings have invariably the most vacant and boorish faces it is possible to conceive. But the fine and delicate drawing, and the beauty both of landscape and interior, with all their minute accessories, are to our thinking the most remarkable characteristics of these unique illustrations. Perhaps the least successful pictures are those of Jack climbing the bean-stalk, and his escape on the fairy-harp ; the former betrays the fact that the artist never was a climber, or he would have secured Jack's safety by clasping his arms round the main stem of the bean ; and the latter introduces a fairy-harp flying, which is a sort of thing that not even Mr. Cruikshank's imagination could satisfactorily conceive.
But though we have put the pictures first, we do not forget that Mr. Cruikshank has taken much trouble to amend the tales themselves ; and for these emendations we cannot express the same admiration. That in his hands the rendering is pure and innocent we willingly admit, and we concede also his right to alter the old text so far as is necessary for such rendering, but we may sometimes question the necessity. With an unseen friend whom, nevertheless, we so admire, and who has grown to be so dear to us, we feel we may venture to express freely our difference of opinion, though Mr. Cruikshank deals in porcupine as well as crowquills, and were we approaching as enemies we should do well to be careful. In this edition he shoots out the former unsparingly, and in some instances deservedly, against
* George Craittharik4 Fairy Library. London: Bell and Daldy.
Mr. Read the publisher, Mr. Dickens, Mrs. Beecher Stowe "(for calling his hair grey " when it happens to be dark brown"), and even against the Inquirer newspaper, the modest organ of the Unitarian Christians; indeed, his animated behaviour in the midst of assailants forcibly reminds us of a reverend and excitable, not to say irascible, theologian whom we once saw arguing with two cool laymen; he was unfortunately placed, being between them on a sofa, but the jumps he gave so as to face them as they attacked him in turn were in themselves not a little convincing, and seemed to add both courage and power to his arguments.
If Mr. Dickens and the Inquirer newspaper have not carried conviction to Mr. Cruikshank's mind, we can scarcely hope to do so ; but though we may fail to establish that the old tales were best left alone for the sake of the young, we can plead that for the sake of the tired and worn middle-aged man, who agrees to read "just one story" to his little ones, they should be left unchangedi that the old happy feeling and the half-ashamed smile at his own pleasure may steal over him for a while, instead of a sense of wrong and indignation at finding his household gods disturbed. But children too should be spared, for though less grieved, they are more indignant at variations ; a small listener to Mr. Cruikshank's reading of Cinderella lately took exception even to the colour of the lizards, declaring that "they were not green in his Cinderella;" it was sad to witness his disappointment at this and other details, for his nature was single-minded and faithful, and he .had been read to sleep by Cinderella for nearly a thousand-and-one nights, and on the only occasion when, moved by filial love, he had asked to have a composition of his father's read to him instead, it had not proceeded far before he remarked dejectedly, " I don't think I quite understand—please Cinderella."
Mr. Cruikshank's alterations have been made as the result of two theories which we think are untenable ; first, that children notice and profit by the moral of a story ; and second, that they are injured by the relation of any wicked deeds that it may con- tain. We venture to think that it is the imagination alone that is excited in children by fairy-stories—not the moral faculty ;— and it is the success or failure of the favourite character, and not the motives which actuate, or the means which are used, however bad these may be, which impress the juvenile mind. Let the hero or heroine be but ill-used, or pretty, or good in the outset, and it matters nothing how she or he gains or regains prosperity, so that it be achieved. And the moral of a story—so that the object of interest be but happy in the end—makes as little impression, if indeed it be not met by the reasonable request, "Would you much mind missing that and going to where So-and- So does so-and-so ?" Children detect any attempt to smuggle a moral into a story, and instinctively resent it, or they endure it only for their own ends when they cannot otherwise command the pleasant parts, like the Welshman who was glad of his rector's sermons, because " Indeed I do not care much for them, but I like to get my moneys, and he be always at home on Saturdays to make his preach, and he pay quick, because he not have too much time."
Mr. Cruikshank writes from an adult point of view, and forgets that the innocent mind of the child neither perceives nor under- stands the wickedness which forms so large a portion of the machinery of fairy stories ; the fun and the success are alone noted ; the giant ripping open his stomach—which so shocks Mr. Cruikshank—carries no thought of indelicacy to the imagination of a child, but is merely regarded as a very funny way of getting rid of the giant ; and we confess that " odd splutter hur nails, hur can do that," with the deed that followed, has always seemed to us one of the strongest points in the story, and we are glad to find that Miss Muloch has neither rejected this nor the cutting of the throats of the six young ogresses in her beautiful edition prepared for the Golden Treasury Series. Since Mr. Cruikshank rejects such exciting incidents, we can scarcely think him correct in stating that he "preserves all the important features." In the same way, the cheating the ogress out of her wealth while she is mourning for her six deceased daughters, does not strike a child as cruel or dishonest, because his interest is centred on Hop-o'-my-Thumb and his parents, and their prosperity is the only thought in his mind ; you can neither make nor wish a child to see both sides of a question, and regard it from the judge's point of view in the spirit of a large-minded, even- handed justice.
Mr. Cruikshank is so honest that he explains that there are not really any ogres or fairies, but we are amused to find that, perceiving how this admission will destroy some of the charm of the book, he postpones it to the very end. He himself sees the impossibility of excluding all dishonest strategy from the adven-
tures of his heroes ; and if he could so exclude it the fairy-tales would be gone, and others of sad real life would be substituted. He is obliged to make Hop-o'-my-Thumb an eaves-dropper and a thief, and his mother a dissimulator—consenting to her husband's plan with an important mental reservation—and Cinderella a prevaricator, and the kind ogress a liar ; and to say that these are not sins because they were justified by the motive, would be teach- ing a more dangerous lesson to children than the worst edition of the fairy tales could do; but, of course, Mr. Cruikshauk does not say this, nor in any way justify the deceptions he is obliged to describe.
Nor is it less certain to us that children pass unnoticed the opportunities which are taken to " improve the occasion," and we cannot help smiling to observe the way in which Mr. Cruikshank has slipped in good little hints, with, as it were, a wink over his shoulder at the seniors, on the subject of going to bed early, washing all over in cold water daily, not eating late suppers, &c., to say nothing of the far deeper lessons which we are confident are systematically skipped, or, if read, go in at one ear and out at the other, on the difficult political questions of State education, free- trade, and convict labour, and of the more comprehensible but still equally heavy ones to children, of gambling and drinking ; on this latter question Mr. Cruikshank holds with the total abstainers, and makes some doubtful statements, as, for instance, that people who get tipsy " soon get ill and die." He has evidently not been in the painful position of the worthy judge who, after descanting on the late appearance of a very aged witness, rashly observed that without doubt ho was a teetotaller. " Well, not exactly yer honour," replied the old man, "for I don't know as I can remember over going to bed sober."
Nevertheless, and anything herein before stated in any wise notwithstanding, let us express our hearty admiration of this exquisitely illustrated edition of four of our most favourite fairy- tales.
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