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THE editor of a London
literary journal was recently inviting men and women in prominent
positions in public life to name for publication the books of their
childhood. So far as I observed, none of the half-hundred or more who
responded gave Blue Beard, Cinderella, Little Red Hiding Hood., or any
of the others in the same category that follow here. But I am none the
less convinced that these old-time favourites, not yet unknown, though
familiar to city children in the present generation mainly in their
variegated and fantastic Christmas pantomime form, were in Scotland and
England alike in the last century more essentially the books of
childhood than any others known and read beyond the walls of the
school-room. The travelling stationers and packmen carried them in their
thousands, in chapbook form, into even the most remote parts of the
country, where they were bartered for and explored with avidity. In many
quarters, indeed, they were so familiar fifty years ago that the books
on occasions could be dispensed with, and the elder members of families
would recite the stories from memory for the delectation of the younger
fry, when all foregathered in a crescent before the kitchen fire to wear
out the long winter evenings. In this manner, under the dim-flickering
light of an "oilie cruizie," in a straggling village in Perthshire, did
I learn first of Blue Beard and Jack the Giant Killer, and many another
hero of chap-book literature. And my experience, I am sure, was by no
means singular. Rather, I feel certain that while telling thus my own. I
am expressing no less truly the experience of many thousands of men and
women now beyond middle life who similarly were born and bred in any
rural parish in Scotland. And, oh, the weird fascination of it all!
There was no doubting of Blue Beard's reality; no hesitation in
accepting as actual every extraordinary feat of Jack the Giant Killer.
Both were as real in our innocent imagination as is now the personality
of King- Edward the Seventh. It never occurred to us then, as it does
now, that the story of Blue Beard is only a gory and fantastic parody of
the history of Eden a temptation, a fall, and a rescue. And we had no
concern about authorship. We did not know then, as we do now and as few
are yet aware, perhaps that Blue Beard, Cinderella, and Little Red
Riding Hood were all written by Charles Perrault, a celebrated French
literateur and poet, who was born in Paris in 1628, and died there in
1703. And to have been told, as we have recently been, on authority that
Perrault's Blue Beard - the Comte Gilles de Rais - was no mere
wife-killer (though he was such) but from his youth upwards, in the
fifteenth century, a man of exquisite culture, and a soldier under Joan
of Arc, would have made for disillusionment so emphatic as to have shred
the tale of a serious amount of its blood-curdling charm. As I can still
enjoy reading them, it is a real pleasure to embrace here these old-time
examples of child literature. Such as follow and all the more popular
will be found in the list are printed verbatim from the chapbooks now
unobtainable, except at a ransom price and without individual comment -
none being required. |
