The Victorian Fairy Tale Book (Pantheon Fairy Tale & Folklore Library) (4 page)

The last gasp of the grand old tradition came with Rudyard Kipling’s
Puck of Pook’s Hill
(1906) and its sequel,
Rewards and Fairies
(1910). But they lack conviction: their fairy machinery is no more than pastework and tinsel, and the stories are crammed more with British history than with fairy lore. The optimism so vital to their predecessors could not survive the horrors of the First World War. Science fiction, the imagination looking forward, supplanted the fairy tale, the imagination looking backward, with the coming of the Modern Age.

The Victorian Fairy Tale Book
does not pretend to embrace all aspects of this vast and varied genre. Instead, it includes only outstanding examples of imaginative fiction and poetry, several by writers who were among the greatest authors of their time. Remarkably, though works of fancy, most never intended as anything more than children’s stories, they reflect Victoria’s England better than most of the earnest novels and social tracts of that era. After all, Henry Morley observed, “everybody knows that fairy tales and other compositions of that kind represent the spirit of the age and nation out of which they spring.” Some amuse, some enchant, some satirize, some criticize—after all, no one creates an alternative world who is content with his own. Whatever their authors’ intentions, these selections, reunited with illustrations from their original editions, display the abundant riches to be found in the Victorian fairy tale.

 
The King of the Golden River
OR
The Black Brothers

I
n a secluded and mountainous part of Stiria, there was, in old time, a valley of the most surprising and luxuriant fertility. It was surrounded, on all sides, by steep and rocky mountains, rising into peaks, which were always covered with snow, and from which a number of torrents descended in constant cataracts. One of these fell westward, over the face of a crag so high, that, when the sun had set to everything else, and all below was darkness, his beams still shone full upon this waterfall, so that it looked like a shower of gold. It was, therefore, called by the people of the neighbourhood, the Golden River. It was strange that none of these streams fell into the valley itself. They all descended on the other side of the mountains, and wound away through broad plains and by populous cities. But the clouds were drawn so constantly to the snowy hills, and rested so softly in the circular hollow, that in time of drouth and heat, when all the country round was burnt up, there was still rain in the little valley; and its crops were so heavy, and its hay so high, and its apples so red, and its grapes so blue, and its wine so rich, and its honey so sweet, that it was a marvel to every one who beheld it, and was commonly called the Treasure Valley. The whole of this little valley belonged to three brothers, called Schwartz, Hans, and Gluck. Schwartz and Hans, the two elder brothers, were very ugly men, with overhanging eyebrows and small dull eyes, which were always half shut, so that you couldn’t see into
them
, and always fancied they saw very far into
you.
They lived by farming the Treasure Valley, and very good farmers they were. They killed everything that did not pay for its eating. They shot the blackbirds, because they pecked the fruit; and killed the hedgehogs, lest they should suck the cows; they poisoned the crickets for eating the crumbs in the kitchen, and smothered the cicadas, which used to sing all summer in the lime-trees. They worked their servants without any wages, till they would not work any more, and then quarrelled with them, and turned them out of doors without paying them. It would have been very odd, if with such a farm, and such a system of farming, they hadn’t got very rich; and very rich they
did
get. They generally contrived to keep their corn by them till it was very dear, and then sell it for twice its value; they had heaps of gold lying about on their floors, yet it was never known that they had given so much as a penny or a crust in charity; they never went to mass; grumbled perpetually at paying tithes; and were, in a word, of so cruel and grinding a temper, as to receive from all those with whom they had any dealings, the nick-name of the “Black Brothers.” The youngest brother, Gluck, was as completely opposed, in both appearance and character, to his seniors as could possibly be imagined or desired. He was not above twelve years old, fair, blue-eyed, and kind in temper to every living thing. He did not, of course, agree particularly well with his brothers, or rather, they did not agree with
him.
He was usually appointed to the honourable office of turnspit, when there was anything to roast, which was not often; for, to do the brothers justice, they were hardly less sparing upon themselves than upon other people. At other times he used to clean the shoes, floors, and sometimes the plates, occasionally getting what was left on them, by way of encouragement, and a wholesome quantity of dry blows, by way of education.

Things went on in this manner for a long time. At last came a very wet summer, and everything went wrong in the country round. The hay had hardly been got in, when the haystacks were floated bodily down to the sea by an inundation; the vines were cut to pieces with the hail; the corn was all killed by a black blight; only in the Treasure Valley, as usual, all was safe. As it had rain when there was rain nowhere else, so it had sun when there was sun nowhere else. Every body came to buy corn at the farm, and went away pouring maledictions on the Black Brothers. They asked what they liked, and got it, except from the poor people, who could only beg, and several of whom were starved at their very door, without the slightest regard or notice.

It was drawing towards winter, and very cold weather, when one day the two elder brothers had gone out, with their usual warning to little Gluck, who was left to mind the roast, that he was to let nobody in, and give
nothing out. Gluck sat down quite close to the fire, for it was raining very hard, and the kitchen walls were by no means dry or comfortable-looking. He turned and turned, and the roast got nice and brown. “What a pity,” thought Gluck, “my brothers never ask anybody to dinner. I’m sure, when they’ve got such a nice piece of mutton as this, and nobody else has got so much as a piece of dry bread, it would do their hearts good to have somebody to eat it with them.”

Just as he spoke, there came a double knock at the house door, yet heavy and dull, as though the knocker had been tied up—more like a puff than a knock. “It must be the wind,” said Gluck; “nobody else would venture to knock double knocks at our door.” No it wasn’t the wind: there it came again very hard, and what was particularly astounding, the knocker seemed to be in a hurry, and not to be in the least afraid of the consequences. Gluck went to the window, opened it, and put his head out to see who it was. It was the most extraordinary-looking little gentleman he had ever seen in his life. He had a very long nose, slightly brass-coloured, and expanding towards its termination into a development not unlike the lower extremity of a key bugle. His cheeks were very round, and very red, and might have warranted a supposition that he had been blowing a refractory fire for the last eight-and-forty hours. His eyes twinkled merrily through long silky eyelashes, his moustaches curled twice round like a cork-screw on each side of his mouth, and his hair, of a curious mixed pepper-and-salt colour, descended far over his shoulders. He was about four feet six in height, and wore a conical pointed cap of nearly the same altitude, decorated with a black feather some three feet long. His doublet was prolonged behind into something resembling a violent exaggeration of what is now termed a “swallow-tail,” but was much obscured by the swelling folds of an enormous black, glossy-looking cloak, which must have been very much too long in calm weather, as the wind, whistling round the old house, carried it clear out from the wearer’s shoulders to about four times his own length.

Gluck was so perfectly paralyzed by the singular appearance of his visitor, that he remained fixed without uttering a word, until the old gentleman, having performed another and a more energetic concerto on the knocker, turned round to look after his fly-away cloak. In so doing he caught sight of Gluck’s little yellow head jammed in the window, with its mouth and eyes very wide open indeed.

“Hollo!” said the little gentleman, “that’s not the way to answer the door: I’m wet, let me in.”

To do the little gentleman justice, he
was
wet. His feather hung down between his legs like a beaten puppy’s tail, dripping like an umbrella; and
from the ends of his moustaches the water was running into his waistcoat pockets, and out again like a mill-stream.

“I beg pardon, sir,” said Gluck, “I’m very sorry, but I really can’t.”

“Can’t what?” said the old gentleman.

“I can’t let you in, sir,—I can’t indeed; my brothers would beat me to death, sir, if I thought of such a thing. What do you want, sir?”

“Want?” said the old gentleman petulantly. “I want fire, and shelter; and there’s your great fire there blazing, crackling, and dancing on the walls, with nobody to feel it. Let me in, I say; I only want to warm myself.”

Gluck had had his head, by this time, so long out of the window, that he began to feel it was really unpleasantly cold, and when he turned, and saw the beautiful fire rustling and roaring, and throwing long bright tongues up the chimney, as if it were licking its chops at the savoury smell of the leg of mutton, his heart melted within him that it should be burning away for nothing. “He does look
very
wet,” said little Gluck; “I’ll just let him in for a quarter of an hour.” Round he went to the door, and opened it; and as the little gentleman walked in, there came a gust of wind through the house, that made the old chimneys totter.

“That’s a good boy,” said the little gentleman. “Never mind your brothers. I’ll talk to them.”

“Pray, sir, don’t do any such thing,” said Gluck. “I can’t let you stay till they come; they’d be the death of me.”

“Dear me,” said the old gentleman, “I’m very sorry to hear that. How long may I stay?”

“Only till the mutton’s done, sir,” replied Gluck, “and it’s very brown.”

Then the old gentleman walked into the kitchen, and sat himself down on the hob, with the top of his cap accommodated up the chimney, for it was a great deal too high for the roof.

“You’ll soon dry there, sir,” said Gluck, and sat down again to turn the mutton. But the old gentleman did
not
dry there, but went on drip, drip, dripping among the cinders, and the fire fizzed, and sputtered, and began to look very black, and uncomfortable; never was such a cloak; every fold in it ran like a gutter.

“I beg pardon, sir,” said Gluck at length, after watching the water spreading in long, quick-silver-like streams over the floor for a quarter of an hour; “mayn’t I take your cloak?”

“No, thank you,” said the old gentleman.

“Your cap, sir?”

“I am all right, thank you,” said the old gentleman rather gruffly.