The Whole Five Feet

Volume 17

Fables by Aesop

Although they're grouped together in this volume as Folklore and Fable, the fables attributed to Aesop, the folk-tales collected by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm, and the tales of Hans Christian Andersen are widely divergent forms. Aesop's fables -- whose origin and development are as tangled as that of the Arabian Nights in the previous volume -- are extremely compact, and their meanings fairly easy to parse. In many cases, in fact, the meaning is made explicit at the end of the work. The Man and the Wood is a typical example:

A man came into a Wood one day with an axe in his hand, and begged all the Trees to give him a small branch which he wanted for a particular purpose. The Trees were good-natured and gave him one of their branches. What did the Man do but fix it into the axe head, and soon set to work cutting down tree after tree. Then the Trees saw how foolish they had been in giving their enemy the means of destroying themselves.

This isn't even a parable so much as a figure, a metaphor that might as easily be absorbed into a larger argument as stand alone. One can easily see a modern politician using this paragraph verbatim in a speech about, say, civil liberties and the war on terror. In fact, one of these fables -- the Belly and the Members, about the other organs rebelling because the belly got all the food, only to find that he had been feeding them in turn -- showed up earlier in the Classics, in a speech by Cicero about misguided resentment towards the Roman senate.

We use these Fables now more or less as they've always been used, as simple, direct metaphors.  Some of Andersen's tales -- The Ugly Duckling, The Emperor's New Clothes -- have obvious lessons, but they are above all wonderful stories with literary value quite separate from their didactic content. On the other hand, when you speaks of someone being a wolf in sheep's clothing, you have in those four words the entirety of that fable's content.

Household Tales by Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm

The very name of the Brother's Grimm -- with its archaic transposition of noun and adjective, the too-perfect resonance of the family name -- suggest men as old and mysterious as the tales they collected. So it's worth reminding readers that Jacob and Wilhelm Grimm were 19th century German philologists and librarians. Their efforts to preserve traditional German tales call to mind both modern students of mythology like Jung and Joseph Campbell and musicologists like Harry Smith who worked to preserve American folk traditions. The point being that they were well educated men seeking to preserve a tradition of which they were in some ways already no longer a part. As soon as an inherited tale gets written down, codified, it becomes something different. the very need to preserve these tales in this way suggests that the oral tradition in which they grew was fading away.

Regardless, we must all recognize how successful the brothers were as preservationists. These tales remain central to our common culture. Who doesn't know about Rapunzel's letting down her long hair to let her lover climb up to her? Or Hansel and Gretel and the trail of breadcrumbs that helped them home? Or Snow White's stepmother being forced to dance in red hot shoes until she dies?

 

Well, maybe not that last one. Let's try again. There's always Cinderella. Who could forget the way the birds who came to rest on the hazel tree that has granted all of Cinderella's wishes come back in the end to peck out her step-sisters' eyes?

Okay, so it seems we don't know these tales as well as we thought.

(Right about here it seems more or less obligatory to provide a lament on the Disneyfication of these stories. And such a lament would be sincere. These tales are far stranger, darker, more interesting than the cartoons that now overshadow them. It is a great shame in many ways that we can no longer read about the seven dwarves, for example, without thinking of names like Sleepy and Dopey. Or that we think that Cinderella had a fairy godmother, when the story of a hazel branch planted at her mother's grave and watered by her tears is so much more beautiful. But of course, these tales didn't belong to the Grimms, and they certainly evolved in the years before the brothers recorded them. What is sad is that they seem now to have stopped evolving: the ersatz version has somehow become definitive. At any rate, this line of argument ought to lead us back where we belong, with the work itself.)

The most striking difference between these tales as they read on the page and these tales as I knew them as a child is how terrifying the former are. I don't mean birds pecking out the eyes Cinderella's sisters, or Snow White's step mother's dancing until she drops dead (which, after all, are part of the happy endings of their respective tales). I mean the constant, grinding threat of starvation and economic hardship. Hansel and Gretel, for example, are sent out into the woods because their family can't afford to feed them. In these stories, the dream of meeting and marrying a prince represents more than a Freudian family romance of returning to your real life. Marrying up is often a matter of life and death. In this way, these tales sometime strangely reminded me of Jane Austin's novels, where courtship is a matter of both romance and avoiding the poorhouse. I realize only as I write this that Austen's novels are another case where the economic terror has been sanded away in modern cinematic versions, leaving only the anodyne romance behind.

Tales by Hans Christian Andersen

Hans Christian Andersen is a different case than the Grimm brothers. While Andersen was influenced by traditional folk-tales, he was a writer, not a compiler, and these fairy tales were only a small portion of his total literary output. That these tales were the original work of a writer who lived around the same time as Tolstoy and Flaubert makes it all the more remarkable that many of them -- The Emperor's New Clothes, The Ugly Duckling -- have as much cultural currency as Aesop's tortoise and hare or the Grimms' Rumpelstiltskin. But despite their inclusion with these other works, Andersen's stories seem to me very much modern literary efforts. Andersen practiced the tale, as a literary genre, in much the way his compatriot Isak Dinesen did a century later. (I'm sure there is more to made of the fact that the greatest Danish writers of the 19th and 20th centuries both mastered this particular form, but I'm not the one to make it.)

Whether for good or for ill, I've never seen Disney's Little Mermaid movie. Nor, before this week, had I ever read the tale -- translated here as The Little Sea-Maid -- on which the movie is based. I had long been told, however, that Andersen's sea-maid dies at the end of his tale, and that the movie's happy ending is one of the many travesties such adaptations commit against their sources. But I wasn't at all prepared for the moment in the original when the sea-maid turns to foam. It is the kind of moment, I think, that can't be passed down orally and transcribed by an anthropologist, that rather can only be created bya single man or woman of literary genius:

Now the sun rose up out of the sea. The rays fell mild and warm upon the cold sea-foam, and the little Sea-maid felt nothing of death. She saw the bright sun, and over her head sailed hundreds of glorious ethereal beings--she could see them through the white sails of the ship and the red clouds of the sky; their speech was melody, but of such a spiritual kind that no human ear could hear it, just as no human eye could see them; without wings they floated through the air. The little Sea-maid found that she had a frame like these, and was rising more and more out of the foam.

Whither am I going? she asked; and her voice sounded like that of other beings, so spiritual, that no earthly music could be compared to it.

To the daughters of the air! replied the others. A sea-maid has no immortal soul, and can never gain one, except she win the love of a mortal. Her eternal existence depends upon the power of another. The daughters of the air have likewise no immortal soul, but they can make themselves one through good deeds. We fly to the hot countries, where the close, pestilent air kills men, and there we bring coolness. We disperse the fragrance of the flowers through the air, and spread refreshment and health. After we have striven for three hundred years to accomplish all the good we can bring about, we receive an immortal soul, and take part in the eternal happiness of men. You, poor little Sea-maid, have striven with your whole heart after the goal we pursue; you have suffered and endured; you have by good works raised yourself to the world of spirits, and can gain an immortal soul after three hundred years.

And the little Sea-maid lifted her glorified eyes toward God�s sun, and for the first time she felt them fill with tears. On the ship there was again life and noise. She saw the Prince and his bride searching for her; then they looked mournfully at the pearly foam, as if they knew that she had thrown herself into the waves. Invisible, she kissed the forehead of the bride, fanned the Prince, and mounted with the other children of the air on the rosy cloud which floated through the ether. After three hundred years we shall thus float into Paradise!

--CRB, May 17, 2007

Volume 18

All for Love by John Dryden

Like the Folklore and Fable of last week's volume, the Modern English Drama collected in volume eighteen actually represents a great diversity of work. The plays range almost two centuries, from the Restoration to the Romantic era. There are comedies and tragedies, prose dramas and verse, and some seem written more for the page than the stage.

Of the authors represented, only Dryden has appeared earlier in the Classics -- as the translator of the Aeneid. Both that translation and his play All For Love include lengthy prefaces, and it may be that Dryden is more impressive as a critic -- even of his own work -- than as an artist. The preface to All For Love makes a fitting opening to this survey of post-Elizabethan drama, because it states directly the problem all these writers face:

In my style, I have professed to imitate the divine Shakespeare; which that I might perform more freely, I have disencumbered myself from rhyme. Not that I condemn my former way, but that this is more proper to my present purpose. I hope I need not to explain myself, that I have not copied my author servilely: Words and phrases must of necessity receive a change in succeeding ages; but it is almost a miracle that much of his language remains so pure; and that he who began dramatic poetry amongst us, untaught by any, and as Ben Jonson tells us, without learning, should by the force of his own genius perform so much, that in a manner he has left no praise for any who come after him.

I have yet to make sense of the order of the Classics, which feature Shakespeare and the other Elizabethans in the 46th and 47th volumes, but includes Dryden here in volume 18. Nonetheless, reading through the Classics in the way that I have encourages one to see certain works within the context of the literary traditions from which they emerged. Dryden himself demands such consideration with his choice of material in All For Love:

The death of Antony and Cleopatra is a subject which has been treated by the greatest wits of our nation, after Shakespeare; and by all so variously, that their example has given me the confidence to try myself in this bow of Ulysses amongst the crowd of suitors, and, withal, to take my own measures, in aiming at the mark. I doubt not but the same motive has prevailed with all of us in this attempt; I mean the excellency of the moral: For the chief persons represented were famous patterns of unlawful love; and their end accordingly was unfortunate.

This is a sly rhetorical move: is it really the the excellency of the moral that motivates, or the chance to take one's own measures? Of course, the answer may be a bit of both. The question, then, becomes -- where does he measure? In this case, I'm still not sure. Dryden was a master of the heroic couplet (into which he translated the Aeneid), but here he writes in blank verse, and the result is often quite fine. Here is Antony's general, Ventidius, rousing him to battle:

No; 'tis you dream; you sleep away your hours
In desperate sloth, miscalled philosophy.
Up, up, for honour's sake; twelve legions wait you,
And long to call you chief: By painful journeys
I led them, patient both of heat and hunger,
Down form the Parthian marches to the Nile.
'Twill do you good to see their sunburnt faces,
Their scarred cheeks, and chopt hands: there's virtue in them.
They'll sell those mangled limbs at dearer rates
Than you trim bands can buy.

Still, I was occasionally bored by this play, as I never am by Shakespeare, and at no point was I moved in the way I am each time I read the last act of Lear or Othello. It's an unfair comparison, of course, even if Dryden asks for it.

The School for Scandal by Richard Brinsley Sheridan

She Stoops to Conquer by Oliver Goldsmith

The two plays that follow Dryden's in this volume are written in unmetered prose, which gives them a less anxious place within the dramatic tradition. They also happen to be comedies, thought farce is perhaps the better term.  The day I spent earlier this week reading The School for Scandal and She Stoops to Conquer was one of the most enjoyable in recent memory. As with any good farce, there is lots of rather silly word play. Mistaken identity abounds. The plot is advanced through subterfuge and, where necessary, bald coincidence, until the end, when the guy gets the girl. And it's all a lot of fun. I'm tempted just to leave it at that, but I will say that these plays also reminded me that sometimes an author chooses his subject not for taking measure but for giving pleasure.

The Cenci by Percy Bysshe Shelley

A Blot in the Scutcheon by Robert Browning

Manfred by Lord Byron

The volume ends with plays by three Romantic poets.  Two of the three -- Shelley's The Cenci and Byron's Manfred -- weren't really intended for performance.  The Cenci reads less like a closet drama than Manfred does, but Shelley must have known that it's subject matter -- the plot centers on an act of incestous rape -- would keep it off the stage. Both plays are best read as long Romantic poems. Manfred bears resemblances to Faust (which comes in the next volume), in its treatment of a man who seeks superhuman, alchemical knowledge and ultimately comes to pay for this desire. Both plays have the dark, gothic feel that makes Byron's and Shelley's brand of Romanticism so appealing (to me, at least).

Browning, on the other hand, wrote his plays with the stage in mind, and A Blot in the Scutcheon is a wonderful dramatic tragedy. I don't know if it's much performed these days, but it ought to be. I wrote earlier that Dryden's play didn't move me in the way that tragedy sometimes can. But I didn't fully realize this until a few days later, when I found myself crying as I read the last few lines of Browning's play.

--CRB, May 24, 2007