English has no word for the German Mährchen, so we say “fairytale” even when the story has no fairies. Spenser’s older use of “fairy” could excuse it, if an excuse were needed where need must.
Asked what a fairytale is, I would say, “Read Undine; that is one. Read others too, and you will see.” Pressed to define it, I would sooner try to describe the abstract human face, or say what makes a human being. A fairytale is just a fairytale, as a face is just a face, and Undine is the loveliest I know.
Someone who won’t define a man may still say what he ought to be. I won’t go even that far with the fairytale, since my early work in the form would illustrate my present judgment poorly. I will only say some things that help in reading rightly the fairytales I would want to write or care to read.
Some thinkers would feel cramped if they could use only forms found in nature, or invent only what the physical world’s laws allow. That doesn’t mean they want to escape law. Nothing lawless can give any reason to exist, and at best it would only look alive.
The natural world has its laws, and we mustn’t tamper with them, whether portraying the world or using it. But they may suggest other kinds of law, and a person may invent a little world with laws of its own, since something in him loves calling up new forms, perhaps the nearest he comes to creating. New embodiments of old truths I call products of the Imagination; mere inventions, however lovely, the work of the Fancy. Either way, law has been at work.
Once the inventor has made his world, the highest law is harmony among the laws that brought it into being, which he must keep. The moment he forgets one, the story becomes unbelievable on its own terms: to live even briefly in an imagined world we must see its laws obeyed, and when they are broken the imagination we lend to another’s invention stops working. Picture the gracious creatures of a childlike corner of Fairyland talking cockney or Gascon! However lovely the beginning, the tale would sink into burlesque, the least worthy kind of writing. An inventor who breaks the laws of his ideas, or sets one against another, contradicts himself and is no artist; his instruments are tuned to different keys. The human mind is the product of living law: it thinks, lives and grows by law, so only with law can it get anywhere. Discordant ideas may come, but if he uses one his work goes dull and he drops it from lack of interest. Beauty grows only in the soil of law, and Truth can be clothed only in beauty. Call Imagination the tailor who cuts her garments to fit, and Fancy his journeyman who stitches the pieces together or at most finishes the buttonholes. A maker who obeys law works as his Creator does; one who ignores it is the fool who heaps up stones and calls the pile a church.
The moral world is different. There a person may dress things in new forms and use his imagination freely, but may invent nothing. He may not, for any purpose, turn moral laws upside down or meddle with the relations between living souls; the laws of the human spirit hold in any world he invents. It would be no offence to imagine a world where everything repelled instead of attracted, but it would be wicked to write of a man called good who always does bad, or a man called bad who always does good: that notion is utterly lawless.
“You write as though a fairytale were important. Must it have a meaning?”
It can’t help having some meaning: proportion and harmony give it vitality, and vitality is truth. The beauty may show more than the truth, but without the truth there would be no beauty and no delight. Each reader, though, will find a meaning according to his own nature and growth, so readers differ.
“Then how can I be sure I’m reading your meaning out of it, not mine into it?”
Why should you be sure? Reading your meaning into it may be better, a higher use of your mind than reading mine out of it, and yours may be the better meaning.
“If my child asks what the fairytale means, what do I say?”
If you don’t know, say so; nothing is easier. If you do see a meaning, give him that. A genuine work of art means many things, and the truer the art, the more it means. But if my drawing is so poor that it needs THIS IS A HORSE written under it, why should it matter that neither you nor your child knows what it means? It is there less to convey a meaning than to wake one. If it doesn’t even wake an interest, throw it away; the meaning may be there, but not for you. Nor does a label help someone who can’t recognize a horse; a painter’s business isn’t zoology.
Your children are unlikely to trouble you about the meaning. They find what they are able to find, and more would be too much. I write not for children but for the childlike, whether five, fifty or seventy-five.
A fairytale is not an allegory, though allegory may be in it. Only a real artist can write a strict allegory that doesn’t weary the spirit; an allegory must be Mastery or Moorditch (a triumph or a quagmire).
A fairytale, like a butterfly or a bee, helps itself from every side, sips every wholesome flower and spoils none. A true fairytale is very like a sonata. We know a sonata means something, and with vague enough talk and loose enough metaphor, minds can meet over its meaning and feel a more or less satisfying sympathy. But if two or three people each wrote down what it meant to him, how close would they come to a definite idea? Hardly at all: it will have roused related feelings, but probably not one common thought. Has the sonata failed? Was it meant, or ought it to be expected, to convey anything defined?
“But words aren’t music. Words, at least, are made to carry a precise meaning!”
Words rarely carry the user’s exact meaning. And even if they can convey a definite one, that doesn’t mean they should never carry anything else. Words are living things with many uses: they can state a scientific fact, or cast on a mother’s heart the shadow of her child’s dream; they can be fitted together like a jigsaw map or arranged like notes on a staff. Is the music in them to count for nothing? Are they only to describe, never to impress? A child’s tears may have no definable cause; does that leave his mother no remedy for his vague misery? When a fairytale, a sonata, a gathering storm or a limitless night sweeps you away, do you stop to wrestle with it and ask where its power comes from? Each obeys a law in its composer’s mind, and people feel it differently: to one listener a sonata is a world of fragrance and beauty, to another of soothing and sweetness only; to one the gathering clouds are a wild dance with terror at its heart, to another a majestic march of heavenly hosts, with Truth at their center pointing the way but not yet speaking. The strongest forces work in what we cannot fully grasp.
Next to rousing his conscience, the best thing you can do for your fellow is not to give him things to think about but to wake what is in him, to make him think for himself. The best Nature does for us is to stir moods in which thoughts of high importance arise. Does any part of her wake only one thought, or make two people in the same place think the same thing? Is she a failure for not being definite, when she rouses something deeper than understanding, the power beneath thoughts, and so sets feeling and thinking to work? Nature awakens moods and sets thought moving, and that is what a sonata, and a fairytale, should do.
“Then readers can imagine whatever they like, even what you never meant!”
Not whatever he likes, but whatever he can. If he isn’t a true man, he will draw evil out of the best, and we needn’t mind how he treats any work of art. If he is a true man, he will imagine true things, and it hardly matters whether I meant them; they are there even if I can’t claim to have put them there. Unlike God’s work, which cannot mean more than he meant, man’s must. Everything God made has layer upon layer of rising significance, and he expresses the same thought in higher and higher forms. A man has only God’s things, his embodied thoughts, to express his own thoughts with, so his words and figures inevitably combine in another mind in ways he never foresaw: every thought is allied to so many others, every figure involves so many relations, every symbol hints at so many facts. He may well find truth in what he wrote, since he was dealing all along with things that came from thoughts beyond his own.
“But surely you would explain your idea to anyone who asked?”
Again: if I can’t draw a horse, I won’t write THIS IS A HORSE under my attempt, and a key to a work of imagination would be just as absurd. A tale is there to show, not to hide; if it shows nothing at your window, leave it out in the cold. Asking me to explain is like saying, “Roses! Boil them, or we won’t have them!” My tales may not be roses, but I won’t boil them.
As long as I believe my dog can bark, I won’t sit up and bark on his behalf.
Whoever aims at logical conviction must work to avoid being misunderstood, not just to be understood. Whoever aims to move by suggestion should play on the reader’s soul as wind plays an aeolian harp. If there is music in my reader, I would gladly wake it. May a fairytale of mine be a firefly that flashes, goes dark and may flash again; in a hand that doesn’t love its kind, it turns into an ugly little thing that can neither flash nor fly.
With music, I think, the best course is to be still and let it work on the part of us it exists for. We spoil countless precious things by intellectual greed. Anyone who insists on being a man rather than a child can only become a little man, a dwarf, though he won’t need consolation, being sure he is very large.
If some strain of my “broken music” makes a child’s eyes flash, or his mother’s grow dim for a moment, my work will not have been in vain.