Märchen

“ Turning from fables to the wider domain of sagas, we are met by two works deserving of the most careful study. The relations between themselves of the märchen and the saga, the relation of tradition to historical fact, and the influence of a different series of beliefs, historical and religious, imposed by a higher and conquering upon a lower and vanquished culture, each and all demand the student’s attention. ”

“ B. eine musikalische Phantasie, die harmonischen Folgen einer Aeolsharfe, die Natur selbst... In einem echten Märchen muss alles wunderbar, geheimnissvoll und zusammenhängend sein; alles belebt, jeder auf eine andere Art. ”

“ Most of these stories have preternatural or supernatural elements, and even such as have no such elements have still the atmosphere of wonder, and those fanciful or fantastic interpretations characteristic of the folk-imagination.
2. Märchen, or what we call "nursery tales"—those told for artistic pleasure, pure imaginative play, the creative exercise of the art-instinct. They may or may not exhibit the supernatural or preternatural elements; in some of them animals are among the actors. ”

“ In the material we use for children, while it is not profitable to draw any close distinctions between romantic and realistic stories, we can not fail to distinguish in general between the hero-tale or the folk Märchen, where we must expect preternatural powers and marvelous events, and the story which purports to deal with real people, and with experiences which, however rare, are still possible or probable. ”

“ Darum ist die Natur so rein poetisch, wie die Stube eines Zauberers, eines Physikers, eine Kinderstube, eine Polter- und Vorrathskammer. Ein Märchen ist wie ein Traumbild ohne Zusammenhang. Ein Ensemble wunderbarer Dinge und Begebenheiten, z. ”

“ Many such poems survive in our ballad literature.
p. xvThe material of the ballad may be either romantic or historical. The former class is based on one of the primeval invented situations, one of the elements of the Märchen in prose. Such tales or myths occur in the stories of savages, in the legends of peasants, are interwoven later with the plot in Epic or Romance, and may also inspire ballads. Popular superstitions, the witch, metamorphosis, the returning ghost, the fairy, all of them survivals of the earliest thought, naturally play a great part. ”

“ We have seen here that the fairy tale must contain the child's interests and it must be able to stand the test of a true classic. It must stand the test of literature in its appeal to emotion and to imagination, in its appeal to the intellect through its basis of truth, and to the language-sense through its perfection of form; it must stand the test of the short-story and of good narration and of description. ”

“ Imagination belongs to Tragedy, or the serious muse; Fancy to the comic. Macbeth, Lear, Paradise Lost, the poem of Dante, are full of imagination: the Midsummer Night’s Dream and the Rape of the Lock, of fancy: Romeo and Juliet, the Tempest, the Faerie Queene, and the Orlando Furioso, of both. The terms were formerly identical, or used as such; and neither is the best that might be found. The term Imagination is too confined: often too material. It presents too invariably the idea of a solid body;—of ‘images’ in the sense of the plaster-cast cry about the streets. ”

“ The life of the ode is ideal, that of the epic grandiose, that of the drama real. In fine, this triple poetry springs from three grand sources—the Bible, Homer, Shakspere. Such are the diverse aspects of thought at different eras of man and society. Here are its three faces—youth, manhood, old age. Examine a single literature by itself or all literatures en masse, and you will always reach the same fact—the lyric poets before the epic, the epic before the dramatic. ”

“ The province of the epic is the poetical narrative of real or supposed events, and the representation of real, or at least natural, characters; and history, in its noblest examples, is an account of occurrences in which great events are commemorated, and distinguished men appear as agents and actors. Epic poetry and the drama are but narratives, the former partly and the latter wholly, in the form of a dialogue, but their characters and personages are usually, in part at least, the creations of the imagination. ”

“ In these entertainments we find a certain resemblance to the miracle plays out of which the modern drama was developed; and do we not also find a certain nineteenth century likeness of the ancient moralities, in these life-dramas, death-dramas, and devil-dramas, in which our young poets delight to sow their wild oats; giving us all manner of caprices for imagination, hysterics for passion, revolting descriptions for the sublime, soliloquy for dialogue, and dialogue for action? ”

“ We have now reached the poetic culmination of modern times. Shakespeare is the drama; and the drama, which with the same breath moulds the grotesque and the sublime, the terrible and the absurd, tragedy and comedy—the drama is the distinguishing characteristic of the third epoch of poetry, of the literature of the present day.
Thus, to sum up hurriedly the facts that we have noted thus far, poetry has three periods, each of which corresponds to an epoch of civilization: the ode, the epic, and the drama. Primitive times are lyrical, ancient times epical, modern times dramatic. ”

“ Dame Fairy Tale comes bearing a magic wand in her wrinkled old fingers, with one wave of which she summons up that very spirit of joy which it is our chief effort to invoke. She raps smartly on the door, and open sesames echo to every imagination. ”

“ Perhaps foremost among these should be reckoned that of the 'regular' drama--that is of the drama based upon an imitation of the classics, chiefly of the Latin authors. The conception of dramatic art which was in men's minds at the time naturally and inevitably influenced the development of a form of poem which was daily becoming more sensibly dramatic. Next there was the influence of the mythological drama embodying the romantic and ideal elements of classical myth, but in form representing the tradition of the old religious plays. ”

“ It is one of those tales which are peculiarly calculated to beguile the dreary leisure of a long winter evening, and are even attractive and intelligible to childhood, while animated by fervent truth in the delineation of character and passion, and invested with the embellishments of poetry lowering itself, as it were, to the simplicity of the subject, they transport even manhood back to the golden age of imagination. ”

“ By its comprehensiveness and the variety of its substance, which are the signs and products of its dramatic imagination, epic poetry of the heroic age is distinguished from the more abstract kinds of narrative, such as the artificial epic, and from all kinds of imagination or fancy that are limited in their scope. ”

“ The drama, in its finished literary and histrionic sense, is seen when a story, instead of being merely described in forms, words, or colors,—as by sculpture, narrative, and painting,—is exhibited by fit personages in living action with all the appropriate accessories of looks, attitudes, tones, articulations, gestures, and deeds. ”

“ And even in comedy as in tragedy, in prosaic even as in prophetic inspiration, in imitative as in imaginative works of genius, the sovereign of modern poets has detected the same touch of terror wherever the deepest note possible has been struck, the fullest sense possible of genuine and peculiar power conveyed to the student of lyric or dramatic, epic or elegiac masters. ”

“ The more closely the words are studied, the completer the illusion grows. Creatures of the imagination—fairies, ghosts, witches—are delineated with a like potency, and the reader or spectator feels instinctively that these supernatural entities could not speak, feel, or act otherwise than Shakespeare represents them. ”

“ Shakespeare says ‘the lover, the lunatic, and the poet, are of an imagination all compact.’ It matters little whether it is prose or poetry; there is often more imagination and more poetry in prose than in rhyme. ”

“ Every Tragedy, therefore, must have six parts, which parts determine its quality—namely, Plot, Character, Diction, Thought, Spectacle, Song. Two of the parts constitute the medium of imitation, one the manner, and three the objects of imitation. And these complete the fist. These elements have been employed, we may say, by the poets to a man; in fact, every play contains Spectacular elements as well as Character, Plot, Diction, Song, and Thought.
But most important of all is the structure of the
incidents. ”

“ In the epic, the poem of romance, and the tragedy, selected characters are placed in those circumstances in which all their special qualities unfold themselves, and the depths of the human heart are revealed, and become visible in significant actions. ”

“ Æschylus proves the man by the giant. In Shakespeare the drama approaches nearer to humanity, but remains colossal. Macbeth seems a polar Atrides. You see that the drama opens Nature, then opens the soul; there is no limit to this horizon. The drama is life; and life is everything. The epic poem can be only great; the drama must necessarily be immense. ”

“ The structure of the epic may be determined from the fundamental conception of its nature. As a narrative of an important and heroic event, it should be simple, direct, and dignified in its treatment. The incidents should be introduced in a natural order, and their prominence should be regulated according to their [146] relative importance. In an epic poem, as in every other creation of art, the law of symmetry should be observed.
But the epic admits of episode. The poet may stop the flow of his narrative for a time to dwell upon some incident connected with or growing out of the main theme. ”

“ KING LEAR The Tragedy of Lear is deservedly celebrated among the dramas of Shakespeare. There is perhaps no play which keeps the attention so strongly fixed; which so much agitates our passions and interests our curiosity. The artful involutions of distinct interests, the striking opposition of contrary characters, the sudden changes of fortune, and the quick succession of events, fill the mind with a perpetual tumult of indignation, pity, and hope. ”

“ And He alone shall judge His own, so I His judgment bide. Fate has written a tragedy; its name is "The Human Heart". The Theatre is the House of Life, Woman the mummer's part; The Devil enters the prompter's box and the play is ready to start. ”

“ The drama, so long as it continues to express poetry, is a prismatic and many-sided mirror, which collects the brightest rays of human nature and divides and reproduces them from the simplicity of these elementary forms, and touches them with majesty and beauty, and multiplies all that it reflects, and endows it with the power of propagating its like wherever it may fall. ”

“ Tragedy, comedy, the epopee, the novel, satire, the madrigal, epigram—or again, lyric drama, comic opera, oratorio, the cantata, song—these correspond to so many aspects under which things can be regarded, painted, or sung, or to so many natural modes of feeling, natural aspirations of the human soul. ”

“ Second, the melodrama, by its artistic groupings, colors, and movements, its scenic processions, its magic pictures, its orderly evolution of romantic adventures, the multiform interplaying of the characters and fortunes of its actors upon one another, draws our attention from ourselves, enlists our feelings in the fates of others, and thus exercising our faculties, disciplines, purifies, and emancipates them, making them readier and more competent for whatever exigencies we may be called on to meet. ”

“ Now it is part of the ideality of the highest sort of dramatic poetry, that it presents us with a kind of profoundly significant and animated instants, a mere gesture, a look, a smile, perhaps—some brief and wholly concrete moment— into which, however, all the motives, all the interests and effects of a long history, have condensed themselves, and which seem to absorb past and future in an intense consciousness of the present. ”

“ Romance in many varieties is to be found inherent in Epic and in Tragedy; for some readers, possibly, the great and magnificent forms of poetry are most attractive when from time to time they forget their severity, and when the tragic strength is allowed to rest, as in the fairy interludes of the Odyssey, or the similes of the clouds, winds, and mountain-waters in the Iliad. ”

“ An important means of emphasis is contrast—in character, situation, and even dialogue. Melodrama has always rested, in large part, for its definite emotional appeals on sharply contrasted characters—the spotless hero, the double-dyed villain, the adventuress, and the heroine so innocent 202 of the world as to provide unlimited dramatic situations. ”

“ This grouping of drama, action, and passion as the qualities of great poetry is significant. Bald narrative can never realize character or situation as can the dramatic form, either in narrative or for the stage, when the whole action takes place before the mind's eye instead of being told. ”

“ The stories given are for the most part adaptations of favorite tales from folklore,—Andersen, Grimm, Æsop, and the Arabian Nights having been freely drawn upon.
Children are dramatic by nature. They are for the time the kings, the fairies, and the heroes that they picture in their imaginations. ”

“ To it we owe the epic, the lyric, the entire drama in every one of its developments, including burlesque, the idyll, the romantic novel, the novel of adventure, the essay, the dialogue, the oration, the lecture, for which perhaps we should not forgive them, and the epigram, in all the wide meaning of that word. ”