CHILDREN'S MUSE.

Auckland Star, Volume LIX, Issue 231, 29 September 1928, Page 4 (Supplement)

CHILDREN'S MUSE.

TO-DAY'S ADVANTAGES.

NEW KINDS pF FAIRIES

(By ROBIN HYDE.)

Dreadful old bores, in the days of our youth, used fervently to tell us how lucky we were to be children: how "even worse, if worse could be" would be the black passage of our adolescence, the becalmed seas of our middle age, the uncomfortable havens of our senility. Is it, then, a sign of advancing decrepitude that I should xbc~ r : to feel that the present day isn't a bad time to bo on the small side-of seven? It is this matter of "Books for the children." How many remember, in days gone by, the unrivalled scope that Christmastides and birthdays gave to acidulous aunts and unpleasant uncles? They c ~uld give one "Elsie" books. One was popularly believed and even expected to read them. Elsie the Inevitable, getting born, being brought up, falling sick, refusing to getting married, having ch..dren, submitting to

grandchildren, all in the very way no human child would ever select. And the rest of our library wasn't so much better—that is, for the weaker vessel, who was not su 4 to covet her brother's "Masterman Ready," "The Three Midshipmen," Captain Marryatt, Talbot Baines Reed or Harold Avery. She was given books in which, as one writer says, "good little girls died early, but contented; bad little girls died later, but miseruL y." The Childish Palate.

Things nowau-ys are served so daintily for the childish palate. Contrast the hectic-cheeked moralities of the "Elsie" booKs with tfhe sweet and wholesome life-teachings of an Edith Howes, as exemplitieu in "fairy Rings" aid "The Cradle Ships." And ior the boy to whom adventure is the whole .ut of life, there are not, nowadays, a few outstanding classica, Tom Sawyers and Huckleberry Pin left stranded in the desperate coi t pan/ of legions of Buffalo Bills. One of the unc.-t inscriptions I have ever seen on a book is this: "Because I have known th torment of thirst, I would dig a well where others may drink." The book is just the story of two boys' very reasonable adventures in the wild woods. But it tells exactly how to build a tent, and how to make a pine bough bod a thing of luxury, and what names may be fitted to the queer herbs and flowers that tantalise one from forest paths, and how to distinguish bird., that fly bh. over the sunsets; all this without the faintest symptom of dullness or technicality, the real knowledge in the book skilfully disguised by a glamour of adventure. Then one comes to the fairies! Well, perhaps we will meet nobody who is more at home in the highest courts of Fairyland than Hans Andersen. But with Andersen and Grimm "the tale's the thing." It remained for Barrie to humanise fairies, producing a Tinker Bell, who is a spoilt and sweet little girl; and a Peter Pan, who can convince the most disifrusioned and double-chinned business man that the process of his growing up has not, thank Heaven, been so very complete. L Two Kinds of Fairies. There have always been two kinds of fairies; for purposes of classification, we'll call them the shaggy fairies and the shining fairies. Of the shaggy fairies, in those misguided days of our youth, we caught nothing but the briefest of glimpses, vouchsafed in old Irish or Danish faii'y tales. Th6re was the leprechaun, the fairy cobbler, with a beard indubitably shaggy, and others, part animal, part miniature man, part pure fairy, who peeped out at us from under toadstools and from the hollows in oak trees. But the shaggy fairies" were, in the main, a secret folk. The shining fairies, with gauzy wings and tiny proud heads, held the stage, and everybody from Shakespeare in his "Midsummer Night's Dream" to the latest and best of our nineteenth century writers bowed down to them and worshipped them. Kipling it was who produced the father of all shaggy fairies, Puck of Pook's Hill. No tinselled manikin was Puck, but a great hairy spirit of the oak, ash and thorn, on whose shoulders any child might ride. And since that day the shaggy fairies have been the best loved of the playmates to be found in fairy tales. Kipling again, I fancy, was first responsible for the twin brother of the fairy who is half an animal; he created the animal who is half a fairy—the animal who can talk. In his "Just So" stories will be found dozens of the most companionable animals, to all of whom the gift of speech has given just that extra touch of sociability which makes them perfect companions for the argumentative child. ° But if one can love the story of the "Spring Running" one can live in Kenneth Grahame's book, "The Wind in the Willows." The animals here have no long names. They are just Rat, Mole, and Toad, or in moments of greatest affection, "Moalie" and "Toadie." But they are friends to whom the child should be introduced in his nursery lays and whom he will not have lost, if *- behaves himself, when he is ninety. •H»»e the shining fairies, disgruntled, sp/wuf their wings and flown quite away? No further than into illustrations and frontispieces. While the author's comrade at arms, the artist, has a say in the matter of children's books the shining fairies will always be treated with respect. For there's no denying it, wings are more picturesque than preat hairy ears, and the tiniest glass ■dipper in the world much more enticing than Puck's bare and goatish toes. So arrayed in much war-paint at the hands of Edmotid Dulac or Kav Neilsen, the most fetching and fashionable of shinVi!m , rna y still be seen in most •.'luldren s books.