ENGLISH FAIRY POETRY

Evening Post, Volume LXXXIII, Issue 94, 20 April 1912, Page 10

ENGLISH FAIRY POETRY

In a review of "English Fairy Poetry," by Flows Delattre (Froude), the London Spectator states . that after Shakespeare the lairy faith declined. Scottish theology aud Puritanism turned uour faces towards that innocent world, and the belief began to die even in the rninde of. the common people. More and more it became a literary artifice, -with no roots in humanity. But there was still some delightful . verse to be inspired by it. Drayton, towards the end of hie long life, published his "Nimphidia," a fairy burlesque in a gulloplng mock-heroic metre, in which are recorded the quarrels of I'igwiggen and Oberoh— a very different Obei-oii from Shakespeare* King. The thing was so. much an arlifice now that_ it could be parodied. Browne, of Tavistock, in his "Britannia's Pastorals" introduced fairy scenes, full of subtle and curious description ; but it is wit we get now rather than romance. | Milton -i« more respectful, and used tho homely English fairies as he used ' Greek nymphs and fauns to give to his high thought what Sir Henry Wottou called "a certain Doric delicacy." To Thomas Randolph they are only tricksy - beings who kiss dairymaids on the sly. , But with Horrick artifice reaches its consummation. The lover of Julia, had, indeed, talked at times with the fairies, , but they did not give him the Btuff for his "Oberon's Feast." "Herricks fairy , world," says M. Delattre truly, "is cc» j sentially different from Shakespeare's. ! The ono might bo justly compared to the t early evening of a fine summer day, * when the country is all aglow with the - last rays of the departing sun. The \ other is but an artificial summer night, euch as we see represented on the stage, 1 with painted scenery instead of a natural landscape." After Herrick the "Good Folk" fare poorly in literature. Their- heyday had gone with the old religion and the old ways. Puritanism denounced them, and they were no better treated at the Restoration, the temper of which— "at the same time gross and dandified," says M. Delattre — had no love of delicate simplicities. Pepys thought A Midsummer 1 Night's Dream "the most insipid, ridi- ' culous play that ever I saw in my life." | About 1650 fairy poetry became extinct in England, and to' tbe-eighteenth-cen-'' tury poeta a "fay" was a cumbrous poetic property who had something to ido. with a "bower" or a "grotto." ! , But the little < people.' had > thfeto t re-f venge. In time the Romantic Revival set tho horns of Elfland blowing again, and we have all tho witcheries of Scott and Hogg, of Keate and Coleridge. It j was no more than an archaism, perhaps, for all its beauty, for the England of 1820 believed as lit/tle as tho England of Pope. But in our own day it would seem as if we had got back almost to the condition of the early Elizabethan age, for we have Mr. Yeate and hie school making a passionate creed out of fairy-tales and claiming for it a popular 1 as well as a literary following.

Mrs. Kawlcr— So your daughter is in Paris having her voice cultivated.^ Does she, intend to enter professional life ? Mrs. Blunderby— Oh, yes, indeed. She is studying to be a bella-donna.