Page:A Study of Fairy Tales.djvu/92

68 narration. They were against reconstruction to beautify and poetize the legends. They were not opposed to a free appropriation for modern and individual purposes. They kept close to the original, adding nothing of circumstance or trait, but rendering the stories in a style and language and development of detail which was their own literary German.

Perrault (1628–1703) had taken the old tales as his son, Charles, a lad of ten or twelve, told them. The father had told them to the son as he had gathered them up, intending to put them into verse after the manner of La Fontaine. The lad loved the stories and re-wrote them from memory for his father with such charming naïveté that the father chose the son's version in preference to his own, and published it. But the tales of Perrault, nevertheless, show the embellishment of the mature master-Academician's touch in subduing the too marvelous tone, or adding a bit of court manners, or a satirical hit at the vanity and failings of man.

Dasent (1820–96) has translated the Norse tales from the original collection of Asbjörnsen and Moe. Comrades from boyhood to manhood, scholar and naturalist, these two together had taken long walks into the secluded peasant districts and had secured the tales from the people of the dales and fells, careful to retain the folk-expressions. Dasent, with the instinct, taste, and skill of a true scholar, has preserved these tales of an honest manly race, a race of