The Dial (Third Series)/Volume 75/Gentle Sorcery
GENTLE SORCERY
Moonshine and Clover. A Doorway in Fairyland. By Laurence Housman. 8vo. 219 pages. Harcourt, Brace and Company. $2 each volume.
IN THESE tales selected from four volumes published previously, the outstanding impression is that of moral sensibility; a heightened sense of the appropriateness of outward beauty to inward—as in the case of Mr Housman's novel, The Sheepfold. But whereas the austerity and calm but torrential force in The Sheepfold make it unique, there is variableness in the symmetry and in the power of the telling of these later stories. The fairy-tale, like the question, bespeaks faith in the outcome of what is not yet evolved; and in their prime quality of illusory credibility, Mr Housman's tales command belief. One reads eagerly until the end has been reached, infinitesimally disaffected by an occasional flaw. Although usually in the fairy-tale, good triumphs over evil and virtue is synonymous with beauty, an appearance of moral insouciance is essential; and in a number of these stories, one sees perhaps too plainly, the wish to bless. Also, evolving from an affection for the child mind and perhaps from a wish not to labour the matter, we have from time to time a kind of diminutive conversation as of an adult in the nursery, which is death to the illusion of make-believe. There is poetic security, however, in the statement, "he closed his eyes, and, with long silences between, spoke as one who prayed," and in the observation that Toonie's wife when her husband did not return, "became a kind of widow"; the pace is especially businesslike in this story of Toonie. Minute rapier-like shafts of crossing searchlights seem to play upon the "tight panting little bodies" whose sentinel Toonie outwitted, "picking him up by the slack of his breeches, so that his arms and legs trailed together along the ground." In The Traveller's Shoes, one is infected with the poison of
"Sister, sister; bring me your hair,
Of our mother's beauty give me your share.
You must grow pale, while I must grow fair!"
In the tradition of the house that Jack built, and of the stick that beat the dog, the fire that burned the stick, the water that put out the fire, there is newness in the evolving of the Princes birth-day present.
"His fairygodmother had sent him a bird, but when he pulled its tail it became a lizard, and when he pulled the lizard's tail it became a mouse, and when he pulled the mouse's tail, it became a cat. . . . He pulled the cat's tail and it became a dog, and when he pulled the dog's it became a goat; and so it went on till he got to a cow. And he pulled the cow's tail and it became a camel, and he pulled the camel's tail and it became an elephant, and still not being contented, he pulled the elephant's tail and it became a guinea-pig. Now a guinea-pig has no tail to pull, so it remained a guinea-pig." Intricately perfect as a pierced ivory mosque, The Prince with the Nine Sorrows is a tale of nine sisters enchanted into peahens. Eight having refused to regain their identity at the sacrifice of their brother's life, the ninth after pecking out his heart, pecked out her own in remorse, substituting it for his and he, "taking up his own still beating heart, laid it into the place of hers so that which was which they themselves did not know."
In these two books there is a disparity in favour of Moonshine and Clover, there being perhaps but one story in a Doorway in Fairyland, The Ratcatcher's Daughter, which may surely be depended upon to remain in the mind. In this most civilized obverse of fox-hunting ethics, a gnome having got himself caught in a trap with a view to entrapping his captor, is found apparently "wriggling and beating to be free." As the price of freedom, he consents to give the ratcatcher all the gold in the world and to make his daughter pure gold so that the king's son will marry her. Then when the ratcatcher finds that the prince will marry her only in the event that she can be made natural, in order to effect a retransformation, he is obliged to relinquish to the gnome his last penny. The White Doe maintaining throughout the image of a creature springing this way and that across a narrow forest stream, A Capful of Moonshine with its theme of the man who wished to know 'how one gets to see a fairy," The Gentle Cockatrice monumentally patient despite a recurring desire to identify its tail, and The Man Who Killed the Cuckoo, are tales one does not forget. This Mr Badman's progress, told with a laconic wonder and embodying newly as it does, the moral contained in the story of Midas, is an account of a man who "lived in a small house with a large garden" and "took no man's advice about anything." Finding that the poisonous voice that he had disliked at a distance proceeded from himself, he "felt his eyes turning inwards, so that he could see into the middle of his body. And there sat the cuckoo." We find him eventually "sailing along under the stars," tied into a bed of cuckoo feathers, "complete and compact; and inside him was the feeling of a great windmill going round and round and round."
One must not monopolize; one need not avenge oneself; in improving the morals of the world, one should begin by improving one's own; these are the mordant preoccupations about which Mr Housman's fancy plays.