#45 Gustave Flaubert – A Simple Heart

In Pont L’Evêque, in Normandy, Madame Aubain has a maid called Félicité. She is an excellent maid, who can handle all the business of running the house and is thoughtlessly loyal to her mistress. In the eyes of the world, she is a person of no consequence – no property; no family; no learning or prospects. But Flaubert’s aim is to show that such a life is still rich in meaning.

The story takes you through the whole of her life, from her abandonment as a girl to her lonely death in the garret of the Aubain family home. There is a youthful love affair, where a rich young man falls in love with her, but marries a rich old woman to be sure of avoiding military service. There is the raising of the mistress’ family – young Paul and Virginie – whom she both loves deeply. There is her own family, who try to profit from her but whom she loves nonetheless; at least until the death of her own beloved nephew. And then, of course, there is the famous parrot.

The parrot was called Loulou. HIs body was green, the tips of his wings were pink, the top of his head was blue and his breast was gold-coloured.

Unfortunately, he had the tiresome habit of chewing his perch, and he kept plucking out his feathers scattering his droppings everywhere and splashing the water from his bath all over his cage.

You could sum Félicité up in that parrot alone. Given to her mistress by a friend eager to offload the offensive beast, it is offloaded on the poor maid as one more burden to bear. Its cantankerousness is tremendous – it squawks; it goads; it bites the tips off of umbrellas. None of this stops Félicité from loving the creature; and when it flies away she runs all around town desperate to find it. Even though this quest lands her with severe illness and even makes her deaf, she begrudges the parrot nothing. And, in return, the parrot starts returning the love.

Only one sound reached her ears, and that was the voice of her parrot. Almost as if he was deliberately trying to entertain her, he would imitate the clicking of the turnspit, the shrill cry of the fishmonger or the sawing from the joiner’s shop on the other side of the street. whenever the front doorbell range, he would imitate Madame Aubain and shout “Félicité! The door! The door!”

When Loulou dies, Félicité has him stuffed, and keeps him as her one great treasure. She even starts conflating, in her simpleminded way, the dead parrot with the Holy Spirit. Eventually, as she dies, she offers the withered taxiderm to the Easter procession as an offering to the lord. Drowned out among the noble gifts from wealthy households, it is nevertheless there as she herself departs this life, translated to heaven under the wings of the celestial parrot.

If Edith Wharton doesn’t know how to write about poor people without treating them as ridiculous, Flaubert most certainly does. Félicité’s life might be spent caring for unworthy things, but he gets across that there is nothing unworthy about them in her eyes. There is nothing ridiculous about the love she shows – indeed the love makes noble the ignoble things around her.

Part of the trick here is brevity. There is no lingering in the narrative over each incident of pain (or, more rarely, joy). The world moves on, and it recedes into the background. The highs and lows are tragedies of a scale that could form the crux of many a novel. Here, it is passed over in a few sentences.

Madame Aubain, who was counting the stitches on a piece of knitting, put her work to one side, opened the letter, gave a sudden start and then, lowering her voice and looking very serious, she said ‘they are sending you very bad news … your nephew …’

Victor was dead. That was all the letter said.

Within a few lines, she remembers she has washing to do, and must get on with it. After a few pages, life has moved along to the next tragedy. There is no moral commentary, about unbearable burdens or the like. Indeed there is no burden which Félicité could not bear. Life just goes on, until it doesn’t.

It’s a masterpiece of realism – the idea that literature’s purpose is to tell life the way it is, and to try to communicate the business of living as accurately as you can. And realism , if it is really to work, has to tell the story of Félicité just as well as it does the most romantic heroine.

#67 Charles Darwin – It was Snowing Butterflies

Penguin like Darwin. This is the third time he’s turned up in this blog, and each time I make the same point – that quite aside from his scientific achievements Darwin was a fantastic writer. His prose is thoughtful, charming, fluid and evocative that suggests that, had his inclinations been different, he could have made the back of the ten pound note as a novelist instead of a scientist.

The gloomy depth of the ravine well accorded with the universal signs of violence. On every side were lying irregular masses of rock and torn-up trees; other trees, though still erect, were decayed to the heart and ready to fall. The entangled mass of the thriving and the fallen reminded me of the forests within the tropics—yet there was a difference: for in these still solitudes, Death, instead of Life, seemed the predominant spirit.

This book is an extract from his account of the voyage of the Beagle – published about a decade before he proposed the theory of evolution; but detailing the observations that led him there. In that slightly aimless spirit of discovery that characterised Victorian England, the Royal Navy sent HMS Beagle and a well-trained naturalist to the far corner of the earth with the aim of discovering … stuff. They were’t particularly fussy what – better charts; jars full of specimens; abolition of the Book of Genesis – just as long as it kept the officers and men busy.

What they saw along the way deserved a good chronicle, and Darwin was happy to oblige. Though he wasn’t to know it, the 1830s was the beginning of the end for much of the wilderness of the world, and the sense of lands primordial and undisturbed was about to end for good over much of the planet. Fantastic sights were about to disappear:

One evening, when we were about ten miles from the Bay of San Blas, vast numbers of butterflies, in bands or flocks of countless myriads, extended as far as the eye could range. Even by the aid of a telescope it was not possible to see a space free from butterflies. The seamen cried out “it was snowing butterflies,”

There are accounts of the water turning phosphorescent at night; of thousands of gossamer spiders floating onto the ship and covering it with web. On the land, the crew struggles its way up hostile rivers to reach mountains that no civilised man has trod. The last great age of the explorers – this time scientific as much as cartographic – is at its apogee.

The end of this age is discernible in its progress. Take this account of the herds of guanacos (Patagonian relatives of the llama):

That they are curious is certain; for if a person lies on the ground, and plays strange antics, such as throwing up his feet in the air, they will almost always approach by degrees to reconnoitre him. It was an artifice that was repeatedly practised by our sportsmen with success, and it had moreover the advantage of allowing several shots to be fired, which were all taken as parts of the performance.

Perhaps we are more lucky than we know that Darwin found his theory when he did. It’s not so much that evolution wouldn’t have been found – it’s a logical conclusion once you have figured out the idea of genetics – but that it wouldn’t have been found in the wild. That it would have been the sterile product of labs and papers, rather than the fertile isles of the Galapagos. Instead you have Darwin, Captain Fitzroy and the crew of the Beagle, and all the mysteries of creation outfolded in front of them.

#70 Homer – Circe and the Cyclops

Whenever the District Line starts playing up, I think of Odysseus. A quick journey out; ten years to get home. I think the two of us are about even. In my case, there are no psychopathic cyclopses or sex-mad sorceresses. But he never needed to change at Hammersmith, so we’re probably on an even footing.

Both of us have a right to blame shadowy, all-powerful forces too: the Olympian gods in his case, TfL in mine. And for Odysseus, at least he has the satisfaction that he knows the gods are doing this to him on purpose.

It doesn’t normally take ten years to get from Troy to Ithaca. It’s just that whenever Odysseus gets near, something goes wrong. When he visits the palace of Aeolus, master of the winds, he is given a bag of wind that can take him straight to his destination. But when he falls asleep his crew, thinking it full of treasure, open it up and release a hurricane. He is driven back to Aeolus’ shore, and asks for the same help again. Instead, the king shouts at him:

Away from my island – fast – most cursed man alive
It’s a crime to host a man or speed him on his way
When the blessed deathless gods despise him so.

And for the Iliad and the Odyssey, this is a recurring theme – that the gods are making this happen for their own personal amusement. The Trojan war, for example, is partly about Agamemnon seeking to recover his wife after Paris steals off with her. But it’s mostly about the gods wanting to have the most awesome war of all time, with the best possible warriors and the most heroic deeds; a bit like a dog fight in a pub car park.

Similarly, with Odysseus’ journey home the aim of the gods is to punish him as much as they possibly can. Not all of them – some gods are on his side; just as they were on the side of the Greeks at Troy. But those that were on the other side were, frankly, poor losers. Also, Odysseus doesn’t help himself by blinding Poseidon’s son.

“Hear me –
Poseidon, god of the sea-blue mane who rocks the earth!
Grant that Odysseus, raider of cities,
Son of Laertes, who makes his home in Ithaca,
Never reaches home. Or, if he’s fated to see
His people once again and reach his well-built house
And his own native country, let him come home late
And come a broken man – all shipmates lost,
Alone in a stranger’s ship –
And let him find a world of pain at home!”

But the gods in ancient Greek myth are more interested in a cool story than they are in sense or justice. They get involves when the score needs to be evened up or the impossible made achievable. It is when things are darkest that they will try to tip the scales.

Modern Homeric scholars, steeped in the ideas of postmodernism, have noted that this gives the gods a role remarkably similar to that of the author in a story – seeking to create the most dramatic tension in the tale. The heroes go to Troy because, well, that’s what heroes have to do. They fight and die like characters in an action movie because that is what they are in the story to do, and the gods are there like directors and screenwriters to make sure.

So poor Odysseus, kept once more from his home, is cursed as much by the narrative as by the divine. Like all good characters, he ought to spend some time staying on the right side of the author.

#62 Matsuo Basho – Lips Too Chilled

This book is set in haiku, and so I will blog with apt concision.

Some say haiku is fraud, too short for meaning; nothing could be less true. With only seventeen syllables, there is nowhere for one to hide. The poet is more easily hanged with too little rope, not too much.

Early autumn –
rice field, ocean,
one green

If you profess nature, you must paint a landscape with a spiders web. If you promise your soul, you have one phrase with which to deliver it.

Another haiku?
Yet more cherry blossoms –
not my face.

Ask not what is lost in contraction – ask what is left when it is done.

Moonlit plum tree –
wait,
spring will come.

#31 Edgar Allan Poe – The Telltale Heart

You have to credit a man with innovation. Before Edgar Allan Poe, I wonder if anyone had ever thought about surreptitiously walling up their adversaries in a wine vault; or speculated on the chances of being driven mad by the sound of the still-beating heart of your murder victim as placed under the floorboards.

I talked more fluently, and with a heightened voice. Yet the sound increased –and what could I do? It was a low, dull, quick sound –much such a sound as a watch makes when enveloped in cotton. I gasped for breath –and yet the officers heard it not. I talked more quickly –more vehemently; but the noise steadily increased.

I don’t mean to imply that no one had ever thought of doing these things, but none had ever thought to do them with the style and immediacy of Poe’s writing. And in some things, he genuinely was an innovator. You can just imagine him looking at the pendulum on a grandfather clock and having the ‘eureka’ moment of wondering what would happen if you attached a gigantic axe blade to it.

Anyway; Poe is generally recognised as the first definitely-great American writer of prose. So there’s something of an irony that he wrote about a world that was as un-American as can be. After all, the USA is generally short on mouldering castles, decayed bloodlines and ancient terrors.

If your chosen mode is the gothic, this poses a problem. If a raven goes around quothing ‘nevermore’ in a reasonably priced coffee outlet, it doesn’t attract the same attention. Translated to the old world, however, it gets the necessary patina with hardly any effort at all.

I reined my horse to the precipitous brink of a black and lurid tarn that lay in unruffled lustre by the dwelling, and gazed down — but with a shudder even more thrilling than before — upon the re-modelled and inverted images of the gray sedge, and the ghastly tree-stems, and the vacant and eye-like windows.

You don’t even get tarns in the US; though later authors found out there’s an awful to you can do with a bayou and a bit of Spanish moss. That’s for another day though.

This is relevant, because in Poe the setting matters almost as much as the characters. The Cask of Amontillado is about travelling down into damp and pestilential cellars of an ancient palazzo; and in the Fall of the House of Usher, the edifice and the lineage are almost indistinguishable.

The discolouration of the ages had been great. Minute fungi overhung the whole exterior, hanging in a fine, tangled web-work from the eaves. Yet all this was apart from any extraordinary dilapidation. No portion of the masonry had fallen; and there appeared to be a wild discrepancy between its still perfect adaptation of parts, and the crumbling adaptation of the individual stones. In this there was much that reminded me of the specious totality of of old woodwork which has rotted for some years in some neglected vault, with no disturbance of the breath of the external air.

(On a side note, this characteristic makes Poe an illustrator’s dream</endplug>).

So Poe is the first great American writer, and spends his time writing about something which is profoundly un-American. America in the nineteenth century was the antithesis of decay – a frontier society that was green-of-wood and fresh. Yet however much the nation looked west, its culture to a large extent looked back across the ocean, and peopled its mind with castles, knights, carnivals and devils. And Poe, in his inventiveness, sits to usher them in to their demise.

#28 Chaucer – The Wife of Bath

So, having courted contempt with race and empire, it’s time to move on to gender politics. The Wife of Bath is the most famous of Chaucer’s characters, mostly because until pretty recently English literature had a shortage of female characters who are forthright in their sexuality, and it is still a little disconcerting that the Wife of Bath, the best example, was envisaged at about the same time as they were putting the tower on York Minster.

I’ll have no quarrel with virginity,
Let them be pure wheat loaves of maidenhead
And let us wives be known for barley bread.

In the Canterbury Tales, the premise is that a party of pilgrims on the way to Canterbury has agreed that each one of their number shall tell a tale to help pass the time. With the Wife of Bath, the prologue tells us more than the story.

First off, as the quote on the top-left shows, she has been married five times, and wouldn’t rule out a sixth if circumstances worked out favourably. Indeed her fifth husband was one of the pallbearers at the funeral of her fourth – she still remembers thinking that his legs looked uncommonly fine as he bore the coffin away.

As such, she knows more than most about making a marriage work. It forms the centre of her actual tale – a story of an Arthurian knight who must find the secret of what it is that women truly want. After a year’s questing, in which no two people can agree upon an answer, he is given the solution by a wise old woman in the forest.

“A woman wants the self-same sovereignty
Over her husband as over her lover,
And master him. He must not be above her”

(The tale itself then has the old woman require the knight to marry her, and demands him by reason and honour to treat her well in spite of her withered and loathsome condition. He is argued into submission, and which point she reveals she is actually a beautiful young maiden disguised by sorcery, and they begin a long and happy marriage. It’s happy endings all round, except for the girl the knight raped at the start of the story).

If you wanted to read the Wife of Bath as villainous, you certainly could. Even setting aside the unabashed lust, the fact she gives a ten page lecture on the art on using a preemptive argument to distract from her own imperfections would get a chuckle from the misogynists of the world. But her underlying point is an honest one – which is that life is not fun for a medieval woman, and any degree of freedom has to be earned and protected – especially in the context of a marriage.

Indeed her fifth husband, a student from Oxford half her age, is the most dictatorial of the five she has had. He is constantly reading from a book giving all the historical precedents for treating women harshly and holding them in disrespect – from Eve to Delilah, from Pasiphae to Xanthippe. It is this book, in fact, which causes them to have their most ugly row.

She can no longer stand all this instruction, and tears three pages from the book (and this is pre-printing, when books are hideously expensive; so this is like flushing his new iPhone down the loo then flinging his laptop out the window) then socks him in the face. He hits her back and knocks her senseless. But the aftermath of this proves the remaking of them as a couple, and she makes him burn the book.

And when he said ‘my own and truest wife
Do as you please for all the rest of life,
But guard your honour and my good estate,’
From that day forward there was no debate.

You cannot judge the Wife of Bath unless you realise how limited her options were. In a world where a married woman could not own property or leave the house unaccompanied without attracting comment, there would be no freedom that was not won through force of will. And against such a background, to my mind you can only cheer her as takes on one husband after another.

#24 Rudyard Kipling – The Gate of the Hundred Sorrows

There is possibly no English author to be more wary of defending than Kipling. A few years ago, I picked up a book called The Western Lit Survival Kit, which rated the works of various great authors out of ten in terms of importance, accessibility and fun. For Kipling, they added an extra column marked ‘evil’, and gave him ten out of ten each time.

Regular readers will know how tiresomely worried I am about orientalism. It’s time for me to cash in those chips and make a case for a man who may not match the tenor of our own age, but understood all too well the position of his.

One of the short stories in the book, In the House of Sudhoo, the unnamed narrator is drawn in by an Indian acquaintance of his to a question of magic. The titular Sudhoo is worried for his son, and has enlisted the help of his shifty downstairs neighbour, a seal-cutter who claims to be a sorcerer capable of saving him in return for money. Sudhoo is worried that using magic might be illegal; and though the narrator reassures the Indian on this point he agrees to watch the next ‘jadoo’ from behind a screen.

Sudhoo and two of his neighbours take their seats, and the lights go down. Suddenly, the room is illuminated with a pale blue-green light, and the seal-cutter from downstairs is revealed on the floor. His face is blue and grey, and his eyes have gone fully white.

His head and neck were the only parts of him off the floor. They were nearly at right angles to the body, like the head of a cobra at spring. It was ghastly. In the centre of the room, on the bare earth floor, stood a big, deep, brass basin, with a pale blue-green light floating in the centre like a night-light. Round that basin the man on the floor wriggled himself three times. How he did it I do not know. I could see the muscles ripple along his spine and fall smooth again; but I could not see any other motion. The head seemed the only thing alive about him, except that slow curl and uncurl of the labouring back-muscles.

It all seems utterly unearthly, until the man starts spouting fire from his mouth. The narrator, having done such a feat himself and knowing how easily explained it is, restores himself to control and keeps watch. Ventriloquising through a blackened child’s head floating in a basin, the seal-cutter gives the latest news of Sudhoo’s son, and promises to cure him for two hundred rupees.

Our narrator is not the only one seeing through this; Suddhoo’s neighbour Janoo is more than suspicious of its motives. Since she was hoping to receive a legacy from old Suddhoo, she is furious to see him so easily gulled. But she cannot say anything without risking a reprisal from a local merchant, friend of the seal-cutter, to whom she is deeply in debt and who she fears will poison her food.

And, on reflection, our narrator is powerless too:

Now, the case stands thus. Unthinkingly, I have laid myself open to the charge of aiding and abetting the seal-cutter in obtaining money under false pretences, which is forbidden by Section 420 of the Indian Penal Code. I am helpless in the matter for these reasons. I cannot inform the Police. What witnesses would support my statements? Janoo refuses flatly, and Azizun is a veiled woman somewhere near Bareilly- lost in this big India of ours. I dare not again take the law into my own hands, and speak to the seal-cutter; for certain am I that, not only would  Suddhoo disbelieve me, but this step would end in the poisoning of Janoo, who is bound hand and foot by her debt to the bunnia.

So what does he do? Nothing. He realises that he has to let matters take their own course, though he predicts that before the year is out Janoo will have poisoned the seal cutter by way of revenge.

Now, I’m not going to argue that the story doesn’t contain some of the more objectionable stereotypes that form part of the Victorian conceptualisation of the orient. There is only one character in this tale who is not a fool or a crook, and that is our British narrator. The fact that he can see through all of this is a function of his superior understanding of the world, and marks him out as the better human being in all this mess.

But I think you miss something very important if you stop there, mark it a ten for evil, and move on, because you’re overlooking the whole point of the story. The narrator might be a superior European, but his ability to stop any of this wrongdoing is precisely zero. He cannot stop the old man being swindled; his laws are powerless because of the complexities of the situation he is in. Rather than a heroic figure setting right the errors of the natives, he finds himself morally compromised as a result of having got involved in the first place.

And that is a recurring theme in Kipling. His most notorious poem, The White Man’s Burden, has nothing nice to say about the natives, but is also clear that the civilising mission on which the west was engaged might be moral but would always be thankless. While he approved the project at the level of his gut, he knew it was madness in his head.

His most prophetic poem, Arithmetic on the Frontier, caught this fact perfectly. Talking of the clever young officer sent from England and shot in a mountain skirmish to pacify an angry tribe, he pins down the waste in a single couplet.

Two thousand pounds of education,
Drops to a ten rupee jezail.

You can say he neatly predicted the outcome of Empire, plus Vietnam and Iraq to boot, when he said “With home-bred hordes the hillsides teem / The troopships bring us one by one / At vast expense of time and steam / To slay Afridis where they run.” You could read a hundred books on the subject, or watch 24 hour news until your eyes bleed, and still be a century behind Kipling with his warning “The odds are on the cheaper man”.

Britain might have more than enough post-Imperial guilt to go around, and a need to make itself as post-racial as it can be; but Kipling doesn’t deserve to be the sacrificed to clean our conscience. If we mark him ten for evil, we mark ourselves zero for understanding.

#50 Wilfred Owen – Anthem for Doomed Youth

What passing bells for those that die as cattle?
Only the monstrous anger of the guns
Only the stuttering rifles rapid rattle
Can patter out their hasty orisons.

You may have noticed that poetry and I do not get on, especially when mandated by the educational powers that be. But those first few lines from Owen’s Anthem for Doomed Youth have stuck with me since school, and show no signs of going away.

They called the first world war ‘the war to end all wars’. It wasn’t, of course, but in a more abstract sense it was. Before the war, people were blithe about what war might mean – brave, uniformed men risking all and returning with glory; and by doing so proving their nation’s valour to the universe. Sacrifice, where it came, was tragic and bittersweet; dulce et decorum est.

In the Marne, in Flanders, in the Somme, all of that threw itself into the mechanical realities of war – the equations of slaughter that proved that with sufficient technology it is a thousand times easier to kill a man than it is to keep him alive. That the ratios of sword to shield that kept Ajax vital and Horatius on the bridge did not apply once the maxim gun had raised the productivity of the soldier to match that of the factory hand. That the equipment with which Europeans had conquered the world could cut into their own bodies just as easily as it had their primitive targets.

Always they must see these things and hear them,
Batter of guns and shatter of flying muscles,
Carnage incomparable and human squander
Rucked too thick for these men’s extrication.

Therefore still their eyeballs shrink tormented
Back into their brains,

There are two essential truths of the first world war. The first is that it was slaughter. The second was that it was pointless. Both of these can be questioned on points of detail – the allied cliche of stubborn and endless death at the hands of blind generals isn’t wholly true – but had anyone in 1914 known of where things would end, the guns of August would never have sounded.

And this is why the first world war has to remain the emblem of all conflict; and its poetry stand as the reproach to all those generations of martial propagandists. War, where it comes, must never be for glory; it must be steep price paid for a worthwhile goal. Never off-limits; perhaps not even the last resort; but something so physically serious that it can never be treated lightly. Where the haze of distance should not blind us to the consequences.

It was not a lesson that could be learnt in the abstract: it could only be bought in blood and agony. The soldiers of the trenches were not a lost generation as much as a blood-sacrifice to clear away a myth; a sacrifice so dear that it could only be justified if it were judged inevitable. And, inevitable or not, now the price has been paid it demands remembrance.

#53 Christina Rossetti – Goblin Market

Once upon a time, in a land far, far away, the goblins needed to hire better PR.

“We must not look at goblin men,
We must not buy their fruits:
Who knows upon what soil they fed
Their hungry thirsty roots?”

The poem tells the story of two sisters, Laura and Lizzie, who hear to procession of a ragtag tribe of goblins selling the most delicious looking fruits. Lizzie disregards her sister’s warnings and lingers behind when the goblins approach. She buys fruit, at the cost of a ringlet of her golden hair, and finds it intense beyond words. The figs, the grapes, the plums and the greengages all give her a pleasure, the like of which she has never had before.

The next night, she eagerly plans to buy more. But the goblins do not come. Worse still, Laura can still hear their cry “Come buy our orchard fruits, Come buy, come buy” – only Lizzie, who has tasted them once and can never forget, is shut away from them. Lacking and wanting, she wastes away.

Lizzie can only watch for so long. She goes to the goblins, trying to buy some fruit to fill Laura’s needful hunger. The goblins are only too happy to give her their wares; but not to carry away. She must eat it, they insist. When she says no, things turn ugly:

They began to scratch their pates,
No longer wagging, purring,
But visibly demurring,
Grunting and snarling.
One call’d her proud,
Cross-grain’d, uncivil;
Their tones wax’d loud,
Their looks were evil.
Lashing their tails
They trod and hustled her,
Elbow’d and jostled her,
Claw’d with their nails,
Barking, mewing, hissing, mocking,
Tore her gown and soil’d her stocking,
Twitch’d her hair out by the roots,
Stamp’d upon her tender feet,
Held her hands and squeez’d their fruits
Against her mouth to make her eat.

And so, while standing in front of a fifty foot-high sign saying THIS IS A METAPHOR, Lizzie endures all of the goblin men’s efforts to force their fruit into her mouth. She prevails, and dripping with juice she returns home. That juice in turn saves Laura and cures her of her need, and they both live happily ever after.

As I read this, I reflected on another story of goblins. One of Terry Pratchett’s last books, Snuff, was about the most despised race upon the Discworld – the goblins. Given that one of Pratchett’s great themes was tolerance, you won’t be surprised to learn that by the end everyone has realised that they are a unique, fragile people who should be treated with respect as well.

Rossetti, by contrast, sees the otherness of her goblins as a reason for fear. It may make them interesting, compelling, even seductive; but it is also the reason they are never to be trusted.

Both authors are products of their time. If Pratchett’s fundamental assumption is that people should be able to get along, provided they aren’t too proud, Rossetti’s position is that the unknown is full of danger and needs to be guarded against.

Ironically, Rossetti’s time was by far the safer of the two, but there’s something about the way that trust has changed in between. Rossetti’s goblins are hateful for it’s own sake (though referred to as ‘fruit merchants’, they go about their business like a philanthropic drug cartel). They wish for malice. Today, we might ask ourselves why on earth anyone might actually behave like that. And in doing so, we find that our world is not populated by goblins, but by people. And that, by extension, the fruit is safe to enjoy.

#23 Hans Christian Andersen – The Tinder Box

So we’ve had The Brothers Grimm, and I’ve already talked about the brutality of fairy tales. Andersen’s stories in this collection are charming by comparison, with only a few cases of self-mutilation (but little girls shouldn’t always be thinking of dancing, or else it’s only to be expected that they will lose their legs and having to go round on crutches for the rest of their unnaturally short lives).

Fairytales always have a special place in their heart for the trickster, or the character who is clever enough to out-think the dimwits around him. Take the story of Little Claus and Big Claus, who live in the same village. After an argument, Big Claus kills Little Claus’ only horse. Little Claus troops off mournfully to town to sell the hide to recoup at least something. Then, in an unlikely turn of events, he manages to convince a farmer that the hide is in fact magical and comes home with a wheelbarrow full of money. Big Claus learns of this, and comes running over to find out more.

“Where did you get all this money?”
“Oh, I got it for my horsehide. I sold it last night.”
“That was certainly a good price!” said Big Claus, and raced back home, picked up an axe and struck every one of his four horses on the forehead. Then he skinned them and drove into town with the hides.
“Hides! Hides! Who wants to buy hides?”

The resulting hilarity does not improve relations between the Clauses. Big Claus decides to take his axe to the prankster’s head while he slept; only to hit his elderly grandmother, who had just expired in Little Claus’ bed. Little Claus, ever the entrepreneur, manages to turn this into another bushel of money by tricking an innkeeper into thinking he killed her. And when Big Claus hears how Little Claus has made money from the exercise, promptly kills his own grandmother and tries to sell her to the local apothecary.

Now enraged past all reason, Big Claus decides to get his revenge by putting Little Claus in a sack and dropping him in the river. But Little Claus escapes swaps places with an aged cowherd who is keen to pioneer assisted dying, and leading his newly acquired cattle meets Big Claus coming back from the bridge.

“Didn’t I drown you?”
“Yes you did,” said little Claus, “You threw me in the river not half an hour ago.”
“But where did you get these wonderful cattle?” asked Big Claus
“They’re sea cattle.”

He tells a wonderful tale of how, on drowning, a maiden living at the bottom of the river came and opened the bag, and gave him this herd of cattle to look after. He thanks Big Claus for having put him in the way of such a good piece of luck.

Big Claus congratulates him on his luck, and asks if he might get some sea cattle if he jumped into the river. Little Claus says he thinks he might. He offers to help, if Big Claus will find a sack and walk with him to the bridge.

“Put a rock inside, because otherwise I’m afraid I won’t sink,” said Big Claus.
“Oh, I’m sure you will,” said Little Claus

And they all lived happily ever after; other than Big Klaus, his grandmother; little Claus’ grandmother; all of the horses and the people who handed over vast sums of money based on fraud. The moral of the story, I guess, is to pull a fast one on others before they pull it on you.