et l'Echelle. A poor man leaves his three sons no more than a cat, a cock, and a ladder. The eldest carried his cat to such a mouse-ridden country as Dick Whittington found. The owner of the cock discovers a land where (there being no cocks) the king every night sends chariots and horses to bring the dawn. The lad with the ladder makes himself agreeable to the imprisoned wife of a jealous lord, a sort of fabulously innocent Agnes, in a mythical Ecole de Maris. All three sons find fortunes and bonnes fortunes, and the märchen displays a jolly indifference to morality. The long story of Les Trots Filles de Boulanger mixes up the ancient fiction of a queen, who is accused of giving birth to puppies, with the "dancing water" and "singing apple" of the Arabian Nights. In all the popular stories in Mélusine one detects a satiric humour and a kind of worldly wisdom which are the characteristics of French märchen. The fancy of Celts of the Continent is certainly most unlike the wild imagination of the West Highlanders. In their tales (collected by Mr. Campbell) the ancient Celtic genius projects fantastic shapes on a back-ground of mists. You have more than the strangeness of the Mabinogion, you have human fancy in its wildest expression, and withal, a sentiment, a poetry, not unworthy of the ancient bards. There is nothing of all this in the positive, commonplace French and Breton märchen, where fancy is stunted, and incredulous wit thrusts in its word now and then, or priests and popes are introduced hap-hazard among the figures of the earliest fiction.
Looking back on the field of French folk-lore, we seem to detect more of primitive practice and superstitious usage than we have preserved in England. France escaped the full force of the Reformation, and the Catholic Church has always been tolerant of the earlier rites which she sanctified, while Puritanism persecuted even the dances of May Day. In the matter of poetry, French peasants retain little of much value, except the traditional love-songs, which have often a touch of the idyllic sentiment of the Canticles. Both in poetry and story, the peasants of France show the imaginative defects of a people which has been long in contact with the hardest side, the harshest form of civilisation. Hence a somewhat sterile fancy, a certain vulgarity, a mordant humour, and a grain of incredulity.
