Actually, his remark indeed was that a fairy-tale “may say best what is to be said!” He pointed out in that connection that he was using the phrase “fairy tale” and not the phrase “children’s stories” though it might seem children’s stories were, in fact, what he was talking about. But he was (he said) bowing to his friend Tolkien’s demonstration that the connection between children and fairy-tales was not as close as was generally thought—so his Narnia books were fairy-tales, and were “‘for children’ only in the sense that I excluded what I thought they would not like or understand” (On Stories, p. 47). He goes on:
As these images [faun with umbrella in the snow, queen on a sledge, magnificent lion] sorted themselves into events (i.e., became a story) they seemed to demand no love interest and no close psychology. But the Form which excludes these things is the fairy tale. And the moment I thought of that I fell in love with the Form itself [my emphasis]: its brevity, its severe restraints on description, its flexible traditionalism, its inflexible hostility to all analysis, digression, reflections, and ‘gas.’ I was now enamored of it. Its very limitations of vocabulary became an attraction; as the hardness of the stone pleases the sculptor or the difficulty of the sonnet delights the sonneteer. (pp. 46–47)
I have emphasized Lewis’s statement that he fell in love with the form when he came to begin writing the Narnia books, because it suggests that he was not previously enamored of the form, which may be important for us. I have not emphasized the severe constraints on description or the difficulty of using the form delighting the user, the first because I’m not sure of its relevance, the second because I am not sure the experience is universal.
Not all fairy-tales—not even all of Grimm’s fairy-tales—eschew description, and it is certain neither E. Nesbit nor the Narnia books show the fairy-tale restraint. But let us look briefly at that restraint in two of Grimm’s lesser-known tales, both of which begin with a descriptive passage, “Master Pfriem” and “The Little Folks’ Presents”—the first begins “Master Pfriem was a short, thin, but lively man, who never rested a moment. His face, of which his turned-up nose was the only prominent feature, was marked by small-pox and pale as death; his hair was grey and shaggy, his eyes small, but they glanced perpetually about on all sides” (Grimm’s Complete Fairy Tales, Doubleday, n.d., p. 395). “The Little Folks’ Presents” (p. 155) begins:
A tailor and a goldsmith were traveling together, and one evening when the sun had sunk behind the mountains, they heard the sound of distant music, which became more and more distinct. It sounded strange, but so pleasant that they forgot all their weariness and stepped quickly onwards. The moon had already arisen when they reached a hill on which they saw a crowd of little men and women, who had taken each other’s hands, and were whirling round in the dance with the greatest pleasure and delight.
One is reminded of the example I have read of how economy in description can be a great strength—“They came out of the castle by a gate toward the sea, and the moon shown clear.” The point is that we, the readers (or listeners), bring our experiences, or images, or vision, to give descriptive substance to the simple words, and by our co-operation, our being part of the process, what is described becomes more real to us. But while this is certainly true of the fairy-tales in Grimm (though in differing degrees as they are from different sources), it may be less true of Narnia, as it is less true of E. Nesbit.
Here is a description of the Dance of Plenty from Prince Caspian (p. 205):
Then Bacchus and Silenus and the Maenads began a dance, far wilder than the dance of the trees; not merely a dance for fun and beauty (though it was that too) but a magic dance of plenty, and where their hands touched, and where their feet fell, the feast came into existence—sides of roasted meat that filled the grove with delicious smell, and wheaten cakes and oaten cakes, honey and many-colored sugars and cream as thick as porridge and a smooth as still water, peaches, nectarines, pomegranates, pears, grapes, strawberries, raspberries—pyramids and cataracts of fruit. Then, in great wooden cups and bowls and mazers, wreathed with ivy, came the wines; dark, thick ones like syrups of mulberry juice, and clear red ones like red jellies liquefied, and yellow wines and green wines and yellowy-green and greenish-yellow.
In one sense, of course, there is economy in this description—much of it is by nouns and there are a couple of simple similes. But it is scarcely the restricted description under severe restraint of the fairy-tale (though of course what it is describing isn’t restrained either). And here, for comparison, is a passage from one of E. Nesbit’s books:
“I see” said the Queen, “a sort of play-thing. Well, I wish that all these slaves may have in their hands this moment their fill of their favorite meat and drink.” Instantly, all the people in the Mile End Road, and in all the other streets where poor people live, found their hands full of things to eat and drink. From the cab window could be seen persons carrying every kind of food, and bottles and cans as well. Roast meat, fowls, red lobsters, great yellowy crabs, fried fish, boiled pork, beef-steak puddings, baked onions, mutton pies . . . (E. Nesbit, The Story of the Amulet [1906], in Octopus ed., 1979, pp. 515–16)
The Queen here is the model for the Empress Jadis in The Magician’s Nephew, but the point here is that severe economy of description in the fairy-tale mode is no more a characteristic of E. Nesbit and the Five Children (Robert, Anthea, Jane, Cyril and “The Lamb”) than it is of C.S. Lewis and the Four Pevensies—even though there is a kind of restraint imposed by restrictions on vocabulary for the proximate audience. And what of the other point Lewis made in his “Fairy Tales May Say Best What’s to Be Said” is the pleasure in conforming the artist’s creation to a strict form, his example (besides the fairy tale) being the sonnet?
I think I see what he is getting at, though I am not sure it is the way I would put it (but I may not have his point quite right). Certainly there is a pleasure in playing the creation against the form, as Lewis does with the novel in Perelandra—or as I have done in writing sonnets (not very expert ones)—but a difficulty in exact conformity seems to me something apart from the creative process. I recall that when A.E. Housman spoke of difficulty in the creative process (in his lecture on “The Name and Nature of Poetry”), he carefully concealed which lines in the poem in question had come easily and which with difficulty. I suggest that Lewis’s excitement with the form was part and parcel of his love for epigram, for “short-form” fiction (short story or story in instalments), and for certainty—as in (for example—it is G.K. Chesterton’s example) The Song of Roland, where “Païens ont tort et Chrestiens ont droit!”
“Short-form” fiction and certainty are part of the “children’s story” or the “fairy-tale” mode. One other point here—a person writing a sonnet can feel part of the great tradition gathered about that form, as indeed can anyone using an established form: that is part of what Lewis was talking about when he was talking about John Milton’s decision to write a secondary epic. And that can serve as inspiration. I believe Lewis was inspired to further creation by his writing in the manner and tradition of E. Nesbit, rather as Andrew Lang had been inspired in Prince Prigio by writing in the manner and tradition of Thackeray’s The Rose and the Ring. One other thing might be mentioned here (we’ll take it up in a subsequent chapter in talking about the watchful dragons) a matter frequently overlooked, I think, in the discussion of such fairy-tale collections as the Grimms’—which is, just how Christian (in many