Rice University
Structure and Quality in Silas Marner
Author(s): Ian Milner
Source: Studies in English Literature, 1500-1900, Vol. 6, No. 4, Nineteenth Century (Autumn,
1966), pp. 717-729
Published by: Rice University
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/449365 .
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Structureand Quality in Silas Marner
IA N
MI LNER
SILASMARNERSTANDSAPARTfrom George
Eliot's other novels, even of the early period. Its simple, compact design and special tone suggest the moral fable. Born of
"a sudden inspiration" which "came across my other plans"'1
the story has a freshness, an easy-running yet disciplined
flow, a varied and surely focussed narrative control, an
unerring command of character portrayal of a certain range,
and a flexible rendering of dialogue, such as George Eliot
scarcely ever bettered. These and other graces have earned
it the title of "that charming minor masterpiece."2 The
limiting judgment is underlined: "But in our description of
the satisfaction got from it, 'charm' remains the significant
word."3
Whatever George Eliot intended, she brought off something other than a pleasant piece of pastoral injected with
some "moral truth." She was herself conscious of the deeper
implications of her theme. She had to reassure Blackwood
that, though "rather sombre" at the beginning:
I hope you will not find it at all a sad story, as a
whole, since it sets-or is intended to set-in a strong
light the remedial influences of pure, natural human
relations.4
Though she promised Blackwood the story's "Nemesis" was
"a very mild one" the moral terrain traversed reveals matters
strange to pastoral. Charm there is, fresh and spontaneous
in the set choral scenes at the Rainbow Inn, the Casses' New
Year's Eve dance, in the glimpses of Silas learning a father's part, and in the natural vigour of Dolly Winthrop. Yet
something else emerges, of more far-reaching and sombre
aspect, that defines the tale and its quality as art equally
with the charm of the pastoral scenes or the narrative grace.
George Eliot told Blackwood that Silas Marner
'G. S. Haight, The George Eliot Letters, New Haven, 1954-55, III, p. 171.
aF. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition, New York: Doubleday AnchorBooks, 1954, p. 62.
lLeavis, p. 63.
'Haight, III, p. 382.
718
SILAS
MARN E R
came to me first of all, quite suddenly, as a sort of
legendary tale ... but, as my mind dwelt on the subject,
I became inclined to a more realistic treatment.5
In the tension between the "legendary" and the "realistic"
components, considered in their joint relation to the structure of values unfolded in the tale, lies its full meaning and
appeal.
Silas stands at the center of the legendary element. In
the opening pages he is introduced, by name only, the shadowy figure of a linen-weaver who has migrated to Raveloe
from "an unknown region called North'ard." He is an alien,
living in chosen isolation from the village community. His
trade alone makes him suspect: the "mysterious action" of
his loom fascinates yet awes the Raveloe lads. If they merely
glanced in his window he would fix on them a "dreadful
stare" such as "could dart cramp, or rickets, or a wry mouth"
at any one of them. The village shepherd was not sure
whether the weaver's trade "could be carried on entirely
without the help of the Evil One."
Silas, at the outset, gives the impression of a presence,
not of an individualized personality. When we are carried
back fifteen years to Lantern Yard we have a momentary
glimpse of a devout but featureless young man, wholly absorbed by his faith (marriage is just a further link with the
sacrament). What matters, and what stands out in the telling, is the wrong done to Marner-the cold malice of a
friend that destroys his place in the community, cuts off his
marriage, and blasts his faith: "there is no just God that
governs the earth righteously, but a God of lies, that bears
witness against the innocent" (Ch. I).
The force of Silas's blasphemy, coming from one whose
faith was his life, measures the scale of the evil he has encountered. He turns his back on the ruptured community of
trust and fellowship which previously had been his only
medium of existence. He denies and flees from the divine
will that has betrayed his trust. George Eliot hints there
was something animistic in his escape from the numen of
Lantern Yard: "And poor Silas was vaguely conscious of
something not unlike the feeling of primitive men, when they
fled thus, in fear or in sullenness, from the face of an unpropitious deity" (Ch. II).
6Haight, III, 382.
I AN
MILNER
719
In his Raveloe cottage Marner lives in isolation for fifteen
years. His brief attempt to enter the community by treating
the sick with herbs only widens his separation and confirms
distrust as to the sources of his knowledge. Work is his
anodyne, the golden guineas his only god. George Eliot, in
a few pages of Ch.II, builds up a powerful sense of the cumulative process of Silas's estrangement from his former
humanity: his faith, trust, sense of purpose as a human
being. His work now is carried on without aim: he weaves
"like the spider, from pure impulse, without reflection."
The web is the familiar image used in the novels to suggest
the narrowing of vision from egoism or lack of fellowship.
He lives at a sub-human level, his life reduced "to the unquestioning activity of a spinning insect." In a different
image George Eliot underlines his dehumanization:
Strangely Marner's face and figure shrank and bent
themselves into a constant mechanical relation to the
objects of his life, so that he produced the same sort of
impression as a handle or a crooked tube, which has
no meaning standing apart. (Ch.II)
This is surely one of the most powerful instances of metaphor used to evoke character transformation. Marner is reduced to the world of objects, thingified. His human essence
has "no meaning standing apart." The image springs from
the immediate environment: it is more effective than the
somewhat related but less naturally concrete metaphor of
Isabel Archer's disillusion:
She saw . . . the drying staring fact that she had
been an applied handled hung-up tool, as senseless and
convenient as mere shaped wood and iron.6
The intensity of Marner's attachment to things leads to
fetishism:
the money not only grew, but it remained with him.
He began to think it was conscious of him, as his loom
was, and he would on no account have exchanged those
coins, which had become his familiars, for other coins
with unknown faces. (Ch.II)
Cut off from human relations, Silas lives with the "faces"
'Henry James, The Portrait of a Lady, ch. 52: cited by W. J. Harvey in
his discussion of settings as "metonomic, or metaphoric, expressions of
character," Essays in Criticism XIII, i (Jan., 1963), 62.
720
S I L A S MARN E R
of coins, which he draws out at night "to enjoy their companionship." His old brown earthenware pot, in which he
fetches water, is for twelve years his
companion . . . always lending its handle to him in the
early morning, so that its form had an expression for
him of willing helpfulness..
.. (Ch.II)
And, in a superb proleptic image, he
thought fondly of the guineas that were only half
earned by the work in his loom, as if they had been
unborn children-thought of the guineas that were
coming slowly through the coming years, through all
his life.... (Ch.II)
The irony of the image is doubly weighted: there is an echo
of the loss of Silas's earlier human impulse to marry and
have children and a foretokening of the nemesis that is to
rob him of his guineas while giving him "gold" in other kind.
George Eliot makes use of choric scenes very effectively
to suggest the warmth and vitality of the Raveloe popular
community. And alongside this pulsing communal life from
which he has isolated himself, Silas's alienation is felt more
starkly by the reader. The night he loses his gold Silas is
driven, ironically, to seek redress from his fellow-man. The
spiritedly and solidly rendered Rainbow Inn company (Ch.VI),
whose individual quirks and petty animosities do not break
down but merely variegate the overall sense of community,
forms a choric scene that throws into high contrast Silas's
abrupt and otherworldly irruption: "the pale thin figure of
Silas Marner was suddenly seen standing in the warm light,
uttering no word, but looking round at the company with
his strange unearthly eyes" (Ch.VII).
The other major use of a choric scene as an image of communal life-the New Year's Eve dance at the Red Houseis yet more developed and, from its timing and placing, more
effective in aesthetic strategy. Its immediate background is
filled in by the attempts of Mr. Macey and of Dolly Winthrop
to bring Marner into the community by persuading him to
go to church, especially on Christmas day. The sense of
Silas's alienness is tragicomically suggested in the scene
where he confesses to an amazed Dolly that he has never been
"to church," only "to chapel" (the "new word" puzzled Mrs.
Winthrop: "she was rather afraid of inquiring further, lest
'chapel' might mean some haunt of wickedness" [Ch.X]).
IAN
MILNER
721
Mrs. Winthrop's lard-cakes and persuasions cannot free
Marner from his enwalled isolation. He spends Christmas
Day alone. The Nature scene is finely used to image his
condition:
In the morning he looked out on the black frost that
seemed to press cruelly on every blade of grass, while
the half-icy red pool shivered under the bitter wind;
but towards evening the snow began to fall, and curtained from him even that dreary outlook, shutting
him close up with his narrow grief. And he sat in his
robbed home through the livelong evening, not caring
to close his shutters or lock his door, pressing his head
between his hands and moaning, till the cold grasped
him and told him that his fire was grey. (Ch.X)
Not often did George Eliot attain such stark concreteness and
force of the unerring word. Silas's color-drained world contrasts with the church-going scene immediately following:
"the church was fuller than all through the rest of the year,
with red faces among the abundant dark-green boughs. . . ."
Mrs. Barbara Hardy has shown that "in George Eliot the
scenic method is inseparable from the habit of metaphor. The
interplay between scene and image fixes a symbolic frame
around the scene.
. .
."7 Christmas Day in Raveloe offers a
wealth of confirmatory example.
The Casses' New Year's Eve dance (Ch.XI) is the pivotal
point in the unfolding of the relation between community and
non-community in the story. The zest and warmth of the collective occasion are tinglingly felt in the writing. George
Eliot holds a sensitive balance between her evocation of the
choric whole, the total company linked as a community despite distinctions of social grading, and that of individualized figures (of whom Nancy and Priscilla Lammeter are the
most vivid). The fellowship represented at the dance is
exclusive: it is the occasion for "all the society of Raveloe
and Tarley," not for all and sundry. But the "privileged
villagers" who are admitted, like Macey and Ben Winthrop,
are granted full and salted commentary on the doings of their
betters. Their presence does not let us forget the wider
popular community in whose name they speak.
The "legendary" element that enters deeply into the structure of Silas Marner is most evident in the narration of
7The Novels of George Eliot, London, 1959, p. 200.
722
S I LA S MA RN E R
Silas's finding of the child on his cottage hearth (Ch.XII).
The role of chance, obvious and considerable, doesn't disturb:
it confirms the legendary mood. The mother, giving way to
the effects of her drug, collapses within a child's toddling
distance (through snow) of Marner's cottage door. The door
of the cottage is open (at the very moment Marner is holding it ajar, caught in one of his cataleptic fits) so that the
child can set out to catch "the bright living thing"-the light
thrown across the darkened snow from the cottage fire. The
child enters the cottage without Marner's being aware of it.
Recovering from his trance he goes back to his fireside:
to his blurred vision, it seemed as if there were gold
on the floor in front of the hearth. Gold!-his own gold
brought back to him as mysteriously as it had been
taken away! The heap of gold seemed to glow and get
larger beneath his agitated gaze.
Not until he touches the gold does he encounter "soft warm
curls" instead of "the hard coin with the familiar resisting
outline." Later, when he first takes the child on his lap, he
experiences an "emotion mysterious to himself, at something
unknown dawning on his life." And instead of his being
reduced to the world of objects, of being thingified, his
chief fetish is itself made flesh:
Thought and feeling were so confused within him,
that if he had tried to give them utterance, he could
only have said that the child was come instead of the
gold-that the gold had turned into the child" (Ch.XIV,
my emphasis).
Up to the point of the child's discovery the narrative has
much in common with the pastoral romance of a lost child
and foster-father such as Shakespeare drew upon for The
Winter's Tale. There are some striking parallels. The association of the discovered child with gold, and the fairy-tale
coloring, occurs in The Winter's Tale. Having found the
child and "bundle" left on the wild Bohemian shore by
Antigonus, the shepherd says to his son:
Now bless thyself: thou mettest with things dying,
I with things new-born. Here's a sight for thee: look
thee, a bearing-cloth for a squire's child! Look thee
here: take up, take up, boy; open't. So, let's see. It was
told me I should be rich by the fairies: this is some
changeling. Open't: what's within, boy?
I AN
MILNER
723
And the son replies:
You're a made old man: if the sins of your youth
are forgiven you, you're well to live. Gold! all gold.
The old shepherd brings up the foundling as his daughter
Perdita. "Time, the Chorus" announces that sixteen years are
to be passed over, bringing on the climax of the love and
recognition scenes in which Florizel claims Perdita as wife
and Perdita is revealed as the daughter of Leontes and
Hermione. Part II of Silas Marner opens with the sentence:
"It was a bright autumn Sunday, sixteen years after Silas
Marner had found his treasure on the hearth" (Ch.XVI).
Both the period and the structural function of the time element correspond exactly. Eppie, brought up by Silas as his
own daughter, is found to be "a squire's child" (though she
rejects her natural father). And she pledges herself to marry
not a scion of the gentry but a workingman. The common
elements are obvious. But the difference of denouement, determined by Eppie's acquired bond of kinship with working
folk, is the essence of the tale.
There is also a difference of moral atmosphere. While
The Winter's Tale treats the incident as something out of an
old ballad, George Eliot makes strong play with the numinous quality of Silas's experience. Telling Dolly Winthrop
of the event Silas says: "Yes-the door was open. The money's
gone I don't know where, and this is come from I don't know
where" (Ch.XIV). Later, reflecting on his experience, he
thinks of Eppie in terms of: "this young life that had been
sent to him out of the darkness into which his gold had
departed" (Ch.XVI). The "sent to him" links up with that
first confused "feeling" he had had immediately after his
discovery: "that this child was somehow a message come to
him from that far-off life: it stirred fibres that had never
been moved in Raveloe-old quiverings of tenderness-old
impressions of awe at the presentiment of some Power presiding over his life .. ." (Ch.XII).
More than once Dolly Winthrop interprets the mystery as
the natural working of the will of "Them as was at the making
of us." And in the end Silas settles for a slightly troubled
deism: " 'That drawing o' the lots is dark: but the child was
sent to me: there's dealings with us-there's dealings'"
(Ch.XVI).
The drama of Marner's re-humanization is expressed in a
724
SILAS
MARNER
more realistic vein that contrasts significantly with the
legendary and numinous atmosphere of his earlier alienation.
The shadowy, somewhat depersonalized Marner of Part I
gradually acquires a voice and gestures of his own. His first
tentative steps in parenthood are rendered with a moving
simplicity, enlivened with a quiet humour which skirts sentimentalization. The sense of an awakened Marner, of a man
who has laid hold on life again, is strong in the little scene
in which he defies Mrs. Kimble, the voice of respectable
society, to take the child away:
"No-no-I
can't part with it, I can't let it go,"
said Silas, abruptly. "It's come to me-I've a right to
keep it." The proposition to take the child from him
had come to Silas quite unexpectedly, and his speech,
uttered under a strong sudden impulse, was almost
like a revelation to himself: a minute before, he had
no distinct intention about the child (Ch.XIII, my emphasis).
The dialogue scenes in which Dolly Winthrop discourses on
the whole right and duty of parents have a vitality and clarity
of rendering which, if due primarily to her superlatively
expressed vis animae, also show Marner in sharper profile.
Marner's recovery of his humanity emerges partly from
the uncommented narrative of his growing care and affection
for Eppie. It is also pointed up in the authorial commentary,
not generalizing and didactic but expository: "Unlike the
gold which needed nothing, and must be worshipped in closelocked solitude-which was hidden away from the daylight,
was deaf to the song of birds, and started to no human tonesEppie was a creature of endless claims and ever-growing
desired, seeking and loving sunshine, and living sounds, and
living movements . . ." (Ch.XIV).
Marner slowly comes to
break out of the "ever-repeated circle" in which his thoughts
had been trapped by his gold: "his soul, long stupefied in a
cold narrow prison, was unfolding too, and trembling gradually into full consciousness' (Ch.XIV). The extent of the
change in Silas is indicated in a passage at the close of Part I;
Wordsworthian in moral tone, it has a concrete simplicity of
utterance and a natural vein of feeling that George Eliot
rarely achieved:
No child was afraid of approaching Silas when
Eppie was near him: there was no repulsion around
IAN
MILNER
725
him now, either for young or old; for the little child
had come to link him once more with the whole world.
There was love between him and the child that blent
them into one, and there was love between the child
and the world-from men and women with parental
looks and tones, to the red lady-birds and the round
pebbles (Ch.XIV).
Marner's loss and recovery of his humanity forms the major
part of the novel's two-fold theme. It is developed by the
skilful use of several mutually sustaining modes of presentation. In the end the reader feels strongly that a warped and
deadened personality has come alive and whole under "the
remedial influences of pure, natural human relations."
*
*
*
The secondary theme in the double structure of Silas Marner
is the conflict of contrasted moral values and of social planes
in which those values respectively inhere. The confrontation,
considering the novel's limited span, is worked out with a
sure sense of dramatic gradation and tragic irony to a finely
staged catastrophe. Godfrey and Silas are fatal opposites
brought into a fatal conjunction. The thematic development
of Marner's loss and recovery of his humanity is counterpointed with the stages of Cass's moral deception and defeat.
The death of Godfrey's first wife (long willed by him) ironically brings "salvation" to himself (he can marry Nancy
Lammeter) and to Silas (the finding of Eppie). Godfrey's
marriage to Nancy, though it offers some happiness, is childless: unblessed according to the tale's simple symbolism.
Eppie, the image of life's renewal, brings Silas back his lost
humanity: "Eppie called him away from his weaving, and
made him think all its pauses a holiday, reawakening his
senses with her fresh life, even to the old winter-flies that
came crawling forth in the early spring sunshine, and warming him into joy because she had joy" (Ch.XIV).
The very discovery of the child sets off contrasted reactions.
Godfrey, when he first comes to Marner's cottage to see his
daughter, feels "a conflict of regret and joy, that the pulse
of that little heart had no response for the half-jealous yearning in his own . . ." (Ch.XIII). He assumes Marner will hand
the child over to the parish. "Who says so?" said Marner,
sharply. "Will they make me take her?" The impulsive, possessive love of the stranger lights up the self-divided cal-
726
S ILAS
MARN E R
culatingness of the father, intent only upon a convenient disposal of the child and of his conscience:
"Poor little thing !" said Godfrey. "Let me give something towards finding it clothes." He had put his hand
in his pocket and found half-a-guinea, and, thrusting it
into Silas's hand, he hurried out of the cottage . . .
(Ch.XIII).
Godfrey's half-guinea salve meets with a further challenging contrast in the person of Dolly Winthrop. It is she whose
immediately offered help in caring for the "tramp's child"
(as good society has it) Marner appreciates most. When he
shows her the half-guinea she replies: "'Eh, Master Marner...
there's no call to buy, no more nor a pair o' shoes; for I've got
the little petticoats as Aaron wore five years ago, and it's ill
spending the money on them baby-clothes, for the child '11grow
like grass i' May, bless it-that it will'" (Ch.XIV). Dolly,
the wife of Ben Winthrop the wheelwright, is finely individualized, above all by her speech, which in its natural running on, its energy and liveliness, its homespun but never
banal simplicity, is matched only by Mrs. Poyser's. Dolly has
a Shakespearean largeness of stature, a rounded substantiality
and rootedness in the earth. She is a genuine folk-figure, an
image of the people's reserves of instinctive sympathy and
care for the fellow-needy, practical know-how, forthrightness,
resourcefulness, and good humor. She is the one person to
whom Silas can unburden his doubts as to the drawing of lots
that drove him into the wilderness. Dolly's faith that "Them
as was at the making on us. .. knows better and has a better
will" is in the last resort unshakable. But when she speaks of
it the achieved control of tone and Shakespeare-like concreteness of language are evident:
And that's all as ever I can be sure on, and everything else is a big puzzle to me when I think on it. For
there was the fever come and took off them as were
full-growed, and left the helpless children; and there's
the breaking o' limbs; and them as'ud do right and be
sober have to suffer by them as are contrairy-eh,
there's trouble i' this world, and there's things as we
can niver make out the rights on. (Ch.XVI)
Dolly Winthrop, the wife of a working-man, complements
Marner, the weaver, in his function of creating the popular
scale of values in the tale. Their friendly association at the
IAN
M ILNER
727
outset in the bringing up of Eppie, their growing understanding of each other, are sealed by Eppie's marriage to Dolly's
son Aaron.
The conflict of opposed values that has been growing
throughout the story comes to a head in the final challengeand-response scene between Godfrey and Nancy Cass and
Silas and Eppie (Ch.XIX). As in the encounter between Adam
Bede and Arthur Donnithorne the class gap between the pairs
is brought out emphatically and in shrewdly varied ways.
Silas is on the defensive from the start: "always ill at ease
when he was being spoken to by 'betters'" and answering
Godfrey "with some constraint." When Godfrey remarks that
Silas's gold (recovered with the finding of Dunstan Cass's
body in the Stone-pit) won't go far, even to maintain only
himself, Silas is "unaffected" by the rich man's argument:
"We shall do very well-Eppie and me 'ull do well enough.
There's few working-folks have got so much laid by as that.
I don't know what it is to gentlefolks, but I look upon it as a
deal-almost
too much.
. .
." From then on the scene has a
spiralling tension, finely controlled as it mounts to the denouement. Godfrey pursues his gentlemanly line of the parent
who, wishing to make amends, is bent merely on ensuring
Eppie's welfare: "making a lady of her." When Eppie responds that she doesn't wish to be a lady (though dropping
a curtsy respectfully) Godfrey gets assertive: "It's my duty,
Marner, to own Eppie as my child, and provide for her." He
warns that otherwise Eppie "may marry some low workingman," and accuses Silas: "You're putting yourself in the way
of her welfare." And Silas yields, after a struggle: "Speak
to the child. I'll hinder nothing." There is a touch of classical
tragic irony in Nancy and Godfrey's ready assumption, at
this point, that their mission has succeeded:
"My dear, you'll be a treasure to me," said Nancy,
in her gentle voice. "We shall want for nothing when
we have our daughter."
It is Eppie who now stands at the center of the stage (the
scene, like others of George Eliot's best, is as immediate and
direct in its interchanges as a play). But she "did not come
forward and curtsy, as she had done before. She held Silas's
hand in hers, and grasped it firmly-it was a weaver's hand,
with a palm and finger-tips that were sensitive to such pressure-while she spoke with colder decision than before":
728
SI LAS
MARN E R
"'Thank you, ma'am-thank you, sir, for your offersthey're very great, and far above my wish. For I should have
no delight i' life any more if I was forced to go away from
my father, and knew he was sitting at home, a-thinking of
me and feeling lone. .. .' " When Nancy tries once more ("a
duty you owe to your lawful father") Eppie brings the moral
drama to a full close: "'I can't feel as I've got any father
but one... I wasn't brought up to be a lady, and I can't turn
my mind to it. I like the working-folks, and their victuals,
and their ways. And,' she ended passionately, while the tears
fell, 'I'm promised to marry a working-man, as '11live with
father, and help me to take care of him.'"
The dramatic surprise is well brought off, without histrionics. The social gap, and the habits of speech and behavior
on each side of the gap (Eppie's curtsies and final "ma'am"
and "sir"; Godfrey's recourse to moral principles to bolster
his commandeering:
".. . it's my duty to insist on taking care
of my own daughter") are finely caught. As in Adam Bede
the clash of moral values is worked out and finally resolved
within a specific class-differentiated context. Godfrey's
natural assumption that his daughter should not marry "some
low working-man" falls to pieces in face of Eppie's declaration.
The light of human charity comes from Silas Marner's hearth
-the "bright gleam" that fetched the child "in over the snow,
like as if it had been a little starved robin," as Dolly Winthrop
put it. It is the grasp of a weaver's hand that sustains Eppie
when making her final act of commitment to "the workingfolks ... and their ways."
The secondary theme of conflicting values adds a dimension to the first. The "remedial influences of pure, natural
human relations" operate within a conditioning social framework. Marner's alienation from himself and his fellow-man is
healed by his uncalculating love for "a tramp's child." Godfrey
Cass disowns his own daughter. The revealing of Eppie as "a
squire's child" immediately poses, in simple but dramatically
clear-cut terms, the question of moral engagement so characteristic of the later novels. Eppie's commitment to the code
of working-folkis the confirming counterpart of Marner's
regaining of human lineaments. There is the wider implication,
to be spelt out in the more complex crisis of Esther Lyon, that
some such commitment is the necessary price of moral health.
The final quality of Sil(asMarner is other than "charming."8
I AN
MILNER
729
The mark of man's inhumanity to man lies heavy across its
early pages. Marner's cursing of his God, his destruction of
himself as a human being, his abject despair, belong not to
the pleasant illusion of fairy-tale but to the encounters of
tragic moral drama. Silas Marner is one of the most effective
renderings of the experience-so characteristically modernof man's alienation. In the wide moral resonance of its double
theme, and in its consummately controlled art, it merits a more
substantial place in the critical estimate of George Eliot's
work.
CHARLESUNIVERSITY,PRAGUE
'After completion of my article I find that Dr. Leavis has somewhat
revised his attitude. In a footnote, datemarked 1959, he states: "I think
now that I have done less than justice to Silas Marner, and that my
stresses on 'minor' and 'fairy-tales' are infelicitous." (The Great Tradition, Harmondsworth, Middlesex: Penguin [Peregrine Books] 1962,
p. 60 n.)