LITTLE JOHANNES _Translated from the Dutch of_ _FREDERIK VAN EEDEN_ _By CLARA BELL_ _With an Introductory Essay_ _by ANDREW LANG_ _LONDON: WILLIAM HEINEMANN_ _MDCCCXCV_ INTRODUCTION LITERARY FAIRY TALES The _Märchen_ or child's story, is a form of literature primevally old, but with infinite capacity of renewing its youth. Old wives' fables, tales about a lad and a lass, and a cruel step-mother, about three adventurous brothers, about friendly or enchanted beasts, about magical weapons and rings, about giants and cannibals, are the most ancient form of romantic fiction. The civilised peoples have elaborated these childlike legends into the chief romantic myths, as of the Ship Argo, and the sagas of Heracles and Odysseus. Uncivilised races, Ojibbeways, Eskimo, Samoans, retain the old wives' fables in a form far less cultivated,--probably far nearer the originals. European peasants keep them in shapes more akin to the savage than to the Greek forms, and, finally, men of letters have adopted the _genre_ from popular narrative, as they have also adopted the Fable. _Little Johannes_, here translated from the Dutch of Dr. Frederik van Eeden, is the latest of these essays, in which the man's fancy consciously plays with the data and the forms of the child's imagination. It is not my purpose here to criticise _Little Johannes, an Allegory of a Poet's Soul_, nor to try to forestall the reader's own conclusions. One prefers rather to glance at the history of the Fairy Tale in modern literature.