Andrew Lang and the catawampus of Romance

Evolution in Victorian fairy tales

Today I am delighted to bring you a guest post by

Anna McCullough

, who recently received her PhD from St. Andrews university. Anna is an expert in Victorian children’s literature and the way it presents and uses ideas of evolution. This piece is about the fascinating writer and polymath Andrew Lang and the evolutionary ideas in his fairy tales. Here is Anna’s St. Andrews profile. Here are her published papers. Anna is now working on anthropological ideas in popular Victorian fiction. I will be following her work with interest.

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“The strangeness and the beauty of life”

Although his works are now largely forgotten, in the late-Victorian era Andrew Lang was a household name. Lang was a Victorian polymath whose range of intellectual interests would be astounding in our specialised academic culture today and were impressive even in his day. His sharp-tongued editorial columns were widely read in weekly popular journals and magazines, to the extent that one of his biographers called his readership “almost a cult”. Legends (many of them true) circulated about his impressive intellectual capabilities. As a six-year-old, he would place five open books on chairs and read them simultaneously by moving from one to the other. Awestruck colleagues recounted how he would receive his editorial subject, sit down, write the article in under an hour, and then send it to the printer with no revision. He wrote and published at such an astonishing rate that people wondered if “Andrew Lang” was a syndicate of writers capitalising on a famous name.

Lang was particularly famous for his championship of the romance genre over realism, which was the dominant genre in the late 1800s. He loved fairy tales, compiling over 20 fairy tale anthologies and writing fairy stories himself. He loved the popular fiction of Robert Louis Stevenson (Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde), H. Rider Haggard (King Solomon’s Mines), and Rudyard Kipling (The Jungle Books). He wrote passionately that romance literature contained “that element which gives a sudden sense of the strangeness and the beauty of life; that power which has the gift of dreams, and admits us into the region where men are more brave and women more beautiful and passions more intense than in ordinary existence” (“Romance and the Reverse”). You may recognise these sentiments from 20th-century fantasy writers, like J.R.R. Tolkien, who drew many of their ideas about fantasy from Lang.

But Lang also had scientific reasons for championing romance. He traced the origins of romance literature back to ancient folklore. In his view, romance was powerful because it invoked primal emotions that had been ingrained in mankind’s biology and culture for thousands of years.

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Two views of evolution: fitness or progress?

To understand Lang’s view of romance, we need to go further back in the Victorian era to the publication of two important works: Charles Darwin’s On the Origin of Species (1859) and Edward Burnett Tylor’s Primitive Culture (1871).

Darwin’s Origin made evolutionary theory acceptable to a middle-class, moderate Victorian audience. Versions of evolution had circulated since the 18th century, but they were usually seen as radical and unscientific. Darwin’s meticulous compiling of evidence and his carefully worded statements about divine design won over readers who would previously have rejected evolution.

Darwin also offered a version of evolution that was not necessarily progressive. His mechanism of natural selection is not an intelligent force that is trying to achieve a specific outcome. Natural selection is merely a process of cause and effect that enables better adapted organisms to survive. And the qualities that a particular environment might require for survival are entirely relative. Fitness could require qualities that we think of as “better”, like intelligence or strength, but equally it could require being green, being malicious, being loud, or being small.

Think about the implications of this. Natural selection means that more recent biological developments are not inherently “better”, they are just better for a specific environment. Moreover, regressing to a previous stage of development is not necessarily a problem. It might just indicate that the environment has changed to be more like an environment from the past.

This explanation of biological change remained controversial into the 20th century, but it was nonetheless influential. Within just a few years of Origin, people began to extrapolate Darwin’s ideas beyond biology to describe cultural development. How can we understand the development of human civilisation if it is not inherently improving? Darwin himself had to address the relevance of his theory to humanity in his next work, The Descent of Man (1871).

And this is where Tylor’s Primitive Culture, published in the same year as Descent, comes in. Tylor was an anthropologist who claimed to be uninfluenced by Darwin. However, his view that “the institutions which can best hold their own in the world gradually supersede the less fit ones” smells strongly of ideas like natural selection and survival of the fittest.

Tylor argued that humanity progressed through three stages: savagery, barbarism, and civilisation. This cultural narrative isn’t strictly Darwinian: natural selection doesn’t “progress”. Tylor’s attempt to blend natural selection with cultural progression is just one example of the multiplicity of Victorian versions of evolution.

Tylor also proposed the doctrine of “survivals”: the cultural equivalent of an ostrich’s wings. He described survivals as “processes, customs, opinions, and so forth” that have lingered from a previous stage in cultural evolution. The most obvious examples of primitive survivals are superstitions or rituals, but Tylor also offered more amusing suggestions, like coat tails and the collars worn by English clergymen. He argued that survivals had an original purpose, even if they are bizarre now: “Meaningless customs must be survivals….they had a practical, or at least ceremonial, intention when and where they first arose, but are now fallen into absurdity”. 

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Lang’s view on survivals 

Andrew Lang was a friend of Tylor’s and an anthropologist himself. His anthropological writings were tremendously influential and are often referenced in modern studies of the history of anthropology.

Lang used Tylor’s theory of survivals to explain the origin of myths and folklore that seem inexplicable to modern people. He insisted that human culture is rational in all stages of development and that people once had reasons for their legends, even if they are now obscure. Lang believed that “savage” minds were both rational and imaginative. Lang’s theory, like Tylor’s, blends Darwin’s nonprogressive evolution with a developmental understanding of culture.

Lang had a much greater appreciation for savage minds than Tylor did. Tylor didn’t think that survivals of primitive culture were worth retaining in modern civilisation. He saw survivals as “things worn out, worthless, frivolous, or even bad with downright harmful folly”. He also commented with satisfaction that “progress has far prevailed over relapse”.

Lang, on the other hand, saw survivals as beneficial to modern culture and rejoiced when he found instances of “relapse”. He believed primitive man’s rationality and imagination had died out in modern culture. These qualities only survived in children and some literary writers, particularly romance novelists like R.L. Stevenson and H. Rider Haggard. Lang also included Charles Dickens: “the genius of Dickens was a relapse on the early human intellectual condition”.

Unsurprisingly, Lang wanted to be one of these imaginative writers himself. He wrote several fairy tales that sold well (although he did not think he was very good at it—he once lamented that “pancakes are imaginative” compared to him.) These fairy stories demonstrate and encode his beliefs about survivals, relapse, and romance. He wrote five fairy tales, but I’ll just focus on two: Prince Prigio (1889) and its sequel Prince Ricardo (1893).

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Prince Prigio and the dragon. “Why do cultures all around the world have stories of fairies and dragons if they didn’t exist?”

Prince Prigio, the hero of the first story, needs to regress to an earlier stage of evolutionary development before he is fit to rule. In classic fairy tale fashion, Prigio’s parents have offended the fairies, and so a wicked fairy cursed the infant prince with being too clever. As a result, Prince Prigio possesses the knowledge of modern man, but without the primitive imagination to balance it out he struggles to survive. He has an impressive ability to reason from a young age and reads extensively, but modern knowledge misleads his reason, leaving him obstinate and incredulous. He refuses to accept the existence of a Firedrake (something like a dragon) that terrorises the kingdom because it is “not in the Natural History Books”.

Prigio’s mother is far too clever as well. She vocalises the opinions of realists whom Lang frequently debated in his journalism. For instance, when informed about a flying carpet, she exclaims, “Nonsense! …. a story out of the Arabian Nights is not suited for a modern public, and fails to win aesthetic credence”. 

Lang thought so-called realists ignored evidence when it did not suit their image of reality. He championed romance as a way of seeing differently and of learning to consider uncomfortable facts. In Prince Prigio, he reverses facts and superstition to illustrate how some people dogmatically insist on their version of reality. The queen refuses to admit the existence of fairies even when they attend supper: “But the queen, though she saw them distinctly, took no notice of them. You see, she did not believe in fairies, nor in her own eyes, when she saw them”. 

Prigio’s primitive imagination is finally unlocked when he falls in love with the Lady Rosalind:

Now, at this very moment when the prince, all of a sudden, was as deep in love as if he had been the stupidest officer in the room an extraordinary thing happened! Something seemed to give a whirr! in his brain, and in one instant he knew all about it! He believed in fairies and fairy gifts, and understood that his cap was the cap of darkness, and his shoes the seven-league boots, and his purse the purse of Fortunatus! He had read about those things in historical books: but now he believed in them.

As it turns out, the “historical books” did tell him about magic, but he had been unwilling to believe them since they contradicted more “scientific” books. Prigio is now armed with the qualities of primitive man—a powerful imagination, belief in the supernatural, and magical relics—as well as those of civilised man—rationality and knowledge. By using all of these, he defeats the Firedrake and the icy Remora (an exciting encounter that I encourage you to go read for yourself).

In Prince Prigio, Lang suggests that the “modern public” is not necessarily more intelligent than people from the past. He challenges the realist assumption that progressive evolution is the best way to survive, suggesting that regression to more primitive forms and ideas might produce a fitter person. By relapsing to a more primitive mindset, Prigio finds the ideal blend of savage and civilised that enables him to protect his kingdom.

So what does that mean in the actual, non-fantasy world? Lang often slyly remarked, “Why do cultures all around the world have stories of fairies and dragons if they didn’t exist?” He wasn't arguing that this common belief necessarily proves the existence of magical beings (or the existence of God, for that matter), but that truly rational people are open to all possibilities. They don’t discredit survivals of the past just because they are from the past, but instead they think carefully about the truth claims these survivals make and what value they might have in the present.

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The power of “good old books which people do not usually read”

These ideas made Lang unpopular with other intellectuals. Both in his time and today, critics have claimed that he refused to recognise the importance of realism. So was he a romantic, blinded to the grim reality of the non-magical world we live in? The next fairy story, Prince Ricardo, gives the other half of Lang’s argument. It demonstrates that the ideal person is able to blend past and present and to interact purposefully with the real world. 

Ricardo, Prigio’s son, has the opposite problem from his father. He spends his time using magical implements on swashbuckling adventures and neglects his studies to deplorable effect. He needs to evolve and leave youth behind.

Prince Ricardo is a commentary on education and the improving effects of knowledge. The young prince has failed to read and thus lacks the knowledge to survive and develop. He needs to read history to have better information about the magic he uses, and he needs to read geography to know where the countries he visits are. Here, and throughout his work, Lang repeatedly argues that people (especially children) should read books of every genre.

But in Prince Ricardo, he does hint that fairy tales might be the most important books to read: “That is the advantage of reading: Knowledge is Power; and you mostly get knowledge that is really worth having out of good old books which people do not usually read”. Thus, while Prince Prigio advocates regression down toward a blended middle state, Prince Ricardo demonstrates the importance of upward, progressive evolution toward the same middle state.

Prince Prigio and Prince Ricardo demonstrate that reality may not align with realism, and that the successful individual must meet adventure with the imagination of primitive man, as well as the knowledge of modern man. 

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The catawampus of romance

In “Romance and Realism” (1887), one of his most strongly worded and controversial essays, Lang argued that survivals are fun and bring joy to the world (qualities he thought that realist literature lacked). He emphasised that “our mixed condition” of primitive and modern allows people to “enjoy all sorts of things”: 

We will get all the fun we can out of the ancestral barbarism of our natures. I only wish that we had more of it….Not for nothing did Nature leave us all savages under our white skins; she has wrought thus that we might have many delights, among others “the joy of adventurous living”, and of “reading about adventurous living”. 

Lang compares cultural survivals—like myths—with biological evolutionary survivals like teeth and hair. He argues that people should recognise the usefulness of survivals and seek a blend of past and present, of primitive imagination and modern knowledge. With striking, graphic language he urges readers to resist the “Coming Man” who will be “bald, toothless, highly ‘cultured’ and addicted to tales of introspective analysis”. Instead, people should embrace “adventurous living” and “reading about adventurous living”.

Lang saw cultural evolutionary regression as the only possible deliverance from decadence and stagnation. He feared that if literature was dominated by the realists, they would produce a civilisation of  “bald, toothless, and highly ‘cultured’” people. This society would be like Prince Prigio, blinded to unacceptable realities.

But Lang believed that romance literature had survival value, and that by incorporating the imagination of primitive man we can become better adapted to our world. In his essay “Modern Fairy Tales”, he wrote that fairy tales “teach the true lessons of our wayfaring in a world of perplexities and obstructions”. So he used his writing, whether anthropological or fictional, to promote survivals like wild imagination, adventurous living, or even just love of fairy tales. When properly used in the modern world, these survivals can enable anyone to survive the perplexities and metamorphoses of life.

As Lang concluded, “if the battle between the crocodile of Realism and the catawampus of Romance is to be fought out to the bitter end—why, in that Ragnarôk, I am on the side of the catawampus”.