Excerpt from The Tales of the Sixty Mandarins
This is a real book of new Fairy Tales. Gatherings of legends of the people, partly Indian, partly Chinese, have been touched by the genius of a writer, himself from the East, who brings his own wit and fancy to the telling of his tales, and is as ready to invent as to hand down tradition. A Fairy Tale should be all action, with something done in every sentence, or something said that carries on the story in a short and lively way. Whatever truth there may be living in its fiction must live in the tale itself, as closely joined to it as soul to body. Long moralising in a Fairy Tale is as the sound of Bottom snoring in Titania's lap.
But here is Titania herself in whimsical mood, at play in the East. It is an old playground of hers - she must have been visiting her comrades there, when she made Oberon jealous with "a lovely boy stolen from an Indian king." And Oberon, when he came to tease her for the boy, had not he also, as far as Titania knew, "come from the farthest steep of India?"
Mr. P. V. Ramaswami Raju's best Introduction to readers in England is this book of his, to which he has written his own Preface. He is a graduate of the Madras University; he is a Member of the Asiatic Society; and he had just been called to the bar at the Inner Temple when he left England for India, and left the manuscript of these tales in my hands.
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