There are fables where the rocks and the mountains speak.  Emerson has given us one where the Mountain and the Squirrel had a quarrel.  The Mountain called the Squirrel “Little Prig.”  And then continues a clash of personalities more possible to illustrate than at first appears.  Here we come to the second stage of the fairy-tale where the creature seems so unmanageable in his physical aspect that some actor must be substituted who will embody the essence of him.  To properly illustrate the quarrel of the Mountain and the Squirrel, the steep height should quiver and heave and then give forth its personality in the figure of a vague smoky giant, capable of human argument, but with oak-roots in his hair, and Bun, perhaps, become a jester in squirrel’s dress.

Or it may be our subject matter is a tall Dutch clock.  Father Time himself might emerge therefrom.  Or supposing it is a chapel, in a knight’s adventure.  An angel should step from the carving by the door:  a design that is half angel, half flower.  But let the clock first tremble a bit.  Let the carving stir a little, and then let the spirit come forth, that there may be a fine relation between the impersonator and the thing represented.  A statue too often takes on life by having the actor abruptly substituted.  The actor cannot logically take on more personality than the statue has.  He can only give that personality expression in a new channel.  In the realm of letters, a real transformation scene, rendered credible to the higher fancy by its slow cumulative movement, is the tale of the change of the dying Rowena to the living triumphant Ligeia in Poe’s story of that name.  Substitution is not the fairy-story.  It is transformation, transfiguration, that is the fairy-story, be it a divine or a diabolical change.  There is never more than one witch in a forest, one Siege Perilous at any Round Table.  But she is indeed a witch and the other is surely a Siege Perilous.

We might define Fairy Splendor as furniture transfigured, for without transfiguration there is no spiritual motion of any kind.  But the phrase “furniture-in-motion” serves a purpose.  It gets us back to the earth for a reason.  Furniture is architecture, and the fairy-tale picture should certainly be drawn with architectural lines.  The normal fairy-tale is a sort of tiny informal child’s religion, the baby’s secular temple, and it should have for the most part that touch of delicate sublimity that we see in the mountain chapel or grotto, or fancy in the dwellings of Aucassin and Nicolette.  When such lines are drawn by the truly sophisticated producer, there lies in them the secret of a more than ritualistic power.  Good fairy architecture amounts to an incantation in itself.