Never, I suppose, was a painter less maladif in his work than Morland,
that lover of simple and sun-bright English scenes. Probably, this
picture of his is all cheerful in intention. Yet the effect of it is
saddening.
Superficially, the scene is cheerful enough. Our first impression is of
a happy English home, of childish high-spirits and pretty manners. We
note how genial a lady is the visitor, and how eager the children are
to please. One of them trips respectfully forward--a wave of yellow
curls fresh and crisp from the brush, a rustle of white muslin fresh
and crisp from the wash. She is supported on one side by her grown-up
sister, on the other by her little brother, who displays the nectarine
already given to him by the kind lady. Splendid in far-reaching
furbelows, that kind lady holds out both her hands, beaming
encouragement. On her ample lap is a little open basket with other ripe
nectarines in it--one for every child.
Modest, demure, the girl trips forward as though she were dancing a
quadrille. In the garden, just beyond the threshold, stand two smaller
sisters, shyly awaiting their turn. They, too, are in their
Sunday-best, and on the tiptoe of excitement--infant coryphe'es, in
whom, as they stand at the wings, stage-fright is overborne by the
desire to be seen and approved. I fancy they are rehearsing under their
breath the 'Yes, ma' am,' and the 'No, ma'am,' and the 'I thank you,
ma'am, very much,' which their grown-up sister has been drilling into
them during the hurried toilet they have just been put through in
honour of this sudden call.
How anxious their mother is during the ceremony of introduction! How
keenly, as she sits there, she keeps her eyes fixed on the visitor's
face! Maternal anxiety, in that gaze, seems to be intensified by social
humility. For this is no ordinary visitor. It is some great lady of the
county, very rich, of high fashion, come from a great mansion in a
great park, bringing fruit from one of her own many hot-houses. That
she has come at all is an act of no slight condescension, and the
mother feels it. Even so did homely Mrs. Fairchild look up to Lady
Noble. Indeed, I suspect that this visitor is Lady Noble herself, and
that the Fairchilds themselves are neighbours of this family. These
children have been coached to say 'Yes, my lady,' and 'No, my lady,'
and 'I thank you, my lady, very much'; and their mother has already
been hoping that Mrs. Fairchild will haply pass through the lane and
see the emblazoned yellow chariot at the wicket. But just now she is
all maternal--'These be my jewels.' See with what pride she fingers the
sampler embroidered by one of her girls, knowing well that 'spoilt'
Miss Augusta Noble could not do such embroidery to save her life--that
life which, through her Promethean naughtiness in playing with fire,
she was so soon to lose.
Other exemplary samplers hang on the wall yonder. On the mantelshelf
stands a slate, with an ink-pot and a row of tattered books, and other
tokens of industry. The schoolroom, beyond a doubt. Lady Noble has
expressed a wish to see the children here, in their own haunt, and her
hostess has led the way hither, somewhat flustered, gasping many
apologies for the plainness of the apartment. A plain apartment it is:
dark, bare-boarded, dingy-walled. And not merely a material gloom
pervades it. There is a spiritual gloom, also--the subtly oppressive
atmosphere of a room where life has not been lived happily.
Though these children are cheerful now, it is borne in on us by the
atmosphere (as preserved for us by Morland's master-hand) that their
life is a life of appalling dismalness. Even if we had nothing else to
go on, this evidence of our senses were enough. But we have other
things to go on. We know well the way in which children of this period
were brought up. We remember the life of 'The Fairchild Family,' those
putative neighbours of this family--in any case, its obvious
contemporaries; and we know that the life of those hapless little prigs
was typical of child-life in the dawn of the nineteenth century. Depend
on it, this family (whatever its name may be: the Thompsons, I
conjecture) is no exception to the dismal rule. In this schoolroom,
every day is a day of oppression, of forced endeavour to reach an
impossible standard of piety and good conduct--a day of tears and
texts, of texts quoted and tears shed, incessantly, from morning unto
evening prayers. After morning prayers (read by Papa), breakfast. The
bread-and-butter of which, for the children, this meal consists, must
be eaten (slowly) in a silence by them unbroken except with prompt
answers to such scriptural questions as their parents (who have
ham-and-eggs) may, now and again, address to them. After breakfast, the
Catechism (heard by Mamma). After the Catechism, a hymn to be learnt.
After the repetition of this hymn, arithmetic, caligraphy, the use of
the globes. At noon, a decorous walk with Papa, who for their benefit
discourses on the General Depravity of Mankind in all Countries after
the Fall, occasionally pausing by the way to point for them some moral
of Nature. After a silent dinner, the little girls sew, under the
supervision of Mamma, or of the grown-up sister, or of both these
authorities, till the hour in which (if they have sewn well) they reap
permission to play (quietly) with their doll. A silent supper, after
which they work samplers. Another hymn to be learnt and repeated.
Evening prayers. Bedtime: 'Good-night, dear Papa; good-night, dear
Mamma.'
Such, depend on it, is the Thompsons' curriculum. What a painful
sequence of pictures a genre-painter might have made of it! Let us be
thankful that we see the Thompsons only in this brief interlude of
their life, tearless and unpinafored, in this hour of strange
excitement, glorying in that Sunday-best which on Sundays is to them
but a symbol of intenser gloom.
But their very joy is in itself tragic. It reveals to us, in a flash,
the tragedy of their whole existence. That so much joy should result
from mere suspension of the usual re'gime, the sight of Lady Noble, the
anticipation of a nectarine! For us there is no comfort in the
knowledge that their present degree of joy is proportionate to their
usual degree of gloom, that for them the Law of Compensation drops into
the scale of these few moments an exact counter-weight of joy to the
misery accumulated in the scale of all their other moments. We, who do
not live their life, who regard Lady Noble as a mere Hecuba, and who
would accept one of her nectarines only in sheer politeness, cannot
rejoice with them that do rejoice thus, can but pity them for all that
has led up to their joy. We may reflect that the harsh system on which
they are reared will enable them to enjoy life with infinite gusto when
they are grown up, and that it is, therefore, a better system than the
indulgent modern one. We may reflect, further, that it produces a finer
type of man or woman, less selfish, better-mannered, more capable and
useful. The pretty grown-up daughter here, leading her little sister by
the hand, so gracious and modest in her mien, so sunny and
affectionate, so obviously wholesome and high-principled--is she not a
walking testimonial to the system? Yet to us the system is not the less
repulsive in itself. Its results may be what you please, but its
practice were impossible. We are too tender, too sentimental. We have
not the nerve to do our duty to children, nor can we bear to think of
any one else doing it. To children we can do nothing but 'spoil' them,
nothing but bless their hearts and coddle their souls, taking no
thought for their future welfare. And we are justified, maybe, in our
flight to this opposite extreme. Nobody can read one line ahead in the
book of fate. No child is guaranteed to become an adult. Any child may
die to-morrow. How much greater for us the sting of its death if its
life shall not have been made as pleasant as possible! What if its
short life shall have been made as unpleasant as possible? Conceive the
remorse of Mrs. Thompson here if one of her children were to die
untimely--if one of them were stricken down now, before her eyes, by
this surfeit of too sudden joy!
However, we do not fancy that Mrs. Thompson is going to be thus
afflicted. We believe that there is a saving antidote in the cup of her
children's joy. There is something, we feel, that even now prevents
them from utter ecstasy. Some shadow, even now, hovers over them. What
is it? It is not the mere atmosphere of the room, so oppressive to us.
It is something more definite than that, and even more sinister. It
looms aloft, monstrously, like one of those grotesque actual shadows
which a candle may cast athwart walls and ceiling. Whose shadow is it?
we wonder, and, wondering, become sure that it is Mr.
Thompson's--Papa's.
The papa of Georgian children! We know him well, that awfully massive
and mysterious personage, who seemed ever to his offspring so remote
when they were in his presence, so frighteningly near when they were
out of it. In Mrs. Turner's Cautionary Stories in Verse he occurs again
and again. Mr. Fairchild was a perfect type of him. Mr. Bennet, when
the Misses Lizzie, Jane and Lydia were in pinafores, must have been
another perfect type: we can reconstruct him as he was then from the
many fragments of his awfulness which still clung to him when the girls
had grown up. John Ruskin's father, too, if we read between the lines
of Praeterita, seems to have had much of the authentic monster about
him. He, however, is disqualified as a type by the fact that he was 'an
entirely honest merchant.' For one of the most salient peculiarities in
the true Georgian Papa was his having apparently no occupation
whatever--his being simply and solely a Papa. Even in social life he
bore no part: we never hear of him calling on a neighbour or being
called on. Even in his own household he was seldom visible. Except at
their meals, and when he took them for their walk, and when they were
sent to him to be reprimanded, his children never beheld him in the
flesh. Mamma, poor lady, careful of many other things, superintended
her children unremittingly, to keep them in the thorny way they should
go. Hers the burden and heat of every day, hers to double the roles of
Martha and Cornelia, that her husband might be left ever calmly aloof
in that darkened room, the Study. There, in a high armchair, with one
stout calf crossed over the other, immobile throughout the long hours
sate he, propping a marble brow on a dexter finger of the same
material. On the table beside him was a vase of flowers, daily
replenished by the children, and a closed volume. It is remarkable that
in none of the many woodcuts in which he has been handed down to us do
we see him reading; he is always meditating on something he has just
read. Occasionally, he is fingering a portfolio of engravings, or
leaning aside to examine severely a globe of the world. That is the
nearest he ever gets to physical activity. In him we see the static
embodiment of perfect wisdom and perfect righteousness. We take him at
his own valuation, humbly. Yet we have a queer instinct that there was
a time when he did not diffuse all this cold radiance of good example.
Something tells us that he has been a sinner in his day--a rattler of
the ivories at Almack's, and an ogler of wenches in the gardens of
Vauxhall, a sanguine backer of the Negro against the Suffolk Bantam,
and a devil of a fellow at boxing the watch and wrenching the knockers
when Bow Bells were chiming the small hours. Nor do we feel that he is
a penitent. He is too Olympian for that. He has merely put these things
behind him--has calmly, as a matter of business, transferred his
account from the worldly bank to the heavenly. He has seen fit to
become 'Papa.' As such, strong in the consciousness of his own
perfection, he has acquired, gradually, quasi-divine powers over his
children. Himself invisible, we know that he can always see them.
Himself remote, we know that he is always with them, and that always
they feel his presence. He prevents them in all their ways. The Mormon
Eye is not more direly inevitable than he. Whenever they offend in word
or deed, he knows telepathically, and fixes their punishment, long
before they are arraigned at his judgment-seat.
At this moment, as at all others, Mr. Thompson has his inevitable eye
on his children, and they know that it is on them. He is well enough
pleased with them at this moment. But alas! we feel that ere the sun
sets they will have incurred his wrath. Presently Lady Noble will have
finished her genial inspection, and have sailed back, under convoy of
the mother and the grown-up daughter, to the parlour, there to partake
of that special dish of tea which is even now being brewed for her.
When the children are left alone, their pent excitement will overflow
and wash them into disgrace. Belike, they will quarrel over the
nectarines. There will be bitter words, and a pinch, and a scratch, and
a blow, screams, a scrimmage. The rout will be heard afar in the
parlour. The grown-up sister will hasten back and be beheld suddenly, a
quelling figure, on the threshold: 'For shame, Clara! Mary, I wonder at
you! Henry, how dare you, sir? Silence, Ethel! Papa shall hear of
this.' Flushed and rumpled, the guilty four will hang their heads,
cowed by authority and by it perversely reconciled one with another.
Authority will bid them go upstairs 'this instant,' there to shed their
finery and resume the drab garb of every day. From the bedroom-windows
they will see Lady Noble step into her yellow chariot and drive away.
Envy--an inarticulate, impotent envy--will possess their hearts: why
cannot they be rich, and grown-up, and bowed to by every one? When the
chariot is out of sight, envy will be superseded by the play-instinct.
Silently, in their hearts, the children will play at being Lady
Noble.... Mamma's voice will be heard on the stairs, rasping them back
to the realities. Sullenly they will go down to the schoolroom, and
resume their tasks. But they will not be able to concentrate their
unsettled minds. The girls will make false stitches in the pillow-slips
which they had been hemming so neatly when the yellow chariot drove up
to the front-door; and Master Harry will be merely dazed by that page
of the Delectus which he had almost got by heart. Their discontent will
be inspissated by the knowledge that they are now worse-off than
ever--are in dire disgrace, and that even now the grown-up sister is
'telling Papa' (who knows already, and has but awaited the formal
complaint). Presently the grown-up sister will come into the
schoolroom, looking very grave: 'Children, Papa has something to say to
you.' In the Study, to which, quaking, they will proceed, an endless
sermon awaits them. The sin of Covetousness will be expatiated on, and
the sins of Discord and Hatred, and the eternal torment in store for
every child who is guilty of them. All four culprits will be in tears
soon after the exordium. Before the peroration (a graphic description
of the Lake of Fire) they will have become hysterical. They will be
sent supperless to bed. On the morrow they will have to learn and
repeat the chapter about Cain and Abel. A week, at least, will have
elapsed before they are out of disgrace. Such are the inevitable
consequences of joy in a joyless life. It were well for these children
had 'The Visit' never been paid.
Morland, I suppose, discerned naught of all this tragedy in his
picture. To him, probably, the thing was an untainted idyll, was but
one of those placid homely scenes which he loved as dearly as could
none but the brawler and vagabond that he was. And yet... and yet...
perhaps he did intend something of what we discern here. He may have
been thinking, bitterly, of his own childhood, and of the home he ran
away from.
'YET AGAIN'