THE ENGLISH SCHOOL OF ROUSSEAU
Effects of Rousseau’s teaching in England—Henry Brooke’s _Fool
of Quality_, the English _Emile_—Thomas Day: his connection
with the Edgeworths—_Sandford and Merton_—_Little Jack_—Theory
and Romance: Philip Quarll as a Rousseauist—_The New Robinson
Crusoe_—Madame d’Epinay and Mary Wollstonecraft: _The Original
Stories_—Blake’s illustrations—Traces of Marmontel and Madame
le Prince de Beaumont in _The Juvenile Tatler_ and _The Fairy
Spectator_.
In England, Rousseau’s teaching had more effect on the actual life of the
family than on books. Children, no longer cramped by the old pedantries,
began to show unexpected powers of action and self-control, and parents,
relieved of their harsher duties, chose to make friends rather than
philosophers of their children.
It was only in books that theorists could represent this genuine progress
by the make-believe of impossible children and perfect parents. Most
writers of children’s books were theorists of one sort or another, and
now that they had begun to draw from life, they tried to make it fit
their theories. Thus the new books were hardly less didactic than the old.
Some reflect Johnson’s hostility to Rousseau, others support the new
ideas with definite religious teaching, and many that present the Child
of Nature as an existing type, endow him with the precocious wisdom of
a Lilliputian. There is hardly a book among them, even among the many
adaptations of French stories, in which the setting and characters are
not plainly English.
The most consistent of all Rousseauists was Thomas Day,[85] the author
of _Sandford and Merton_,[86] and he owed the success of his book at
least as much to his own observations and experiments, as to Rousseau.
Much of its interest, moreover, can be traced to the example of an
English novelist; for in choosing some pieces for children from Henry
Brooke’s _Fool of Quality_, Mr. Day had been so struck by its simple and
vivid style as to regret that Brooke himself had not written books for
children; and it is clear that, while the theory of _Sandford and Merton_
came direct from Rousseau, many dramatic situations, which are the life
of the story, were suggested by _The Fool of Quality_.[87]
This, indeed, was a book after Rousseau’s own heart. The hero, Henry
Earl of Moreland, is an English Emile quickened out of knowledge by more
natural and livelier adventures. Brought up by a foster-mother among
village children, he stands for the virtues of a natural education,
against a brother bred at home in the luxurious fashion of the time. The
scene of his first visit (at five years old) to his parents, is a satire
on Society, and the farcical turn of his adventures brings the romance of
theory into touch with the novel of life and humour. This little Harry
is the most natural child of fiction; like Emile at a later stage, he
knows nothing of the respect due to people of rank, and is quite unmoved
by his unusual surroundings; but as yet he has no philosophy; he values
things as children do, for what they mean to him. A laced hat is useless
as a head-covering, but an effective missile for playing ducks and drakes
among the wine-glasses; when he gets astride a Spanish pointer and rides
him among the company, he sees no reason to dismount because the dog,
growing outrageous, rushes into a group of little masters and misses and
overthrows them like ninepins; and when he has crowned the adventure by
throwing down a fat elderly lady and three men, he arises and strolls
leisurely about the room “with as unconcerned an aspect as if nothing
had happened amiss, and as though he had neither art nor part in this
frightful discomfiture”.
Emile, a much older boy, at his dinner party, received a hint from his
mentor, and for the rest of the meal “philosophised all alone in his
corner” about luxury, superior all to the grown-up guests. The little
Harry, merely unhappy at having to hold his knife and fork “just so” and
say so many “my lords and my ladies”, very naturally cries, “I wish I was
with my mammy in the kitchen.” Neither then nor at any other time does he
seem conscious of superior wisdom; but Theory hangs upon the foolishness
of his mother. An uncle, whimsical rather than didactic, but none the
less a moralist, fills the place of Rousseau’s tutor, and later, when the
boy appears in clothes “trimmed like those of your beau insects vulgarly
called butterflies,” this humorist so impresses him with the comparison
of that “good and clever boy called Hercules” who was given a poisoned
coat to wear, that Harry rips and rends the lacings of his suit and runs
down to obey a summons “with half the trimmings hanging in fritters and
tatters about him.”
Where Emile was controlled and self-centred, Harry is all impulse and
warmth of heart. He fights like a little tiger to avenge his brother
or to punish some young scamp, and cares little for the opinion of his
fellows; yet he shows the greatest tenderness to animals or persons in
distress. His mother, seeking proof of his wits and finding him ready to
give away all his clothes except his shirt, decides that “there is but
the thickness of a bit of linen between this child and a downright fool”,
and so leaves him to his more discerning father.
At times, the author, preoccupied with social and political ideals,
so neglects the story that even his lively humour can scarce restore
it; yet he can forget Rousseau’s theories in scenes that he invents to
illustrate them; nor does he ever accept a theory without proof. To the
philosopher’s contention “that self-love is the motive to all human
actions”, Brooke answers in the words of the estimable Mr. Meekly,
“Virtue forbid”; and his own philosophy is the sounder for a trustworthy
ballast of religion and patriotism.
Among minor digressions are a dialogue about toys, another on ghosts,
and some of the “thousand little fables” by which Harry’s uncle, “with
the most winning and insinuating address, endeavoured to open his mind
and cultivate his morals”. One of these, “The Fable of the Little Silver
Trouts”, has a tenderness that sets it apart from common fables. It reads
like an Irish folk-tale moralised by some good priest.
If Henry Brooke could have passed on his gifts of humour and sympathy
to the writers of children’s books, they would have known better than
to tie life down to theory. As it was, they were mostly obsessed by the
desire to teach, and preferred Mr. Day’s model of a faultless hero to one
like the Fool of Quality, who actually discovered two boys within him,
one “proud, scornful, ostentatious and revengeful”, the other “humble,
gentle, generous, loving and forgiving”.
This English Emile was a moral contrast in himself, an anomaly that might
weaken every “Example” in moral tales.
Thomas Day would have no such compromise between good and evil. Moral
truths were best expressed by distinct types. To combine these in one
person was to confuse the issue. Mr. Day lived, as he wrote, to prove
his theories, and whenever the unknown quantity of human nature thwarted
him, went back to them with unshaken confidence. A great part of his
life was given to works of active benevolence, and his death was no less
consistent than his life; for he died in trying to prove that a young
horse could be tamed by kindness.
Only once he seems to have acted in what must have seemed to him an
irrational way, and that was at the request of the lady (Miss Elizabeth
Sneyd) whom at that time he hoped to make his wife. With his natural
propensity to improve and educate, he had asked her, in preparation for
their future life, to forgo many pleasant and harmless diversions which
seemed to him useless or unreasonable. Miss Sneyd, with proper spirit,
suggested that a French dancing-master might help Mr. Day to overcome
certain faults of deportment which displeased her, and so nice was his
sense of justice, that he actually crossed to France and spent some time
in a hopeless experiment. Nobody could have taught Mr. Day to dance;
perhaps the lady knew it. Such graces as he managed to acquire only
provoked her to say that she liked him better as he was before, and he
retired to console himself with philosophy.
His next venture promised better success. He resolved to educate two
orphan girls upon Rousseau’s plan, so that, in time, one of them might
fill the place he had intended for Miss Sneyd. But Nature again proved
herself too strong for Philosophy. The children quarrelled, refused to
be educated “in Reason’s plain and simple way”, and could not be cured
of shrieking when their guardian frightened them to test their courage.
As they grew up, he was forced to admit another failure; but he clung
to his theories, and oddly enough lost nothing of his belief in the
reasonableness of “female character”. A later pupil of his more than
justified this confidence. Richard Lovell Edgeworth, although he had
been Day’s successful rival in love, was still his friend, and used to
send his little daughter Maria to spend her holidays with him. By that
time Mr. Day had found a lady who could endure his ways, and was settled
in Essex, busy with schemes for the benefit of his poor neighbours.
Maria Edgeworth, fresh from a conventional boarding school, was quick
to appreciate his odd humours and philosophic mind. She obediently
swallowed his doses of tar-water, submitted to the severest tests in
exact reasoning, and under his influence, acquired that intense regard
for truth which stamped all her later writings. Yet it was not through
any theories derived from him or from her father that she became the
greatest writer of Moral Tales, but through her own experience of life
and character; and her work for children must be considered apart from
her Rousseauist principles. Mr. Day, indeed, whose ideal of womanhood was
in some ways little in advance of Rousseau’s, did his best to crush her
first effort (the translation of _Adèle et Théodore_) by expostulating
with her father for encouraging it; but Maria was too much his pupil to
give way to a prejudice based solely on his horror of “female authorship”.
Mr. Day was fully alive to the want of good books for children; not only
did he put his own talents at their service, by contributing to Mr.
Edgeworth’s instructive serial _Harry and Lucy_,[88] but he found the
task so interesting that it grew into an independent volume, three parts
dissertation and experiment, and the fourth a fresh effort to express
life in terms of theory.
Doubtless he found it a relief to work out in a book the experiments
which he had found so disconcerting in practice: to show, as the result
of his system, a super-Fool of Quality,—a farmer’s son, instead of a
nobleman’s,—and to make his foil the spoilt child of rich parents. These
are the two children, Harry Sandford and Tommy Merton, “introduced as the
actors” to give interest and coherence to Mr. Day’s collection of lessons
and stories.
When he says they are “made to speak and behave according to the order
of Nature,” “Nature” must be understood to mean the “natural” result
of Theory; for it is only the Bad Boy who, in his naughtiness, is a
real child of Nature. The Good Boy of the Moralist is a stock figure of
allegory, but the Bad Boy lives; a hundred models will serve for his
portrait. He is the real hero of _Sandford and Merton_, as Satan is of
_Paradise Lost_.
Thus, even in a book, human nature was too much for Mr. Day; and yet his
Good Boy, Harry Sandford, is something more than the good half of the
Fool of Quality. His virtues, although superhuman, are not unlike those
of the youthful Thomas Day; but under the guidance of Mr. Barlow, that
insufferable model of the Perfect Tutor, he exhibits the mature head of
Mr. Day on young shoulders, and so becomes the mouthpiece of Rousseau,
the lay-preacher of Mr. Barlow’s sermons, and the chief instrument of the
Bad Boy’s reformation.
There is a note of English severity in Mr. Day’s reading of Rousseau.
His notion of self-control is stricter than anything in the _Emile_:
“Mr. Barlow says we must only eat when we are hungry and drink when
we are dry”; he is utterly intolerant of wealth: “The rich do nothing
and produce nothing, the poor everything that is really useful”. Mr.
Barlow, Harry Sandford and the amiable Miss Simmons take it in turns
to express Mr. Day’s opinions of the idle and frivolous pastimes of
Society. Mr. Barlow was “an odd kind of man who never went to assemblies
and played upon no kind of instrument,” he was “not fond of cards” and
preferred relating moral histories. Harry Sandford found the theatre
“full of nothing but cheating and dissimulation;” and when the youthful
guests of Tommy’s house-party were preparing for a Ball, “Miss Simmons
alone appeared to consider the approaching _solemnity_ with perfect
indifference”.
Much of this is autobiography. Under the figure of Miss Simmons’s uncle,
Mr. Day, in fact, discloses himself: “a man of sense and benevolence, but
a very great humorist”. It is his humour to look at the world as his poor
boy looks at the rich man’s house:
“To the great surprise of everybody, he neither appeared pleased nor
surprised at anything he saw.”
Many incidents of the story, which, like the fight between Harry and
Master Mash, owe little to Henry Brooke, may be taken as reminiscent of
Mr. Day’s boyhood; for although he has a true instinct for drama, he is
incapable of pure invention.
“The originality of the author” he says “is a point of the least
consequence in the execution of such a work as this”. Harry Sandford
refusing to betray the hare to the huntsman, or at loggerheads with the
“little gentry”, is the Fool of Quality; but when he discusses the World
with Miss Simmons, he is a brother of the philosophic Emile.
Mr. Day borrows many of his instructive details from Rousseau: the
juggler, who taught Emile the use of magnets by means of an artificial
duck, conspires with Mr. Barlow and Harry to teach the uninformed Tommy
Merton; but there are other experiments more practical than Rousseau’s,
which suggest actual experience and the co-operation of Mr. Edgeworth.
These alternate with short tales introduced according to what Mr. Day
calls the “natural order of association”; but their effect is to weaken
the genuine interest of the enveloping story. “The Gentleman and the
Basket Maker”[89] gains nothing by the Good Boy’s elocution; Leonidas
shakes himself free from Mr. Barlow’s patronage.
Yet, with all these digressions, children found matter of interest in
_Sandford and Merton_ for another century. The most didactic parents
could not have controlled the choice of so many nurseries, nor would Mr.
Day accept a grown-up verdict without the children’s assent. “If they are
uninterested in the work”, he wrote in his preface, “the praises of a
hundred reviewers will not console me for my failure”.
The truth is that persons who stand no higher than Mr. Barlow’s knee can
go through the book without seeing much of him.
The simple story of “Little Jack”, no less characteristic of Day,
appeared in _The Children’s Miscellany_: (1787),[90] but may have been
written earlier. The moral is quite explicit; “that it is of little
consequence how a man comes into the world, provided he behaves well and
discharges his duty when he is in it”; but Jack’s life begins at the edge
of experience, when he is suckled by a goat; and later, his duty leads
him into many adventures which, although they appear true, happen in a
romantic setting of foreign countries.
Thus theorists, without acknowledging romance, may use it for their
own purposes. Robinson Crusoe’s island lent enchantment to Emile’s
most practical employments, and Rousseau’s followers chose two wholly
romantic figures to point their arguments against society. The negro,
cut off from his own people, freed from his oppressors, is a striking
and pathetic mark in the midst of his white brothers. He now becomes a
type of the Natural Man, and a hero of children’s books.[91] The second
witness against social institutions is that first friend of children,
the shipwrecked sailor-man in his island, who still holds them by the
spell of circumstance, even while he repeats the strange jargon of
revolutionary doctrines.
Mr. Day had transcribed, along with extracts from _The Fool of Quality_,
“some part of Robinson Crusoe”, without any serious additions; but Philip
Quarll the Hermit, one of Crusoe’s earliest successors, appeared in _The
Children’s Miscellany_ as a Rousseauist philosopher.
The original chap-book of 1727[92] has no suggestion of theory, but it
points out one vital difference between Philip Quarll and Crusoe. Quarll
actually comes to love his solitude and loses all desire to return to his
own country.
To the theorist, this proved him a forerunner of Rousseau, and the
editor of 1787 could furnish him with the latest version of the creed.
He begins by reflecting (as Rousseau did with _Robinson Crusoe_) on the
edifying spectacle of shipwrecked men, “deprived in an instant of all
the advantage and support which are derived from mutual assistance ...
obliged to call forth all the latent resources of their own minds”; and
then remarks that the story “whether real or fictitious, is admirably
adapted to the illustration of the subject”.
The poetical language of this hermit, so unlike Crusoe’s plain story,
suggests the influence of Saint Pierre, whose descriptions of scenery
were more elaborate but less vigorous than Rousseau’s. “Feathered
Choristers” entertain him “with melodious harmony;” Nature “puts on her
gay enamelled garb and out of her rich wardrobe supplies all vegetables
with new vesture.”
In such phrases, the philosophic hermit exalts Solitude at the expense of
Society.
There is much unconscious humour in the account of the hermit’s efforts
to overcome Nature, for although he has some of Crusoe’s practical
ability, he trusts rather to theory. Depressed at the persistent hatred
of a tribe of monkeys, for whom he has dug roots, he meditates on its
cause, and deciding that he must have forfeited their respect “by hiding
the beauty of his fabric under a gaudy disguise”, he discards the
irrational garments which distinguish men from monkeys, and presents in
his own person Rousseau’s Natural Man.
A friendly monkey, “Beau Fidèle”, plays the part of Friday, and the
“surprising tractability and good nature” of this beast, contrasted with
the ingratitude of a shipwrecked sailor, strengthen the general argument.
This is how the Philosopher, after fifteen years in his island,
apostrophises a ship that suddenly appears:
“Unlucky invention! That thou shouldst ever come into men’s thoughts! The
Ark which gave the first notion of a floating habitation, was ordered
for the preservation of man, but its fatal copies daily expose him to
destruction”; and when the sailors fail to take him off, “despite a
sudden impulse to return”, he reflects upon his good fortune in having
escaped the world, and counts his own situation happier than theirs.
There is, of course, no Footprint in the Sand; yet the tale has romantic
features. A child might skip most of the descriptions, but he would
remember the white-bearded hermit and his monkey-servant in their hut
built of growing trees. Crusoe had no such leaf-tapestry on his walls;
and there is a map of Philip Quarll’s island which is a formulary of
romantic truth; for in it may be seen (at A) the place where the Hermit
was cast away, and at B, the place where Mr. Dorrington (who discovered
him) landed; at E, the Hermit’s Lodge, and at K, the lake between the
Rock and the Island.
The new _Philip Quarll_ with all its absurdities was better reading for
Children than _The New Robinson Crusoe_ (Campe’s _Robinson der Jüngere_,
translated into English from the French in 1788).[93] Crusoe’s ship
never carried a heavier cargo than Campe’s tiresome family, who break
up the story with their dull colloquies; but the book is a fresh proof
that these philosophers had to call in the old masters to enforce their
lessons, and could discover no more attractive theme than the old one of
voyages and islands.
The English _Conversations of Emily_ appeared in the same year as _The
Children’s Miscellany_. Four years later, Mary Wollstonecraft, full of
theories for the better education of girls, assumed the mantle of Madame
d’Epinay, or rather placed it on the shoulders of a Representative whom
no touch of human weakness could redeem from the hard grip of Reason:
Mrs. Mason, a monstrous creation of her own.[94] It would be impossible
to paint Mrs. Mason’s portrait. Nothing softer than granite could suggest
her outline. Compared with her, Emily’s Mother is all kindness and
indulgence. Her two charges, Mary and Caroline, are mere wax tablets
whereon she records her impressions of virtue. Their very faults are
placed upon them like labels, for Mrs. Mason to remove. Emily, though she
was her mother’s “friend”, was a real child, pleased and amused by formal
Nature lessons and unimaginative stories, since nothing better might be
had; playing with dolls, “jumping, running about and making a noise”.
Mary, in the _Original Stories_, has to prove that she can “regulate her
appetites”, before Mrs. Mason says: “I called her my friend, and she
deserved the name, _for she was no longer a child_.” Mary and Caroline
have no mother; Mary Wollstonecraft had no confidence in parents. She
called in Mrs. Mason, a sort of moral physician, to make good the
defects of a casual up-bringing. Mrs. Mason, true to the _tradition
d’Epinay_, “never suffered them to be out of her sight”. She exhibited
every excellence that she exhorted them to attain; and that none of
her perfections should escape their notice, she discoursed upon these
at intervals. Her success is inevitable and complete. She conducts her
pupils through carefully selected experiences; she conducts the reader
through the book. She never hesitates or doubts; she never betrays
surprise.
The Tales were written “to illustrate the Moral”: it is thus that Mrs.
Mason answers “the Ænigma of Creation”. She sees everything, understands
everything, explains everything.
“‘I declare I cannot go to sleep’, said Mary, ‘I am _afraid of Mrs.
Mason’s eyes_’.”
Mrs. Mason conforms and makes everybody else conform to her moral
formulæ: “Do you know the meaning of the word Goodness?” she asks. “I
see you are unwilling to answer. I will tell you. It is, first, to avoid
hurting anything; and then to continue to give as much pleasure as you
can.”
Three chapters are given to “the treatment of animals”. The children are
allowed to read Mrs. Trimmer’s _Fabulous Histories_,[95] and to read it
“over again” to a little friend, if they can make her understand that
_birds never talk_.
In the _Original Stories_, pleasure is administered like medicine.
Benevolence is a chief part of Mrs. Mason’s Theory; she is resolutely,
almost sternly benevolent. Joy is never admitted without a dispensation
from Reason. When the children have acted “like rational creatures”, Mrs.
Mason allows them two lines of joy:
“Look, what a fine morning it is. Insects, birds, and animals, are all
enjoying this sweet day.”
Blake snatched the words eagerly for his frontispiece. His
“illustrations” are a touchstone for Mary Wollstonecraft’s imagination.
_He could not draw Mrs. Mason._ In her place he introduces a central
figure of his own, meditative, sweet, and firm; spiritual, even
decorative, as Mrs. Mason never was. Yet he, like the rest, was dominated
by the monstrous original; his Masonic Symbol appears in every picture.
The children are his own; he dresses them to order, but makes haloes of
their little round straw hats.
This author has an effective manner of disposing landscape to correspond
with her sombre or determinedly joyful moods. Blake does not attempt the
moonlight scene that moves Mrs. Mason to discourse upon her gloomy past,
and present resignation. “I am weaned from the world, but not disgusted,”
she observes. Such a state of mind would be unintelligible to Blake. But
he manages to convey something of the formal desolation of the ruined
Mansion-house, to which Mrs. Mason brings the children “to tell them the
history of the last inhabitants”. They cling about her, and one looks
back in a vain hope of escape, for “when they spoke, the sound seemed to
return again, as if unable to penetrate the thick stagnated air. The sun
could not dart its purifying rays through the thick gloom, and the fallen
leaves contributed to choke up the way and render the air more noxious”.
A heavy atmosphere is characteristic of the book; it suggests the German
_Elements of Morality_, which Mary Wollstonecraft translated two years
later. The promise of romance in the settings of Mrs. Mason’s stories is
never fulfilled.
Blake was oppressed by her realistic solution of the mystery of the
unseen harper. He followed the “pleasing sound” in his own way, and
discovered the player for himself: not Mrs. Mason’s explicit and
tangible old man, but a spirit harping under a starry sky.
Neither Thomas Day nor Mary Wollstonecraft could have written a
“Lilliputian” book; and even the author of the _Juvenile Tatler_ and
_Fairy Spectator_, whose titles suggest the old traditions, turns back
only to copy the types of Marmontel, the moral fairy tales of Madame le
Prince de Beaumont.
_The Juvenile Tatler_,[96] by Mrs. Teachwell (Lady Fenn) is a collection
of moral dialogues and dramas: “The Foolish Mother”, “The Prudent
Daughter”, “The Innocent Romp”, and others suggested by Marmontel. But
the characters are wholly English. The Innocent Romp is a feminine
counterpart of the Bad Boy.
The other persons of this drama (real people too) are Mr. Briskly,
a Widower, whom Marmontel would have called “The Foolish Father”;
Mrs. Freeman, his sister, “The Wise Aunt”; Miss Prudence Freeman, her
daughter, “The Good Cousin”.
Lady Fenn’s humour is English, like her characters: she invents amusing
pranks for her heroine, and is original in admitting a girl to the
masculine pastime of mischief.
A very natural dialogue between the Foolish Father and the Wise Aunt
prepares the reader for the entrance of the Romp. Her latest offence
has lost her an eligible suitor. Chasing the housemaid with a rotten
apple, she has just thrown it full in the face of Lord Prim, alighting
from his coach to pay his compliments to her, on her return from school.
Thus announced, she enters, fresh from an excursion into a neighbour’s
garden by way of the wall. Questioned about the visible traces of this
adventure, she confesses that she fell from the top of the wall, and
adds that she would like to fall twenty times if she could be sure she
was not seen, and _to make her cousin Prudence fall too_. “La! Cousin,”
she cries, with seductive enjoyment, “’tis delightful! Just like flying.”
(A cautious foot-note explains: “This was written before the invention of
Air Balloons.”)
When the author has a doubt about the moral influence of her heroine, she
inserts a corrective foot-note.
The Romp, it is disclosed by her Aunt, not content with dressing the cat
in baby-linen to play at a mock-christening, disguised herself as an old
woman, and carried it to Mr. Starchbland, the Curate. Upon this there
are three separate comments: The Foolish Father’s _“A profane trick”_;
The Wise Aunt’s “She thought no further than the surprise it would be to
the person who should lift up the mantle and possibly”——Oh, excellent
Wise Aunt!—“_possibly_, the roguery of getting the parson scratched.”
And, last, the foot-note, to avert parental criticism: “_Let it not be
supposed that Miss B would suffer the Sacred Rite to begin_”.
The author’s sympathies are with the Aunt (she was an aunt herself). So
the Wise Aunt carries off her niece to undergo a moderate process of
conversion. The Foolish Father, who “dotes” upon his daughter “when she
is neatly dressed and tolerably sedate”, is obviously drawn from life.
_The Fairy Spectator_,[97] “By Mrs. Teachwell and Her Family”, is Mrs.
Argus transformed into the Benevolent Educational Fairy of Madame de
Beaumont. Here is a characteristic bit of dialogue:
_Mrs. Teachwell_: You know that stories of Fairies are all
fabulous?
_Miss Sprightly_: Oh, yes! Madam.
_Mrs. Teachwell_: Do you wish for such a Fairy Guardian?
_Miss Sprightly_: Very much, Madam.
_Mrs. Teachwell_: Why, my dear?
_Miss Sprightly_: _Because she would teach me to be good._
A world where all fairies are “fabulous” is, of course, a world without
dreams. When Miss Sprightly weeps on rising, because she cannot banish
the thought of “the most pleasing dream which she ever had in her
life”, the inexorable Mrs. Teachwell meets the situation with a simple
formula: “Idle girl, make haste!” The Fabulous Beings whom she admits on
sufferance are not more fairylike than “the smallest wax doll.”
Two lines from _The Fairy Spectator_ betray the Rousseauist’s attitude to
Fairyland:
“I will write you a Dialogue in which the Fairy shall converse, and _I
will give you a Moral for your Dream_.”