SOME GREAT WRITERS OF LITTLE BOOKS
The fallacy of Disguise—Qualities of the “great” writers—Mrs.
Barbauld’s literary lessons: _Hymns in Prose_—_Evenings
at Home_—A new vein of romance—Charles Lamb’s attack
on the Schoolroom: Science and Poetry—The _Tales from
Shakespeare_—“Lilliputian” attitude of the Lambs—_The
Adventures of Ulysses_—_Mrs. Leicester’s School_—The Taylors
of Ongar: Imagination and spiritual life—Method of work—_The
Contributions of Q. Q._—“The Life of a Looking Glass”—Mrs.
Sherwood: the struggle between imagination and dogma—_The
Infant’s Progress_—_The History of the Fairchild Family_.
Disguise is of little advantage to a writer, least of all to a writer of
children’s books. For although he has many invisible cloaks to choose
from, Sharp-Eyes and Fine-Ear are hot upon his track. They recognise the
pedant under his “Mask of Amusement”, they judge the Moralist by the
standard of his own Bad Boy, and are no more impressed by the Perfect
Parent or Tutor than birds by a scarecrow, when once they have found out
that it is not alive.
A writer may be just as sincere in acknowledging the reality of wonders
as in finding matter of interest in everyday things, if he express his
own point of view; but the maker of puppets or bogeys has given up his
personality and disguised his voice. He may be forgiven if he can reveal
himself at odd moments by individual gestures, as the whimsical editor of
a Lilliputian “Gift” would sometimes peep out in his preface; no single
lapse will be remembered against him: the “Children’s Friend” atoned for
one little Grandison by many lifelike portraits.
But the great writers were those that lived most fully in their
stories. It was no more essential that they should write nothing else
but children’s books than that a mother should never go outside her
nursery; for as every man (unless he be a pedant or a monster) has
something of the child in him, so every child likes to enter into the
talk and business of men. There never was a good child’s book that a
grown-up person could not enjoy; and the habit of “talking-down” to
children, whether in books or in life, is more fatal to understanding and
friendship than the abstract reasoning of the Lilliputians. When Johnson
praised Dr. Watts for his condescension in writing children’s verses,
he did him an injustice, for no man could have taken a little task more
seriously. As to Mrs. Barbauld,[123] had she deserved half the abuse of
her critics, she never would have found favour in so many nurseries.
De Quincey, who was evidently well-disposed towards the “Queen of all
the Blue-stockings” (in spite of her misguided preference for Sinbad)
says that she “occupied the place from about 1780 to 1805 which from 1805
to 1835 was occupied by Miss Edgeworth.” At any rate she was a pioneer
in the art of writing for children, and Miss Edgeworth had a genuine
admiration for her work.
But although there was a certain likeness in the aims and ideas of these
two, each had her own qualities, which were the outcome of essential
differences in character.
Mrs. Barbauld had grown up among the boys of her father’s school, and in
her youth was as active and mischievous as a boy. There is a story told
of how she escaped an importunate suitor by climbing an apple-tree in the
garden and dropping over the wall into a lane. Miss Edgeworth, in the
same situation, would have walked out by the gate.
It is true that none of Mrs. Barbauld’s stories show this spirit of
mischief: she was playful only in light verse or talk or letters; but
she made her personality felt in a romantic attitude to life and Nature,
which, although it did not much affect her choice of subjects, made her
style unusually free and moving.
She had no children of her own, but adopted a nephew, “little Charles”,
for whom she wrote most of her stories; and at Palgrave, where she and
her husband had a school, she was the mother, tutor and playfellow of the
boys.
The tutor, indeed, comes out in all her stories; the playfellow and the
mother are not always there. Yet she was dominated neither by facts
nor theories. A deep sense of spiritual truth underlay her teaching,
and her feeling for the poetry of Nature was the nearest approach to a
Renaissance of Wonder in children’s books.
It may be doubted whether the famous _Hymns in Prose_[124] ever appealed
to children as it did to their parents. Mrs. Barbauld entirely disagreed
with Rousseau’s principle that there should be no religious teaching in
early life, and that a young child cannot appreciate natural beauties;
but she also rejected Paley’s crude idea of the Creator as a sort of
Divine Mechanic,[125] which some writers preferred to the neutral deism
of Rousseau.
She held that children’s thoughts should be led from the beauty of the
flower to the wonder of creation.
“A child”, she says, “to feel the full force of the idea of God, ought
never to remember when he had no such idea.” It must come early, with no
insistence upon dogma, in association with “all that a child sees, all
that he hears, all _that affects his mind with wonder or delight_.”
“Wonder” was a word unknown to educational theorists, who believed that
everything could be discovered or explained. It is her use of those
words “wonder” and “delight” which sets Mrs. Barbauld apart from other
writers of little books, for it shows something like the spirit of
romantic poetry.
The revealing power of the poet was never hers. She feels, but cannot
show a child as many wonders as he could find for himself in the nearest
hedgerow. The _Hymns_ are a kind of compromise between “Emblems” and
pictures of Nature. There are no far-fetched analogies: the parable of
the Chrysalis anticipates Mrs. Gatty;[126] and the language, though
rhythmic, is free from the conventional phrases which spoil some of Mrs.
Barbauld’s “prose-poetry.”
Any mother might use the same images to give her child a first idea of
the love of God:
“As the mother moveth about the house with her fingers on her lips, and
stilleth every little noise that her infant be not disturbed; as she
draweth the curtains around its bed and shutteth out the light from its
tender eyes; so God draweth the curtains of darkness around us, so He
maketh all things to be hushed and still that His large family may sleep
in peace.”
But it was the Tutor in Mrs. Barbauld that made her choose prose; for
although she was a facile verse-writer, she was better acquainted with
Latin hexameters than with ballads, and doubted whether children should
be allowed to read verse “before they could judge of its merit”.
Her best work is certainly in _Evenings at Home_[127], the popular
miscellany which she and her brother, Dr. Aikin, brought out in parts
between 1792 and 1796.
“Sneyd is delighted with the four volumes of _Evenings at Home_”,
wrote Miss Edgeworth in 1796, “and has pitched upon the best
stories—‘Perseverance against Fortune,’ ‘The Price of a Victory’,
‘Capriole’”.
It would take an Edgeworth boy to amuse himself with “The Price of a
Victory”, a logical exposition which robs soldiering of its romance;
or with “Capriole”, the tale of a little girl and her pet goat; but
“Perseverance against Fortune” fills a whole “Evening” with adventures
that most boys would read. The hero is sold as a slave, pressed into the
Navy and suffers many other hardships before he succeeds as a farmer. Yet
he is a mere type of the persevering man. The story amounts to little
more than a clear statement of what happened, with pictures of what was
there. It was the matter of these tales that chiefly interested Miss
Edgeworth. She approved of arguments against the cruelties of war, she
wept with the little girl over her lost pet, she heartily admired the
good farmer for his patient industry and liked to picture his fields,
fenced off from the “wild common”, his “orchards of fine young fruit
trees”, his hives and his garden.
Sneyd Edgeworth had had a “practical education” and kept the family
traditions. Another boy, perhaps, would have chosen “Travellers’
Wonders,” though the traveller confessed that he never met with
Lilliputians, nor saw the black loadstone mountains nor the valley
of diamonds; or, if these “voyages” were too tame, there were “The
Transmigrations of Indur”, adventures of a man, an antelope, a dormouse,
a whale,—centred in one person by the mystery of transmigration.
Mrs. Barbauld wrote without apology of “the time when Fairies and Genii
possessed the powers which they have now lost”. Nobody reading “Indur”
would suspect her of a design to teach Natural History; but she never
forgot her profession and there are more lessons than stories in her
books.
The average boy would submit to a talk about Earth and Sun, or Metals,
or the manufacture of Paper, rather than read “Order and Disorder, a
_Fairy Tale_”, and doubtless, in those days, boys were less impatient of
Instruction; but a lesson never can be a story. A hundred stories could
be written on Stevenson’s text:
“The world is so full of a number of things.
I’m sure we should all be as happy as kings”;
but the authors of _Evenings at Home_ chose instead the encyclopædic
ideal of “Eyes and no Eyes”, and produced a series of object lessons.
What was worse, Mrs. Barbauld, in her anxiety to be clear, made the fatal
mistake of “talking down”.
Charles Lamb, writing to Coleridge in 1802, bitterly resents her
popularity: “Goody Two Shoes” he says, “is almost out of print. Mrs.
Barbauld’s stuff has banished all the old classics of the nursery, and
the shopman at Newbery’s hardly deigned to reach them off an old exploded
corner of the shelf when Mary asked for them. Mrs. Barbauld’s and Mrs.
Trimmer’s nonsense lay in piles about. Knowledge, insignificant and vapid
as Mrs. Barbauld’s books convey, it seems must come to a child in the
shape of knowledge; and his empty noddle must be turned with conceit
of his own powers when he has learnt that a horse is an animal, and
Billy is better than a horse, and such like, instead of _that beautiful
interest in wild tales_, which made the child a man, while all the time
he suspected himself to be no bigger than a child. Science has succeeded
to poetry no less in the little walks of children than with men. Is there
no possibility of averting this sore evil? Think what you would have
been now, if instead of being fed with tales and old wives’ fables in
childhood, you had been crammed with Geography and Natural History!”
Lamb is so clear upon the main issue that he cannot be just to the
“instructive” children’s book. He loved the tales of his own childhood,
with their “flowery and gilt” and all their delightful oddities.
For that, and because he understood the gentle humour of the
“Lilliputians”, he forgot whole pages of “instruction” in _Goody Two
Shoes_, and placed it on a level with the “wild tales” of romance and
adventure.
Had Mary and he read _Fabulous Histories_ together, or “The
Transmigrations of Indur”, he might have allowed some “old exploded
corner of a shelf” to the schoolroom authors; at any rate he would not
have written:
“Hang them! I mean the cursed Barbauld crew, those blights and blasts of
all that is human in man and child!”
Science had succeeded to poetry. “The little walks of children” ran
through Botanical Gardens; but there is no doubt at all that children,
those amphibious breathers of romance and realism, enjoyed it.
Lamb’s quarrel with the Schoolroom was something of a paradox. He
took the side of the Romantics against the Scientists; and yet wrote
children’s books at the suggestion of the arch-theorist Godwin, who,
as his publisher, naturally had some influence upon his choice. It was
doubtless through Godwin that, instead of following the traditions he
admired, he began by “adapting” greater works, and went on to write about
children from a grown-up point of view.
The greater number of the _Tales from Shakespear_[128] are Mary’s; but
she and Charles lived and wrote in such accord, that there is no marked
difference in the style. His, of course, are freer and more graceful.
“I have done Othello and Macbeth,” he writes to Manning (May 10th, 1806),
“and mean to do all the tragedies. I think it will be popular among the
little people, besides money. It’s to bring in sixty guineas.”
Now it is one thing to turn a child loose in an old library,—he will
forage for himself and will seldom choose any but wholesome fare. It is
quite another to provide him with such stories as “Measure for Measure”,
“Othello” and “Cymbeline”; to simplify the philosophy of _Hamlet_ and
weaken the grim magnificence of _Lear_.
The raw material of the plays would not attract many children, and those
who were ready for Lamb’s _Tales_ might have gone to Shakespeare himself.
It is clear, then, that the Lambs were Lilliputian in their attitude to
children. Yet they were wise in their generation; for in 1805 (when they
began to write the _Tales_) a boy of twelve was playing Romeo, Hamlet and
Macbeth to crowded houses at Covent Garden and Drury Lane.[129]
The “little people” of the day were incredibly mature. To know them, in
the delicate studies of Charles and Mary Lamb, is to find the limits of
Rousseau’s influence. For in spite of the pioneer work of Mr. Day, and
the activities of the whole “Barbauld crew”, these were Lilliputians, the
children of Lilliputians. Lamb’s _Tales_ must have been infinitely more
diverting than most of the books they read; and if some, more childlike
than the rest, flinched at the tragedies, they could turn to the magician
Prospero, the fairies of _A Midsummer Night’s Dream_, or the trial
between the Merchant and the Jew.
After all, the Lambs understood the vital qualities of the stuff they
used. Who would not choose these tales rather than “The Price of a
Victory”? They are not lessons, but literature, and that is why children
are still reading them.
Lamb’s next venture was surer.
“Did you ever read my Adventures of Ulysses,[130] founded on Chapman’s
old translation of it?” he asks in a letter to Barton, “for children or
men. Chapman is divine, and my abridgment has not quite emptied him of
his divinity.”
A prose version of Homer, if he had gone straight to the Greek, would
have been still better; there was no good reason for turning Chapman into
prose, although Lamb could do it gently.
But Mrs. Barbauld’s “nonsense” fades into insignificance beside the
matter of this book, and her remarks about “wonder and delight” have not
half the meaning of Lamb’s phrase “_for children or men_.”
These were “adventures” that had been told in the childhood of the Greek
people. Lamb knew they were a natural food for children, trusted his
instinct and defied his publisher.
In the matter of catering for children, Godwin was constrained on the one
side by his theories, on the other by the parents who bought the books.
Not every parent professed his hard and cold philosophy, but they were
mostly concerned for morals, and if any lacked interest in the more
serious problems of education, they were the more likely to be caught
by some prevailing pose of “Sensibility”. It did not follow, if they
allowed their children to read “Othello”, that they would approve of
the primitive survivals in Homer; nor did these in the least agree with
Godwin’s exalted theories of the uncivilised mind. He would have had Lamb
soften his account of the Cyclops devouring his victims, and the putting
out of the monster’s eye, which Lamb called “lively images of shocking
things”. This is the point where Art and Theory must part company.
“If you want a book which is not occasionally to shock”, wrote Lamb, “you
should not have thought of a tale which was so full of anthropophagi and
wonders. I cannot alter these things without enervating the book, and I
will not alter them if the penalty should be that you and all the London
Booksellers should refuse it.”
Lamb had good reason to trust his sister’s judgment where children were
concerned. Their partnership in the making of little books was one-sided,
and in a letter to Barton, Charles confessed that he wrote only three
of the stories in _Mrs. Leicester’s School_:[131] “I wrote only the
Witch Aunt, the First Going to Church and the final story about a little
Indian girl in a ship”. But there are many subtle touches in the rest
which suggest his hand, and if one may hazard a guess at their manner
of working, Mary wrote little that they did not first discuss together,
and revised much with his help. The framework of the book is all that
connects it with Miss Fielding’s _Governess_; there is nothing of her
bright objective treatment.
This, indeed, is not a child’s book at all, but a book of child-thought
and experience, full of insight and tenderness, revealing everywhere the
pathos of childhood.
Charles and Mary lived their childish days over again in these stories.
They forgot that as children they had not seen things in the same light.
They forgot (those days had been short for them) that children, however
precocious, are not concerned with their own thought-process, but
with life and movement and adventure. And so their stories are really
essays about children: essays that let the grown-up reader into some of
the little people’s secrets. If it were possible for children to see
themselves with the eyes of men and women, then _Mrs. Leicester’s School_
might be to them what the _Essays of Elia_ are to their parents. As it
is, no child could appreciate the irony of innocence which runs through
the book like a refrain.
A suggestion of Wordsworth, in the story of “Elizabeth Villiers”, can
hardly be accidental. The little girl has learnt to read from her
mother’s epitaph, and her sailor uncle, just home from sea, finds her in
the churchyard rehearsing her lesson.
“‘Who has taught you to spell so prettily, my little maid?’ ... ‘Mamma,’
I replied; for I had an idea that the words on the tombstone were somehow
a part of mamma, and that she had taught me.” The uncle, who knows
nothing of his sister’s death, asks for her and turns in the direction of
the house. “You do not know the way, I will show you,” says the child,
and she leads him to the grave.
There is a similar pathos, not less beyond the insight of most children,
in Elinor Forester’s account of her father’s wedding-day:
“When I was dressed in my new frock, I wished poor Mamma was alive to see
how fine I was on Papa’s wedding-day, and I ran to my favourite station
at her bedroom-door.”
But there is another motif in the book which, although its chief appeal
is to grown-up sympathies, might satisfy a child’s love of contrast
and surprise: the strangeness of familiar things; the romance of the
unromantic.
Emily Barton is a little Cinderella, carried off by her father (whom she
has forgotten) from the house of relations who have neglected her. A
postchaise takes the place of the pumpkin-coach, a new coat and bonnet do
humble duty for a ball-dress.
Thus equipped, she jumps into the chaise “_as warm and lively as a little
bird_”. Mary Lamb has a store of such tender phrases.
The home that most children take as a matter of course, is a palace of
delight to this little girl. Tea is a feast.
“Whenever I happen to like my tea very much, I always think of the
delicious cup of tea Mamma gave us after our journey.”
The father and mother, loved by other children without thought, are a
King and Queen of romance:
“Mamma, to my fancy, looked very handsome. She was very nicely dressed,
quite like a fine lady. I held up my head and felt very proud that I had
such a papa and mamma.”
A ride through the London streets becomes a royal progress. In her exile,
the child has had no toys: “the playthings were all the property of one
or other of my cousins”. Now she appreciates the joy of ownership. Not
toys alone, but little books are purchased, and by a mischievous turn,
Mr. Newbery’s old device is turned against his successors: “Shall we
order the coachman to the corner of St. Paul’s Churchyard, or shall we go
to the Juvenile Library in Skinner Street?”
This is far removed from the dramatic realism of the Edgeworth School. It
is the difference between the facts and the poetry of everyday life.
There is more poetry (but less that a child would take) in Charles Lamb’s
story of the little four-years-old girl in Lincolnshire and her “first
going to church”.
The house is too far from a village for the family to attend church,
until they are able to set up “a sort of carriage”. But the child is
attracted by “the fine music” from the bells of St. Mary’s, which they
sometimes hear in the air. “I had somehow conceived that the noise which
I heard was occasioned by birds up in the air, or that it was made by the
angels, whom (so ignorant I was till that time) I had always considered
to be _a sort of bird_.”
The bells calling Susan to church give the story a spiritualised
Whittington touch. The ride to church and the child’s first impressions
are wonderfully described.
“I was wound up to the highest pitch of delight at having visibly
presented to me the spot from which had proceeded that unknown friendly
music: and when it began to peal, just as we approached the village, it
seemed to speak _Susan is come_, as plainly as it used to invite me _to
come_, when I heard it over the moor.”
Here again, things that most children disregard, from thoughtless
familiarity, appear strange and delightful to the lonely child. “All was
new and surprising to me on that day; the long windows with little panes,
the pillars, the pews made of oak, the little hassocks for the people
to kneel on, the form of the pulpit with the sounding board over it,
gracefully carved in flower work.”
Akin to this is the theme of changed fortune: privileges only recognised
when lost. It is the moral (never pointed in these tales) of “Charlotte
Wilmot” and “The Changeling”. The child of the ruined merchant describes
her first night in the house of his poor clerk. The moon, often watched
in happier days, is now a symbol of misfortune:
“There was only one window in the room, a small casement, through which
the bright moon shone, and it seemed to me the most melancholy sight I
ever beheld.”
Poetry, not fact, is again the chief element in the story of the “little
Indian girl in a ship”. Her gentle, imaginative sailor-nurse gives her
no Natural History or Geography. He turns her thoughts to “the dolphins
and porpoises that came before a storm, and all the colours which the
sea changed to”; she is never troubled about the genus of the one or
the causes of the other. If Lamb had set down this sailor’s tales, as
no doubt he would have told them to a child, he could have made a real
children’s book, of “the sea monsters that lay hid at the bottom, and
were seldom seen by man; and what a glorious sight it would be, if our
eyes could be sharpened to behold all the inhabitants of the sea at once
swimming in the great deeps, as plain as we see the gold and silver fish
in a bowl of glass”.
In the same way a visit to the country is not made the subject of lessons
on rural occupations or botany. As a matter of fact, Grandmamma’s orchard
is a fairy place where pear-trees and cherry-trees blossom together, and
bluebells come out with daffodils. The profusion of these flowers and the
sound of their names might attract a child that yet would miss the best
touches:
“Sarah was much wiser than me, and _she taught me which to prefer_.... I
was very careful to love best the flowers which Sarah praised most, yet
sometimes, I confess, I have even picked a daisy, though I knew it was
the very worst flower, because it reminded me of London and the Drapers’
Garden!”
Here Mary might have aimed a gentle shaft at the hated instructive
writers, who taught children “which to prefer”; but there is no double
intention in Sarah.
Only one story, “The Changeling”, has really dramatic moments. There
is a miniature _Hamlet_ scene in this, a “little interlude” played by
children, which causes the wicked nurse to betray herself. A child
would enjoy it better than the _Tales from Shakespear_. But the little
girl who frightens herself into believing that her aunt is a witch is
best understood by readers of “Witches and Other Night-Fears”; little
Margaret, reading herself into Mahometism and a fever would be less
interesting to small folk than the book, _Mahometism Explained_, which
she found in the old library, “as entertaining as a fairy-tale”. The
humour is too subtle for children, they would enjoy the picture of Harlow
Fair better than that quaint account of the grave physician puzzled over
an extraordinary case, “he never having attended a little Mahometan
before”.
And so it is with the pictures of child-life. The grown-up reader has
the best memory for Emily Barton (very young indeed) at her first play.
Emily herself remembered that it was _The Mourning Bride_; but she was so
far confused between this “very moving Tragedy” and “the most diverting
Pantomime” which followed it, that she made a strange blunder the next
day.
“I told Papa that Almeria was married to Harlequin at last, but I assure
you I meant to say Columbine, for I knew very well that Almeria was
married to Alphonso; for she said she was in the first scene.”
At the back of the grown-up mind, besides, there are pictures to help
in the reading. Charles and Mary, instead of Emily Barton, reading the
tomb-stones, looking up at the great iron figures of St. Dunstan’s
Church,[132] or talking over their first visit to Mackery End (too long
ago for Charles to remember); Mary at Blakesmoor with the old lady who
had “no other chronology to reckon by than in the recollection of what
carpet, what sofa cover, what set of chairs were in the frame at that
time”. Or John Lamb, the father, taking a walk to the Lincolnshire
village, “just to see how _goodness thrived_.”[133]
* * * * *
Ann and Jane Taylor cherished ideals clearer and much simpler than
the Lambs. They had no tragedy to darken their youth; the struggle
with poverty (very real at first) was lightened by the cheerful
co-operation of a whole family. They were all engaged upon the father’s
craft of engraving; they all (father, brothers, sisters, even the
mother) wrote.[134] They were “directed” (a phrase of their own) by
an unquestioning religious faith which simplified and solved all
the problems of life. The narrowing influence of the village was
counteracted by breadth of intellect and by individual genius. There
was, of course, nothing to supply the generous education of London life,
or the exquisite literary discernment of the Lambs; but Jane Taylor
showed, even in her books for children, a power of enjoyment and a sense
of humour that is sometimes associated with intensely serious beliefs.
She was untouched by popular philosophy, and adhered to the literary
traditions of the school of Pope; but the world of the spirit was more
real to her than earth itself; her work has rare qualities of spiritual
insight and imagination.
This does not apply, of course, to the simple rhymes which were the
sisters’ first literary venture. Mary Lamb could make waistcoats while
she was “plotting new work to succeed the Tales”. The intricate process
of engraving demanded more attention. They were not free till eight
o’clock, and had household duties besides; but, as Ann says, “a flying
thought could be caught even in the midst of work, or a fancy ‘pinioned’
to a piece of waste paper.”
Some of the rhymes (there is more to be said of them) were written too
easily or too hastily to be of much account, but there are points in
favour of a method that makes writing a relaxation, and allows no time
for second thoughts.
The _Original Poems_[135] have a spontaneity and freshness that take a
small child at once. The sisters never lost the secret of writing for
children, because they could always think with them. Ann, the eldest,
had mothered the family, and afterwards brought up a family of her own;
yet she wrote at _eighty_: “The feeling of being a grown woman, to say
nothing of an _old_ woman, does not come naturally to me”.
Many writers (especially moralists) try to hold a child’s attention
beyond its power. Jane Taylor in this, as in other matters, understands
her audience.
“I try to conjure up some child into my presence, address her suitably,
as well as I am able, and when I begin to flag, I say to her, ‘_There,
love, now you may go_.’”
Jane was the genius of the family. “Dear Jane had no need to borrow, what
I could ill afford to lose,” said the gentle Ann, of some good thing
which had been attributed to her brilliant sister.
The habit of “castle-building” caused Jane many heart-searchings. She was
as stern with herself as Bunyan; she magnified all her little failings
(or supposed failings) into sins. “I know I have sometimes lived so much
in a _castle_ as almost to forget that I lived in a _house_, and while I
have been carefully arranging aerial matters _there_, have left all my
solid business in disorder _here_.”
It was absurd, of course, to accuse a Taylor of disorder; but the
distrust of imagination was characteristic. She valued imagination only
so far as it interpreted spiritual truth. The great difference between
Jane Taylor and the realists was that her reality had no connection with
materialism. To her, the life of the spirit was the greatest reality. A
thing was real or unreal according to its intrinsic worth. Her sharpest
satire was poured upon the material benevolence of philosophy, “_the
light of Nature-boasting man_”, or the poet who could
“Pluck a wild Daisy, moralise on that
And drop a tear for an expiring gnat.”
True benevolence, so her creed ran,
“... rises energetic to perform
The hardest task, or face the rudest storm.”
Duty and sacrifice are her watchwords. The search for happiness brings
only “The lessons taught at Disappointment’s knee.” Earth is wonderful,
but men misuse it, seeking worthless things in their madness; yet:
“The soul—perhaps in silence of the night
Has flashes, transient intervals of light;
When things to come without a shade of doubt
In terrible reality stand out.
...
These are the moments when the mind is sane.”
_The Essays in Rhyme_[136] are for grown-up readers, but they state with
perfect clearness the ideals that inspired her work for children.
Under the pseudonym of “Q. Q.”, Jane Taylor contributed for six years to
the _Youths’ Magazine_,[137] and her best pieces (afterwards collected)
were “for children or men.”
“_The young are new to themselves; and all that surrounds them is novel._”
“Q. Q.” gives them short moral tales, full of point and humour: really
“entertaining” moral tales, and brilliant little character-studies. They
read, and begin to know themselves. She introduces them to “Persons
of Consequence” (one, “little Betsy Bond, daughter of John Bond, the
journeyman Carpenter”). She sets forth a contrast: the old Philosopher,
so wise that he is humble, and the Young Lady, just leaving School, who
considers herself “not only perfectly accomplished but also thoroughly
well-informed”; or the two brothers, one of whom writes a clever essay on
self-denial, while the other practises it. Youth is left to judge between
them.
The most arresting of these “Contributions”, “How it strikes a Stranger”,
inspired Browning’s poem “The Star of my God Rephan.” A stranger from
another planet, finding himself upon Earth, is filled with interest and
wonder at what he sees. He enters readily into the pleasures of the new
life, and remains thoughtlessly happy till he is faced with the unknown
fact of death.
They refer him to the priests for an explanation.
“How!” he replies, “then I cannot have understood you; do the priests
only die? Are not you to die also?” When he understands, he regards
death as a privilege and refuses to do anything “inconsistent with his
_real interests_.” The Adventure is described with a wonderful force of
imagination; but the lesson strikes upon youthful ears like the voice in
_Everyman_:
“Everyman, stand still. Whither art thou going,
Thus gaily?”
Some, not yet ripe for this encounter, would turn for comfort to the
bright and imaginative “Life of a Looking Glass,” and revive their more
childish interest in the “adventures of things”.
The Glass, “being naturally of a reflecting cast,” would catch, but not
hold the restless attention of very little persons. It was for those past
the stage of actual belief in talking things, who came back to it with a
new perception of imaginative correspondences.
The tranquil passage of the story (so perfectly adapted to the “speaker”)
is broken now and then by a flash of wit. There is nothing extraordinary
about the incidents: that the writer admits; but she never fails “to give
the charm of novelty to things of everyday”, and chooses her pictures not
so much for moral ends as because they would be likely to persist among
the “reflections” of a looking-glass.
First, the large spider in the carver and gilder’s workshop “which,
after a vast deal of scampering about, began very deliberately to weave
a curious web” all over the face of the glass, affording it “great
amusement.” There is something in the responsive brightness of the
thing that gives immediate sanction to the idea of its being _amused_.
Then, the lively apprentice who gave it “a very significant look”, which
it took at the time for a compliment to itself. And then a succession
of images in quick movement reflected from a London Street. “The
good-looking people always seemed the best pleased with me”, it remarks,
with a sly gleam, “which I attributed to their superior discernment.”
After this, the scene changes to one of almost lifeless calm; the “best
parlour of a country house, whose Master and Mistress see no company
except at Fair time and Christmas Day.”
“Perhaps I should have experienced some dismay”, remarks the glass, “if I
could have known that I was destined to spent _fifty years_ in that spot.”
The younger the reader, the more endless such an interval would seem;
yet if any had patience to follow the tale at its own pace, they might
enjoy the fashion of that parlour: the old chairs and tables, the Dutch
tiles with stories in them, that surrounded the grate, and the pattern
of the paper hangings “which consisted alternately of a parrot, a poppy
and a shepherdess—a parrot, a poppy and a shepherdess”. The repeated
phrase suggests the length of days. “The room being so little used, the
window-shutters were rarely opened; but there were three holes cut in
each, in the shape of a heart, through which, day after day and year
after year, I used to watch the long dim dusty sunbeams streaming across
the dark parlour.”
Youth cannot wait for description, but these words translate themselves
into light and shade.
Here is the mistress of that parlour, ready dressed for church on a
Sunday morning, trotting in upon her high-heeled shoes, unfolding a
leaf of the shutters and standing straight before the looking-glass.
She turns half round to the right and left to see if the corner of her
well-starched kerchief is pinned exactly in the middle. The glass has
turned portrait painter. “I think I can see her now”, it says, “in her
favourite dove-coloured lustring (which she wore every Sunday in every
Summer for seven years at the least) and her long full ruffles and worked
apron”. Then follows the master, who, though his visit was somewhat
shorter, never failed to come and settle his Sunday wig before the glass.
Thus half a century goes by, with the imperceptible movement from youth
to age. The glass is reset in a gilt frame to suit the fashion of new
times; once more it reflects young faces and vibrates with the laughter
of youth.
Jane Taylor could be didactic on principle, but she was a true artist and
knew that virtue is best recommended by its visible effects.
The looking-glass, “incapable of misrepresentation,” cannot help
showing errors and vanities; but having acquired “considerable skill in
physiognomy”, discovers more than the mere outside. Its last study is
almost a “Character”:
“There was, of course, in a few years, some little alteration, but
although the bloom of youth began to fade, there was nothing less of
sweetness, cheerfulness and contentment in her expression. She retained
the same placid smile, the same unclouded brow, the same mildness in her
eye (though it was somewhat less sparkling) as when it first beamed upon
me ten years before.”
This is the Princess of the Moral Tale. She gives a last glance at the
looking-glass in her bridal dress, and leaves it to its memories.
“Sometimes my dear mistress’s favourite cat will steal in as though in
quest of her; leap up upon the table and sweep her long tail across my
face; then, catching a glimpse of me, jump down again and run out as
though she was frightened.”
There is no “moral”, only this epilogue in dumb-show to repeat the theme
of change.
The humour of the looking-glass has an undersense of pathos; but this
is not the pathos of _Mrs. Leicester’s School_. It would touch a child
directly, like a picture without words.
Books had no more to do with Jane Taylor’s love of Nature than with her
understanding of her fellow creatures. She looked out of a diamond-paned
window upon quiet Essex fields and “a tract of sky”.[138] The sky, always
the most beautiful thing in a flat country, was to her more productive
than the soil of the realists. But she loved gardens too, and caught the
individuality of flowers. Ann’s _Wedding Among the Flowers_[139] is less
amusing than Jane’s “fable” of the envious weed that shoots up till it
overtops the fence, and then, provoked by the beauty of the flowers in
the next garden, twists the chief beauty of each into a defect:
“Well, ’tis enough to make one chilly
To see that pale consumptive lily
Among these painted folks.
Miss Tulip, too, looks wondrous odd,
She’s gaping like a dying cod;
What a queer stick is Golden-Rod!
And how the violet pokes!”
Flowers are _persons_ to Jane Taylor. She loves them as friends: “the
good, gay and well-dressed company which a little flower garden displays”.
“Science has succeeded to poetry,” said Lamb. Jane Taylor did not think
them incompatible. Her “old retired gentleman” could look at his garden
from two points of view:
“a part of the pleasure which now in my old age I derive from
my flowers arises, I am conscious, from the distant yet vivid
remembrance they recall of similar scenes and pleasures of my
childhood. My paternal garden seems still to me _like enchanted
ground_, and its flowers like the flowers of Paradise. I shall
never see the like again, vain as I am of my gardening! Those
were _poetry_, these are botany!”[140]
Imaginative power in the Taylors illuminated their religious conceptions.
In Mrs. Sherwood,[141] it struggled against the formulæ of rigid
doctrine. From six to thirteen, she learned her lessons standing in
the stocks with an _iron collar_ round her neck. When it was taken off
(seldom, she says, till late in the evening), she would run for half a
mile through the woods, as if trying to overtake her lost playtime. It
says much for the quick recoveries of youth that she was a happy child.
Stanford Rectory, where she spent her “golden age”, was surrounded by
woods and hills that seem to have become a part of her before the iron
collar was imposed. She built huts and made garlands with her brother;
they acted fairy tales in the woods: tales of “dragons, enchanters and
queens”. She remembered her mother teaching them to read from “a book
where there was a picture of a white horse feeding by moonlight”, a print
of pure romance. She remembered the wonder-tales told on dark winter
evenings by “a person vastly pleasant to children” who came across the
park “in a great bushy wig, a shovel hat, and a cravat tied like King
William’s bib”.
And yet, when she began to write books for children, after some years of
married life in India, she put on an iron collar of her own accord, to
set forth the dire consequences of Original Sin. When (perhaps late in a
chapter) she took it off, her imagination could conjure up no fairies;
but working upon the memories of her own childhood, it brought life into
the tale.
Mrs. Sherwood wrote an extraordinary number of children’s books; many
were published by Houlston the Quaker as chap-books.[142] The sternest
and most uncompromising dogmatism cannot crush the life out of them,
nor weaken the vivid pictures they contain. Her first journey across
the hills to Lichfield, when she was a child of four, had made a deeper
impression on her mind than all her Indian travels. She had fresher
memories of the English hills than of “the Indian Caucasus hanging as
brilliant clouds on the horizon”. The quiet inland life that is the chief
matter of her autobiography[143] is reflected in most of her stories. She
is not concerned with any wider interests; great events pass unnoticed,
as they do in some nurseries; but whenever Mrs. Sherwood remembers her
Doctrines, she goes back to the Warnings and Examples of the seventeenth
century. There is a grim shadow on her nursery wall, and in the midst
of the most innocent employments, her little people shrink and cower.
This spectre stood over her when she tampered with a book which children
of all ages understand and enjoy. She accepted _The Pilgrim’s Progress_
as a part of her creed; her knowledge of it accounts for the fine
simplicity of her style. Yet in her _Infant’s Progress from the Valley
of Destruction to Everlasting Glory_,[144] there is not a giant nor a
castle to atone for her bane on “toys” which the strictest philosopher
would pass as harmless and instructive. Her poor little pilgrim suffers
a martyrdom of denial in a juvenile Vanity Fair:
“Then I saw that certain of these teachers of vanities came and spread
forth their toys before Humble Mind, to wit, pencils, and paints, maps
and drawings, _pagan poems_ and _fabulous histories_, musical instruments
of various kinds, with all the gaudy fripperies of modern learning.”
Some of these things had been the delight of Mrs. Sherwood’s youth; but
in her passion for dogma, she forgot the white horse and the fairy tales,
and persuaded herself that an iron collar was the only protection against
vanity.
Her adaptation of Sarah Fielding’s _Governess_[145] shows the same
Puritan intolerance. The book had been in her own nursery library, along
with _Margery Two-Shoes_, _Robinson Crusoe_ and “two sets of fairy
tales.” Yet she expurgated all but one of the “moral” fairy tales allowed
by Mrs. Teachum, and inserted in their place “such appropriate relations
as seemed more likely to conduce to juvenile edification.”
It is likely (and for her children’s sake to be hoped) that Mrs.
Sherwood’s practice was kinder and more cheerful than her precepts. _The
Fairchild Family_,[146] the best known, and the best of her books, is
full of interest and reality; and in this, the setting is her home and
the persons are her own children.
To enjoy it, a child must skip solid pages of doctrine, and would do well
besides to skip most of the stories read by the Fairchild Family out of
little gilt books which “the good-natured John” brought them from the
Fair.
These were chap-books, but of a sort only less forbidding than those the
pedlar carried in Puritan days. John gave the largest to Lucy and the
other to Emily. “‘Here is two pennyworth, and there is three pennyworth,’
said he.
‘My book,’ said Emily, ‘is the History of the _Orphan Boy_![147], and
there are a great many pictures in it; the first is the picture of a
funeral.’
‘Let me see, let me see!’ said Henry, ‘_oh, how pretty!_’”
Late editors flinch at the inhumanity of the punishments, and usually
omit the gibbet story which, at the outset, throws a horrible shadow
on the book. There has been a quarrel in the nursery; the children are
penitent, they have been forgiven; but Mr. Fairchild deems it necessary
to give them a concrete illustration of the fate of one who has failed
to control his passions. He takes them to “Blackwood” (so far off that
little Henry has to be carried) and shows them the body of a murderer
hanging from a gibbet. “_The face of the corpse was so shocking that the
children could not look upon it_”.
It is to be supposed that children who survived this kind of treatment
could be happy, since there was little left to excite their terror.
Henry, when he steals a forbidden apple, is threatened with fire and
brimstone and locked up in a dark room. The very frightfulness of all
this would defeat its end, for if a child could live through it, and look
up the next morning at an unclouded sky, or take his part in the cheerful
concerns of men, the thing would come, in time, to have no meaning for
him. It is clear that this happened with the Fairchild Family. They act
and talk (save when they are made the mouthpieces of older persons)
like healthy and ordinary children. They even dare to be naughty in an
ordinary way. No sooner are Mr. and Mrs. Fairchild called away from
home, than original sin begins to assert itself. This chapter is “_On the
Constant Bent of Man’s Heart towards Sin_”.
Emily and Lucy play in bed instead of getting up: “Emily made babies of
the pillows, and Lucy pulled off the sheets and tied them round her, in
imitation of Lady Noble’s long-trained gown.” There is no encouragement
for the dramatic games of children, any more than for dancing, in Mrs.
Sherwood’s books.
Then Henry announces hot buttered toast for breakfast; they hurry down
“without praying, washing themselves, combing their hair, making their
bed, or doing any one thing they ought to have done.”
After breakfast they take out their books, but they have eaten so much
that they “cannot learn with any pleasure”. A quarrel is checked by
Henry’s discovery of a little pig in the garden. The three at once give
chase. Another “juvenile” _Pilgrim’s Progress_, this:
“Now, there was a place where a spring ran across the lane, over which
was a narrow bridge, for the use of people walking that way. Now the pig
did not stand to look for the bridge, but went splash, splash, through
the midst of the water; and after him went Henry, Lucy and Emily, though
they were up to their knees in mud and dirt.” Mrs. Sherwood had caught
the live clearness of Bunyan’s pictures.
A neighbour (one of the unregenerate, whom the children have been
forbidden to visit) kindly dries their clothes; she also regales them
with cider, “and as they were never used to drink anything but water, it
made them quite tipsy for a little while.”
The good-natured John, discovering their condition, calls them “naughty
rogues”. He gives them dinner and ties them to their chairs, but
afterwards relents and allows them to play in the barn, where he thinks
they can do no more mischief. Here they let down a swing which they are
only supposed to play with when Papa is present; Emily falls out of it
and narrowly escapes being killed.
At this point Mr. and Mrs. Fairchild quite unexpectedly come home. The
children fall upon their knees and fade once more into unreality.
Thus Mrs. Sherwood replaces the iron collar after her bursts of freedom.
It is hardly a disguise. It does not change her personality, it simply
keeps her rigid.
Even Mrs. Fairchild had enjoyed some interludes; but that was when she
was little and naughty. She actually confessed to her Family that “a
little girl employed about the house” had tempted her on one occasion _to
climb a cherry-tree_.
Afterwards her aunts talked to her whilst she cried very much. “Think
of the shame and disgrace”, said they, “of climbing trees in such low
company, after all the care and pains we have taken and the delicate
manner in which we have reared you!”
But she also remembered and quoted the words of that “little girl
employed about the house”:
“Oh, Miss, Miss! I can see from where I am all the town and both the
churches, and here is such plenty of cherries! Do come up!”
This is a prose foretaste of _The Child’s Garden_.