_Yesterday Rebecca Mason,
In the parlour by herself,
Broke the handsome china basin
Placed upon the mantel-shelf._
🥀 By a kind of dreadful punctuality of rhythm and rhyme, by the
forethought of the surname of Rebecca, by the unadorned austerity of the
anecdote, the reader is fairly subdued. Here is the “inevitable” word of
which, in recent literary criticism, we heard so much. That stanza is
written for our overthrow and confusion. It is as though a sheep had
butted us, and done it efficiently. A mother of to-day tested on her
modern children the verses—“Cautionary Verses” is the appropriate name
of some of them—written by the Misses Taylor (Jane and Anne) and by Mrs.
Turner, the creator of Rebecca Mason, for the children of the earlier
part of the nineteenth century. The little hearers were not much more
than bored. It was prose work of about the same period, and animated by
the same spirit, that had the full success of irony. Mrs. Turner had as
it were fixed us with her eye and challenged us to think Rebecca Mason’s
name to be artificially prepared; she brought her stanza to a close
which left the reader speechless. But Mrs. Fenwick must really “abide
our question.” Mrs. Fenwick wrote a book about a Bad Family and a Good.
She asks us to believe that these families lived in the same town, in
the same street, in “handsome houses” of equal size, and that they
teemed with an equal brood of six children—three good girls and three
good boys, and three bad girls and three bad boys. There is a kind of
heroic symmetry here which is ill-suited to the quality of Mrs.
Fenwick’s prose. Now, young children love to hear of large families, and
to get their names and ages precisely right. But these two equal batches
of six caused something like dismay; and when their names were disclosed
the spirit of derision sprang forth, and was not quenched again.
🥀 It is not wise to tempt too much that spirit of derision in children.
Burlesque and irony do not accord with the simplicity which becomes
them. But there is derision and derision. In this case it was fresh, it
was cordial, it was purely humorous, and as joyous as the laugh of
running races. The Bad Family’s names—alliterative—gave the signal for
the first laugh: Greedy George and Selfish Sarah; but Manly Edward and
Well-bred Charles in the Good Family were hailed with candid delight.
You might envy Manly Edward his reception, the generous laughter of a
little girl of eight suddenly confronted with his masculine perfections;
Well-bred Charles never had in his own day of a hundred years ago, from
any literal reader, the welcome he had from the honest irony of this
child. Is scorn really joyous in the heart of man or woman? It was as
joyous as ever Tennyson imagined it in the humorous heart of this
childish listener: innocent scorn, liberal scorn, intelligent scorn,
simple exhilaration of contempt. For really studious Arthur, patient
Emma, generous Susan and the rest deserved to be thus rejected with the
most cheerful incredulity; they were intolerable.
🥀 But perhaps scorn and contempt are not the just words. What the child
expresses in her loyal laughter is derision without its sneer; a sally
of cheerful astonishment at the book, at the children who took it
seriously, at the authoress who administered it. It is in fact neither
more nor less than good laughter at bad art. The child does not deride
the virtues at all; the manliness of Edward and the good manners of
Charles—so far as those qualities accorded with human life—would command
her respect in any contemporary child. Happily so, for the sense of
humour is by no means the most important sense in a young child;
credulity is better, admiration is much better, and simplicity is still
much better. The sense of humour would be dearly gained at the expense
of these. But there is no such expense. The habit of burlesque and irony
in childhood is deplorable and unchildlike. But purely childlike and
purely natural is the humour that rejects Mrs. Fenwick’s families. She
has what she merits, and even if the quality of the hilarity she causes
now were questionable, the fault lies with her. She might have raised a
better kind of laugh while she was yet at her authorship, and she did
not.
🥀 And if she refreshed no one with humour in her own day, did she fill
her young readers with any good aspirations? She was really too dull to
have any real appreciation of the manliness of Edward or of the industry
of Arthur. And see how she rewards and how she avenges. To the Good
Family she awards the approval of the street in which the two handsome
houses were situated. The Bad Family she punishes with the ill opinion
of the same neighbourhood. Mrs. Fenwick, and Mrs. Turner, and the Misses
Taylor were very small writers in their day, but they share with two
great—most diversely great—writers one certain character. They have as
little spirituality as Sir Walter Scott and Jane Austen. And children
are not without a sense of that defect when right things and wrong
things, and their consequences, are the matter of a story.