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:

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

True benevolence, so her creed ran,

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 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:

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:

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:

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.