THE HOUSEHOLD FAIRY.*
TALES, like ghosts, assume very different and very common- place appearances when closely examined ; a feeling of excitement arises at the first glance, to be often speedily succeeded by the discovery that the thing is dull and prosaic ; and, with both, one's experience is like that of children, who, with glass in hand, and half-eager, half-timid expectation, watch the ginger-beer, that was to be so delightfully restive, give up its tardy cork with flat indifference, while the tame, greenish fluid remains vapidly quiescent. We have known tales of the kind we speak of turn,. on a closer acquaintance, into sermons, metaphysics, politics, science, philanthropy, history, guide-book, police reports, every- thing—but it has been left to the Lady Lytton to achieve the marvel of conjuring a story out of a housekeeper's manual, and of raising the housekeeper herself to the dignity of a heroine ; unless, indeed, we ought to consider the receipts and maxims as the real centres of attraction, which we would do, but for the difficulty of their numbers, and from an inability to decide their genders, and so to class them correctly as heroes or heroines.
The Lady Lytton calls her book a " narrative ;" we should suggest " dialogue " as a truer description—heavy dialogue, carried on between an appreciative lodger and her amiable landlady, while the latter gently titillates the feet and alleles of the former. At the first and last pages we are told that the maid, who has been trained by the landlady, is the household fairy ; bat from page 243 we gather that the mistress is so, and we lean to this view of the matter because all the marvels of the book are wrought by the wisdom and goodness of the mistress ; we fancy the Lady Lytton is a little confused on this point herself ; she has probably borne in mind the adage "Set a thief to catch a thief," and having set a fairy to make a fairy, is rather at a loss to know which is which ; however, we may assume that the old lady is the fairy, and it therefore becomes our duty to describe her. Mrs. Winifred Weldon is her name, and keeping lodgings is her occupation, and she resides at "The Blossoms," on the banks of the Dee, in North Wales, and—with singular geography—within a mile and a half of a village in Anglesea ; she is surrounded by Welsh peasantry who- substitute p's for b's, es for d's, and c's for g's,—which is an English person's only idea of Welshmen's English—but who, in other respects, speak a dialect of mixed Yorkshire and Somerset- shire. Mrs. Winifred Weldon is a quite perfect old fairy of the class that "chastens but to reward" the objects of its regard ; benevolent, religious, firm but mild to her inferiors—we could almost say hard ;—and respectful to her betters—we could almost say obsequious, or, "not to put too fine a point upon it," fawn- ing; she was a farmer's daughter on the estate of an exceptional nobleman, who allowed her to be educated—with the young lords and ladies, his children—by an exceptional tutor who became a bishop, being "not only very learned," but "a thoroughly good man." We are, therefore, not surprised to find her—humble as is her sphere—quoting Shakespeare, Bacon, Prior, Burns, Southey, Wordsworth, and the Bible to the lady- lodger with whom the heavy but useful dialogue is carried on ; but we should be a little surprised to find the high-born lodger— the sister of a lord—praising the old lady's pure English, of which we have numberless strange examples, except that she does not appear to be a very good judge of it herself, as the following
a The Bousehold Fairy. By the Lady Lytton. London : Hall and Co. instances, taken from very numerous ones, sufficiently attest ; in describing her landlady's appearance she says, she was "also dressed in black, but none of your flimsy modern fabrics, but a thick silk ; " the beauty of youth which has gone she speaks of as "retrospective beauty ; " and fiuther on we read, " Audrey, here, take the lady's cloak and parasol up to her room ; ' a mandate which, while Audrey—which was the maid's name—obeyed, I began looking about me."
The dialogue consists very largely of unblushing praise, amount- ing to gross personal flattery, administered by the lodger to the landlady, and of the retort-courteous, by the landlady, in the form of laudation of the aristocracy, served up with the pride that apes humility ; ' with this is combined unmeasured abuse of women-servants,—even of their bad English ; surely this is the kettle calling the pan,'—which would, we cannot doubt, have called forth the episcopal rebuke of the "thoroughly good" bishop, if be had heard his early pupil's naughty words. The poor servants -are ridiculed, laughed at, sneered at, and called all sorts of bad names through page after page, and without interruption, since -the two good ladies have it all their own way, none of the vilified -class being permitted to enter upon the scene to defend themselves. It is attempted to relieve the heavy dialogue by an incessant and ponderous jocosity, of the often-quoted -Esop's-ass description, which never fails, and which is in at the death in a somewhat profane pun—we apologize if no pun is -meant—on Mrs. Weldon's name, as the closing passage of the book. Now and then, indeed, this gamboling has a certain success of its own ; we are amused, -for instance, to read that the old housekeeper's eyes were "like those -of an old dog who knew that life was not all marrow-bones and meadows." Why should "meadows" be bliss to an old dog ? Was the Lady Lytton perhaps thinking of a horse and a dog ?
But though we are not enraptured with the plan or the style of the book, the receipts, maxims and suggestions contain some things that are new and much that is valuable both to mistresses and maids ; and the subject of the relation of master and servant is one of the greatest interest to all householders—to whom the book is dedicated,—aud had Lady Lytton approached it in a spirit of more kindly feeling to the class she writes about, and treated it with more ability, the book might have been as useful as the sub- ject is important. As far as the ignorance, obtuseness, and self- sufficiency of a large portion of the servant-class, and the consequent
• discomfort to their employers is concerned, her case is strongly put, and much of it undeniable; but the superiority of the old relations between master and servant is too constantly in her mouth, without a thought of the effort after greater self-dependence, self-respect, and mental culture of which the modern self-assertion is the indication ; without regard also to the treatment received from the employers, who are so much the more responsible for the mutual -relations, and whose ignorance in directing and superintending is, too often, quite as great as that of the employed in serving, and with- out remonstrance, too, how negligent the State has hitherto been of the education of the lower classes. Moreover, the Lady Lytton does not hesitate to select for her animadversions exceptionally bad -samples, and to ignore the very numerous instances, still existing, of able, upright, respectful and faithful servants ; and of such the present writer alone could name many now in active service.
But Lady Lytton's book undertakes to show how good servants are trained from very unpromising materials, and we cannot find -that she has succeeded in doing so ; twenty dull pages, at the com- mencement, are devoted to a minute description of the way in which the lodging-house is kept and the duties of the attendants peaformed,—in proof, we conclude, that success had followed the training which is afterwards to be described ; and therefore it is a disappointment to learn that there was only one quiet lady to • serve and two active women to serve her, and that the only two trained servants to whom we are introduced were not " evoked " "from very unpromising materials," but from "excellent materials," " as their parents, though miserably poor, are excellent people as to thorough honesty and perfect integrity of character." Of her other pupils, it is stated that Mrs. Winifred Weldon had . succeeded in nine cases out of twelve, but we have only this bold statement to rely on, and we ask in vain how did she succeed ?' We have, indeed, numberless sentences like the following ; one, at least, of which is silly—about the sugar and gold ;—aud another— the last quoted—cruelly false :—" My great difficulty of all was to
• -convince them of the great wickedness of telling falsehoods." "One of my hardest tasks is to get them to leave off filth and finery." "I have brought her to act up to my motto of work first and then leisure and pleasure after.'" "I always tell these poor ignorant girls that a servant who will take a lump of sugar would take an ingot of gold or a diamond ring if an opportunity offered." "As I tell them, servants, to deserve their
name, and to be worth their salt should be a sort of furniture-doctor." "And, above all, I try to impress upon them that great, sad truth,—it will not be those of their own class, who have done so much to corrupt and to prevent their doing their duty in that state of life to which it has pleased God to call them,' that will give them a crust,—no, nor even a crumb of bread, if they were starving." But, like a wise old fairy, she keeps her own counsel and won't part with the receipt. She does not tell us how she got them to adopt her mottoes, or convinced them of the error of their ways, or persuaded them to leave off filth and falsehood. She has it all her own way while she recounts the wise things she said and the good things she made them do ; but one scene between herself and her pupils, in which we could follow her method of persuasion and watch its gradual effect upon the mind and conduct, would do more than pages of unproved assertion, or even of sound opinion. Miss Muloch in her story—dull though it is—has done far more to improve the friendly relation between " Mistress and Maid "—the title of her novel—and caught far better the right method of revealing the process by which a gentle and wise teacher influences a young servant.
The two or three measures and rules we are told of, which go beyond mere advice, and which are brought to bear on the young domestics, do not raise the old lady's wisdom in our estimation; broken china has to be replaced out of the servants' wages, which —to say nothing of the heavy disproportion between the flue and the wages, for Mrs. Winifred Weldon only pays .E.8 a year—tempts, and generally leads to, deceit ; and a long quotation from Isaiah (iii. 16-24) against dress, is fixed above the kitchen chimney. piece, where it would, we fear, arouse antagonism in the breast of a new comer, and be a dead-letter after the first week.
The book, however, would not be without some value to servants, if they could pass patiently over the abuse of their own class, the laudation of that above them, the sanctimonious con- ceit, and all its other defects ; one remark especially, at page 60, would be of inestimable service, if token religiously to heart ; it is on the vast superiority of the influence of a good fellow-servant over that of the best mistress in the world, because her position, trials, and duties are the same.
Previous page
