THE ADVENTURES OF HERR BABY.*
Mits. MoLcswoaTn's Christmas tales are all charming, and some of them truly pathetic, but she has never given us anything of the lighter and more agreeable kind more fascinating than this, though the subject of it—Herr Baby, as his German nurse calls him—is a child between four and five years of age, and the interest is all concentrated upon him. That, with such a hero, and no incidents beyond what are the most natural for such a child, Mrs. Molesworth should have been able to produce a story at least as interesting to elder people as to children, is a great evidence of her power. But the truth is that she has made in this tale a real study of character, and Herr Baby's is a character with much more interest in it than that of nine-hundred and ninety-nine out of every thousand grown-up persons, —a character at once gentle and tenacious of its purposes, dreamy and sympathetic, eager and patient, clinging and en- terprising,—all which it is not so easy to make us see in a mere baby without the help of description, yet all which Mrs. Molesworth does make us see without the aid of any description at all, by merely relating what Herr Baby says and does. Mr. Walter Crane has added to the charm of the book by his illus- trations, which are, indeed, amongst the very few illustra- tions we remember to story-books, that seem to add some- thing to the story. The picture in which Herr Baby stops, in the middle of his tea, leaning his head on his hand, to declare that the prospect of the family packing which will have to be gone through before the journey, is too much for him, and that he thinks that they had better inter- rupt their tea and begin at once, gives exactly such an impres- sion of the intense earnestness and gentleness of the small boy as the story itself gives, and it would not be easy to do more. In the interview with the little girl at the lodge, when Herr Baby is extracting a promise from the child that she is never to forget to feed the rabbits during the family's winter abroad, the expression is not quite so natural ; it is, indeed, a little • The Adventures of Herr Baby. By Mrs. Molesn orth. London : Macmillan and Co.
overdone, and reminds us of the " intense" school of the modern aesthetes, rather than of the child-like intensity of Herr Baby.
There is a good deal more of art in the story than the hasty- reader of it would suspect. The manner in which everything from the beginning turns upon Herr Baby's earnestness of nature, how that leads, first, to his desire to tell the other children of the in- tended journey, and that to his distress as to how the packing shall ever get done, and that to the story of his mother's dangerous adventure as a child in premature packing, and that to Herr Baby's musing on the sort of trunk which would best suit his own necessities, and that, again, to his fall and the breakage of Vene- tian glass which he is so anxious ever afterwards to replace, and that, once more, to the final adventure in the South of France, where Herr Baby pilots himself and the cat to the old curiosity shop, in which he had seen theVenetian glass so closely resembling the jugs he had broken,—testifies to Mrs. Molesworth's skill in making her story the mirror in which her little hero's character is reflected. The whole thing, of course, is on a very small scale,—except, indeed, the size of the page and type, which is attractively roomy, without being too large,—but the small scale is by no means a petty scale, and the work done in it is of a fine kind. Few children will fail to be delighted with this story, and still fewer grown-up persons who have the patience to bear with the babyish idiom till they have discovered how remarkable a little character it is which expresses itself in this childish " lubbish talk." 'We ought, perhaps, to explain that we are here using Herr Baby's scornful term, though not for his own childish idiom, but for the foreign languages which he hears talked around him on the shores of the Mediterranean.
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