AN AUTHORESS OF YESTERDAY.
SETTING aside Hans Christian Andersen, is there any writer who wrote ostensibly for children. who ranks above Juliana Horatia Ewing ? The point is arguable. She could not have written R. L. Stevenson's "Child's Garden of Verse," but really we think a good case might be made out for her admission to the second place, if we confine ourselves to prose. So far, at least, as English writers are concerned, we do not know who could be put above her. The idea of writing for children specially is a modern one, and, despite the crowd of contemporary scribblers for the schoolroom, our choice is not among many.
Before us at the present moment lies "The Ewing Reader," a book for the use of schools lately published by the S.P.C.K. (is.), and made • up of short selections cut out of Mrs. Ewing's stories. From a literary point of view the extracts are representative and very well chosen. One or two' are so good as to make one marvel that their author never won for herself a greater name. Indeed, it is impossible to believe but that she would have been counted in the first rank of our writers of fiction had she been able to maintain for any length of time the George Eliot-like level which she occasionally reached. .
As a "reader" we do not predict any great success for this volume. Children delight in Mrs. Ewing's stories when they read them as a whole and for the story, but most of the extracts here given will only appeal to the literary critic,— and critics as a rule have left their teens behind them. They are made and not born. Treating the book, • then, from a literary standpoint, we congratulate Mrs'. Eden, who is responsible for the selection, upon the self-control which has led her to quote so little from Mrs. Ewing's best- known books. In the opinion of the present writer, they do not contain her finest work. We have nothing here from "The Story of a Short Life," and very little from the immortal "Jackanapes." On the other hand, the opening scene of "Jan of the Windmill"—the best thing, to our mind, that she ever wrote—is quoted at length, and enough from "Six-to Sixteen" to make every true admirer of her work regret deeply that she never set herself to write serious romance. The public has decided that " Jackanapes " is Mrs. Ewing's masterpiece, and it is no doubt, artistically speaking, her most perfect work taken as a whole. But "Jackanapes" and "The Story of a Short Life," which is very much like it, are both painted upon a very small scale. Miss Gatty in her sketch of her sister's life, written immediately after her death, quotes with approval a critic who compared the former book to a Meissonier. For ourselves, we would compare both to exquisite examples of miniature portraiture. There is about them a delicacy and a unity of conception and finish which are beyond all praise, but they are not very lifelike, and are open to the charge of too uniform a prettiness. We do not complain of the smallness of their scale ; it is essential to them. The pathos by which they are pervaded would have become cloying had it covered a larger canvas. We are conscious throughout that the great art and the great object of the writer are to bring tears to our eyes. Even when we are watching the geese on the green, or laughing at the exploits of two little boys at the fair, or being initiated into 'the humours of life in barracks, we cannot forget that these things are by the way.
Everything—humour, drama, reality even—is subordinated to the pathetic. "In all things remember the end" was a favourite motto of Mrs. Ewing's, and we are told in the sketch of her life which we have already quoted that she not in- frequently wrote the last chapter of her stories before the first. No doubt in so doing she showed herself an artist, but we think the necessity for emotional and atmospheric foresight in fiction is just now exaggerated by the critics. Te artist who would hold the mirror up to Nature should surely remember that one of the ever-present facts of life is that we cannot foresee for a second, and that coming events, even in a picture, must not cast too unnaturally deep a shadow before.
None of this criticism, however, applies to "Jan of the Windmill." Most of our readers no doubt remember the story. A boy brought up by a miller and his wife displays a genius for drawing, is educated by an old Scotch school- master, stolen by a travelling pedlar, rescued by a benevolent artist, and finally restored to his high-born and prosperous parents. So much for the story, which is for the children ; but what a power of scene-painting and character-drawing we find displayed in the first chapter. We see the mill exposed upon the plain, standing amid the bare sameness of a treeless landscape, yet looking upon the endless variety of a windy sky. "Storm without and within !" we read. "So the wind- miller might have said, if he had been in the habit of putting his thoughts into an epigrammatic form, as a groan from his wife and a growl of thunder broke simultaneously upon his ear, whilst the rain fell scarcely faster than her tears." The miller's wife had just lost her youngest child. " For eight full years she had been the meekest of women. If there was a firm (and yet, as he flattered himself, a just) husband in all that dreary, straggling district, the miller was that man. And he always did justice to his wife's good qualities —at least to her good quality of submissiveness—and would till lately have upheld her before any one as a model of domestic obedience." The miller "was one of those good souls who live by the light of a few small shrewdities (often proverbial), and pique themselves on sticking to them to such a point, as if it were the greater virtue to abide by a narrow rule the less it applied. The kernel of his domestic theory was, Never yield, and you never will have to,' and to this he was proud of having stuck against all temptations from a real, though hard, affection for his own ; and now, after working so smoothly for eight years, had it come to this ?" In her grief he could do nothing with his wife. She no longer feared and no longer obeyed him. "She moaned though be bade her be silent, she wept in spite of words which had hitherto been an effectual styptic to her tears." He was powerless. "Weakness in human beings is like the strength of beasts, a power of which, fortunately, they are not always conscious." Outside the wind blew a hurricane. The miller went back to his work dreading the loss of his sails. "How it raged ! The miller's wife was an uneducated, commonplace woman enough, but, in the excited state of her nervous system, she was as sensible as any poet of a kind of comforting harmony in the wild sounds without." Into this scene come a man and a woman bringing a baby, for which they desire to find a home. The miller forces his wife to accept the child, and is then frightened at the effect of his act. "He wished the minus would cry again—that silence
was worse than anything He wished she would move across the room and take up the child, with an intensity that almost amounted to prayer." The strain of the situation so well worked up is relieved as naturally as the storm outside calms down. An older child asleep in the room wakes, is pleased by the sight of the baby, the miller's wife is presently comforted, and the miller expresses his sudden sense of relief in the commonplace manner in which be would have been sure to express it. "4 Shall un have a bit of supper, missus?' was his cheerful greeting on coming in. 'But take your time,' he added, seeing her busy with the baby, 'take your time.'" Two more extracts from the same story show us, first, the little nurse-boy—a charming study of the tenderness which the hard necessity of minding their smaller brothers and sisters occasionally develops in the children of the poor— and secondly, the old Scotch schoolmaster who discovers the genius of the hero. Perhaps no more kindly, no more attrac- tive portrait of a self-educated man could be found than Mrs. Ewing gives us in "Master Swift." He has that fresh delight
in desultory reading, that keen pleasure in every exercise of the niind for its own sake, which come to those who have sought knowledge under difficulties, and have never fallen Into that attitude of doubt and perpetual distinction which seems inseparable from modern culture and is the outcome of intellectual satiety.
The specimens of Mrs. Ewing's lighter work are equally well chosen. In her interpretations of animal character she followed her master Hans Andersen very close, and, oddly enough, the temptation to abuse her gift of pathos never comes to her among beasts.
At her very best Mrs. Ewing wrote for grown-up people. Yet every one of her books is calculated to please a child. At her beet she deals frankly—indeed, one might in a true sense say realistically—with that aspect of life which may profitably be studied by the young. In her shorter, more laboured, and, strange to say, more popular stories she looks deliberately at the same side of life through rose-coloured spectacles dim with gentle tears.
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