Magic Casements
Children's Illustrated Books. By Janet Adam Smith.. (Britain Pictures. Collins. 5s.)
Our of the whole excellent Britain in Pictures series it would be hard to find one capable of giving more pure pleasure than this. The difficulty about appraising it is that of remaining objective. One can indeed appreciate with proper detachment the delicious "Nestlings Frightened by a Monster " with which someone— possibly Bewick—illustrated Mrs. Trimmer's History of the Robins in x821; or the lively savages of the Life and Adventures of Robinson Crusoe, as presented to the young reader of 1753 • or the calM flowing lines of William Blake's group of mother and daughters from Original Stories by Mary Wollstonecraft ; and one's detachment extends to the author's commentary. But how can one assess one's own nursery intimates—Beatrix Potter, Tenniel, Edward Lear, the Crane-Greenaway-Caldecott galaxy, H. J. Ford of the Andrew Lang fairy books ? Miss Adam Smith can do it. Unmistakably loving them all, she can still differentiate and analyse, distinguishing the reality and earthiness mingled with the " love, innocence and mystery " of Beatrix Potter from the romantic prettification of Walter Crane ; the dream-like seriousness of. Tenniel from the fantasy of Lear. And how right she is about the haunting quality, capable of shaping a lifetime's dream-imagery, which informs Arthur Hughes's illustrations to the Curdle stories !
3he is not so sure about contemporary children's books. Never have there been so many good, competent, entertaining and attrac- tive ones available—alongside, of course, an equally unprecedented mass of the execrably, gratuitously and unforgivably bad. But " Are any touched," she asks, " with the imagination, the personal vision, the slight dottiness even, that gave us the Songs of Innocence, Alice and Tom Kitten ? " Perhaps Walter de la Mare's Three Royal Monkeys, as illustrated by Mildred Eldridge—and what about the same author's Bells and Grass, with the magically absurd Emmett drawings ? It is certakily, hard to think of another example. Perhaps today's nursery readers will, a generation hence, discern such qualities in the Mum fie books, or that delightful piece of pre- geography, David Bone's The Little Boy and his House, or Miss Adam Smith's own favourite Orlando the Marmalade Cat. But they may well decide that the first-named are slick, machine-made and dated and the others merely pleasant. For real, authentic, undeniable " personal vision " and " slight dottiness," the Frenchman Babar has had it all his own way.
One misses some old favourites—Heath Robinson's Bill the Minder, for instance, along with other old friends unidentifiable, alas, by memory. (Who was responsible, long ago before the First Great Flood, for that glorious colony of goblins, elves or leprechauns who never did anything less than fifty strong, careering down moun- tains, for instance, on one vast toboggan, ten deep, inextricably intermingled, in inexhaustible detail and an enviable whirl of motion ?) But in so small a compass omissions are inevitable ; and how much, how phenomenally much, is here ! Miss Adam Smith, in fact, does more than provide a succinct, technically knowledgeable, and visually charming history of her subject ; for readers brought up in an English nursery she opens a window backward into a lost world and evokes the temps perdu. HONOR CROOME.
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