A happy half-century, and other essays

by Agnes Repplier

The most appalling thing about the precocious young people of this period was the ease with which they slipped into print. Publishers were not then the adamantine race whose province it is now to blight the hopes of youth. They beamed with benevolence when the first fruits of genius were confided to their hands. Bishop Thirlwall’s first fruits, his “Primitiæ,” were published when he was eleven years old, with a preface telling the public what a wonderful boy little Connop was;—how he studied Latin at three, and read Greek with ease and fluency at four, and wrote with distinction at seven. It is true that the parent Thirlwall appears to have paid the costs, to have launched his son’s “slender bark” upon seas which proved to be stormless. It is true also that the bishop suffered acutely in later years from this youthful production, and destroyed every copy he could find. But there was no proud and wealthy father to back young Richard Polwhele, who managed, when he was a schoolboy in Cornwall, to get his first volume of verse published anonymously. It was called “The Fate of Llewellyn,” and was consistently bad, though no worse, on the whole, than his maturer efforts. The title-page stated modestly that the writer was “a young gentleman of Truro School”; whereupon an ill-disposed critic in the “Monthly Review” intimated that the master of Truro School would do well to keep his young gentlemen out of print. Dr. Cardew, the said master, retorted hotly that the book had been published without his knowledge, and evinced a lack of appreciation, which makes us fear that his talented pupil had a bad half-hour at his hands.

Miss Anna Maria Porter—she who delighted “critical audiences” by reciting Shakespeare at five—published her “Artless Tales” at fifteen; and Mrs. Hemans was younger still when her “Blossoms of Spring” bloomed sweetly upon English soil. Some of the “Blossoms” had been written before she was ten. The volume was a “fashionable quarto,” was dedicated to that hardy annual, the Prince Regent, and appears to have been read by adults. It is recorded that an unkind notice sent the little girl crying to bed; but as her “England and Spain; or Valour and Patriotism” was published nine months later, and as at eighteen she “beamed forth with a strength and brilliancy that must have shamed her reviewer,” we cannot feel that her poetic development was very seriously retarded.

And what of the marvellous children whose subsequent histories have been lost to the world? What of the two young prodigies of Lichfield, “Aonian flowers of early beauty and intelligence,” who startled Miss Seward and her friends by their “shining poetic talents,” and then lapsed into restful obscurity? What of the wonderful little girl (ten years old) whom Miss Burney saw at Tunbridge Wells; who sang “like an angel,” conversed like “an informed, cultivated, and sagacious woman,” played, danced, acted with all the grace of a comédienne, wept tears of emotion without disfiguring her pretty face, and, when asked if she read the novels of the day (what a question!), replied with a sigh: “But too often! I wish I did not.” Miss Burney and Mrs. Thrale were so impressed—as well they might be—by this little Selina Birch, that they speculated long and fondly upon the destiny reserved for one who so easily eclipsed the other miraculous children of this highly miraculous age.

“Doubtful as it is whether we shall ever see the sweet Syren again,” writes Miss Burney, “nothing, as Mrs. Thrale said to her” (this, too, was well advised), “can be more certain than that we shall hear of her again, let her go whither she will. Charmed as we all were, we agreed that to have the care of her would be distraction. ‘She seems the girl in the world,’ Mrs. Thrale wisely said, ‘to attain the highest reach of human perfection as a man’s mistress. As such she would be a second Cleopatra, and have the world at her command.’

“Poor thing! I hope to Heaven she will escape such sovereignty and such honours!”

She did escape scot-free. Whoever married—let us hope he married—Miss Birch, was no Mark Antony to draw fame to her feet. His very name is unknown to the world. Perhaps, as “Mrs.—Something—Rogers,” she illustrated in her respectable middle age that beneficent process by which Nature frustrates the educator, and converts the infant Cleopatra or the infant Hypatia into the rotund matron, of whom she stands permanently in need.

THE EDUCATOR

The Schoolmaster is abroad.—Lord Brougham.

It is recorded that Boswell once said to Dr. Johnson, “If you had had children, would you have taught them anything?” and that Dr. Johnson, out of the fulness of his wisdom, made reply: “I hope that I should have willingly lived on bread and water to obtain instruction for them; but I would not have set their future friendship to hazard for the sake of thrusting into their heads knowledge of things for which they might have neither taste nor necessity. You teach your daughters the diameters of the planets, and wonder, when you have done it, that they do not delight in your company.”

It is the irony of circumstance that Dr. Johnson and Charles Lamb should have been childless, for they were the two eminent Englishmen who, for the best part of a century, respected the independence of childhood. They were the two eminent Englishmen who could have been trusted to let their children alone. Lamb was nine years old when Dr. Johnson died. He was twenty-seven when he hurled his impotent anathemas at the heads of “the cursed Barbauld crew,” “blights and blasts of all that is human in man and child.” By that time the educator’s hand lay heavy on schoolroom and nursery. In France, Rousseau and Mme. de Genlis had succeeded in interesting parents so profoundly in their children that French babies led a vie de parade. Their toilets and their meals were as open to the public as were the toilets and the meals of royalty. Their bassinettes appeared in salons, and in private boxes at the playhouse; and it was an inspiring sight to behold a French mother fulfilling her sacred office while she enjoyed the spectacle on the stage. In England, the Edgeworths and Mr. Day had projected a system of education which isolated children from common currents of life, placed them at variance with the accepted usages of society, and denied them that wholesome neglect which is an important factor in self-development. The Edgeworthian child became the pivot of the household, which revolved warily around him, instructing him whenever it had the ghost of a chance, and guarding him from the four winds of heaven. He was not permitted to remain ignorant upon any subject, however remote from his requirements; but all information came filtered through the parental mind, so that the one thing he never knew was the world of childish beliefs and happenings. Intercourse with servants was prohibited; and it is pleasant to record that Miss Edgeworth found even Mrs. Barbauld a dangerous guide, because little Charles of the “Early Lessons” asks his nurse to dress him in the mornings. Such a personal appeal, showing that Charles was on speaking terms with the domestics, was something which, in Miss Edgeworth’s opinion, no child should ever read; and she praises the solicitude of a mother who blotted out this, and all similar passages, before confiding the book to her infant son. He might—who knows?—have been so far corrupted as to ask his own nurse to button him up the next day.