Jane Taylor could be didactic on principle, but she was a true artist and knew that virtue is best recommended by its visible effects.
The looking-glass, “incapable of misrepresentation,” cannot help showing errors and vanities; but having acquired “considerable skill in physiognomy”, discovers more than the mere outside. Its last study is almost a “Character”:
“There was, of course, in a few years, some little alteration, but although the bloom of youth began to fade, there was nothing less of sweetness, cheerfulness and contentment in her expression. She retained the same placid smile, the same unclouded brow, the same mildness in her eye (though it was somewhat less sparkling) as when it first beamed upon me ten years before.”
This is the Princess of the Moral Tale. She gives a last glance at the looking-glass in her bridal dress, and leaves it to its memories.
“Sometimes my dear mistress’s favourite cat will steal in as though in quest of her; leap up upon the table and sweep her long tail across my face; then, catching a glimpse of me, jump down again and run out as though she was frightened.”
There is no “moral”, only this epilogue in dumb-show to repeat the theme of change.
The humour of the looking-glass has an undersense of pathos; but this is not the pathos of Mrs. Leicester’s School. It would touch a child directly, like a picture without words.
Books had no more to do with Jane Taylor’s love of Nature than with her understanding of her fellow creatures. She looked out of a diamond-paned window upon quiet Essex fields and “a tract of sky”.[138] The sky, always the most beautiful thing in a flat country, was to her more productive than the soil of the realists. But she loved gardens too, and caught the individuality of flowers. Ann’s Wedding Among the Flowers[139] is less amusing than Jane’s “fable” of the envious weed that shoots up till it overtops the fence, and then, provoked by the beauty of the flowers in the next garden, twists the chief beauty of each into a defect:
“Well, ’tis enough to make one chilly
To see that pale consumptive lily