Her books, after all, were simply properties reserved for her parts of Moralist and Schoolmistress. She dramatised the theories of Rousseau, and although her wonderful energy hardly atoned for her lack of depth and soundness, she left a rich legacy of device and suggestion to those who could use it better.
Rousseau’s affinity to Locke on the side of theory, and to Richardson in sentiment may account for some common features of French and English tales, but it does not explain the writing of “Lilliputian” books by two such authors as Berquin and Madame de Genlis.
There is, of course, no great difference between “writing down” Rousseau’s doctrine for children, and making miniature versions of Richardson and La Bruyère; but Berquin’s humour should have saved him from Le Petit Grandison,[83] and Madame de Genlis might have reflected on the undramatic qualities of Le Petit La Bruyère.[84] Berquin’s Lilliputian hero reveals himself in letters to his mother as a perfect miniature of Sir Charles Grandison, not less insufferable for his youth; and the little La Bruyère is made up of conventional homilies: “Of Reading, Study and Application”; “Of Personal Merit”; “Of the Heart” (introduced by a quotation from Marmontel); “Of Insipidity” (perhaps evoked by the other platitudes).
It was Rousseau himself who saw that the subject of education was entirely new, even after Locke’s treatise, and would be new after his own. The closest of his followers overlooked his chief discovery.
CHAPTER V
THE ENGLISH SCHOOL OF ROUSSEAU
Effects of Rousseau’s teaching in England—Henry Brooke’s Fool of Quality, the English Emile—Thomas Day: his connection with the Edgeworths—Sandford and Merton—Little Jack—Theory and Romance: Philip Quarll as a Rousseauist—The New Robinson Crusoe—Madame d’Epinay and Mary Wollstonecraft: The Original Stories—Blake’s illustrations—Traces of Marmontel and Madame le Prince de Beaumont in The Juvenile Tatler and The Fairy Spectator.
In England, Rousseau’s teaching had more effect on the actual life of the family than on books. Children, no longer cramped by the old pedantries, began to show unexpected powers of action and self-control, and parents, relieved of their harsher duties, chose to make friends rather than philosophers of their children.
It was only in books that theorists could represent this genuine progress by the make-believe of impossible children and perfect parents. Most writers of children’s books were theorists of one sort or another, and now that they had begun to draw from life, they tried to make it fit their theories. Thus the new books were hardly less didactic than the old.
Some reflect Johnson’s hostility to Rousseau, others support the new ideas with definite religious teaching, and many that present the Child of Nature as an existing type, endow him with the precocious wisdom of a Lilliputian. There is hardly a book among them, even among the many adaptations of French stories, in which the setting and characters are not plainly English.