“‘I declare I cannot go to sleep’, said Mary, ‘I am afraid of Mrs. Mason’s eyes’.”
Mrs. Mason conforms and makes everybody else conform to her moral formulæ: “Do you know the meaning of the word Goodness?” she asks. “I see you are unwilling to answer. I will tell you. It is, first, to avoid hurting anything; and then to continue to give as much pleasure as you can.”
Three chapters are given to “the treatment of animals”. The children are allowed to read Mrs. Trimmer’s Fabulous Histories,[95] and to read it “over again” to a little friend, if they can make her understand that birds never talk.
In the Original Stories, pleasure is administered like medicine. Benevolence is a chief part of Mrs. Mason’s Theory; she is resolutely, almost sternly benevolent. Joy is never admitted without a dispensation from Reason. When the children have acted “like rational creatures”, Mrs. Mason allows them two lines of joy:
“Look, what a fine morning it is. Insects, birds, and animals, are all enjoying this sweet day.”
Blake snatched the words eagerly for his frontispiece. His “illustrations” are a touchstone for Mary Wollstonecraft’s imagination. He could not draw Mrs. Mason. In her place he introduces a central figure of his own, meditative, sweet, and firm; spiritual, even decorative, as Mrs. Mason never was. Yet he, like the rest, was dominated by the monstrous original; his Masonic Symbol appears in every picture. The children are his own; he dresses them to order, but makes haloes of their little round straw hats.
This author has an effective manner of disposing landscape to correspond with her sombre or determinedly joyful moods. Blake does not attempt the moonlight scene that moves Mrs. Mason to discourse upon her gloomy past, and present resignation. “I am weaned from the world, but not disgusted,” she observes. Such a state of mind would be unintelligible to Blake. But he manages to convey something of the formal desolation of the ruined Mansion-house, to which Mrs. Mason brings the children “to tell them the history of the last inhabitants”. They cling about her, and one looks back in a vain hope of escape, for “when they spoke, the sound seemed to return again, as if unable to penetrate the thick stagnated air. The sun could not dart its purifying rays through the thick gloom, and the fallen leaves contributed to choke up the way and render the air more noxious”. A heavy atmosphere is characteristic of the book; it suggests the German Elements of Morality, which Mary Wollstonecraft translated two years later. The promise of romance in the settings of Mrs. Mason’s stories is never fulfilled.
Blake was oppressed by her realistic solution of the mystery of the unseen harper. He followed the “pleasing sound” in his own way, and discovered the player for himself: not Mrs. Mason’s explicit and tangible old man, but a spirit harping under a starry sky.
Neither Thomas Day nor Mary Wollstonecraft could have written a “Lilliputian” book; and even the author of the Juvenile Tatler and Fairy Spectator, whose titles suggest the old traditions, turns back only to copy the types of Marmontel, the moral fairy tales of Madame le Prince de Beaumont.