The revealing power of the poet was never hers. She feels, but cannot show a child as many wonders as he could find for himself in the nearest hedgerow. The Hymns are a kind of compromise between “Emblems” and pictures of Nature. There are no far-fetched analogies: the parable of the Chrysalis anticipates Mrs. Gatty;[126] and the language, though rhythmic, is free from the conventional phrases which spoil some of Mrs. Barbauld’s “prose-poetry.”
Any mother might use the same images to give her child a first idea of the love of God:
“As the mother moveth about the house with her fingers on her lips, and stilleth every little noise that her infant be not disturbed; as she draweth the curtains around its bed and shutteth out the light from its tender eyes; so God draweth the curtains of darkness around us, so He maketh all things to be hushed and still that His large family may sleep in peace.”
But it was the Tutor in Mrs. Barbauld that made her choose prose; for although she was a facile verse-writer, she was better acquainted with Latin hexameters than with ballads, and doubted whether children should be allowed to read verse “before they could judge of its merit”.
Her best work is certainly in Evenings at Home[127], the popular miscellany which she and her brother, Dr. Aikin, brought out in parts between 1792 and 1796.
“Sneyd is delighted with the four volumes of Evenings at Home”, wrote Miss Edgeworth in 1796, “and has pitched upon the best stories—‘Perseverance against Fortune,’ ‘The Price of a Victory’, ‘Capriole’”.
It would take an Edgeworth boy to amuse himself with “The Price of a Victory”, a logical exposition which robs soldiering of its romance; or with “Capriole”, the tale of a little girl and her pet goat; but “Perseverance against Fortune” fills a whole “Evening” with adventures that most boys would read. The hero is sold as a slave, pressed into the Navy and suffers many other hardships before he succeeds as a farmer. Yet he is a mere type of the persevering man. The story amounts to little more than a clear statement of what happened, with pictures of what was there. It was the matter of these tales that chiefly interested Miss Edgeworth. She approved of arguments against the cruelties of war, she wept with the little girl over her lost pet, she heartily admired the good farmer for his patient industry and liked to picture his fields, fenced off from the “wild common”, his “orchards of fine young fruit trees”, his hives and his garden.
Sneyd Edgeworth had had a “practical education” and kept the family traditions. Another boy, perhaps, would have chosen “Travellers’ Wonders,” though the traveller confessed that he never met with Lilliputians, nor saw the black loadstone mountains nor the valley of diamonds; or, if these “voyages” were too tame, there were “The Transmigrations of Indur”, adventures of a man, an antelope, a dormouse, a whale,—centred in one person by the mystery of transmigration.
Mrs. Barbauld wrote without apology of “the time when Fairies and Genii possessed the powers which they have now lost”. Nobody reading “Indur” would suspect her of a design to teach Natural History; but she never forgot her profession and there are more lessons than stories in her books.
The average boy would submit to a talk about Earth and Sun, or Metals, or the manufacture of Paper, rather than read “Order and Disorder, a Fairy Tale”, and doubtless, in those days, boys were less impatient of Instruction; but a lesson never can be a story. A hundred stories could be written on Stevenson’s text: