Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books Part 5

"What is a louis d'or?" cried three of my children; and "What is brandy?" asked the other four.

"I smell valerian," said I; on which they poked out their seven noses, and I ran at them with my spines, for a father who is not an Encyclopaedia on all fours must adopt _some_ method of checking the inquisitiveness of the young.

One more quotation must be made from the end of the story, where Father Hedgehog gives a list of the fates that befell his children:

Number one came to a sad end. What on the face of the wood made him think of pheasants' eggs I cannot conceive. I'm sure I never said anything about them! It was whilst he was scrambling along the edge of the covert, that he met the Fox, and very properly rolled himself into a ball. The Fox's nose was as long as his own, and he rolled my poor son over and over with it, till he rolled him into the stream. The young urchins swim like fishes, but just as he was scrambling to sh.o.r.e, the Fox caught him by the waistcoat and killed him. I do hate slyness!

It seems scarcely conceivable that any one can sympathize sufficiently with a Hedgehog as to place himself in the latter's position, and share its paternal anxieties,--but I think Julie was able to do so, or, at any rate, her translations of the Hedgepig's whines were so _ben trovati_, they may well stand until some better interpreter of the languages of the brute creation rises up amongst us. As another instance of her breadth of sympathy with beasts, let us turn to "A Week Spent in a Gla.s.s Pond" (which also came out in _Aunt Judy's Magazine_ for 1876), and quote her summary of the Great Water-beetle's views on life:

After living as I can, in all three--water, dry land, and air,--I certainly prefer to be under water. Any one whose appet.i.te is as keen, and whose hind-legs are as powerful as mine, will understand the delights of hunting, and being hunted, in a pond; where the light comes down in fitful rays and reflections through the water, and gleams among the hanging roots of the frog-bit, and the fading leaves of the water-starwort, through the maze of which, in and out, hither and thither, you pursue and are pursued, in cool and skilful chase, by a mixed company of your neighbours, who dart, and shoot, and dive, and come and go, and any one of whom, at any moment, may either eat you or be eaten by you. And if you want peace and quiet, where can one bury oneself so safely and completely as in the mud? A state of existence without mud at the bottom, must be a life without repose!

I must here venture to remark, that the chief and lasting value of whatever both my sister and my mother wrote about animals, or any other objects in Nature, lies in the fact that they invariably took the utmost pains to verify whatever statements they made relating to those objects. Spiritual Laws can only be drawn from the Natural World when they are based on Truth.

Julie spared no trouble in trying to ascertain whether Hedgehogs _do_ or do not eat pheasants' eggs; she consulted _The Field_, and books on sport, and her sporting friends, and when she found it was a disputed point, she determined to give the Hedgepig the benefit of the doubt.

Then the taste for valerian, and the fox's method of capture, were drawn from facts, and the gruesome details as to who ate who in the Gla.s.s Pond were equally well founded!

This (1876) volume of the Magazine is rich in contributions from Julie, the reason being that she was stronger in health whilst she lived at Aldershot than during any other period of her life. The sweet dry air of the "Highwayman's Heath"--bared though it was of heather!--suited her so well, she could sleep with her hut windows open, and go out into her garden at any hour of the evening without fear of harm. She liked to stroll out and listen to "Retreat" being sounded at sundown, especially when it was the turn of some regiment with pipes to perform the duty; they sounded so shrill and weird, coming from the distant hill through the growing darkness.

[Ill.u.s.tration: OUR LATEST PET--A REFUGEE PUP, WHOM WE HAVE SAVED FROM THE COMMON HANGMAN.]

We held a curious function one hot July evening during Retreat, when, the Fates being propitious, it was the turn of the 42nd Highlanders to play. My sister had taken compa.s.sion on a stray collie puppy a few weeks before, and adopted him; he was very soft-coated and fascinating in his ways, despite his gawky legs, and promised to grow into a credit to his race. But it seemed he was too finely bred to survive the ravages of distemper, for, though he was tenderly nursed, he died.

A wreath of flowers was hung round his neck, and, as he lay on his bier, Julie made a sketch of him, with the inscription, "The Little Colley, Eheu! Taken in, June 14. In spite of care, died July 1.

_Speravimus meliora_." Major Ewing, wearing a broad Scotch bonnet, dug a grave in the garden, and as we had no "dinner-bell" to m.u.f.fle, we waited till the pipers broke forth at sundown with an appropriate air, and then lowered the little Scotch dog into his resting-place.

During her residence at Aldershot Julie wrote three of her longest books--"A Flat Iron for a Farthing," "Six to Sixteen," and "Jan of the Windmill," besides all the shorter tales and verses that she contributed to the Magazine between 1870 and 1877. The two short tales which seem to me her very best came out in 1876, namely, "Our Field"

(about which I have already spoken) and "The Blind Man and the Talking Dog." Both the stories were written to fit some old German woodcuts, but they are perfectly different in style; "Our Field" is told in the language and from the fresh heart of a Child; whilst the "Blind Man"

is such a picture of life from cradle to grave--aye, and stretching forward into the world beyond,--as could only have come forth from the experiences of Age. But though this be so, the lesson shown of how the Boy's story foreshadows the Man's history, is one which cannot be learned too early.

Julie never pictured a dearer dog than the Peronet whom she originated from the fat stumpy-tailed puppy who is seen playing with the children in the woodcut to "Our Field."

People sometimes asked us what kind of a dog he was, but we never knew, except that he was the nicest possible kind.... Peronet was as fond of the Field as we were. What he liked were the little birds. At least, I don't know that he liked them, but they were what he chiefly attended to. I think he knew that it was our field, and thought he was the watch-dog of it; and whenever a bird settled down anywhere, he barked at it, and then it flew away, and he ran barking after it till he lost it; by that time another had settled down, and then Peronet flew at him, all up and down the hedge. He never caught a bird, and never would let one sit down, if he could see it.

Then what a vista is opened by the light that is "left out" in the concluding words:--

I know that Our Field does not exactly belong to us. I wonder whom it does belong to? Richard says he believes it belongs to the gentleman who lives at the big red house among the trees. But he must be wrong; for we see that gentleman at church every Sunday, but we never saw him in Our Field.

And I don't believe anybody could have such a field of their very own, and never come to see it, from one end of summer to the other.

It is almost impossible to quote portions of the "Blind Man" without marring the whole. The story is so condensed--only four pages in length; it is one of the most striking examples of my sister's favourite rule in composition, "never use two words where one will do." But from these four brief pages we learn as much as if four volumes had been filled with descriptions of the characters of the Mayor's son and Aldegunda,--from her birthday, on which the boy grumbled because "she toddles as badly as she did yesterday, though she's a year older," and "Aldegunda sobbed till she burst the strings of her hat, and the boy had to tie them afresh,"--to the day of their wedding, when the Bridegroom thinks he can take possession of the Blind Man's Talking Dog, because the latter had promised to leave his master and live with the hero, if ever he could claim to be perfectly happy--happier than him whom he regarded as "a poor wretched old beggar in want of everything."

As they rode together in search of the Dog:

Aldegunda thought to herself--"We are so happy, and have so much, that I do not like to take the Blind Man's dog from him"; but she did not dare to say so. One--if not two--must bear and forbear to be happy, even on one's wedding-day.

And, when they reached their journey's end, Lazarus was no longer "the wretched one ... miserable, poor, and blind," but was numbered amongst the blessed Dead, and the Dog was by his grave:

"Come and live with me, now your old master is gone," said the young man, stooping over the dog. But he made no reply.

"I think he is dead, sir," said the gravedigger.

"I don't believe it," said the young man, fretfully. "He was an Enchanted Dog, and he promised I should have him when I could say what I am ready to say now. He should have kept his promise." But Aldegunda had taken the dog's cold head into her arms, and her tears fell fast over it.

"You forget," she said; "he only promised to come to you when you were happy, if his old master was not happier still: and perhaps--"

"I remember that you always disagree with me," said the young man, impatiently. "You always did so. Tears on our wedding-day, too! I suppose the truth is, that no one is happy."

Aldegunda made no answer, for it is not from those one loves that he will willingly learn that with a selfish and imperious temper happiness never dwells.

The "Blind Man" was inserted in the Magazine as an "Old-Fashioned Fairy Tale," and Julie wrote another this year (1876) under the same heading, which was called "I Won't."

She also wrote a delightfully funny Legend, "The Kyrkegrim turned Preacher," about a Norwegian Brownie, or Niss, whose duty was "to keep the church clean, and to scatter the marsh marigolds on the floor before service," but, like other church-sweepers, his soul was troubled by seeing the congregation neglect to listen to the preacher, and fall asleep during his sermons. Then the Kyrkegrim, feeling sure that he could make more impression on their hardened hearts than the priest did, ascended from the floor to the pulpit, and tried to set the world to rights; but eventually he was glad to return to his broom, and leave "heavier responsibilities in higher hands."

She contributed "Hints for Private Theatricals. In Letters from Burnt Cork to Rouge Pot," which were probably suggested by the private theatricals in which she was helping at Aldershot; and she wrote four of her best Verses for Children: "Big Smith," "House-building and Repairs," "An Only Child's Tea-party," and "Papa Poodle."

"The Adventures of an Elf" is a poem to some clever silhouette pictures of Fedor Flinzer's, which she freely adapted from the German.

"The Snarling Princess" is a fairy tale also adapted from the German; but neither of these contributions was so well worth the trouble of translation as a fine dialogue from the French of Jean Mace called "War and the Dead," which Julie gave to the number of _Aunt Judy_ for October 1866.[29] "The Princes of Vegetation" (April 1876) is an article on Palm-trees, to which family Linnaeus had given this n.o.ble t.i.tle.

[Footnote 29: These translations are included in "Miscellanea," vol.

xvii.]

The last contribution, in 1876, which remains to be mentioned is "Dandelion Clocks," a short tale; but it will need rather a long introduction, as it opens out into a fresh trait of my sister's character, namely, her love for flowers.

It need scarcely be said that she wrote as accurately about them as about everything else; and, in addition to this, she enveloped them in such an atmosphere of sentiment as served to give life and individuality to their inanimate forms. The habit of weaving stories round them began in girlhood, when she was devoted to reading Mr. J.G.

Wood's graceful translation of Alphonse Karr's _Voyage autour de mon Jardin_. The book was given to her in 1856 by her father, and it exercised a strong influence upon her mind. What else made the ungraceful Buddlaea lovely in her eyes? I confess that when she pointed out the shrub to me, for the first time, in Mr. Ellacombe's garden, it looked so like the "Plum-pudding tree" in the "Willow pattern," and fell so far short of my expectation of the plant over which the two florists had squabbled, that I almost wished that I had not seen it!

Still I did not share their discomfiture so fully as to think "it no longer good for anything but firewood!"

Karr's fifty-eighth "Letter" nearly sufficed to enclose a declaration of love in every bunch of "yellow roses" which Julie tied together; and to plant an "Incognito" for discovery in every bed of tulips she looked at; whilst her favourite Letter XL., on the result produced by inhaling the odour of bean flowers, embodies the spirit of the ideal existence which she pa.s.sed, as she walked through the fields of our work-a-day world:

The beans were in full blossom. But a truce to this cold-hearted pleasantry. No, it is not a folly to be under the empire of the most beautiful--the most n.o.ble feelings; it is no folly to feel oneself great, strong, invincible; it is not a folly to have a good, honest, and generous heart; it is no folly to be filled with good faith; it is not a folly to devote oneself for the good of others; it is not a folly to live thus out of real life.

No, no; that cold wisdom which p.r.o.nounces so severe a judgment upon all it cannot do; that wisdom which owes its birth to the death of so many great, n.o.ble, and sweet things; that wisdom which only comes with infirmities, and which decorates them with such fine names--which calls decay of the powers of the stomach and loss of appet.i.te sobriety; the cooling of the heart and the stagnation of the blood a return to reason; envious impotence a disdain for futile things;--this wisdom would be the greatest, the most melancholy of follies, if it were not the commencement of the death of the heart and the senses.

"Dandelion Clocks" resembles one of Karr's "Letters" in containing the germs of a three volumed romance, but they _are_ the germs only--and the "proportions" of the picture are consequently well preserved.

Indeed, the tale always reminds me of a series of peaceful scenes by Cuyp, with low horizons, sleek cattle, and a glow in the sky betokening the approach of sunset. First we have "Peter Paul and his two sisters playing in the pastures" at blowing dandelion clocks:

Rich, green, Dutch pastures, unbroken by hedge or wall, which stretched--like an emerald ocean--to the horizon and met the sky.

The cows stood ankle-deep in it and chewed the cud, the clouds sailed slowly over it to the sea, and on a dry hillock sat Mother, in her broad sun-hat, with one eye to the cows, and one to the linen she was bleaching, thinking of her farm.

The actual _outlines_ of this scene may be traced in the German woodcut to which the tale was written, but the _colouring_ is Julie's!

The only disturbing element in this quiet picture is Peter Paul's restless, inquiring heart. What wonder that when his bulb-growing uncle fails to solve the riddle of life, Peter Paul should go out into the wider world and try to find a solution for himself? But the answers to our life problems full often are to be found within, for those who will look, and so Peter Paul comes back after some years to find that:

The elder sister was married and had two children. She had grown up very pretty--a fair woman, with liquid misleading eyes. They looked as if they were gazing into the far future, but they did not see an inch beyond the farm. Anna was a very plain copy of her in body; in mind she was the elder sister's echo. They were very fond of each other, and the prettiest thing about them was their faithful love for their mother, whose memory was kept as green as pastures after rain.

Peter Paul's temperament, however, was not one that could adapt itself to a stagnant existence; so when his three weeks on sh.o.r.e are ended, we see him on his way from the Home Farm to join his ship:

Leena walked far over the pastures with Peter Paul. She was very fond of him, and she had a woman's perception that they would miss him more than he could miss them.

"I am very sorry you could not settle down with us," she said, and her eyes brimmed over.