Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 132.djvu/452

446 schoolmasters to imbue youth with the fanciful superstition that no harm could happen to the good. The preternatural satisfaction, for instance, with which the good basket-maker of the story, stripped to the skin, but nevertheless with folded arms significant of profound equanimity, goes off at the king's command behind his once rich oppressor in a like state of nature but with arms in wild agitation, as showing his very slight confidence in his moral resources, "to a savage and remote island," only in order to teach the latter a lesson as to the moral advantages of industry over indolent wealth wherever human nature is reduced to its lowest terms, would alone tell the reader in the most vivid way how completely the artist was ready to enter into the pious fraud of Squire Martin, and persuade the children who gazed upon his pictures that all the world conspires together to punish indolence and reward industry. And it is the same with all the pictures in which the didactic ages delighted. We have before us, for instance, a facsimile of one of the great picture-alphabets of the Puritan Fathers, printed at Boston, Massachusetts, in 1691, in which "Z," for instance, stands for Zaccheus, of whom it is stated that

the picture representing Zaccheus as a sort of turnip with four dots of features upon it, into which a very fuzzy gorse-bush has unexpectedly blossomed, while the turnip hangs from the gorse-bush in so dangerous a position as to threaten falling on the heads of the small crowd with extended arms standing beneath. Yet even those four dots representing the features of Zaccheus manage to convey, not the humility of the man, but his self-satisfaction that the tree had been, provided for his benefit, as a sort of reserved seat at a function of importance. This picture-alphabet may well be said to represent a period much more rudimentary, in the art of engraving at all events, than was the older stone age in drawing on reindeer horns. Yet the profound satisfaction and delight of morality in itself, and the subserviency of all creation to it, is deeply engraved upon it. Thus the letter "O," in the Puritan's alphabet, is accompanied by this admirable rhyme, —

and is illustrated by three figures with wands in their hands, so rudely drawn that it would seem hardly possible they should have any expression at all, but yet there is an expression of moral triumph over the universe, even in the scratches which shadow forth the countenances of Young Obadias and his two companions. And the same maybe said of the illustration annexed to the letter "S," and which is accompanied by the lines, —

"Young Sam'l's" face is wholly undecipherable, but his right arm is raised, certainly not in supplication, but in a most Pharisaic attitude of victorious virtue. There can be no doubt in any one's mind who has concerned himself at all with the illustrated children's books of the age of our ancestors, that the art of these books abounded in the moral fictions which are repeated in the didactic literature of the same day, and delighted in representing the triumphant power of morality over all things, animate and inanimate, and was even penetrated with the notion, — very much in opposition to the orthodox theology of the day, — that the good man was satisfied from himself.

Yet we suspect that Lord Granville's little protegée might, if she had been given one of the old illustrated works of our great-grandmothers, instead of the best work of the modern kind, have found much more delight in it than she could ever find in the most finished pictures of the new children's books. For one thing, in the old didactic illustrations, you never could mistake the artist's purpose, — and that, at all events with children, is no small matter. It may be very true, that the artist's purpose was to some extent jesuitical, — to make bad boys look more miserable than they are, and good boys more prosperous; to make prim girls appear the idol of all their friends, and lively ones their embarrassment and horror, which is not according to life; but anyhow, the satisfaction of a picture, especially for the young, depends in great measure on the easy mastery of its motive. When Billy Freeman and Tommy Truelove stand hand-in-hand, with their lace ruffles gracefully mingled, and their two pairs of legs bowed by the sympathy of friendship, so as to enclose precisely symmetrical arcs, no child has a moment's doubt that the moral dignity attained by these schoolboy paragons of friendship is the real subject of the picture. All the Freemans and the 