Page:Littell's Living Age - Volume 132.djvu/453

Rh Trueloves and all their connections evidently had such a picture, or something like it, continually before their mind's eye, and the artist was but reducing to visible form the vision of an enthusiastic countryside. So in the Puritans' Almanack of 1691, where Mr. Rogers, the Marian martyr, is seen enveloped in a mass of apparently wavy calico, which is really meant for Smithfield flames, and Mrs. Rogers (with her nine small children) stands by in triumph, looking with delight at as much of her husband as is not hidden by the rolls of calico, the motive of the picture, — the complete triumph of piety over pain in both Mr. Rogers and his worthy spouse, — is as conspicuous as is the scoffing disposition of the soldiers who are on guard at the stake. But the modern pictures have this defect that they are so very like fragments of real life (to which there is frequently no motive), that the child cannot catch any drift in the pictures at all, and is very apt, therefore, to get a much fainter impression out of them than out of the letter-press itself.

Again, whatever may be said of the execution of the old-fashioned illustrations, no one can deny their grotesqueness, nor the efficiency of that grotesqueness in impressing on children's minds the ideas associated with it. And though it is true that its tendency is to associate those ideas rather with the sense of the ludicrous than with any feeling of sympathy, yet we are not at all sure that that materially injures the effectiveness of the artist's purpose, so far as it was a wholesome purpose at all. For if you feel inclined to laugh at the ostentatious and pompous self-sufficiency of the virtue so grotesquely delineated, you feel no less inclined to laugh at the ostentatious idiocy and weakness of the folly or the vice, so that both sides of the controversy being alike inlaid with quaint exaggerations, the whole tendency of the result remains unaltered, though it is associated with a certain background of ludicrous effects. And the pleasure which the illustrations give is probably greater than any pleasure which undistorted art and accurate realism could carry into the undeveloped mind of a child. For undistorted art and truth must be full of the most complex shades and colors, which in their subtlety and completeness go far beyond a child's apprehension. All special emphasis involves a kind of disproportion; and all grotesqueness a certain amount of abstraction from real life, and an excessive stress on some quality out of which the sense of oddity arises. Why, for instance, is the picture of the ill-behaved Miss Gresham, who jumps up on chairs, and goes down on all fours in the strawberry-bed to pick herself strawberries, so impressive in its contrast with the little prigs in mob-caps, — Miss Offley and the Miss Townsends, who look like lugubrious charity children engaged in singing psalms? Because the almost idiotic diablerie of the one child and the intolerable propriety of the others sets you off in fits of laughing, before you are aware of the details of Miss Gresham's bad behavior, which is thus described. At tea she "eagerly turned over the toast to search for the largest pieces, and helped herself so often that Mrs. Offley at last said, 'My dear Miss Gresham, I would have you eat as much as is proper for you, I am sure, but I think your mamma would not be pleased with your manner of helping yourself, nor with your taking so large a quantity. You must excuse me if I say I think you have had enough.' She then asked Miss Townsend and her sister, who had eaten much less, if they did not choose another cake or a piece more toast; to which Miss Townsend answered, 'Indeed, madam, we do not choose to eat any more, but if you will give me leave, I will put this small cake in my pocket for my brother Edward.' 'I do not give you leave to take that, miss,' said Mrs. Offley; 'I beg you will eat it, and I will give you another for Master Townsend.' 'That may be your present, then, madam,' says Miss Townsend, 'but if you please, this shall be saved for him, as I saved it from what I took for myself.'" Now if, in the illustrations of these exemplary children, and the foil who sets them off, as a black background sets off a highly-colored foreground, the bad girl had not been made to look like pure greed and dishevelled impudence, and the good ones all primness and starch, there would have been nothing to illustrate. It is this which makes the point of the story, and if these excessive traits had been merged in a multitude of subdued realistic lines, the whole meaning for children would be gone. The old-fashioned illustrator used the features of rebellious or of dutiful children as the algebraist uses symbols apart from concrete numbers, — in order to fix attention on the only qualities with which it concerned him to deal. Now, in whatever direction that practice may have failed, it at least succeeded in the one object of associating moral lessons with some of the funniest figures, and some of the blandest assumptions of triumphant infantine virtue, which were ever 