Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books. Horatia K. F. Eden
the indefiniteness of those they inherit and those they receive in baptism. The ruling peculiarity of a character is apt to show itself early in life, and it showed itself in Madam Liberality when she was a little child.
Plum-cakes were not plentiful in her home when Madam Liberality was young, and, such as there were, were of the "wholesome" kind—plenty of breadstuff, and the currants and raisins at a respectful distance from each other. But, few as the plums were, she seldom ate them. She picked them out very carefully, and put them into a box, which was hidden under her pinafore.
When we grown-up people were children, and plum-cake and plum-pudding tasted very much nicer than they do now, we also picked out the plums. Some of us ate them at once, and had then to toil slowly through the cake or pudding, and some valiantly dispatched the plainer portion of the feast at the beginning, and kept the plums to sweeten the end. Sooner or later we ate them ourselves, but Madam Liberality kept her plums for other people.
When the vulgar meal was over—that commonplace refreshment ordained and superintended by the elders of the household—Madame Liberality would withdraw into a corner, from which she issued notes of invitation to all the dolls. They were "fancy written" on curl-papers, and folded into cocked hats.
Then began the real feast. The dolls came and the children with them. Madam Liberality had no toy tea-sets or dinner-sets, but there were acorn-cups filled to the brim, and the water tasted deliciously, though it came out of the ewer in the night-nursery, and had not even been filtered. And before every doll was a flat oyster-shell covered with a round oyster-shell, a complete set of complete pairs which had been collected by degrees, like old family plate. And, when the upper shell was raised, on every dish lay a plum. It was then that Madam Liberality got her sweetness out of the cake. She was in her glory at the head of the inverted tea-chest, and if the raisins would not go round the empty oyster-shell was hers, and nothing offended her more than to have this noticed. That was her spirit, then and always. She could "do without" anything, if the wherewithal to be hospitable was left to her.
When one's brain is no stronger than mine is, one gets very much confused in disentangling motives and nice points of character. I have doubted whether Madam Liberality's besetting virtue were a virtue at all. Was it unselfishness or love of approbation, benevolence or fussiness, the gift of sympathy or the lust of power, or was it something else? She was a very sickly child, with much pain to bear, and many pleasures to forego. Was it, as the doctors say, "an effort of nature" to make her live outside herself, and be happy in the happiness of others?
All my earliest recollections of Julie (as I must call her) picture her as at once the projector and manager of all our nursery doings. Even if she tyrannized over us by always arranging things according to her own fancy, we did not rebel, we relied so habitually and entirely on her to originate every fresh plan and idea; and I am sure that in our turn we often tyrannized over her by reproaching her when any of what we called her "projukes" ended in "mulls," or when she paused for what seemed to us a longer five minutes than usual in the middle of some story she was telling, to think what the next incident should be!
It amazes me now to realize how unreasonable we were in our impatience, and how her powers of invention ever kept pace with our demands. These early stories were influenced to some extent by the books that she then liked best to read—Grimm, Andersen, and Bechstein's fairy tales; to the last writer I believe we owed her story about a Wizard, which was one of our chief favourites. Not that she copied Bechstein in any way, for we read his tales too, and would not have submitted to anything approaching a recapitulation; but the character of the little Wizard was one which fascinated her, and even more so, perhaps, the quaint picture of him, which stood at the head of the tale; and she wove round this skeleton idea a rambling romance from her own fertile imagination.
I have specially alluded to the picture, because my sister's artistic as well as literary powers were so strong that through all her life the two ever ran side by side, each aiding and developing the other, so that it is difficult to speak of them apart.[2]
[2] Letter, May 14, 1876.
Many of the stories she told us in childhood were inspired by some fine woodcuts in a German "A B C book," that we could none of us then read, and in later years some of her best efforts were suggested by illustrations, and written to fit them. I know, too, that in arranging the plots and wording of her stories she followed the rules that are pursued by artists in composing their pictures. She found great difficulty in preventing herself from "overcrowding her canvas" with minor characters, owing to her tendency to throw herself into complete sympathy with whatever creature she touched; and, sometimes—particularly in tales which came out as serials, when she wrote from month to month, and had no opportunity of correcting the composition as a whole—she was apt to give undue prominence to minor details, and throw her high lights on to obscure corners, instead of concentrating them on the central point. These artistic rules kept her humour and pathos—like light and shade—duly balanced, and made the lights she "left out" some of the most striking points of her work.
But to go back to the stories she told us as children. Another of our favourite ones related to a Cavalier who hid in an underground passage connected with a deserted Windmill on a lonely moor. It is needless to say that, as we were brought up on Marryat's Children of the New Forest, and possessed an aunt who always went into mourning for King Charles on January 30, our sympathies were entirely devoted to the Stuarts' cause; and this persecuted Cavalier, with his big hat and boots, long hair and sorrows, was our best beloved hero. We would always let Julie tell us the "Windmill Story" over again, when her imagination was at a loss for a new one. Windmills, I suppose from their picturesqueness, had a very strong attraction for her. There were none near our Yorkshire home, so, perhaps, their rarity added to their value in her eyes; certain it is that she was never tired of sketching them, and one of her latest note-books is full of the old mill at Frimley, Hants, taken under various aspects of sunset and storm. Then Holland, with its low horizons and rows of windmills, was the first foreign land she chose to visit, and the "Dutch Story," one of her earliest written efforts, remains an unfinished fragment; whilst "Jan of the Windmill" owes much of its existence to her early love for these quaint structures.
It was not only in the matter of fairy tales that Julie reigned supreme in the nursery, she presided equally over our games and amusements. In matters such as garden-plots, when she and our eldest sister could each have one of the same size, they did so; but, when it came to there being one bower, devised under the bending branches of a lilac bush, then the laws of seniority were disregarded, and it was "Julie's Bower." Here, on benches made of narrow boards laid on inverted flower-pots, we sat and listened to her stories; here was kept the discarded dinner-bell, used at the funerals of our pet animals, and which she introduced into "The Burial of the Linnet."[3] Near the Bower we had a chapel, dedicated to St. Christopher, and a sketch of it is still extant, which was drawn by our eldest sister, who was the chief builder and caretaker of the shrine; hence started the funeral processions, both of our pets and of the stray birds and beasts we found unburied. In "Brothers of Pity"[4] Julie gave her hero the same predilection for burying that we had indulged in.
[3] "Verses for Children, and Songs for Music."
[4] "Brothers of Pity, and other Tales of Beasts and Men."
She invented names for the spots that we most frequented in our walks, such as "The Mermaid's Ford," and "St. Nicholas." The latter covered a space including several fields and a clear stream, and over this locality she certainly reigned supreme; our gathering of violets and cowslips, or of hips and haws