GUTTA-PERCHA WILLIE.* Tits cleverest child we know assures us she
has read this story through five times. Mr. Macdonald will, we are convinced, accept that verdict upon his little work as final. We confess it took us somewhat by surprise, and led us to the conclusion that it was im- femtive upon anyone who would fairly criticise such a story as this to become once more in spirit a child of ten, and laying aside for the moment all familiarity with the great average of failure— with "the high which proved too high, the heroic for earth too bard "—look out with fresh eyes on an untried world, with a will to which nothing seems impossible. And then it occurred to us to compare the books and stories such as these, in which the last decade has been so fertile, with those on which our own childhood was nourished. Nothing, perhaps, illustrates better—certainly nothing more encouragingly—the silent social revolution through which we have passed. Not that we are going to say any- thing disrespectful of our old favourites ; Pecksy and Flapsy will still exist when Gutta-Percha Willies have been long forgotten. The "Daughter of a Genius" will have something to say long after the question of Children's Rights is settled or silenced, and the inhabitants of "the Children's Island," (by the way, where is that delightful story to be had now?) ignorant as they were of all the scientific principles which Master Willie seems somehow to have imbibed in infancy, might teach the elements of civilisation some day to that New Zealander who is to be. But for all that, we have made an immense stride in the matter of children's literature. For one thing, to use the grandiloquent language of a modern school, we have learned to recognise the common humanity of childhood and mature age. For the abnormal specimen of boy- hood, perfect if he would but have minded his sums, or had not that particular penchant for his neighbours' apples, or could ever have been in time for school or breakfast, and who is always cured by some grand catastrophe, and lives happy ever after, we have now the child, with all the incipient struggles, temptations, victories, failures, pleasures of after years, but with young-eyed hope, and faith in all possible good. The morning of life, in fact, while the dew is still on the grass, and the sun doesn't scorch, and the caterpillars are only beautiful. And for the -old stern school of education—which was always preaching the bad end of naughty Ned, and the horrible fate of inquisitive Jane
Gutta-Percha Willie. By George Macdonald. London : Henry B. King and Co.
—we have accepted almost as an axiom that it is by climbing towards a high ideal, not by miserable introspection, any nature really grows. Bacon's proverb might be written over most modern stories for the schoolroom or the nursery, "He that aims high, shoots the higher for it, though he shoot not as high as he aim ;" which consideration brings us back to Mr. Macdonald and Gutta-Percha Willie, for we are inclined, on the whole, to think that the charm of this book lies in its dealings with the almost unattainable. Such delightful things Willie does, we should all so much like to do. The impossible and improbable, so calmly glided over that the childish imagination is filled with vague delightful plans, for possible imitation, making its life seem wider and more worthy. What matter that there never was and never could be exactly such a child as Willie ! That he can be imagined pulls us a step higher. Let us look at him a little more closely, and find the secret of Mr. Macdonald's power, for that he has power few will be inclined to dispute. We confess the comical little gold picture in an extreme corner of the cover of the book, of a boy in slender clothing feeding a baby out of a bottle, or rather purposing to do so, did not look to us very promising ; the boy's bare feet, the baby's expression, with its fist in its mouth, and the long-way-off look of the bottle, did not suggest a comfortable arrangement ; but as much of Master Willie's future turns upon that little episode, we were obliged to search further ; and we find that his education was by no means conducted after a fashion that would be approved of by any school board in existence. He was, indeed, long past nine years of age before he could read a single word, his father not choosing that he should learn till he himself expressed a wish to be taught, an experiment, we fear, which would hardly answer in the majority of cases ; but then Willie was an exception, as we shall see. His father and mother were accustomed to talk very freely before him (which, if people did but know it, is the greatest educational process for good or evil in the world), but when Willie is nine years old his world widens, and he gains a new experience altogether by the appearance upon the scene of a sister who takes to squalling so pertinaciously at night, that the rest of Willie's father, broken as it too often is by his occupation as village doctor, is in a fair way to be upset altogether. Under these circumstances, Willie comes to the rescue, and proves himself the beat nurse in the house, being always ready to get up in the middle of the night and feed and quiet the crying infant, to the great relief of both father and mother. We are sure this was a piece of unattainable self-abnegation, which our young ac- quaintance might well read five times with 'bated breath and astonished eyes. Yet laugh as we may, perhaps, as the greater includes the less, this great ripe fruit of unselfishness may have dropped some tiny seed—who knows?—into the open heart. But its use in Willie's education was not to be limited to his love for the tiny Agnes; during all this time he became, in Mr. Macdonald's slightly stilted language, "acquainted with Madam Night," and had settled that "the look of the night was what the day was dreaming." Kind reader, if you will persist in thinking yourself more than nine years old, don't go on ; but if you can throw yourself into the childish schemes that follow, you may get a few moments' amusement, perhaps something more. Willie determines that somehow he will always wake in the middle
of the night and see what she is about ; and having done wonder- ful things already, in the way of discovering wells and making water-wheels, he hits on a plan which answers admirably. He has learned a good many things from an old hunch-backed shoe- maker, whose brain was never idle while his hands were busy with his last, and together the man and the child had studied a single treatise on mechanics, and the boy has performed some incredible feats with hie slight knowledge, and now, after working his brain to weariness to invent some machine that shall wake him, he be- thinks himself of a toy water-wheel he has discarded for its use- lessness, and absurd as we may consider the purpose to which the knowledge is applied, we cannot but admire the cleverness
with which Mr. Macdonald has contrived to put such a consider- able amount of information into the next few pages, while holding children breathless as to the result, which was to make the water- wheel into a new kind of alarum connected by a string with Willie's wrist. We think the simplicity of the story is rather spoiled by reflections couched in such language as this :—
"But if any one had happened to go into the garden after the house- hold was asleep, and had come upon the toy water-wheel, working away in starlight or moonlight, how little, even if he had caught sight of the nearly invisible thread, and had discovered that the wheel was winding it up, would he have thought what the tiny machine was about? How little would he have thought that its business was with the infinite ! that it was in connection with the window of an eternal world—namely, Willie's soul—from which, at a given moment, it-would lift the curtains,
=namely, the eyelids, and let the night of the outer world in upon the thought and feeling of the boy! To use a likeness, the wheel was thus ever working to draw up the slide of a camera obscure, and let in what- ever pictures might be abroad in the dreams of the day, that the watcher within might behold them."
Another experiment in hydraulics is made when Willie could have been hardly more than twelve. His father's cottage was small, but was situated amid the ruins of an old priory, and it was the long disused well, once celebrated for its mineral spring, which our little hero discovered, and which served him so well in all his enterprises. It becomes necessary for his grandmother to reside with them, and Willie's room must be given up to her ; where, then, is Willie to sleep? This is a kind of difficulty in which children de- ‘ight. How can the thing be managed ? Willie, with the help of his Akarpenter and mason friends, converts a bit of the old priory into a snuggery for himself, and then, to save the tired bones of Tibbie, the one old servant, devises a perpetual bath for his room. It looks very like nonsense, but we see our young friends' eyes dance with delight at the idea of a stream being made to rush through a room ; and Willie's trough, and Willie's stream, and Willie's con- trivances altogether for getting the water up to the right level, without disturbing anybody, will have given a young child more practical knowledge of the science of hydraulics than probably would have been learned in the schoolroom in a year. How Willie made a Bird of Agnes, and contrived impossible ladders, and all manner of delightful contrivances for making childhood +unutterably happy, and the very reading of which is pleasant on a summer's day, and how he ultimately found means to make the stream which had served him so well beneficial to other people also, we will not say. We must just notice one other little ex- periment, which, if it had in it little of the useful, is certainly attractive on the score of beauty. Two things, says Mr. Mac- • donald, put it into Willie's head,---" seeing a soaring lark radiant with the light of the unrisen sun, and finding a large gilt ball in a corner of Spelrnan's shop." Now, Master Willie gets a monster kite with an enormous length of tail, to the arch of which he ties his ball, and setting his wheel to call him an hour before sunrise, has to wait through some wet and cloudy days to try his experi- ment. At last, however, he has his kite fairly aloft, tugging at the string he could not let out fast enough :— " He kept looking up after it intently as it rose, when suddenly a -new morning star burst out in golden glitter. It was the gilt ball ; it saw the sun. The glory which, striking on the heart of the lark, was there transmuted into song, came back from the ball, after its kind, in glow and gleam. He danced with delight, and shouted and sang his welcome to the resurrection of the sun, as he watched his golden ball alone in the depth of the air."
Then Mona Shepherd comes upon the scene, and the whole story of the Sun-scout forms as pretty a little idyll as it is often our lot to meet with. The idea, thrown out throughout the story, that -even a child is bound to "help in the general business of the uni- verse," has something in it attractive to youthful self-importance. And those who find it impossible to resist a laugh at some of the fine long sentences in the book, will probably at the same time feel they are laughing at their old selves. We were none of us, of -course, ever half BO good as Willie, or the world would not long ago have agreed that "the quintessence of bother was bottled in a boy ;" but the dreams, the schemes, the unexpressed aspirations, Mr. Macdonald has translated them all, a little too finely, perhaps. We had no theory of the universe, only a dim idea it was made
ior us ; perhaps he has done wisely to make the children of his brain see they were made for it.
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