THE NURSERY AND MODERN THOUGHT.*

THE preparations for Christmas nurseries are at least as magni- ficent as for any other sections of society. New editions of the ancient literature of the nursery magnificently illustrated lie before us, and by their side are the efforts of modern thought to recast the nursery notions of all time in relation to the more special conditions of what somebody (is it not Miss Muloeh ?) calls "the Child-Heart" of modern England. It is both interesting and instructive to compare the classical nursery rhymes of England with the genius of the modern nursery, as conveyed, for instance, in Lear's book of nonsense,—a model carefully imitated by the modern minstrels of Messrs. Ward, Lock, and Tyler, in the " original " section of their catholic and excellent little collection of nursery rhymes, —or in Mr. Hood's very lively little work Jingles and Jokes for Little Folks, which is a very favourable specimen of the modern nursery literature.

It is pleasant first to go back for a moment to the old legends of The House that Jack Built, Mother Hubbard, Jenny Wren, and such histories, for even here the gorgeous and very powerful pre-Raphaelite pictures by which they are accompanied remind us that they are designed for the amusement of a new race of infants. The striking point about these illustrations is the enormous strength of imagination devoted to magnifying details, and the consequent loss of unity of effect. We see in this what has been called the "disintegrating" tendency of modern thought,—one result, as Mr. J. S. Mill has, we think, pointed out, of the victory of the logic of induction and its extension to artistic feeling. For example, in The House that Jack Built, a house built chiefly, as we used to understand it, for the reception of malt, we find that structure itself represented as a striking Gothic building, which might have been designed by Mr. Butterworth, or even the late Mr. Woodward,—a building with quaint gables, and dormer windows. We think that Mr. Ruskin himself would condemn this on the principles which, as far as we remember, he advanced concerning the architecture of railway stations ; for, the house that Jack built should surely have been built in relation to the malt it was to con- tain, rather than to architectural ornament. Perhaps, however, the artist might contend that it was exactly this predominance of ornamental detail in Jack's architectural plans which led to the destruction of the malt by rats, and hence brought into action so extended and subtly connected a series of causes for the purpose of avenging the destruction of the malt. To such a plea we should have no answer, except that the other pic- tures also show a certain predominance of detail over unity of • Nursery Rhymes. New and Old. London : Ward, Lock, and Tyler.

Old Mother Hubbard, illustrated. The house that .Ltek Built, Illustrated. The Affecting SiOly of Jenny Wren, Illustrated. London: Ward, 14..ek, and Tyler. Jingles and Jilts for Little Folk!. By Tom Hood. London : Cassdll, Petter, and effect when no such excuse is admissible. Look, for instance, at that gorgeous pre-Raphaelite cat, with the rat's head in her mouth, who entirely fills up the foreground of a great illustration. She is very finely conceived, and the artist has even studied Darwin, and indicates the cat's deafness—a point not suggested in the legend—by giving her one eye blue and the other green— the object of that subtle touch being to account for her not hearing the dog who is coming round the corner of the malt bags, ready to supply the next link in the chain of destiny, and do to the cat as she is doing to the rat. But note, as Mr. Ruskin would say, how the artist's too great attention to detail has caused him to neglect the spirit of the narrative. This great epic of our childhood always seemed to us to represent a series of retributive actions and reactions based on the ultimate fact of the destruction of the malt. For this purpose came the cat to eat the rat, but then the scales of justice showed that too much vengeance had been taken, and the dog appears to turn the balance by worrying the cat, the cow to provide an equivalent for that extreme measure by tossing the dog, and then, as we get upwards into human life, the law of a higher revenge begins to obtain, for, the maid only milks the cow, the man kisses the maid, and the priest marries the man. But this instruc- tive lesson is all lost if the malt is not originally destroyed, and the artist has represented it as scarcely even diminished by the efforts of the rat, so that the great superstructure of actions built upon it seem founded on a quite inadequate base. "This is the rat that eat the mall [says the old text, in its majestic simplicity, not 'some of the malt'] that lay in the house that Jack built," and the "Child-Heart" feels that the eating of the malt—the malt, and the whole malt—is the moral assumption of the epic. Again, look at that splendid picture of the cow with crumpled horn tossing the dog into the silent deep blue sky, and just missing in her wild career a lovely bed of primroses drawn with true pre-Raphaelite ease. The dog has been sent up with such a rotatory force that he has turned completely over in the air and.% descending, back foremost, the cow watching with infuriated eyes for a new opportunity. Now those primroses, powerfully con- ceived as they are, are a mistake. They bring out no doubt the "great action" of the cow by giving a framework of quiet natural beauty to the tragedy of animal life enacting in that fair scene ; and if " the House that Jack Built" were only intended to serve as occasion for a number of distinct pictures, there would be nothing to object. But the idea of the piece being to bring home the law of cause and effect, no poetic isolation of any individual scene, no flowers likely to suggest in their contrast with that fierce strife "thoughts that do often lie too deep for tears," are admissible. The young woman should be seen in the distance, with her milk- pail on one side, and the corpse of the cat lying near the house that Jack built, would have been well introduced on the other. The artist has lost the essential wholeness of the chain of events in his wish to elaborate the beauty of one individual conception. Even in the illus- trations of Mother Hubbard, in which the satiric force of the dog (probablyan Irish water-spaniel) is well sustained,—when seated in the chair, for instance, he turns his eyes back to note Mother Hubbard's surprise with much decorous irony,—Mother Hubbard herself is a failure. The artist has not observed that the "note" of Mother Hubbard is clearly uncertainty of purpose, and a weakly tentative habit of mind as to the wants of her dog,—a weakness which her dog perceives and wishes to expose. Thus when she goes to the tavern for white wine and red, and comes back, the dog very properly stands on his head, to indicate the inverted character of her conceptions of duty. But the artist has not given this feebly experimental character to Mother Llubbard's face. He has satisfied himself with depicting surprise and amaze- ment in various forms, whereas the true connecting idea of her character is evidently a dependence on her dog of that weak and servile kind which rendered her unable even to strike out a general plan for studying his character, and obliged her to indulge in the very ill-conceived empirical appeals to his tastes, and experiments on his powers, which he so aptly ridicules.

But if the illustrations to the old nursery epics shows a certain modern tendency to lose the whole conception in the study of the individual scenes and details, the new nursery rhymes show modern tendencies operating far more powerfully both for good and evil. Mr. Hood's Jingles and Jokes for Little Folks (a bad title, by the way,—alliteration is always more ad captandum than rhyme), contains, however, one or two pieces free from the modern spirit, —and one almost classical in the freedom and happy arbitrariness of its turns of thought :— "Puss AND HER TILREE Kamm. "Our old eat has kittens three;

What do you think their names should be ? "One 1, a tabby with emerald eyes, And a tail that's long and slender; But into a temper she quickly flies, If you ever by chance offend her.

"I think we shall call her this—

I think we shall call her that:— Now, don't you fancy 'Pepper-pot' A nice name for a cat ?

"One is black, with a frill of white, And her feet are all white fur. too:

If you stroke her, she carries her tail upright, And quickly begins to purr, too.

"I think we shall call her this—

I think we shall call her that :- Now, don't you fancy Sootikin ' A nice name for a cat?

"One is a tortoiseshell, yellow and black, With a lot of white about him : If you tease him, at once he sets up his back ; He's a quarrelsome Tom, ne'er doubt him!

"I think we shall call him this—

I think we shall call him that :— Now, don't you fancy ' Scratchaway ' A nice name for a cat?

"Our old cat has kittens three, And I fancy these their names will be: Pepper-pot Sootikin Scratchaway '—There ! Were there ever kittens with these to compare? And we call the old mother—now, what do you think ? ' 'fabitha Longclawa Tidley wink !' "

Here at length, as Mr. Carlyle said in his patroniAng way of Sterling, is a real joyous dance of thoughts and words, something more than the rub-a-dub of pseudo-infantine fun. The suspense of feeling,—" retarding element," as the great German critic called it—in "I think I shall call her this, I think I shall call her that," followed by the exceedingly happy specimens of feline nomenclature suggested,—will give true delight to the childish mind. Moreover, the illustrating artist has caught most happily the idea of Tabitha Longclaws Tidleywink—Tabitha L. Tidleywink, as she might be called, for there is something really Yankee in her acute face,—who is lying in a most hypocritical sleep amidst her noble progeny. But in general Mr. Hood is not, we fear, free from the vitiating elements of modern thought. For in- stance, Mr. Carlyle has influenced him, and is influencing the nursery through him. We remember that in our own childish days all the nursery rhymes turned on sympathy with the negro. Even little sweeps were hallowed in our infant rhymes, and selected for special consideration and pity for their quasi-negro condition. But Mr. Hood, in the spirit of his master, makes the negro the awful warning for his infantine audience, and even suggests the possibility of getting quasi-negro indolence and sloth under the stimulus of the beneficent whip

THE DIRTY LITTLE BOY, A:CD WHAT BEFELL HIM.

"There was a dirty little boy, Whose hands were never clean ; Oh, such a grubby urchin Had ne'er before been seen !

"And how he wore his clothes out, You hardly would believe: He used to spit upon his slate, And wipe it with his sleeve.

"He shocked and grieved his parents, Who did his state deplore, And said, 'If you go on like this, You'll-turn a blackamoor !

"' So daik your skin is growing, You're such a ragged figure, Your friends will all begin to think

That you're a little nigger!'

"He did not heed the warning, But blacker grew his skin ; His clothes were all in tatters.

So ragged, and so thin !

"At length a Planter met him, And popped him in a sack, And set him hoeing sugar, Because he was so black.

"And still in that plantation

He toils with grief and pain—

For though he tends the sugar, He only gets the cane.

"My little boy, if you are wise, You'll scrub your hands with vigour, And mind your clothes ; or else you may Be taken for a nigger !"

Again, Mr. Hood would make children too self-conscious, in the thoroughly modern spirit. For instance, in the old rhymes, the moral assumption was that children were dirty, and that all the most powerful sanctions of human ethics were required to keep them even in that partially clean condition which would admit at least of further cleaning. The poems on dirt used to be addressed with magisterial solemnity to infants,—not mused and meditated by them. But Mr. Hood makes dirt a moral difficulty in the eyes of a scrupulous and conscientious child,—cleanliness an aspiration, an "infinite sigh" of the soul, as Jean Paul would say ; and worse still, he makes the child positively envy the spontaneous, un- conscious growth of the daisy, showing how bitterly at ten years of age it had already realized the pangs of conscious struggle :—

"Tnz DIFFICULTY OF DIRT.

"Now, I am only ten ; When I'm old, I shall be thirty, And perhaps shall find out then How to keep my hands not dirty !

"For I can't tell you how, They never as they ought are ; Although I am not now, Afraid of soap and water.

"If children could but grow Just like the little daisies, I think we should not show Mamma such dirty faces !"

We are not prepared to deny that this is a natural element in the poetry of the modern nursery, but we doubt exceedingly if it is a healthy one. Even the slight vein of nursery cynicism which underlies Mr. Lear's book of nonsense, and also the original poems towards the end of the excellent nursery poems of Messrs. Ward and Lock, and of which even Mr. Hood's baby audience will imbibe a slight flavour, is better than this early wrestling with the pro- blems of self-government and self-consciousness,--even under the form of a divine struggle against dirt.