From The London Review.
CHILDREN.

PERHAPS there is no truer thing in
Shakespeare than his division of the life of
man into so many ages, each of which is
represented by a separate player upon the
world's stage.
It is not easy for any one in
after life to realize the fact that he or she
was once, and not so very long ago, a damp,
unpleasant baby. Of that first part of our
existence none of us know much; but of
our second part-

"The whining schoolboy, with his satchel, And shining morning face, creeping like snail Unwillingly to school,"

when told that Julius Cæsar in danger of drowning swam to land carrying his Commentaries in his teeth-he exclaims audibly or mentally, "the beast." In these latter days flogging seems to be pretty well abolished, but we will venture to say that a boy who is worth anything will feel less disdishonoured by a caning than by the scolding of a savage and spiteful man.

But to leave schoolmasters and come to the parents themselves. Do they, as a rule, treat their children with an intelligent sympathy? A man whose days are spent in the City, and whose talk is of stocks and funds, of law, or the produce-market, what is generally his idea of duty to his children? almost all of us retain a very lively recollec- Probably it is to leave them as much money tion. Not that we were all whining, or all as possible. He forgets the romance of his crept unwillingly to school; but, neverthe-childhood, and how he once was entranced less, the joys and sorrows of those days are by Robinson Crusoe; how his soul went out indelibly printed on our memories, rather with that desolate hero as he built his hut as happening to some boy or girl of our ac- to dwell in; how his flesh crept on his little quaintance, and who was dear to us, with bones at the footprint in the sand; and how whom we sympathized, and whom we pity he felt that to be shipwrecked on a desert or admire still, than as having occurred to island was a blessing reserved by the gods us in our own early youth. In those days for those especially favoured by them. If joy was ecstasy and sorrow was despair; a man would only call these things to mind, sensation was intense but brief; now it is he would tell the good wife at home to be a There were ter- little blind to the torn knickerbockers aud faint and long drawn out. rible moments in that spring-time of life. dirty boots of the boys, who have their own Who does not remember the first day at desert island, their canoes, their savages, school when turned into the playground and their wild beasts, even as he had in the among a lot of big, rough, unsympathizing, days that come not again to him. Perhaps, strange boys?-good fellows, most of them, though, they may come again to him, if, inbut terrible in their want of veneration for stead of ridiculing the romance of his chilall appertaining to the home and adjuncts dren's lives, and chilling the best and most of their small new schoolfellow. Then to joyous side of their natures, he sympathizes some came nights when they lay down in with them. Then, perhaps, they will let misery, and mornings when they awoke with him watch them as they make their own an undefined sensation of dread, all because cave, and plant the willow wands that are of that Greek or Latin in which they were to sprout and grow and hide the entrance If he has been a companconsciously deficient. There used to be, to their retreat. too, masters who, not content to punish with ion to them both in body and in spirit, they cane or task, would scold with a shrewish, will take him into their confidence, and use reckless tongue; from long practice clever his greater muscular strength to assist them at wounding the feelings of children, know- in their labours; of his intellect in such ing their tenderest parts both in body and matters they will, at best, we fear, have but spirit. It has happened to a boy who has a low opinion, for he must not expect to broken down in a line of Latin to be de- rival the great Crusoe himself. Then, as nounced by his master, before the whole he becomes their beast of burden, their school, as a thief who was picking his fath- hewer of wood, their delver in the soil, perer's pocket, in that he had not learned what haps those long lost days may come again. his father had paid for his being taught. If then, with the sweat of unaccustomed Of course the dull and careless boy puts his labour on his brow, he lies on the green tongue in his cheek and grins the moment turf, a little off from the wild shrubbery the master's eyes are turned away, while where the children have their own domain, one who is sensitive and high-spirited is and watches the little Crusoe as he walks filled with passionate indignation. Such a around his island, and in pretended unconboy feels injured and outraged, and the in-sciousness comes near the band of whispersult rankles in his heart, possibly for the rest of his life. He never hears of or thinks of his old master but like the schoolboy

ing savages, there will be a lighter heart within his breast than within that of many a more successful and perhaps many a better

66

From The London Review. CHAUCER'S ENGLAND.*

man. On the other hand, if he has treated | worst, it cannot rob them of the remem. his children's romances with ridicule, has brance of the past joys, which are their in made fairies a laughing-stock, denied the ex-heritance forever. istence of the great Crusoe, and has sat in the seat of the scorner, he had better not go near the children when their small hearts beat high, and their souls pant after the unknown. The first glance of an unsympathizing person scatters their imaginations; each one will walk off in a different direc- THIS is, in all respects, a singular work. tion, and while the intruder is near their One is no less surprised than gratified to joys are ended. Perhaps the sight of this meet a writer who has at once the frank aumay make him touchy, and he takes the op- dacity and the skill to take up materials portunity to remark upon troublesome chil- which time and tradition have almost rendren always digging holes, making them-dered sacred, and, by the admixture of perselves dirty, and tearing their clothes. The sonal opinion, odd suggestion, and intelliman who does this may be pronounced by gent and far-reaching comparison, to create his friends a good father, he may leave his out of these a thoroughly fresh and enterchildren abundance of money, and when he taining book. It would be hard to name is dead and gone they may remember him anything which is not in this picture of with respect as an excellent man of business, Chaucer's England" except dulness. prudent and honourable, but their hearts It abounds with passages of the finest and will not go up to him with passionate yearn- most sensitive literary criticism which we ing and affection, nor until they themselves have met with for many a year. It contains are old men and women will they always historical parallels in which the writer shows mention his name with that tenderness of the rare gift of being able to grasp the revoice and look of love that should keep his sults of long transitorial periods. It has memory green to his children's children poetry, fiction, antiquarianism, brought in after him. to lend a helping hand in causing a certain time in the history of England to thrill with life and colour. Indeed, as we have already hinted, the book deals with Chaucer's England, plus Matthew Browne. Whenever some stately pageant or some humorous show comes before us, we are conscious at the same moment of the presence at our elbow of an acute and intelligent observer, who explains, and points out, and compares. Instead of this book upon the England of Chaucer's time being, as it might have been, a laborious and well-meant compilation of a bundle of antiquacurious memoranda rian rags and tatters, very curious, but not very inviting-it is a series of illustrations, full of minute accuracy and information, and yet lambent with the picturesque glow and colour of the writer's imagination.. For instance, we are not in the habit of having the influence of worldly reminiscences upon the mind of "a chronicling old monk "described in this fashion:

It is given but to very few of us to hand down to posterity a name made great and famous in the world's strife. We are most of us plodding, uninteresting folk, who seem to leave no mark on the world: history will never know us. But the capacity for producing either misery or happiness is hereditary, and does not stop with us. The children of captious, exacting parents are often themselves captious and exacting; while the memory of loving sympathy bestowed upon ourselves in our young days begets in us the like sympathy towards others. In this way we can all do a good work in the world, and leave behind us loving remembrances. What is it a man dwells upon in the memory of his parents passed away? We fancy it is the games played and races run together rather than the money left behind them. It is the parents who must educate the child; the schoolmaster will never do it. He may cram a certain amount of Greek and Latin into a boy's head, but there he stops. He will never supply the place of the father. It is for the latter to rouse in a child a taste for what is noble and beautiful. Above all, youth should be a time for love and peace and happiness; for none can say what shall come after! Who does not creep with pain at the cry of a child? Let the little ones, at all events, have a happy childhood to look back upon, and then, let fate do her

540

"So long as the house of the religious recluse was a centre of hospitality, and a sanctuary in times of violence, the monks must have possessed a considerable knowledge of the outer world, and then, being debarred from any share in its activities, they would naturally enough become their chroniclers and commentators.. It is impossible, try as we may, to make real to the mind the feelings of a religious recluse with

* Chaucer's England. By Matthew Browne. Two vols. London: Hurst & Blackett.

respect to the outer world, in a day when the lines of demarcation between the sacred and the secular were so sharply and decisively drawn; but for a priest of any imagination and moral force, points of contact would be found. Let any man, having given himself up to the spirit of the place, and heard the chanting, and thought himself back a few hundred years as well as he can, stand in the nave of Westminster Abbey, and, under those awful columnar arches, which seem as if they would draw closer and closer every moment, look up at the painted window through which shines the bright afternoon sun. The feeling of the vowed recluse, accustomed to the cell, the cloister, the vigil, and the silence he cannot have; the use and wont he must miss; but he may help his imagination by permitting the long aisle of Gothic arches to do their natural work upon him. Neither the square nor the round arch affects the mind like the pointed, in which the spire is added; and while the lofty point appears as if it might for ever go on rising, the columns and the arch seem as if they might for ever draw closer and closer around and over

with a very few brief explanatory comments." We are very glad that Mr. Browne was not allowed to follow out this notion. Anybody can make extracts; and there are always a large number of people engaged in so manufacturing books. But that they are interesting, except to people who can again make use of the raw material thus raked together, we are inclined to doubt. particular excellence of the present work The lies in the very fact that the antiquarian jottings about "Chaucer's England,” which are more or less familiar to cultivated readers, have here found a translator and exponent capable of transfusing into them his own personal feeling, and lending to them the light of his own interpretation, so that, instead of a series of bright and interesting essays which Manual of Dates," we have a would be delightful even if they were founded on fiction. Here, for instance, is a passage upon hawking, which is surely very different in style from the work of the "extracter: ""

"It was the gun, of course, that at last put an end to hawking. No doubt, shooting with the fowling-piece is a less cruel method of catching birds than catching them by setting birds of prey at them; but it is hard not to regret the charming sport,

'Only a page that carols unseen,

the man who stands below and looks upwards. In the distance, indeed, the movements of approach seems already begun - there is motion in these arches - a stifling sense of being shut in comes over me as I stand. Suddenly I lift my eyes to the stained window, and what is the effect? All the outer world seems to come in and descend upon me, through the bright colour and the shining that will not be shut out. The plumed knight goes cantering by, with the light on his corslet; the fair lady on her ambling palfrey, with her peaked head-gear and blue Fitting your hawks their jesses.' velvet bodice; the statesman, the citizen, the Was there ever a brighter, freer, more musical labourer, the poor man's wife, the motley of the suggestion put into a couplet? For two things streets; the king's pleasure-barge, the swans, I have many a time sat in a waking dream and and the wherry boat on the river; the Tower, wished myself for a short space in the middle and the markets, and the bordering fields; the ages. I should like to have the medieval young men and the maidens, the old and the Christian faith for a day; to sit in a cathedral, mature, who are yet full of life, the husbandman join in the service, thrill at the 'Dies Ira,' with the fail, the churl in the stocks, the magis-listen to the tread of the passing worshipper as trate on the seat of justice—the world I have if he were walking in the very aisles of everquitted for my cloister pours in upon me like motes in a shaft of suggestion; and for me to write a chronicle will be as natural as for Crusoe to notch his stick."

For the reasons suggested above, we prefer the first of these vol.mes to the second. The first deals more with Chaucer and his writings, illustrating them as chance requires by descriptions of their surroundings; but the second volume, dealing more particularly with these surroundings themselves, is necessarily more of a compilation. Very interesting the compilation is, the author having evidently spared no pains in making his book a trustworthy reflex of Chaucer's times. "If the plan of this book," says Mr. Matthew Browne, in a postscript, had been different, my own taste and my own notion of what ought to be interesting would have led me to compose it entirely of extracts,

66

lasting fate, and watch, with fear and passion, the face of my dear lady as the light through the painted window slanted over her brow. And I should like to go out hawking with my and I would need to be much more hard-hearted dear lady, for a morning also. True, my love than men and women of gentle nurture in the days of Victoria; but let that pass, for a day only. And let me go forth with her into the open, and trot to the river-side, with the falconers at such a distance that they cannot hear our talk, which is, I need not say, of Lancelot, Sir Isumbras, the Tale of Troy, the last tournay (at which I won with my lady's colours on my shoulder), and my own undying passion. of many a travelled mile, and gently buffets my Up sweeps the wind, charged with the soft odours lady's cheek till it is like an apple, the side that's next the sun.' We see the river a little ahead. tall rushes. There is a heron, and we mean to A king-fisher darts up from among the have him. Take off the hood, let go the jesses,

up springs the falcon, his bells jingling, and the real sport of the day is begun. If this is not better than going out blazing away with a gun at once noisome and noisy (instead of musical), I have no taste. It is a poor excuse to say that you kill more game with one gun than you could with a whole stand of falcons, and in half the time. There speaks the greedy stomach. Give me the poetry, and you may take the victuals. But it is useless complaining. The argument from cruelty is a good one, and not even for the pleasure of missing Mr. Cole's shop (which so annoys Mr. Matthew Arnold) at the corner, and the pleasure of feeling that I might go out hawking to-morrow, would I wish the king's mews back to Charing-cross."

Graver, but not less beautiful and sympathetic, is the following passage upon "Merry" England:

for themselves at kiss-in-the-ring or leap-frog. It is scarcely possible to doubt that there was more of this spontaneous pleasure-making in the England of the Edwards than there is now. But of course the change in this particular is part of a larger change which lies, we hope, in the path to a greater good. The lightsomeness, of which I speak as a main characteristic of Chaucer's writings, is long ago gone from our literature, and the other forms of our art do not help us as they ought. When our religion and our art have overtaken the problems set them by the changing conditions of our history, we shall have no reason, even if we now had any reason, to regret Merry England."

We have incidentally mentioned the literary criticism which occurs in this work. The running commentary on Chaucer, which is the backbone of the book, gives occasion "There are, after all, two or three particu- for an analysis of the "Canterbury Tales" lars, if no more, in which we may find a sug-in particular, which we cannot describe othgestion that the England of to-day really and truly is less merry than the England of the middle ages. One obvious consideration is, that the population in general have not the same simple religious faith that they had then. It is easier for a man with a superstition to be merry, than one with a half-faith. There is thus a

erwise than as masterly. Matthew Browne's criticism, as he has shown in previous works, is at all times fresh, unconventional, and, in an eminent degree, suggestive; but in the present case the largeness of the topic seems to have called forth a corresponding largeness of sympathy and of effort, which together have produced a most valuable comimpossible to give any idea by means of mentary upon Chaucer's writings. It is extracts which would themselves most likely contain copious illustrative extracts from Chaucer of this comprehensive study of our first great English poet; but the following glimpse may be taken of the style of treatment. The author is replying to the charge sometimes brought against Chaucer of his having constructed the " Canterbury Tales " in imitation of the "Decameron:

"Boccaccio makes a number of ladies and gentlemen run away from the plague to a country house, and there among arbours, fountains, birds, and other such pretty things, tell tales to each other, in order that they may forget the misery which the very sunshine they are enjoying at peace lights up not far off. The whole conception is evidently medieval-Italian

sense in which a poor Italian peasant may be merrier than a well-to-do Englishman. He can devolve his sins on his confessor, his troubles on his patron saint, and so lay down his cares. Undoubtedly merriment of this order does not accompany a general sense of responsibility, such as it is our aim to cultivate in England now; though, in the time of Chaucer, responsibility was not for churls any more than falconry was. Another obvious point is, that the squalid contrasts of great towns are not favourable to merriment; though they are to drunkenness. And yet another point is, that England is not now a conquering country. War brings mourning, but it brings elation also. The meanest man in the population partakes of the sense of power which a victory brings to a country. Once more, we must take into account, perhaps, the gradual civification of the surface of the land, and the removal of the country to a distance from the eyes of so large a number of the people. The return of the spring, the sight of the near meadows, painted with delight,' as Shakespeare cowardly, romantic, and thin. The treatsays, the sights and sounds of harvest-home, ment is artificial and bald, so far as the framewere all occasions of common joy to the people work or fable' is concerned. What can be in a thousand places where they now miss any poorer or more theatrical than all this twaddle such excitements, sweet and wholesome as they about the birds, the trees, and the sunshine? were. It may be said, even now, that when the It needs not to say that many of the stories have fine days begin, the town pours out its whole-exceeding merit; and some of them, to which some merriment into the green suburbs, whoever Chaucer's tales run parallel, are told with a stays within the stony bounds for amusement. grace, and above all, with a snaky Italian The sweethearts, and the boys and girls-all whose hearts overflow with natural gladnessgo off into the fields to romp and be gay. If they want any pleasure made for them, it is of a very simple character. a merry go-round is enough; but better is the pleasure they make

finesse, which, of course, we do not find in Chaucer. But it is in the framework of his Canterbury Tales' that Chaucer is by universal consent at his best. In the first place, an English poet of the fourteenth century did not neel to travel far for so very obvious and natural an