S there are some painters who are especially "good" at painting sheep, so there are some writers who "do" children with that peculiar touch of truth and charm which only comes of one's being born to one's subject-matter—that particular subject-matter, be it what it may, and no other. Such writers seem to lose their skill when they attempt to apply it to other matters, and it is no more desired of them that they should thus "put to test art alien to the artist" than it would have been desirable for Kate Greenaway to paint after the manner of Rossetti. Specialists of the nursery, the play-room, and the fireside, their business is with the drama of life in its bud and earliest blossom, and such may well be content with the rare laurel that belongs to the creators of Alice in Wonderland, Tom Brown's School Days, Little Women, and Peter Pan. But there are greater writers who, while taking the whole full-orbed world of humanity for their province, include among their various powers a genius for depicting childhood with the rest, and it has not seldom happened with such writers that, masterly as has been their handling of the grown-up drama of life, some of their child-figures remain among their most striking creations, and their pictures of childhood prove to be those which, on reflection, we find most permanent in our memories. Often, indeed, where they carry one of their characters on from innocent childhood to tragic maturity, we find ourselves regretting—as in our daily lives we so often regret of some particularly charming child—that it was ever necessary for them to grow up at all. We seem to lose them as they grow up and fade into the light of common day.
Such a case is that of Richard Feverel. As we look back on that brilliant and beautiful book, it is those morning hours of the story, where Richard and Lucy meet in the first wonder of their boy-and-girl love, that come to seem the only reality in their romance; and whenever at times we take up the book again it is to turn to that chapter where Lucy stands by Farmer Blaize's chair while Richard takes heroic gulps at his little cup of apology, "a pretty little girl with the roses of thirteen springs in her cheeks, and abundant beautiful bright tresses," loitering "shyly by the farmer's armchair to steal a look at the handsome newcomer," Richard all too occupied with his business of humiliation to pay much heed to the beauty which in that other rainbowed chapter of the weir and the dewberries is to be as the opening of the gates of heaven. After this, Adrian Harley may be as witty as he pleases and the story go on amusing and harrowing us by turns; but I think that nowadays we close the book on those first chapters. That early vision was too supernaturally fair. We want to keep it as it is. We would not stain it with the piteous rest.
So with Lorna Doone. I have not read the book for years, and it may be merely a defect of memory. Yet I confess that all that survives of it for me, but that with undying vividness, is the scene where little John Ridd, exploring in quest of loaches the precipitous stream that glides down the mysterious glen leading to the secret fastness of the Doones, falls fainting on the greensward at its top, to find himself in the presence of a queenly little girl, like a fairy in the solitude, who bathes his brow with her little handkerchief and brings him back to consciousness of a new and strangely wonderful world. An enchanted freshness breathes back to one from the mere memory of the scene, so magically pervaded with the spell of running waters in secret rocky places, to the awe of a boy's first revelation of the fay-like being that must be more than mere mortal girl. It is the eternal Daphnis and Chloe, unsophisticated by afterthought, unshadowed by experience.