There are in this work, and it is natural it should be so, one or two touches of self-revelation; the only ones, I think, which she, in all her writing, permitted herself. She makes her hero say of his mother—"Well I remember her old blue gown, her hands hard with rough work, her still girlish figure and small pale face, from which the bloom and the prettiness had gone so early; but the hard hand had, in its kindly pressure, the only genuine love I ever knew; the pale face looks yet on my sleep with a blessing, and the old gown has turned, in my dreams, to the radiant robe of an angel."
And the delicate sensitive character of Lucy, the heroine, reads like the expression of the writer's own personality: into it she has put a touch of romance. In all her work there is never a word of personal complaint, but the words she puts into the mouth of her hero, when Lucy commits suicide, must have been born of her own suffering: "When the burden outgrows the strength so far that moral as well as physical energies begin to fail, and there is no door but death's, that will welcome our weariness, what remains but to creep into that quiet shelter? I think it had come to that with Lucy. Her days were threatened by a calamity, the most terrible in the list of human ills, which the wise Manetho, the last of the Egyptians, with his brave Pagan heart and large philosophy, thought good and sufficient warrant for a man's resigning his place on the earth."
Among other mental qualities, she had, for the fortification of her spirit, a sense of humour. In this same book she writes of "a little man of that peculiar figure which looks as if a not very well filled sack had somehow got legs"; and commenting on a little difficulty of her hero's making, she says, "It is rather an awkward business to meet a family at breakfast whose only son one has kicked overnight."
And how elastic and untarnished must that nature have been which, after years of continuous struggle for bare subsistence, could put her money-wise people on to paper and quietly say of them that, "To keep a daily watch over passing pence did not disturb the Fentons—it was a mental exercise suited to their capacities." The turning of that sentence was surely an exquisite pleasure to its author. And "My Share of the World" is full of cleverly-turned sentences—"Hartley cared for nobody, and I believe the corollary of the miller's song was verified in his favour."
But we must not linger longer over her novel, its pages are full of passages which tell of the vigorous quality of her mind.
Frances Browne's poetry is as impersonal as her prose. She belonged to the first order of artists, if there be distinction in our gratitude. The material with which she tried to deal was Life—apart from herself—a perhaps bigger, and, certainly, a harder piece of work than the subjective expression of a single personality.
The subjects of her poems are in many lands and periods. The most ambitious—"The Star of Attéghéi"— is a tale of Circassia, another is of a twelfthcentury monk and the philosopher's stone, another of an Arab; and another is of that Cyprus tree which is said to have been planted at the birth of Christ, and to spare which Napoleon deviated from his course when he ordered the making of the road over the Simplon.
"Why came it not, when o'er my life
A cloud of darkness hung,
When years were lost in fruitless strife,
But still my heart was young?
How hath the shower forgot the Spring,
And fallen on Autumn's withering?"
These lines are from a poem called "The Unknown Crown." The messenger who came to tell Tasso the laureate crown had been decreed him, found him dying in a convent.
Then she has verses on Boston, on Protestant Union in New England, on the Abolition of Slavery in the United States, on the Parliament grant for the improvement of the Shannon. Her mind compelled externals to its use.
A love of nature was in her soul, a perception of the beauty of the world. She, with her poet's spirit, saw all the green and leafy places of the earth, all its flowery ways—while they, may be, were trodden heedlessly by those about her with their gift of sight.
"Sing on by fane and forest old
By tombs and cottage eaves,
And tell the waste of coming flowers
The woods of coming leaves;—
The same sweet song that o'er the birth
Of earliest blossoms rang,
And caught its music from the hymn
The stars of morning sang."
("The Birds of Spring.")
"Ye early minstrels of the earth,
Whose mighty voices woke
The echoes of its infant woods,
Ere yet the tempest spoke;
How is it that ye waken still
The young heart's happy dreams,
And shed your light on darkened days
O bright and blessed streams?"
("Streams.")
"Words—words of hope!—oh! long believed,
As oracles of old,
When stars of promise have deceived,
And beacon-fires grown cold!
Though still, upon time's stormy steeps,
Such sounds are faint and few,
Yet oft from cold and stranger lips
Hath fallen that blessèd dew,—
That, like the rock-kept rain, remained
When many a sweeter fount was drained."
("Words.")
Many and many such verses there are which might be quoted, but her work for children is waiting.— For them she wrote many stories, and in their employ her imagination travelled into many lands. The most popular was "Granny's Wonderful Chair," published in 1856. It was at once a favourite, and quickly out of print, and, strangely enough, was not reprinted until 1880. Then new editions were issued in 1881, '82, '83, '84, '87, and '89. In 1887, Mrs. Frances Hodgson Burnett published it, with a preface, under the title "Stories from the Lost Fairy Book," re-told by the child who read them. "The Lost Fairy Book" was "Granny's Wonderful Chair."
One has not far to read to discover the secret of its popularity with children. It is full of word-pictures, of picturesque settings. Her power of visualisation is shown in these fairy-tales more, perhaps, than in any other of her writings. Truly, she was fortunate in having the Irish fairies to lead her into their gossamerstrewn ways, to touch her fancy with their magic, and put upon her the glamour of their land. When the stories are of them she is, perhaps, at her best; but each story in the book makes a complete picture, each has enough and no more of colour and scene. And the little pictures are kept in their places, pinned down to reality, by delightful touches of humour. Of the wonderful chair, Dame Frostyface says in the beginning of the story, "It was made by a cunning fairy who lived in the forest when I was young, and she gave it to me because she knew nobody would keep what they got hold of better."
How did a writer who never saw a coach, or a palace, or the picture of a coach or a palace, tell of the palace and the people and the multitudes, of the roasting and boiling, of the spiced ale, and the dancing?
Whence came her vision of the old woman who weaved her own hair into grey cloth at a crazy loom; of the fortified city in the plain, with corn-fields and villages; of floors of ebony and ceilings of silver; of swallows that built in the eaves while the daisies grew thick at the door?
Had her descriptions been borrowed, the wonder of them would cease. But her words are her own, and they are used sparingly, as by one who sees too vividly what she is describing to add one unnecessary or indistinct touch.
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