the water babies and selected poems

Front matter

PORTER LIBRARY _

OF PITTSBURG

Ye

Chapter One Two Three Four Five Six Seven Exght Il

The Water Babies, and, curiously enough, The Swiss Family’ Robinson, were two of the very earliest books I can remember reading, and''it is hard to put on one side those early impressions. Like your first theatre, your first concert, your first visit abroad, almost anything you do or meet or experience for the first time takes on a strange, unreal magic of its own. The Water Babies held that magic for me, and to my joy it holds it still, Reading it again the other day—a hot, still day of June, with the peonies spilling their crimson on the lawn, and all the scents and sounds of summer in the air—I was back at once in another summer morning, many years ago now, when I sat up

in my little bed and opened a book which a favourite aunt had just given me and of which I knew nothing: The Water Babies: A fairy tale for a Land Baby. My copy was that strange contradiction in terms, a ‘‘ Child’s Edition.” In those days, children’s intelligence was not treated with quite so much respect as it is to-day, and many of the world’s great books were chopped about and watered down so that the little ones might absorb the story without, shall we say, too much hard work. I am not sure, though, that: that is always such a bad thing. Grown-up writers often have queer ideas as to what a child will like and understand, and a certain amount of intelligent pruning and cutting out of dead wood frequently does no harm at all. ‘Certainly it did no harm to my appreciation of The Water Babies. If you have ever tried reading it aloud to a child, you will know what I mean. Those endless lists of adjectives, those meaningless references to old worn-out controversy, those sly pieces of propaganda, those outpourings of personal prejudice, are barnacles which slow and hinder the great ship’s progress, and they ought to go.

_ That, though, is surely a matter for the reader. Does it really need the hard hand of an editor? The child learns early enough to do his own editing .. . “‘ This is a boring bit: let’s go on from here,’ and the wise parent obeys meekly. But I would rather have it all there, wouldn’t you? And make my own choice as to what I would leave out. So I am glad the publishers of this edition have put away the scissors they must have itched to use, and have left us the original text, the pure milk of the word.

What a word it is! Can you think of any book which gives us such a picture of this countryside of ours? Yes, perhaps I can think of two: Tafka the Otter and Salar the Salmon. I dare say there are others. You may have your own preferences, and your parents may have theirs. But I think my little town-bred mind first woke to a perception of the English country, with The Water Babies. It is all so brilliantly done. The colours grow out of the story; they are never there for mere effect. It is the story that counts, right from the beginning, but the story is still only the bare bones; it is the colours which clothe it, and clothe it in words and phrases which, years after, linger in one’s memory. ‘‘A mile off and a thousand feet down”; “Clear and cool, clear and cool”; ‘‘ Those that wish to be clean, clean they will be; and those that wish to be foul, foul they will be ’’; ‘“‘ Down to the sea! Down to the sea!”? And the names, too: what music there is in the very sound of them: ‘ Peacepool’’; ‘‘ Shiny Wall”; “‘ Mother Carey’s Haven,” where the good whales go when they die; ‘‘ The Other-end-of-Nowhere ”; “‘ St. Brandan’s Isle’; ‘‘ Harthover Fell”; ‘‘ Vendale.” I wonder if they are as lovely i in themselves as they seem to me now, or whether it is still that old “‘ remembrance of things past ” getting in the way again. I wonder.

But of one thing I am certain. There has never been such a a picture of an English river. Not even that greatest of all river men, Kenneth Grahame, has caught the true, unforgettable river smell as Kingsley has caught it. Each of us has his river. Yours may be the upper reaches of the Thames: the quiet waters below Lechlade, the gentle murmuring shallows by Kelmscott. Or the cool green tree-shade of that busier Thames below Oxford. Or it may be the rivers of the south, the streams of Devon and Cornwall. Or the little meandering rivers of the Cotswolds, Evenlode and Windrush. Or the great rivers of the North. Or the Titans, Wye and Severn. I think I have two rivers, which have meant more to me than any others; the Cherwell, from Magdalen Bridge to the strange sunlit remoteness of its upper waters as far as Islip. And the brown tawny tumbling of the Dee, as it sings down the Vale of Llangollen. In, and on, and by the banks of these two rivers, I have looked and listened and dreamed. So perhaps will all of us. ‘‘ Messing about in boats ”’ is good, but messing about in boats in and by a river is better. Tom’s river may have been a Yorkshire river. Does it matter? Not a little bit, one way or the other. Tom’s river is all rivers rolled into one. Above all it is the river of summer; the cool gentle refuge from the heat; the hot _ afternoon river of the water meadows and the dragon flies; the soft moonlit river of a summer night; the dark brooding river of thunder and storm. (I am not sure that Chapter 3 of The Water Babies, the ‘‘ Down to the Sea” chapter, is not the finest thing that Kingsley ever wrote.) Everyone will have his own favourite passage in this enchanting book. You who may be reading it now for the first time (you lucky persons!), I wonder which parts you will remember in the years to come? The excitement of the chase from Harthover? The bitter weary ordeal of the climb over Harthover Fell and down Lewthwaite Crag? The little old schoolmistress of Bendale, with her “ Bless thy little heart! ’’ and her ‘‘ Water’s bad for thee; Pll give thee milk”? The chiming and. clashing of the church bells, that led Tom “down to the clear, clear _ limestone water, with every pebble at the bottom bright and clean...and he dipped his hand in and found it so cool, cool, cool; and he said, ‘I will be a fish; I will _ swim in the water; I must be clean, I must be clean.’ ”’? Sometimes I think this great opening movement of _ Kingsley’s splendid pastoral symphony is the finest thing in it. But then I remember the exquisite slow movement of the river in high summer “when all the world is young,

‘ 5 lad, and all the trees are green”; the ‘‘ Cool, clear water-world, where the sun is never too hot, and the frost is never too cold’; the river of the smooth gravel waterways; the river of the caddis, and the dragon-fly, and the trout, and the otter, and all the myriad water insects.

And what about the scherzo? The wild hurrying progress of the river and the river creatures “‘ down to the sea’; the exultant tumult of the thunderstorm, when “ the thunder roared, and the lightning flashed, and leaped across Vendale and back again, from cloud to cloud, and cliff to cliff, till the very rocks in the stream seemed to shake; and Tom looked up at it through the water, and thought it the finest thing he ever saw in his life.”

Then the exquisite interludes of the water-baby world: Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby, Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid; Ellie; the poor silly lobster; the salmon. Sentimental stuff, perhaps, some of it, but written, if anything was, from the heart, and one can easily enough forgive the platitudes and the dogmas for the sake of a song like “I once had a sweet little doll, dears ...’’; or the picture of the babies coming home from their day’s work of mending the broken seaweed and putting the rock pools in order, and planting all the shells again in the sand, so that no one may see ‘“‘ where the ugly storm swept in last week.”

Last of all, the great, unequal, but magnificent finale. Tom’s pilgrimage to the Other-End-of-Nowhere, to win his Manhood and redeem his soul; the great onward sweep of the journey to Shiny Wall, through the white gate that never was opened, and so to Peacepool, and Mother Carey’s Haven, and Mother Carey herself. In some ways, though not in all, I find this the most moving part of the whole book. Such delightful characters appear and disappear; the mollys, those spirits of the old Greenland skippers long dead; the storm petrels, and all the thousands of sea-birds; the little dog, swept overboard from the wreck, who followed Tom faithfully to his journey’s end; the good whales, the happy sleepy beasts upon the still oily sea; Mother Carey, “ the grandest old lady Tom had ever seen’: “a white marble lady sitting on a white marble throne.” And, last of all, the blunderbuss and the strange automatic truncheon i in that terrible prison where, in Chimney No. 345, is confined, for his sins, which were many, Tom’s old master and tyrant, Mr. Grimes; no longer the proud tyrant, but sad and sorry, pulling for ever at a pipe which will not draw. There is much in the writing of these closing chapters which we must all regret: the endless digressions, in which the author works off his spleen against politicians, educationists, Catholics, school inspectors, anything and anybody who offend his principles or his prejudices. This is Kingsley at his worst. The propagandist in him has run away with the storyteller, and the result is a confused, interminable mess, which may conceivably hold some interest for the social historian, but has none at all for the child or ordinary reader of to-day. It is this part of the book, more than any other, which needs the editorial scissors, or the brisk skipping of the reader. It almost succeeds in spoiling the beauty of this great finale. Almost, but not quite. For,

_ aside from the journey, two things are left: the revelation to Grimes, by Mrs. Bedonebyasyoudid, of the death of his old mother, the little schoolmistress of Vendale; and Tom’s meeting with Ellie. The first is one of those strange pieces of writing which, balanced on the razor edge of emotion, may so easily topple over into mawkish sentimentality. Some may think it does. Perhaps; we wear our rue to-day with a difference. I still find it deeply moving, because it is simple, because it is sincere, because remorse,

‘when it comes too late, must always be something too terrible to contemplate. Grimes is freed from his chimney ;

he is given another chance, and goes off to expiate his sins by sweeping out the crater of Etna. But the little schoolmistress lies in the churchyard in Vendale, and there will

_be no more tears to be turned into hail by the cold heart of a forgetful son,

_ And the meeting with Ellie? It follows one of the loveliest passages in all this lovely book: the description of St. Brandan’s Isle, with its black cedars, ‘‘ high and sharp

“against the rosy dawn.” Let me quote it in full; it is not

; INTRODUCTION long. “...St. Brandan’s Isle reflected double in the still broad silver sea. The wind sang softly in the cedars, and the water sang among the caves; the sea-birds sang as they streamed out into the ocean, and the land-birds as they built among the boughs; and the air was so full of song that it stirred St. Brandan and his hermits, as they slumbered in the shade, and they moved their good old lips, and sang their morning hymn amid their dreams.”

And so Tom meets at last his Ellie, “ the most graceful creature that ever was seen, looking down, with her chin | upon her hand, and paddling with her feet in the water.... | ‘Oh, Miss Ellie,’ said he, ‘how you are grown!’ ‘Oh, Tom,’ said she, ‘how you are grown too!’ And no wonder: they were both quite grown up.”

I wish Kingsley had ended the Water Babies there. Even the passage which follows, when the Irishwoman, and Mrs. Doasyouwouldbedoneby, and Mrs, Bedonebyasyoudid, and Mother Carey all stand revealed at last, beautiful as it is, is almost an anticlimax. About the “‘ Moral,” which ends the whole book, the less said the better. Even Kingsley did not always know when to stop.

Lastly, the poems. The publishers have included in this edition a selection of some of Charles Kingsley’s verse. — To my mind, there is nothing here to touch the beauty | and simplicity of the two Water babies’ songs, ‘‘ Clear and _ Cool,” and “I once had a sweet little doll, dears.” But — there are several poems that are familiar, and were much © loved by our grandfathers and grandmothers, who set them to music, and sang them in the lamp-light of Victorian evenings. They are almost all pathetic; I can still be — moved by “‘ The Three Fishers,” or “‘ The Sands of Dee,” _ even by “ Lorraine, Lorraine, Loree”; and there is a genuine, haunting quality about the refrain of “‘ The Last Buccaneer”: “the pleasant Isle of Avés, beside the » Spanish main.” But I prefer St. Brandan’s Isle, with its black cedars, high and sharp against the rosy dawn.

Daviw Davis

“WATER BABIES ’ TALE FOR A LAND BABY

*~ : be * i a“ ; "3 = agit : ’ 5 é a fh « : f rT j i bye ‘

CHAPTER ONE I heard a thousand blended notes

\ While in a grove I sat reclined;

In that sweet mood when pleasant thoughts Bring sad thoughts to the mind.

To her fair works did Nature link The human soul that through me ran; And much it grieved my heart to think, What man has made of man.

WorbDsworTH.

ONcE upon a time there was a little chimney-sweep, and his name was Tom. ‘That is a short name, and you have heard it before, so you will not have much trouble in | remembering it. He lived in a great town in the North country, where there were plenty of chimneys to sweep, and plenty of money for Tom to earn and his master to spend. ‘He could not read nor write, and did not care to do either; and he never washed himself, for there was no water up | the court where he lived. He had never been taught to {say his prayers. He never had heard of God, or of Christ, | except in words which you never have heard, and which it would have been well if he had never heard. He cried | half his time, and laughed the other half. He cried when | he had to climb the dark flues, rubbing his poor knees and elbows raw; and when the soot got into his eyes, which it | did every day in the week; and when his master beat him, | which he did every day in the week; and when he had not | enough to eat, which happened every day in the week | likewise. And he laughed the other half of the day, when | he was tossing halfpennies with the other boys, or playing \\leap-frog over the posts, or bowling stones at the horses’ | legs as they trotted by, which last was excellent fun, when there was a wall at hand behind which to hide. As for | chimney-sweeping, and being hungry, and being beaten, QI he took all that for the way of the world, like the rain and snow and thunder, and stood manfully with his back to it till it was over, as his old donkey did to a hailstorm; and then shook his ears and was as jolly as ever; and thought of the fine times coming, when he would be a man, and a master-sweep, and sit in the public-house with a quart of beer and a long pipe, and play cards for silver money, and wear velveteens and ankle jacks, and keep a white bulldog with one grey ear, and carry her puppies in his pocket, just like a man. And he would have apprentices, one, two, three, if he could. How he would bully them, ‘and knock them about, just as his master did to him; and make them carry home the soot sacks, while he rode before them on his donkey, with a pipe in his mouth and a flower in his button-hole, like a king at the head of his army. Yes, there were good times coming; and, when his master let him have a pull at the leavings of his beer, Tom was the jolliest boy in the whole town.

One day a smart little groom rode into the court where ‘Tom lived. Tom was just hiding behind a wall, to heave half a brick at his horse’s legs, as is the custom of that country when they welcome strangers; but the groom saw him, and halloed to him to know where Mr. Grimes, the chimney-sweep, lived. Now, Mr. Grimes was Tom’s own master, and Tom was a good man of business, and always civil to customers, so he put the half-brick down quietly behind the wall, and proceeded to take orders.

Mr. Grimes was to come up next morning to Sir John Harthover’s, at the Place, for his old chimney-sweep was gone to prison, and the chimneys wanted sweeping. And so he rode away, not giving Tom time to ask what the sweep had gone to prison for, which was a matter of interest to Tom, as he had been in prison once or twice himself. Moreover, the groom looked so very neat and clean, with his drab gaiters, drab breeches, drab jacket, snow-white tie with a smart pin in it, and clean round ruddy face, that Tom was offended and disgusted at his appearance, and considered him a stuck-up fellow, who gave himself airs | ‘because he wore smart clothes, and other people paid

| for them; and went behind the wall to fetch the half-brick | after all: but did not, remembering that he had come | in the way of business, and was, as it were, under a flag | of truce. | His master was so delighted at his new customer that he | knocked Tom, down out of hand, and drank more beer that | night than he usually did in two, in order to be sure of | getting up in time next morning; for the more a man’s | head aches when he wakes, the more glad he is to turn out, | and have a breath of fresh air. And, when he did get up | at four the next morning, he knocked Tom down again, | in order to teach him (as young gentlemen used to be | taught at public schools) that he must be an extra good boy | that day, as they were going to a very great house, and | might make a very good thing of it, if they could but give | satisfaction.

And Tom thought so likewise, and, indeed, would have | done and behaved his best, even without being knocked | down. For, of all places upon earth, Harthover Place (which he had never seen) was the most wonderful; and, of all men on earth, Sir John (whom he had seen, having | been sent to gaol by him twice) was the most awful. | Harthover Place was really a grand place, even for the | tich North country; with a house so large that in the frame- | breaking riots, which Tom could just remember, the Duke | of Wellington, with ten thousand soldiers and cannon to | match, were easily housed therein; at least, so Tom be- | lieved; with a park full of deer, which Tom believed to be tmonsters who were in the habit of eating children; with | miles of game preserves, in which Mr. Grimes and the | collier-lads poached at times, on which occasions Tom saw | pheasants, and wondered what they tasted like; with a | noble salmon-river, in which Mr. Grimes and his friends | would have liked to poach, but then they must have got into cold water, and that they did not like at all. In short, _Harthover was a grand place, and Sir John a grand old’ | man, whom even Mr. Grimes respected, for not only could , he send Mr. Grimes to prison when he deserved it, as he did | once or twice a week; not only did he own all the land about for miles; not only was he a jolly, honest, sensible squire as ever kept a pack of hounds, who would do what he thought right by his neighbours, as well as get what he thought right for himself, but, what was more, he weighed full fifteen stone, was nobody knew how many inches round the chest, and could have thrashed Mr. Grimes himself in fair fight, which very few folk round there could do, and which, my dear little boy, would not have been | right for him to do, as a great many things are not which one both can do, and would like very much to do. So Mr. Grimes touched his hat to him when he rode through the town, and called him a “‘ buirdly awd chap,” and his young ladies ‘‘ gradely lasses,’ which are two high compliments in the North country; and thought that that made up for his poaching Sir John’s pheasants; whereby you may perceive that Mr. Grimes had not been to a properly | inspected Government National School.

Now, I dare say, you_never.got.up at three o’clock on a midsummer.morning. Some people get up then because they want to catch salmon; and some, because they want to climb Alps; and a great many more, because they must, like Tom. But, I assure you, that three o’clock on a midsummer morning is the pleasantest time of all the twenty-four hours, and all the three hundred and sixty-five - days; and why every one does not get up then, I never could tell, save that they are all determined to spoil their nerves and their complexions, by doing all night what they might just as well do all day. But Tom, instead of going out to dinner at half-past eight at night, and to a ball at ten, and finishing off somewhere between twelve and four, went to bed at seven, when his master went to the public-house, and slept like a dead pig: for which reason he was as piert* asa game-cock (who always gets up early to wake the maids), and just ready to get up when the fine gentlemen and ladies were just ready to go to bed. 4

So he and his master set out; Grimes rode the donkey in front, and Tom and the brushes walked behind; out of the court, and up the street, past the closed window.

* Lively. 24 shutters, and the winking weary policemen, and the roofs all shining grey in the grey dawn.

They passed through the pitmen’s village, all shut up and silent now; and through the turnpike; and then they were out in the real country, and plodding along the black dusty road, between black slag walls, with no sound but the groaning and thumping of the pit-engine in the next field. But soon the road grew white, and the walls likewise; "

and at the wall’s foot grew long grass and gay flowers, all | drenched with dew; and instead of the groaning of the pit-engine, they heard the skylark saying his matins high | up in the air, and the pit-bird warbling in the sedges, as he had warbled all night long.

All else was silent. For old Mrs. Earth was still fast asleep; and, like many pretty people, she looked still prettier asleep than awake. The great elm-trees in the gold-green meadows were fast asleep above, and the cows fast asleep beneath them; nay, the few clouds which were about were fast asleep likewise, and so tired that they had’ lain down on the earth to rest, in long white flakes and bars, among the stems of the elm-trees, and along the tops of the _alders by the stream, waiting for the sun to bid them rise: and go about their day’s business in the clear blue overhead.,

On they went; and Tom looked, and looked, for he never had been so far into the country before; and longed to get over a gate, and pick buttercups, and look for birds’, nests in the hedge; but Mr. Grimes was a man of business, _and would not have heard of that.

Soon they came up with a poor Irishwoman, trudging along with a bundle at her back. She had a grey shawl: over her head, and a crimson madder petticoat; so you; may be sure she came from Galway. She had neither shoes: nor stockings, and limped along as if she were tired and’ _footsore: but she was a very tall handsome woman, with _ bright grey eyes, and heavy black hair hanging about her cheeks. And she took Mr. Grimes’s fancy so much, that _ when he came alongside he called out to her:

_ “This is a hard road for a gradely foot like that. Will ye up, lass, and ride behind me? ”

But, perhaps, she did not admire Mr. Grimes’s look and voice; for she answered quietly:

“No, thank you; I’d sooner walk with your little lad here.”

“You may please yourself,” growled Grimes, and went on smoking.

So she walked beside Tom, and talked to him, and asked him where he lived, and what he knew, and all about himself, till Tom thought he had never met such a pleasantspoken woman. And she asked him, at last, whether he said his prayers; and seemed sad when he told her that he knew no prayers to say.

Then he asked her where she lived; and she said far away by the sea. And Tom asked her about the sea; and she told him how it rolled and roared over the rocks in winter nights, and lay still in the bright summer days, for the children to bathe and play in it; and many a story more, till Tom longed to go and see the sea, and bathe in it likewise.

At last, at the bottom of a hill, they came to a spring: not such a spring as you see here, which soaks up out of a white gravel in the bog, among red fly-catchers, and pink bottle-heath, and sweet white orchis; nor such a one as you may see, too, here, which bubbles up under the warm sandbank in the hollow lane, by the great tuft of lady ferns, and makes the sand dance reels at the bottom, day and night, all the year round: not such a spring as either of those: but a real North country limestone fountain, like one of those in Sicily or Greece, where the old heathen fancied the nymphs sat cooling themselves the hot summer’s day, while the shepherds peeped at them from behind the bushes. Out of a low cave of rock, at the foot of a limestone crag, the great fountain rose, quelling and bubbling, and gurgling, so clear that you could not tell where the water ended and the air began; and ran away under the road, a stream large enough to turn a mill; among blue geranium, and golden globe-flower, and wild raspberry, and the bird-chérry with its tassels of snow.

And there Grimes stopped, and looked; and Tom looked too. Tom was wondering whether anything lived in that dark cave, and came out at night to fly in the meadows. But Grimes was not wondering at all. Without a word, he got off his donkey, and clambered over the low road wall, and knelt down, and began dipping his ugly head into the spring—and very dirty he made it.

Tom was picking the flowers as fast as he could. The Irishwoman helped him, and showed him how to tie them up; and a very pretty nosegay they had made between them. But when he saw Grimes actually wash, he stopped, quite astonished; and when Grimes had finished, and began shaking his ears to dry them, he said:

_ “ Why, master, I never saw you do that before.”

“Nor will again, most likely. *“I'wasn’t for cleanliness I did it, but for coolness. I’d be ashamed to want washing _ every week or so, like any smutty collier-lad.”

“TI wish I might go and dip my head in,” said poor little Tom. “‘ It must be as good as putting it under the town-pump; and there is no beadle here to drive a chap ees

“Thou come along,” said Grimes, “ what dost want with washing thyself? Thou did not drink half a gallon of beer last night, like me.”

. “YT don’t care for you,” said naughty Tom, and ran down to the stream, and began washing his face.

Grimes was very sulky, because the woman preferred Tom’s company to his; so he dashed at him with horrid words, and tore him up from his knees, and began beating him. But Tom was accustomed to that, and got his head safe between Mr. Grimes’s legs, and kicked his shins with all his might.