Juliana Horatia Ewing And Her Books | Page 4

they inherit and
those they receive in baptism. The ruling peculiarity of a character is
apt to show itself early in life, and it showed itself in Madam Liberality
when she was a little child.
Plum-cakes were not plentiful in her home when Madam Liberality was
young, and, such as there were, were of the "wholesome" kind--plenty
of breadstuff, and the currants and raisins at a respectful distance from
each other. But, few as the plums were, she seldom ate them. She
picked them out very carefully, and put them into a box, which was
hidden under her pinafore.
When we grown-up people were children, and plum-cake and
plum-pudding tasted very much nicer than they do now, we also picked
out the plums. Some of us ate them at once, and had then to toil slowly
through the cake or pudding, and some valiantly dispatched the plainer
portion of the feast at the beginning, and kept the plums to sweeten the
end. Sooner or later we ate them ourselves, but Madam Liberality kept
her plums for other people.
When the vulgar meal was over--that commonplace refreshment
ordained and superintended by the elders of the household--Madame
Liberality would withdraw into a corner, from which she issued notes
of invitation to all the dolls. They were "fancy written" on curl-papers,
and folded into cocked hats.
Then began the real feast. The dolls came and the children with them.
Madam Liberality had no toy tea-sets or dinner-sets, but there were

acorn-cups filled to the brim, and the water tasted deliciously, though it
came out of the ewer in the night-nursery, and had not even been
filtered. And before every doll was a flat oyster-shell covered with a
round oyster-shell, a complete set of complete pairs which had been
collected by degrees, like old family plate. And, when the upper shell
was raised, on every dish lay a plum. It was then that Madam Liberality
got her sweetness out of the cake. She was in her glory at the head of
the inverted tea-chest, and if the raisins would not go round the empty
oyster-shell was hers, and nothing offended her more than to have this
noticed. That was her spirit, then and always. She could "do without"
anything, if the wherewithal to be hospitable was left to her.
When one's brain is no stronger than mine is, one gets very much
confused in disentangling motives and nice points of character. I have
doubted whether Madam Liberality's besetting virtue were a virtue at
all. Was it unselfishness or love of approbation, benevolence or
fussiness, the gift of sympathy or the lust of power, or was it something
else? She was a very sickly child, with much pain to bear, and many
pleasures to forego. Was it, as the doctors say, "an effort of nature" to
make her live outside herself, and be happy in the happiness of others?
All my earliest recollections of Julie (as I must call her) picture her as
at once the projector and manager of all our nursery doings. Even if she
tyrannized over us by always arranging things according to her own
fancy, we did not rebel, we relied so habitually and entirely on her to
originate every fresh plan and idea; and I am sure that in our turn we
often tyrannized over her by reproaching her when any of what we
called her "projukes" ended in "mulls," or when she paused for what
seemed to us a longer five minutes than usual in the middle of some
story she was telling, to think what the next incident should be!
It amazes me now to realize how unreasonable we were in our
impatience, and how her powers of invention ever kept pace with our
demands. These early stories were influenced to some extent by the
books that she then liked best to read--Grimm, Andersen, and
Bechstein's fairy tales; to the last writer I believe we owed her story
about a Wizard, which was one of our chief favourites. Not that she

copied Bechstein in any way, for we read his tales too, and would not
have submitted to anything approaching a recapitulation; but the
character of the little Wizard was one which fascinated her, and even
more so, perhaps, the quaint picture of him, which stood at the head of
the tale; and she wove round this skeleton idea a rambling romance
from her own fertile imagination.
I have specially alluded to the picture, because my sister's artistic as
well as literary powers were so strong that through all her life the two
ever ran side by side, each aiding and developing the other, so that it is
difficult to speak of them apart.[2]
[Footnote 2: Letter, May 14, 1876.]
Many of the stories she told us in childhood were