Kate Greenaway — Story, Setting & Ideas

ivalled among women, but rare indeed when united to attributes of genius.

It is true that what Kate Greenaway mainly did was to draw Christmas cards, illustrate a score or two of toy-books, and produce a number of dainty water-colour drawings; and that is the sum of her work. Why, then, is her name a household word in Great and Greater Britain, and even abroad where the mention of some of the greatest artists of England of to-day scarcely calls forth so much as an intelligent glance of recognition? It is because of the universal appeal she made, almost unconsciously, to the universal heart.

All who love childhood, even though they may not be blessed with the full measure of her insight and sympathy, all who love the fields and flowers and the brightness of healthy and sunny natures, must feel that Kate Greenaway had a claim on her country’s regard and upon the love of a whole generation. She was the Baby’s Friend, the Children’s Champion, who stood absolutely alone in her relations to the public. Randolph Caldecott laboured to amuse the little ones; Mr. Walter Crane, to entertain them. They aimed at interesting children in their drawings; but Kate Greenaway interested us in the children themselves. She taught us more of the charm of their ways than we had seen before; she showed us their graces, their little foibles, their thousand little prettinesses, the sweet little characteristics and psychology of their tender age, as no one else had done it before. What are Edouard Frère’s little children to hers? What are Fröhlich’s, what are Richter’s? She felt, with Douglas Jerrold, that ‘babes are earthly angels to keep us from the stars,’ and has peopled for us a fairy-world which we recognise nevertheless for our own. She had a hundred imitators (from whom she suffered enough), but which of them is a rival on her own ground? M. Boutet de Monvel was inspired by her; but with all his draughtsman’s talent and astonishing invention and resource, he has not what she has: he has given us the _insouciance_ of childhood, but at what sacrifice of touch; he has given us some of the beauty, but at what surrender of nearly all the lovableness and charm. And not babies and school-girls only, but maidens who are past the ignorance though not the innocence of childhood; not roses only, but all the flowers of the garden; not the fields only, but the fair landscape of the English country-side,—all these things Kate Greenaway has shown us, with winning and delightful quaintness, and has made us all the happier for her own happiness in them; and, showing us all these things, she has made us love them and her drawings the more for the teaching and the loveliness in them, and herself as well for having made them.

The children who welcomed her work when it first appeared are grown up now and are looking rather old, and those who bought the picture-books ‘for the little ones’ (as they said) but enjoyed them so much themselves, are mostly wearing spectacles. And all the while Kate Greenaway worked hard, making hundreds, and thousands, of her little pictures, and doing more for the pleasure and happiness of the little folks than most little folks know. So that now when her pencil and her brush are laid aside for ever, and herself has been called away, her life-task being done, it is surely well that we should remember her in affection, and wrap up the memory of her name in a little of the lavender of her love that filled her heart and welled over into her work.