LATER NOVELS. GENERAL ESTIMATE.
Few of Miss Edgeworth’s stories
were written quickly. In her case, however, the
Horatian maxim was scarcely justified, for her best
tales are almost without exception those written with
a running pen. Patronage was one that was longest
in hand, having originated in 1787 from a story told
by Mr. Edgeworth to amuse his wife when recovering
from her confinement. From her frequent mention
of it, quite contrary to her usual custom, one may
conclude she did not find it an easy task. In
1811 she writes: “I am working away at Patronage,
but cannot at all come up to my idea of what it should
be.” We do not know whether it ever did,
but whatever her verdict may finally have been, it
is certain that Patronage, though one of the
longest and most ambitious of her stories, is as a
story one of the least successful. It is labored;
art and design are too apparent; the purpose has too
fatally hampered the invention. There is no denying
that, while containing many excellent scenes, much
shrewd observation of character, Patronage drags,
and the reader is weary ere he has done. It is
both artificial and common-place, and what is more
unfortunate still, the whole fabric is built upon a
confusion of premises. Its purpose is to demonstrate
the evils that result from patronage, and to show
how much more successful are those who rely only upon
their own exertions. Both premises involve a petitio
principii. A capable person helped at the
outset may have cause eternally to bless the patron
who enabled him to start at once in his proper groove,
instead of wasting strength and time after the endeavor often
vain to find it unassisted. Had she
attempted to prove that it was better for each person
to fight his way alone, because this was better for
the moral development of his character, it would have
been another matter. But this is not the line
she pursues. There are no such subtle psychic
problems worked out. The whole question is treated
from the surface only, and the two families chosen
to “point the moral” are not fairly contrasted.
The Percys, the good people who shrink from help so
nervously that they would rather do themselves harm
than accept a helping hand, possess every virtue and
capacity under the sun, while their rivals and relatives,
the Falconers, have no resources but those of cringing
falsehood. They are absolutely incapable, have
learnt nothing, do not care to learn, and depend entirely
upon finding a patron. They further rely upon
their luck that, when settled in their various posts,
no untoward accident may reveal their inability to
fill them. Thus sound morality, good sense and
an independent spirit are contrasted with meanness,
folly and ignorance. As an eminent critic has
well remarked: “The rival families are so
unequal that they cannot be handicapped for the race.
The one has all the good qualities, the other almost
all the bad. Reverse the position; encumber the
Percys (to borrow a Johnsonian phrase) with any amount
of help; leave the Falconers entirely to their own
resources; and the sole difference in the result under
any easily conceivable circumstances will be that the
Percys will rise more rapidly and the Falconers will
never rise at all.”
The materials of the fable, therefore,
are not happy; neither, such as they are, are they
artfully managed. The working out is bald, the
moral bluntly enforced. Never was Miss Edgeworth
more weighted by her aim, never were the fallacies
of her cut-and-dried theories better illustrated.
In this, her longest work, it is specially evident
that her manner was not adapted to what the French
call ouvrages de longue haleine. But if
we at once dismiss from our minds the idea of deriving
instruction from the fable, if we judiciously skip
the dull pages of rhetoric or moral preachings that
are interspersed, we can gain much real enjoyment
from this book, whose characters are excellently planned
and consistently carried out. Patronage contains
some of Miss Edgeworth’s finest creations.
The Percys as a whole are
Too
bright and good
For human nature’s daily
food;
but even in their family had grown
up a character whom we can love, with whom we can
sympathize the warm-hearted, generously
impulsive, sprightly Rosamond, who, according to her
own testimony, resembled her creator. Caroline
Percy is one of the very wise, self-contained and
excellent young persons who so often appear under different
disguises in Miss Edgeworth’s tales. She
is exactly one of those heroines to whom applies the
wickedly witty remark put by Bulwer into the mouth
of Darrell in What Will He Do with It? “Many
years since I read Miss Edgeworth’s novels,
and in conversing with Miss Honoria Vipont methinks
I confer with one of Miss Edgeworth’s heroines so
rational, so prudent, so well-behaved, so free from
silly romantic notions, so replete with solid information,
moral philosophy and natural history; so sure to regulate
her watch and her heart to the precise moment, for
the one to strike and the other to throb, and to marry
at last a respectable, steady husband, whom she will
win with dignity, and would love with decorum!
a very superior girl indeed."
There is also a certain family likeness
in the good fathers of her books. They are, as
a rule, preternaturally wise, circumspect, and apt
to resemble Mr. Edgeworth. It has been well remarked
that though we are told that a just man sins seven
times a day, Miss Edgeworth’s just heroes and
heroines never fall. Undoubtedly there is a want
of variety as well as of human nature in her good
characters, but not so in her bad. There she
ranges over so wide a field that we can but wonder
whence she gathered all this vast experience.
She owned a perfect mine of social satire, and the
skill with which she drew upon it and shaped her various
characters, so as to give them a positive personal
interest and vitality, is astounding. She is
equally happy in her villains, her fools, her fops;
indeed, in painting these latter species Miss Edgeworth
is unrivalled. She seemed to know every weakness
and absurdity of which human nature is capable.
The manner in which she holds this up to view is sometimes
almost remorseless, as from the altitude of one who
has absolutely nothing in common with such creatures.
In Patronage we have several such. Inimitable
are the two Clays, brothers, men of large fortunes,
which they spend in all manner of extravagance and
profligacy, not from inclination, but merely to purchase
admission into fine company. They are known respectively
as French and English Clay; the one affecting a preference
for all that is French; the other, a cold, reserved,
dull man, as affectedly denouncing everything foreign,
boasting loudly that everything about him is English,
that only what is English is worthy attention; “but
whether this arises from love of his country or contempt
of his brother” does not appear. If there
is anything to choose between these two capital creations,
English Clay is perhaps the better. His slow,
surly reserve, supercilious silence and solemn self-importance
are wonderfully sustained; but hardly less excellent
is his brother, with his affected tones, his foreign
airs, and quick, talkative vanity. Lord William
is another remarkably well-drawn picture. He
is an upright, honorable and enlightened nobleman,
who constantly fails to do himself justice, because
he labors under that morbid shyness known as mauvaise
honte, so common in England, so rare out of her
borders. The patron, Lord Oldborough, a high-minded,
austere, but absorbingly ambitious man, is elaborated
with much care and penetration. Very skillfully
are we made to feel that his vices are rather those
of his position than of his heart. Nor must Buckhurst
Falconer be passed over, the only member of the Falconer
family who has one redeeming feature. He once
had a heart, and, though weak as water, and swayed
by the low principles that prevail in his family, he
cannot succeed in stifling every good or noble feeling,
though he has striven hard to compass this end.
These will crop forth occasionally, though they cannot
stay his descent down the path of corruption.
But they permit us to feel for him, to pity him; he
is no cut-and-dried mechanical knave.
A book that contains so many fine
conceptions cannot be called a failure, even to-day,
and since Miss Edgeworth’s contemporaries admitted
her premises, it is no wonder that on its appearance
Patronage achieved a great success. In
those days, when novel-writing had not become so much
of an art as now, the rapid downfall of the whole
Falconer family within the space of a few weeks presented
nothing ludicrous. Such incidents were familiar
in romance, and held allowable there, even if known
to be untrue to life. We now judge from the latter
standard only, and reject, even in fiction, the improbable.
In Patronage, Miss Edgeworth’s fondness
for poetical justice has certainly carried her very
far. Here, as in other of her stories, difficulties
are not allowed to develop and be overcome gradually,
but the knot is cut in the most ludicrously childish
and awkward manner, a summary catastrophe is imagined,
so that the modern reader cannot forbear a smile.
Still, Patronage remains a remarkable book,
replete with sound sense, acute observation and rapid
graphic illustrations of character.
Scarcely so Harrington.
Here, as in Patronage, Miss Edgeworth had set
herself to work out a moral, this time an apology for
Jews. It was written to suggestion, and was on
a theme that lay entirely outside the domain of her
experience. She had to evolve a Jew out of her
moral consciousness, and her delineation is as little
successful as that of other writers who have set themselves
the same task. Her zeal outran her judgment;
her elaborate apology is feeble; and if the Jews needed
vindication they could hardly be flattered by one of
this nature, for she does not introduce us to a true
Jew at all. Her ideas were based upon that rare
and beautiful character, Moses Mendelssohn, a character
as little typical of the Jewish as of any other race
or religious creed, but common to all men who think
and feel philosophically and have raised themselves
above the petty prejudices of mankind. This was
as much as to say that only a Jew who was no Jew was
admirable and estimable. And even his daughter
Berenice, whom we are led to regard throughout as a
Jewess, is finally discovered to have been born of
a Christian mother and christened in her youth, so
that her lover, Harrington, can marry her without
any sacrifice to his social and racial prejudices.
This is weak indeed, since the whole purpose of the
story was to overcome the baseless dislike Harrington
had from childhood entertained for the mere name of
Jew. It would, therefore, have been far more to
the purpose had his prejudices been really, and not
apparently, overcome. The truth is that Miss
Edgeworth herself was a lady not free from prejudices;
and a regard for the opinion of the world, for birth
and social station, was one of these. At the
eleventh hour she probably could not reconcile herself
to letting her hero, a man of good society, marry a
Spanish Jewess; and since he had shown himself willing
to do so, carried away by his deep and sincere feeling,
she doubtless held that he had done enough, and so
terrible a fate must be averted from his head.
The story could not and did not satisfy
Miss Mordecai’s requirements, though she accepted
it as an attempt at making amends. But the authoress
herself recognized in later life that her friend “had
no reason to be satisfied with it, as the Jewess turns
out to be a Christian. Yet she was good enough
to accept it as a peace-offering, and to consider that
this was an Irish blunder, which, with the best intentions,
I could not avoid.”
Contemporary opinion certainly treated
Harrington as not one of the happiest of their
favorite novelist’s stories. Yet with all
its palpable defects there is such an admixture of
excellence that Harrington should not be left
unread, even though we may regret that such capital
figures, painted with such nice skill and delicate
discrimination, should be imbedded in so puerile a
tale. The characters are keenly and lightly drawn,
standing out boldly and clearly. The jargon of
society is once more successfully reproduced, as well
as those fashionable ladies who hide the claws of
a tigress under a velvet paw, and whose complex and
shifting nature Miss Edgeworth understood so well and
reproduced so faithfully. How she, with her simple,
direct character, came to comprehend them so fully,
is almost a marvel. But intuition of character
was a forte with Miss Edgeworth and the grand secret
of her novelistic success. Her truth of touch
was remarkable. Lady Anne Mowbray is a perfect
model of that mixture of feline grace and obstinate
silliness which the world so much admires in its young
ladies; while her mother’s insignificance, which
is not disguised by a stately, formal manner, is delineated
and sustained to perfection. Lord Mowbray is yet
another of Miss Edgeworth’s marvelously acute
portraits of a true man of the world, of an evil nature.
This is concealed by a fair semblance and good manners,
so that it is needful to know him well to guess at
the villain that is hidden under this attractive disguise.
Miss Edgeworth is at her ease and
at her happiest in Ormond. Here she is
on Irish ground, always for her the best, where she
moves with most abandon; where she casts aside
for a time some of her cold philosophy, and allows
herself to appear as the vivacious Irishwoman, which
at heart she was. Ireland, with its long history
of bloodshed and social disorder, had none of those
romantic incidents to offer to the novelist that were
to be found in the equally wild but more noble and
chivalric history of Scotland. Hence Sir Walter
Scott had an easier task to perform than Miss Edgeworth.
The history of which he treated allowed of judicious
and poetic gilding. It lifted into more romantic
regions. Irish history has, unfortunately, never
been elevating, soul-ennobling. It is too much
the record of rebellious séditions and foolish
intrigues, lightly entered upon, inconsistently carried
out. Such a history could scarcely kindle romantic
ideas and desires in the hearts of youth, as did Scott’s
pictures; and Miss Edgeworth did wisely in her Irish
tales to leave history carefully on one side, and
to deal only with the Hibernian character and the
delineation of social manners. For many years
the mere name of Irishman had been regarded in England
as a term of reproach, and they figured as buffoons
in all the novels and plays of the period. It
was Miss Edgeworth who first came to the rescue of
her countrymen, and she did this by no exaggerated
praises, but by sympathetic yet true presentment.
Her national story of Castle Rackrent had established
for her a reputation as a relentlessly truthful writer.
She had invested the tale with none of the poetical
glamor employed by most historical novelists, who seek
to hide from sight the ugly sores that exist in the
society they depict, and thus endeavor to make us
deem that those good old times of which they write
had, despite their lawlessness, some power and strength
of goodness unknown to us. Miss Edgeworth was
too realistic a portrait painter to employ such methods;
hence, where Sir Walter Scott’s rich imagination
led him at times astray, she, on her part, was often
hampered for want of that faculty. Still, her
very reserve was fortunate, considering the theme
on which it was exercised, as matters Irish have for
some cause never been treated with judicial calmness.
Hence to no writer are the Irish so much indebted.
Their less judicious friends were satisfied with indignantly
repelling the charges made against them, while national
partiality magnified all their gifts. Miss Edgeworth
felt with them, loved them, but she was not blinded
by her affection. Starting from the assumption
that the prejudices which existed against her countrymen
arose from imperfect acquaintance with them, she candidly
presented them just as they were, with both their
virtues and vices unvarnished.
After Castle Rackrent, Ormond
was certainly the finest effort of Miss Edgeworth’s
genius, and it is scarcely fanciful to believe that
it owes some of its excellence to the influence exerted
upon her mind by Waverley. Had she but
had Scott’s eye for nature, and introduced us
to some of the beautiful scenery in which her story
occurs, the book might worthily rank beside any of
the Scotch Waverley novels. Was it owing to Scott’s
influence, also, that we have in this case a less
obtrusive moral?
The story of Ormond is in some
respects the reverse of Vivian. The hero
possesses innate force of character, and we watch in
his career the progress of a mind that has not been
cultivated, but shows itself capable of being educated
by circumstances. Ormond is one of those persons
in whom native intuition takes the place of instruction,
and who of their proper strength are equal to all
emergencies. The complications of the story arise
from these inward propensities of his nature and the
contending influences from without with which he has
to grapple. He was an orphan who had been adopted
by Sir Ulick O’Shane, but had not been educated,
because Sir Ulick deemed that there was no use giving
him the education of a landed gentleman when he was
not likely to have an estate. An unfortunate
difference with Sir Ulick’s wife obliged Ormond
to leave his guardian’s roof and avail himself
of the hospitality of a cousin, Cornelius O’Shane,
who called himself King of the Black Islands, after
his estate. More familiarly this original is spoken
of as King Corny. Besides being one of the most
delightful creations in romantic literature, he is
an instructive study towards the comprehension of the
Irish character. Macaulay pointed out, in speaking
of the aboriginal aristocracy of Ireland, that Miss
Edgeworth’s King Corny belonged to a later and
much more civilized generation, but added that “whoever
has studied that admirable portrait can form some
notion of what King Corny’s great-grandfather
must have been like.” King Corny is a most
genuine character; there is no nonsense, no false reticence
about him; he is hasty and violent at times, but he
is not ashamed to show it, neither does he hide his
warm, kind heart. His frank and unsuspecting
nature makes him adored by all his tenantry, none of
whom would wrong their king. There is not a page
in which he figures that does not furnish charming
reading, and there is not a reader but will resent
that King Corny is made to die so early in the book.
It is all the more vexatious to have the most original
and attractive figure thus removed, because it was
needless for the due development of the story.
That the interest, which certainly flags after his
demise, is sustained at all is a proof that the story,
as a story, is above Miss Edgeworth’s average.
And indeed, attention is well maintained to the end,
notwithstanding a few most marvelously unnatural incidents
that occur in the latter portion and stagger belief.
They once more reveal Miss Edgeworth’s curious
clumsiness in getting her brain-children out of the
difficulties in which she has involved them.
The quick alternation of laughter and tears that is
a marked feature of her Irish tales recurs in the earlier
portions of the book, where the scene is laid in the
Black Islands, of which Harry Ormond becomes “prince
presumptive.” The famous postilion’s
letter in the Absentee is hard run by the letter
King Corny writes to Ormond when offering him his
hospitality. Admirable, too, is the account of
his reception by the single-hearted, generous, though
eccentric monarch. This reception scene is characteristic
of the primitive and somewhat dissolute manners of
the time. Indeed, the whole of Harry Ormond’s
residence in the Black Islands affords Miss Edgeworth
opportunities for exercising her peculiar felicity
in displaying manners and customs. She does not
present these by merely a few prominent and striking
traits, but with delicate skill she insinuates little
touches here and there that give local color and perfume
to the whole. It is quite true that Miss Edgeworth’s
books bear reading twice; once for the general impression,
the second time to see how cunningly this impression
is produced.
Miss Edgeworth not having in the case
of Ormond weighted herself with a text, we
have hardly any of her “unco’ gude”
characters, but many of those mixtures that are truer
to poor humanity. The exceptions are Lady and
Miss Annaly, some of her monotonously similar pattern
women, and Dr. Cambray, one of her dull and wooden
immaculate men. Happily they appear but little
in the story. The most able character, after King
Corny, is Sir Ulick O’Shane, the political schemer
and trimmer. A more vulgar or common-place writer
would have represented him as an offensive hypocrite.
Miss Edgeworth does not paint him in repellent colors,
but lets him reveal his baseness little by little,
and rather against his will, until the final catastrophe
presents him in all his native vileness. His
easy and agreeable social manners, his gentlemanly
mode of feeling and acting, due, no doubt, to a long
inheritance of gentlemanly traditions, are shown with
profound penetration. It is a part of Miss Edgeworth’s
power to evince how “great effects from trivial
causes spring;” she makes us vividly realize
all the circumstances under which her events occur.
Thus we witness their development, instead of being
only presented with the final results. This was
rather a new departure in her day, when events finished,
cut and dried, were alone considered worthy of note.
In her conversations she shows considerable dramatic
skill: they are enlivened not only by looks and
gestures, but by what is often as significant, by
moments of silence, by changes of countenance, by
all the minor matters that distinguish spoken from
written words. Neither in dramatic presentation
of incident, nor in picturesqueness and vividness
of character-drawing, has Miss Edgeworth ever touched
a higher standard than in Ormond. The
fact that it was written and sent to press so quickly,
in order to gratify her sick father, proved in its
favor. The result was that it was penned with
more spontaneity, was less carefully worked up than
either Patronage or Belinda, or even
the Absentee, and consequently it reads more
natural. There are fewer forced sentences, fewer
attempts at pointed and epigrammatic writing.
These epigrammatic sentences, which, with but few exceptions,
are but half epigrams, are somewhat aggravating, especially
if too constantly repeated, since they thus picture
neither common nor uncommon talk. It is this
tendency, carried to its highest expression in the
Modern Griselda, that makes Miss Edgeworth’s
personages, while acting and thinking like real people,
not always talk as men and women would. As a
rule, however, her style is easy, finished, flexible,
and at times racy, and while seldom rising to eloquence,
never sinking to tameness. Now and then it is
a trifle cold, and she is too fond of erudite or far-fetched
illustrations. The conversation of her day was,
to use the language of the day, “polite;”
that is to say, slightly stilted, prim, and confined
within narrow bounds, and that she reflected it is
a matter of course, but, as a whole, she managed to
keep herself singularly free from its worst features.
Indeed, her work was really of first-rate quality,
and if we read it without troubling ourselves about
her ethical designs or expecting to find a cleverly-told
plot, we cannot fail to derive enjoyment from it,
or to comprehend why her contemporaries rated her so
highly, though they, on their part, perhaps, valued
her moral teaching more than the present generation,
which does not believe in mere sermons as panaceas.
Indeed, now-a-days, the fashion is too much to divorce
art from didactic intention. In those days it
was the fashion to over-rate the service works of
imagination can render virtue.
It would be easy to bring forward
testimony regarding the fervent admiration bestowed
on Miss Edgeworth by her contemporaries. She
certainly missed, but she only just missed, the highest
greatness. Did Madame de Stael put her sure finger
on the cause when she said, after reading Fashionable
Tales and expressing her great admiration, “Que
Miss Edgeworth était digne de l’enthousiasme,
maïs qu’elle s’est perdue dans la triste
utilité?” Yet to preach utility was held
by Miss Edgeworth as a duty; but for this she might
perhaps never have written at all, since no pecuniary
needs drove her to authorship. And allowing for
this moral strain in her works, and the blemishes that
result thence, which compared with all she achieved
are but trivial, in estimating her work as a whole,
we may well afford to change what Chateaubriand called
“the petty and meagre criticism of defects for
the comprehensive and prolific criticism of beauties.”
We must not look for features such as she cannot furnish,
any more than we should seek for figs upon an apple-tree.
There are certain things Miss Edgeworth can do, and
do inimitably; there are others entirely foreign to
her sphere. Her novels have been described as
a sort of essence of common sense, and even more happily
it has been said that it was her genius to be wise.
We must be content to take that which she can offer;
and since she offers so much, why should we not be
content? Miss Edgeworth wrote of ordinary human
life, and not of tremendous catastrophes or highly
romantic incidents. Hers was no heated fancy.
She had no comprehension of those fiery passions,
those sensibilities that burn like tinder at contact
with the feeblest spark; she does not believe in chance,
that favorite of so many novelists; neither does she
deal in ruined castles, underground galleries nor
spectres, as was the fashion in her day. In her
stories events mostly occur as in sober and habitual
fact. In avoiding the stock-in-trade of her contemporaries
she boldly struck out a line of her own which answers
in some respects to the modern realistic novel, though
devoid, of course, of its anatomical and physiological
character. She used materials which her predecessors
had scorned as worthless. She endeavored to show
that there is a poetry in self-restraint as well as
in passion, though at the very time she wrote it was
the fashion to sneer at this, and to laud as fine that
self-forgetfulness, that trampling down of all obstacles,
no matter of what nature, sung by Byron and Shelley.
She permitted just that amount of tenderness which
the owner could keep under due control. She had
no taste for what was named the grandeur, beauty and
mystery of crime. She seldom devoted her attention
to crimes at all, but gave it to those minor virtues
and vices that contribute more largely to our daily
sufferings or enjoyments. The novels of her day
were too apt to bring forward angels or monsters,
and though she also erred at times in the former respect,
yet on the whole she departed from it, and was among
the first to strike out that path since so successfully
trodden, especially by female novelists, and notably
by George Eliot that of interesting us
in persons moving in the common walks of men.
In her Popular and Moral Tales she was
encumbered like a clergyman in his sermon, and hence
a too solemn and rather stifling air of moral reflection
is apt to pervade. That she overcame it as much
as she did, that her novels are as attractive and
readable as they are, is to the credit of her genius,
which not even Mr. Edgeworth could wholly overlay and
stifle, and she thus with few exceptions triumphed
over that tendency to the “goody,” from
which it seems so difficult for works intended for
edification to keep themselves exempt. Next to
her children’s and Irish tales she is most excellent
in her studies from fashionable life. Her heroes
and heroines moving in the dismal round of inanitiés,
miscalled diversions, are portraits touched up with
nice care in detail, with a keen eye for subtleties
and demi-tints. She loved to expose the false
and mawkish doctrines thought fit for women.
Her fashionable heroines followed the sentimental
teachings of Rousseau and Mrs. Chapone, and held that
the highest mission of woman is to please, and that
she should be not only excused but commended if she
employed every art to compass that end. High-mindedness
was a factor unknown or at least unadmitted in their
philosophy; fashion governed all; to be in the fashion
was the main object of their lives. Miss Edgeworth
did not condemn this too mercilessly or from too lofty
a platform. Her morality, though unexceptionable,
is never austere; she allows and even sanctions worldly
wisdom within certain limits; she was too much a woman
of the world herself to set up Utopian or ascetic
standards. To make conscience agree with the
demands of polite opinion was admitted to be a desirable
and important factor. After all, we are all more
or less affected by the mental atmosphere in which
we live; none of us can wholly get outside the spiritual
air that environs us, and see things from different
points of view; and Miss Edgeworth could do so less
than many, because she was less highly endowed with
sympathetic imagination. Thus her shortcomings
are, in her case, more than in that of many others,
the fault of her surroundings and education.
For, placed immediately under Mr. Edgeworth’s
personal influence, his powers of suasion and plausible
presentment, it was not easy to escape, and his daughter
never questioned his final wisdom or desired such
escape. In a critical reading of her books it
is amusing to note how ever and again her father crops
forth. Thus her heroes constantly ask what manner
of education the young lady of their choice has received,
because as “prudent men” they feel that
only on this can they base their future hopes of happiness.
And yet, strangely enough, with this absolute faith
in the power of education is combined a belief that
nothing, not even this almighty thing, can overcome
the fact that if a girl be the daughter of a woman
who has at any time forgotten herself, no matter how
good the education may have been, no matter that this
parent may have died at her birth or the child never
lived beside her, Miss Edgeworth’s heroes regard
her as necessarily lost consider that it
is impossible she should continue in the straight
path. They will stifle their strongest feelings;
make themselves and the girl miserable rather than
marry her. A special instance of this occurs
in the Absentee, where Lord Colambre
prefers to break off his engagement with his adored
cousin, the charming and high-spirited Grace Nugent,
rather than wed her after he hears a rumor that her
mother has not been legally married to her father.
Hence a deus ex machina has to be evoked, who,
like all such gods, cuts the Gordian knot in bungling
fashion. After attributing all possibilities to
education, there is quite a comic inconsistency in
this method of visiting the offenses of the wrong-doer
upon the victim. But Miss Edgeworth, or rather
her father, appeared to have no comprehension of the
fact that misfortunes of birth most frequently act
on the children as a deterrent; so that they make,
as it were, hereditary expiation. But here appears
the want of tenderness in Miss Edgeworth’s work a
quantity she owned as a woman and lacked as an author.
The two were certainly curiously different at times.
But though not tender, she is always amiable and kindly,
even though she does not look far beneath the surface
and never deals with the soul. Unknown to her
were its silent tragedies, its conflicts, hopes and
fears. Those feelings that did not manifest themselves
in life or action were beyond her range of comprehension.
She had a genius for observing such things as can be
observed; the lower depths are never stirred by herself
or her characters. But it was her genius for
observation, her power for reproducing what she had
seen, that made her greatness a greatness
limited in its extent, but none the less greatness
of its kind. Her works fully merit the admiration
they have so long enjoyed.
An amusing summing-up of Miss Edgeworth’s
novels is given by Leigh Hunt in his poem, Blue
Stocking Revels. Apollo gives a ball to all
the eminent contemporary authoresses, and criticises
his guests as they enter.
At the sight of Miss Edgeworth he says:
“Here
comes one
As sincere and kind as lives
under the sun;
Not poetical, eh? nor much
given to insist
On utilities not in utility’s
list.
(Things nevertheless without
which the large heart
Of my world would but play
a poor husk of a part.)
But most truly within her
own sphere sympathetic,
And that’s no mean help
towards the practic-poetic.”
Then smiling, he said a most
singular thing
He thanked her for making
him “saving of string!”
But for fear she should fancy
he did not approve her in
Matters more weighty, praised
her Manoeuvring.
A book which, if aught could
pierce craniums so dense,
Might supply cunning folks
with a little good sense.
“And her Irish”
(he added), “poor souls! so impressed him,
He knew not if most they amused
or distressed him.”
And now finally we are confronted
with the question, will Miss Edgeworth’s works
live, or will they be left to grow dusty upon the
library-shelves, in company with many names much respected
in their day? Who shall say? The novel is,
of its very essence, the most ephemeral style of literature,
since it deals with the ever-shifting pictures of
its time. Nor is this unjust. The novelist
of worth receives, as a rule, his meed of recognition
in his life-time, which is not the lot of writers
in all branches of literature. On the other hand,
to the student of manners, novels have a value no historian
can outvie, and on this account alone Miss Edgeworth’s
should not be left unread. But not only on this
account, for it is perhaps just in this direction
that they err somewhat; for though no doubt true pictures
of one section of society, there is no denying that
Miss Edgeworth’s outlook is not catholic; that
the world, as she saw it, was prescribed almost exclusively
within the bounds of so-called “good society” a
circle in which the heights and depths of life and
feeling are rarely touched, because of the conventional
boundaries within which its inmates are cooped.
Whence, then, the undeniable fact
that Miss Edgeworth has gradually grown to join that
band of authors known as standard, who are more spoken
of than read? There is so much in her mode of
life-conception that is entirely modern, so much that
is in keeping rather with the advanced school of utilitarian
ethicists than with the more sentimental school of
her day, that it certainly does appear puzzling why
she has not better maintained her place; for it would
be idle to pretend that she has maintained it such
as it was in her life-time. It cannot be because
her plots are ill-constructed. When at her best
she holds attention notwithstanding. Nor does
an author’s power to engross us at all depend
on his constructive faculty. Indeed, some of those
writers who most hold their readers have distinctly
lacked this gift, which often exists independently
of fine novelistic qualities. In portions of
her work Miss Edgeworth need fear no rivals. Why
is it, then, that in attempting an estimate of her
powers, while allowing to her first-class excellences,
we have to deny her a first-class place, thus condoning,
to some extent, those who leave her unread to turn
to less edifying and admirable writers? Is it
not because there is absent from Maria Edgeworth’s
writings that divine spark of the ideal that alone
allows works to live for all time that
spark which it is given to many an inferior author
to own, while it is here denied to a woman of great
intellectual power? While preeminently upright,
high-principled and virtuous, Miss Edgeworth’s
ethics are pervaded by a certain coldness and self-consciousness
that irresistibly give to her good people a pharisaical
character; an impression from which it is always difficult
and at times impossible for the reader to shake himself
free. Her heroes and heroines act with too little
spontaneity; they seem to calculate and know too surely
the exact sum total of ultimate gain that will, in
a justly-ordered world, accrue to them for their good
actions, their self-sacrifice and devotion. Her
heroes are almost as calculating as her villains.
It is a severe test to which to put
an author, to read all his works consecutively; but
it is one that more surely than aught else enables
us to mark his place of merit. If he can stand
this trial he is decidedly above the average; if he
issue thence triumphant he may without hesitation
be pronounced among the great. Miss Edgeworth
weathers this test very respectably; indeed it, more
than all else, enforces upon the reader the great
versatility she displays in character and situation.
Yet it is just after such a perusal that the absolute
lack of the ideal element is so strongly borne in
upon us. As the thirsty mountaineer drinks eagerly
from the first clear streamlet that meets him trickling
down from the heights, so Miss Edgeworth’s readers
eagerly turn from her to some more spontaneous writer
to quench the drought that this continuous perusal
has engendered. Even in this prosaic and materialistic
age the belief in blue roses is happily not wholly
dead; and though we will not suffer the garden of
a novelist to grow no other plant, because we know
that one filled with blue roses only is out of nature
in this terrestrial globe, yet, in a well-ordered parterre,
we do require that the blue rose should also have
its place. It is to novelist and poet that the
cultivation of this rare and heaven-born plant has
been entrusted. Miss Edgeworth knew it not.
Neither by hereditary tendency nor by training had
she made acquaintance with this wonder-flower, for
whose botanical analysis Mr. Edgeworth would have
searched a Flora in vain, and whose existence he would
therefore stoutly have denied.
With “little stores of maxims,”
like Tennyson’s faithless love, Miss Edgeworth,
acting from the very highest motives, after careful
and philosophic deliberation, at personal suffering
to herself, in her printed words, preached down the
instincts of the heart. She knew not that excellent
as utilitarianism is in its place and sphere, there
is something more, something beyond, that is needed
to form the basis upon which human actions are set
in motion. For the spiritual and divine element
in man she made no allowance, and it was this that
drew down on her, from shallow contemporary critics,
that condemnation of want of religion, flung in a
narrow, dogmatic spirit, that wounded her so deeply.
Outwardly the Edgeworths conformed to the established
faith, and though liberal in the sense of being wide-minded,
they were not in religious matters advanced in thought.
Indeed, they thought little, if at all, of the next
world, finding full occupation for their minds in
this. Miss Edgeworth was hemmed in by the visible;
she did not seek to justify the ways of God to man;
life was to her no riddle; if man would but act rightly,
all would be well; she deemed that it is given into
his own hands to do good or evil, to be happy or the
reverse. There was in her nothing of the poet
and the seer; and by so much as she fails to speak
to humanity in all its aspects, by so much she fails
to take rank among the greatest teachers of our race.
But with wisdom and good sense she recognized her
limitations; she set herself a humbler but no less
useful task; she carried out her aim faithfully and
conscientiously, and by so much she too must be ranked
among the good and faithful servants who do the work
appointed by their Lord. And after all, is not
the harmony of humanity best served by the free emission
of the most diverse notes? Miss Edgeworth set
herself to preach utilitarianism and the minor virtues.
She succeeded; and in so far as she succeeded in that
which she set herself to do, life was for her successful,
and she was great.