By the force that is necessary to repress feelings we judge of the intensity of the feeling, and you always contrive to give us by intelligible but simple signs the measure of this force. Writers of inferior genius waste their words in describing feeling, in making those who pretend to be agitated by pa.s.sion describe the effects of that pa.s.sion and talk of the _rending of their hearts_, etc.--a gross blunder, as gross as any Irish blunder; for the heart cannot feel and describe its own feelings at the same moment. It is "_being like a bird in two places at once_." ... Did you really draw the characters from life, or did you invent them? You excel, I think, peculiarly, in avoiding what is commonly called _fine writing_--a sort of writing which I detest, which calls the attention away from the _thing_ to the _manner_, from the feeling to the language, which sacrifices everything to the sound, to the mere rounding of a period, which mistakes _stage effect_ for _nature_. All who are at all used to writing know and detect the _trick of the trade_ immediately, and, speaking for myself, I _know_ that the writing which has the least appearance of literary _manufacture_ almost always pleases me the best. It has more originality in narration of fict.i.tious events: it most surely succeeds in giving the idea of reality and in making the biographer for the time pa.s.s for nothing. But there are few who can in this manner bear the _mortification_ of staying behind the scenes. They peep out, eager for applause, and destroy all illusion by crying, "_I_ said it! _I_ wrote it! _I_ invented it all! Call me to the stage and crown me directly!"

Mrs. Inchbald had written praising _Patronage_, but she had also found some faults. To this Miss Edgeworth replied:--

MY DEAR MRS. INCHBALD:

n.o.body living but yourself could or would have written the letter I have just received from you. I wish you could have been present when it was read at our breakfast-table, that you might have seen what hearty entertainment and delight it gave to father, mother, author, aunts, brothers and sisters, all to the number of twelve.

Loud laughter at your utter detestation of poor Erasmus "as nauseous as his medicines," and your impatience at all the variety of impertinent characters who distract your attention from Lord Oldborough. Your clinging to him quite satisfied us all. It was on this character my father placed his dependence, and we all agreed that if you had not liked him there would have been no hope for us.

We are in the main of your opinion, that Erasmus and his letters are tiresome; but then please recollect that we had our moral to work out, and to show to the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of the reader how in various professions young men may get on without patronage. To the good of our moral we were obliged to sacrifice; perhaps we have sacrificed in vain. Wherever we are tiresome we may be pretty sure of this, and after all, as Madame de Stael says, "good intentions go for nothing in works of art"--much better in French, "_La bonne intention n'est de rien en fait d'esprit_."

You will make me foreswear truth altogether, for I find whenever I meddle with the least bit of truth I can make nothing of it, and it regularly turns out ill for me. Three things to which you object are facts, and that which you most abhor is most true. A n.o.bleman whom I never saw and whose name I have forgotten, else I should not have used the anecdote--the word which you thought I could not have written and ought not to have known how to spell. But pray observe, the _fair_ auth.o.r.ess does not say this odious word in her own proper person. Why impute to me the characteristic improprieties of my characters? I meant to mark the contrast between the niceness of his grace's pride and the coa.r.s.eness of his expression. I have now changed the word _severe_ into _coa.r.s.e_ to mark this to the reader. But I cannot alter without spoiling the fact. I tried if saliva would do, but it would not. So you must bear it as well as you can and hate His Grace of Greenwich as much as you will, but don't hate me. Did you hate Cervantes for drawing Sancho Panza eating behind the door?

My next fact, you say, is an old story. May be so, and may be it belonged to your writer originally, but I can a.s.sure you it happened very lately to a gentleman in Ireland, and only the parting with the servant was added. I admit the story is ill told and not worth telling, and you must admit that it is very natural or it would not have happened twice.

The sixpence under the seal is my third fact. This happened in our own family. One of my own grandfather's uncles forged a will, and my grandfather recovered the estate my father now possesses by the detection of the forgery of a sixpence under the seal.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, for liking the two Clays. But pray don't envelop _all_ the country gentlemen of England in English Clay.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, says my father, for liking Lady Jane Grandville. Her ladyship is his favorite, but n.o.body has ever mentioned her in their letters but you. I cannot believe that you ever resembled that selfish, hollow Lady Angelica. Would you ever have guessed that the character of Rosamond is like--M. E.? All who know me intimately say it is as like as possible. Those who do not know me intimately would never guess it.

_Harrington_ came next. The idea of writing a story of which the hero should be a Jew was not her own, but suggested by an unknown correspondent in the United States, a Jewish lady, who gently reproached her for having so often made Jews ridiculous, and begged she would write a story that should treat of a good Jew. Scarcely was it finished than she began _Ormond_. In February, 1817, she read the first chapter to her father as they were driving out to pay a visit, the last Mr. Edgeworth ever paid. His health had become a source of grave anxiety, and though he masked all his sufferings with cheerfulness and touching unselfishness, it was too evident that his case was serious. The interest and delight he took in Ormond, and his desire to see the story finished, encouraged Miss Edgeworth to go on.

Her stepmother writes:--

In all her anguish of mind at the state of his health, Maria, by a wonderful effort of affection and genius, produced those gay and brilliant pages, some of the gayest and most brilliant she ever composed.... The admirable characters of King Corny and Sir Ulick O'Shane, and all the wonderful scenes full of wit, humor and feeling, were written in agony of anxiety, with trembling hand and tearful eyes. As she finished chapter after chapter, she read them out, the whole family a.s.sembling in their father's room to listen to them. Her father enjoyed these readings so exceedingly as to reward her for the wonderful efforts she made.

Enfeebled as he was by illness, and often while enduring pain, Mr.

Edgeworth nevertheless continued as before to revise his daughter's ma.n.u.script with "an acuteness, a perseverance of attention of which I cannot bear to think," she writes in after years. "He would work at it in his bed for hours together, once at an end for six hours, during an interval of sickness and exquisite pain."

Thanks to the kindness of her publisher, she was able on Mr. Edgeworth's birthday (May, 1817) to put the printed volumes into his hands. It was the last book of hers to which he was to write a preface, and it was characteristic, like his others:--

In my seventy-fourth year I have the satisfaction of seeing another work of my daughter brought before the public. This was more than I could have expected from my advanced age and declining health. I have been reprehended by some of the public critics for the notices which I have annexed to my daughter's works. As I do not know their reasons for this reprehension, I cannot submit even to their respectable authority. I trust, however, the British public will sympathize with what a father feels for a daughter's literary success, particularly as this father and daughter have written various works in partnership. The natural and happy confidence reposed in me by my daughter puts it in my power to a.s.sure the public that she does not write negligently. I can a.s.sert that twice as many pages were written for these volumes as are now printed.

And now, indulgent reader, I beg you to pardon this intrusion, and with the most grateful acknowledgments I bid you farewell forever.

RICHARD LOVELL EDGEWORTH.

This preface was dated May 31st, 1817. On June 13th Mr. Edgeworth died, retaining to the last, as he had prayed, his intellectual faculties. His death was an acute grief to the whole family, a terrible, an irreparable blow to his eldest daughter. She was almost overwhelmed by sorrow, and during the first months that followed her father's death she wrote scarcely any letters. She had not the heart to do so; besides, her eyesight had been so injured by weeping, as well as by overwork the previous winter, when she had been sitting up at night, struggling with her grief and writing _Ormond_, that it caused real alarm to her friends. She was unable to use her eyes without pain; "the tears," she said, "felt like the cutting of a knife." On this account, as well as from her sorrow, the rest of the year is a blank in her life. In the late autumn she went to stay at Black Castle with Mrs. Ruxton, who cheered and nursed her. With rare strength of mind she followed the medical directions to abstain from reading and writing. Needlework, too, of which she was fond, was forbidden to her; she therefore learned to knit in order to employ herself. With patience, fort.i.tude and cheerful disregard of self she bore the mental and physical sufferings that marked the year 1817 a black one in her life.

CHAPTER X.

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 _pet.i.tio 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 una.s.sisted. 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; enc.u.mber 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 circ.u.mstances 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 ill.u.s.trated. 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."[9]

There is also a certain family likeness in the good fathers of her books. They are, as a rule, preternaturally wise, circ.u.mspect, 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 alt.i.tude 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 n.o.bleman, 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 pa.s.sed 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 n.o.ble feeling, though he has striven hard to compa.s.s 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 s.p.a.ce 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 ill.u.s.trations 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 auth.o.r.ess 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 n.o.ble 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-enn.o.bling.

It is too much the record of rebellious seditions 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 a.s.sumption 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 circ.u.mstances. 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 circ.u.mstances 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 ill.u.s.trations. 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 etait digne de l'enthousiasme, mais qu'elle s'est perdue dans la triste utilite?_" 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 pa.s.sions, 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 pa.s.sion, 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 Sh.e.l.ley. 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 enc.u.mbered 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 inanities, 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 compa.s.s 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 G.o.ds, 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 quant.i.ty 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 auth.o.r.esses, 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.