BOOKS.
THE NOVELS OF MISS EDGE WORTH.
ALL children owe a debt of gratitude to Miss Edgeworth. Rosamond and the Purple Jar, for instance, is as perennial a, favourite as Jack and the Beanstalk,—it is almost as im- probable and quite as acceptable. That any child could long for a great glass jar from a chemist's window, and that any mother could play her daughter such a trick as did Rosa- mond's mother, and then allow her child to wear shoes that might have lamed her for life, seems incredible to this wiser generation; but children have good appetites for fiction and keen imaginations, and the fact remains that continual re- prints of Early Lessons and the Parent's Assistant are issued, to meet a continual demand. We doubt, however, whether the present generation remembers how great a debt it owes to Miss Edgeworth as a novelist, or Sir Walter Scott's frank admission in his anonymous " postscript " to Waverley, that his object had been "in some distant degree to emulate the admirable Irish portraits drawn by Miss Edgeworth," an. admission that he repeated at greater length in the general preface to his collected works, where he expressly states that Miss Edgeworth's success in depicting Irish characters led him to think he might follow her example in Scottish fields, and, as he happily expressed it, "disturbed' his indolence," and so gave the world some of its greatest romances. After all, every author is a link in the great chain of literature. Macaulay says that Madame D'Arblay has a claim, to our respect and gratitude not only for giving us her own Evelina, Cecilia, and Camilla, bat because it is to her influence that we owe Mansfield Park and The Absentee. So highly did. he esteem Miss Edgeworth's powers of portrait-painting that he mentions King Corny, one of the characters in Ormond, in a note to his History of England, as a typical descendant of' the Irish aboriginal aristocracy. "Miss Edgeworth's King Corny belongs to a later and much more civilised generation ;. but whoever has studied that admirable portrait can form some notion of what King Corny's great-grandfather must have been." Jeffrey, writing in the Edinburgh Review in 1809 says "If it were possible for reviewers to envy the authors who are brought before them for judgment, we rather think we should be tempted to envy Miss Edgeworth; not, however,- so much for her matchless powers of probable invention—her never-failing good sense and cheerfulness, nor her fine dis- crimination of characters—as for the delightful consciousness of having done more good than any other writer, male Or female, of her generation."
Miss Edgeworth's writings are almost all didactic; she keeps, her moral always before her, as her father observed in one of his prefaces :—" It has therefore been my daughter's aim to pro- mote, by all her writings, the progress of education from the cradle to the grave." Her novels are distinctly "novels with a purpose," though we sometimes happily forget it in admira- tion of the brilliant dialogue and studies of character. Belinda is the first of a selection from her tales and novels now being published by Messrs. Dent and Co., in neat volumes orna- mented outside with shamrocks and an Irish harp, and inside- with reproductions of Harvey's original illustrations. The' inevitable introduction is not particularly interesting nor well written. There are several errors in it ; Mr. Edgeworth's fourth wife was a Miss Beaufort, not Beaumont ; the title of one of the Tales of Fashionable Life should be " (not Emile) de Coulanges ; " and Miss Helen Zimmern and Mr., Wedgwood' have respectively been given an "1" and an " e " too much. Belinda was Miss Edgeworth's first novel; in it she endeavoured to "point a moral" by depicting in sombre colours the darkest side of fashionable life in the careers of Lord and Lady Delacour and their com- panions, with a strong contrast and antidote provided by the Percival household and the virtuous heroine. We cannot
" Belinda. By Maria Edgeworth. London: J. M. Dent and Co.
help rejoicing that Belinda herself was not a favourite with Miss Edgeworth, who writes to Mrs. Barbauld : "I really was so provoked with the cold tameness of that stick or stone, Belinda, that I could have torn the page to pieces." Even among heroines she strikes us as being particularly unin- teresting, and we cannot help suspecting that if Miss Edge- worth had not been imbued with so much respect for what Madame de Steel called la triste Waite, we should have had fewer Belindas and Caroline Percys, "females with well- regulated minds," and more Rosamonds and Helens and Lady Geraldines. Mr. Ticknor, the American historian of Spanish literature, noted in his Journal : "She [Miss Edge- worth] certainly talks quite as well as Lady Delaoour or Lady Davenant, and much in the style of both of them, though more in that of Lady Davenant;" and we have it on her own authority that the charming Rosamond Percy in Patronage much resembled herself. When Lady Delacour is relating her history to Belinda, she says : "My dear, you will be wofully disappointed if in my story you expect anything like a novel. I once heard a General say that nothing was less like a review than a battle ; and I can tell you that nothing is more unlike a novel than real life." Starting with the theory that a good novel need not necessarily resemble real life, we find in Miss Edgeworth's writings many first-rate works in which refresh- ingly witty dialogue and admirably drawn characters counter- balance inartistic plots and a great lack of human interest. Only those who have no real critical perceptions will insist on the primness of her language and the wooden priggishrac, af her heroes and heroines ; conversation was a more polite art in her days than it is now ; " fun " was still slang, as it had been when Miss Burney put the word into Tom Branghton's vulgar mouth ; young and old alike " my-lorded " and " your-lady- shipped " their equals and superiors, and wore their finest manners in company, as they wore their finest clothes. As Lord Jeffrey said,—" Miss Edgeworth need not be afraid of being excelled in that faithful but flattering representation of the spoken language of persons of wit and politeness— in that light and graceful tone of raillery and argument, and in that gift of sportive but cutting medisance which is sure of success in those circles where success is supposed to be most difficult and desirable." But she has probably been most appreciated in relation to those scenes where she forgets for a time her educational purposes and allows full scope to her delightful natural wit and sense of humour. According to Mrs. Barbauld, the dullest part of Belinda, the unreal episode of Clarence Hervey and his Virginia St. Pierre, with its im- possible termination, was dragged in by Mr. Edgeworth, who also insisted on Lady Delacour's extraordinary recovery and subsequent reformation. Miss Edgeworth is more true to herself when she makes Lady Delaoour "invent wit against herself and anticipate caricatures." Harriet Freke is an odious caricature of a woman of fashion, but we are not sure that we have ngt occasionally met with her descendants, though they may possibly speak a different language and wear a different dress. Masquerading in man's clothes in the gallery of the House of Commons, doing "manual exer- cise" on the top of a rocking-stone, driving "unicorn," en- couraging two rival fine ladies to fight a duel, may not be the ways in which modern " fast " women amuse themselves ; but in their turn they hunt and shoot, play cricket and golf, speak in public, and ape the opposite sex in a way that would have astonished our great-grandmothers. In the description of the mock-duel between Lady Delacour and Mrs. Luttridge, Clarence Hervey is introduced driving pigs, dressed in splendid regimentals and armed with a long pole from which hung a bladder, for a wager of a hundred guineas against a French officer and his flock of " turkies." This scene recalls the wager in Evelina, and the race between two old women ; and for farcical effect it is hardly to be equalled in any- other of Miss Edgeworth's writings. The hero of the pigs presently relapses into the reformer of fashionable households, and becomes a hero worthy of the irreproachable Belinda.
But it was in her sketches of Irish character that Miss Edgeworth most excelled. The old steward, "honest Thady," in Castle Backrent, and his masters, Sir Murtagh, Sir Kit, and Sir Candy; the old nurse Ellinor in Ennui ; the brilliant Lady Geraldine and Lord Glenthorn, himself the victim of ennui, satiated with prosperity, and much improved by an avalanche of adversity ; above all the characters in The Absentee, Lady Clonbrony with her English accent, her extravagance, and her galas ; Lady Dashfort, and Mrs. Raffarty,—show Miss Edgeworth at her very best. The villa Tusculum ' and Misa Juliana O'Leary, "very elegant," and Mrs. Rafferty "doing the hozours of Nature and Art," are inimitable. " Indeed ! I don't pretend to be a connoisseur or conoseenti myself; but I'm told the style is undeniably modern. And was I not lucky, Juliana, not to let that Medona be knocked down to me P I was just going to bid, when I heard such smart bidding ; but fortunately the auctioneer let out that it was done by a very old master—a hundred years old. Oh! your most obedient, thinks I !—if that's the case, its not for my money ; so I bought this, in lieu of the smoke-dried thing, and had it a bargain." Miss Edgeworth was surprised at her own success. Thanks to the prestige of what Sydney Smith called "the firm of Edgeworth and Co.," Paris, London, and Edinburgh opened their best houses to her, and made her, much to her modest astonishment, a fashionable lion. As she wrote in later days, "I have been acquainted, and I may say intimately, with some of the most distinguished literary persons in Great Britain, France, and Switzerland, and have seen and heard all those distinguished for conversational talents,—Talleyrand, Dumont, Mackintosh, Romilly, Dugald Stewart, Erskine, Sir W. Scott, Sydney Smith." Yet she always returned with undiminished delight to her dearly loved Irish home, and settled down again to her usual busy routine. While her father lived, she was his right hand in everything, and she devoted herself to her brothers and sisters. Mr_ Ticknor wrote, after his visit to Edgeworthstown in 1835 :— "It is plain they make a harmonious whole ; and by those who visited here when the family was much larger and com- posed of the children of all the wives of Mr. Edgeworth, with their connections produced by marriage, so as to form the most heterogeneous relationships, I am told there was always the same very striking union and agreeable intercourse among them all, to the number sometimes of fifteen or twenty." We can picture the great library at Edgeworthstown, looking out on a shady lawn, the family party reading or working at a large centre table; a little apart is a sofa, and in one par- ticular corner of the sofa stands a quaint little table, on it is a small desk, and in that corner sits a small, slight figure, scrib- bling away in a beautifully neat handwriting, weaving out of her active brain stories for children, or tales of fashionable life, yet joining in the conversation or in the children's games, apart, and yet the centre of that happy family group. When the pen is laid aside, we see mild grey eyes looking at us with a frank, direct gaze, and hear bright, animated talk, full, as Sir Walter Scott says, "of fun and spirit—very good. humoured and full of enthusiasm." Her last novel, Helen, was written when she was past sixty, and proved that she had lost none of her powers,—in fact, that in some ways her genius had mellowed and ripened with age. Lady Davenant is a fine character, Helen and Granville Beauclerk are leas impossibly high-flown, and a more lively and lifelike heroine and hero than she had sketched before. Her mental powers and happy disposition remained with her to the last, and she died, at the age of eighty-two, as she had wished, at home, in the arms of her step-mother, being spared the anguish of a long illness.
Previous page
