Complete Novels of Maria Edgeworth

by Maria Edgeworth

  N. B. — Among the various scratchifications and scarifications in this volume, you may remark that there have been reiterated scratches at Mrs. and Miss Wilmot, and attempts alternately to turn the lady into Mrs. and Miss.

  Be it now declared and understood that the lady is not either Mrs. or Miss Wilmot, but Mrs. Bradford — born Wilmot, daughter of a Mr. and Mrs. Wilmot of Cork — went over to Russia to better herself at the invitation of the Princess Dashkoff, who had, in a visit to Ireland, become acquainted with some of her family. What motives induced her to go to Russia, except the general notion of bettering her fortune, I cannot tell. But she did better her fortune, for the princess gave her pearls in strings, and diamonds in necklaces and rings, and five thousand solid pounds in her pocket, for all which she had like to have been poisoned before she could clear away with them out of Russia.

  When she came back she married, or was married to, Mr. Bradford, a clergyman, and now lives in Sussex, England.

  Now, in consideration of my having further bored you with all this, be pleased whenever you see Mrs. or Miss Wilmot in the foregoing pages to read Mrs. Bradford, and you will save me thereby the trouble and danger of scratching Mrs. or Miss Wilmot into ten or eleven holes.

  The visit to London referred to was paid. Part of the time was spent agreeably visiting friends, seeing sights and reading new books, among them Darwin’s Voyage in the Beagle, which delighted Miss Edgeworth. But the larger portion of her stay was occupied in nursing her sister Fanny through a weary illness, with the added mental anxiety of knowing that Mrs. Edgeworth was ill at home. Both invalids, however, happily recovered, yet Miss Edgeworth was to find an empty chair on her return; her aunt, Mary Sneyd, had been taken away at the advanced age of ninety. As often before, she felt the sorrow keenly, but rallied bravely from its effects for the sake of those who were left and who depended on her yet more.

  During the summer of 1842 Mr. and Mrs. S. C. Hall visited Ireland. They spent some days at Edgeworthstown, with the avowed purpose of writing of its occupants, and we have from their pen also a pleasant picture of the family home-life: —

  “The library at Edgeworthstown” (say the writers) “is by no means the reserved and solitary room that libraries are in general. It is large and spacious and lofty; well stored with books, and embellished with those most valuable of all classes of prints — the suggestive; it is also picturesque, having been added to so as to increase its breadth; the addition is supported by square pillars, and the beautiful lawn seen through the windows, embellished and varied by clumps of trees judiciously planted, imparts much cheerfulness to the exterior. An oblong table in the centre is a sort of rallying-point for the family, who group around it, reading, writing or working; while Miss Edgeworth, only anxious upon one point — that all in the house should do exactly as they like, without reference to her — sits quietly and abstractedly in her own peculiar corner on the sofa, her desk — upon which lies Sir Walter Scott’s pen, given to her by him when in Ireland — placed before her upon a little quaint table, as unassuming as possible. Miss Edgeworth’s abstractedness would puzzle the philosophers: in that same corner, and upon that table, she has written nearly all that has enlightened and delighted the world. There she writes as eloquently as ever, wrapt up to all appearance in her subject, yet knowing, by a sort of instinct, when she is really wanted in dialogue; and, without laying down her pen, hardly looking up from her page, she will, by a judicious sentence wisely and kindly spoken, explain and elucidate in a few words, so as to clear up any difficulty; or turn the conversation into a new and more pleasing current. She has the most harmonious way of throwing in explanations — informing without embarrassing. A very large family party assemble daily in this charming room, young and old bound alike to the spot by the strong cords of memory and love. Mr. Francis Edgeworth, the youngest son of the present Mrs. Edgeworth, and of course Miss Edgeworth’s youngest brother, has a family of little ones who seem to enjoy the freedom of the library as much as their elders. To set these little people right if they are wrong; to rise from her table to fetch them a toy, or even to save a servant a journey; to mount the steps and find a volume that escapes all eyes but her own, and, having done so, to find exactly the passage wanted — are hourly employments of this most unspoiled and admirable woman. She will then resume her pen, and, what is more extraordinary, hardly seem to have even frayed the thread of her ideas; her mind is so rightly balanced, everything is so honestly weighed, that she suffers no inconvenience from what would disturb and distract an ordinary writer.”

  Miss Edgeworth wrote of this notice: —

  Mrs. Hall has sent to me her last number, in which she gives Edgeworthstown. All the world here are pleased with it, and so am I. I like the way in which she has mentioned my father particularly. There is an evident kindness of heart and care to avoid everything that could hurt any of our feelings, and at the same time a warmth of affectionate feeling, unaffectedly expressed, that we all like in spite of our dislike to that sort of thing.

  Early in 1843 Miss Edgeworth was taken seriously ill with bilious fever, from the effects of which she recovered but slowly. In late autumn she once more went to London to pass the winter with her sister. It was to be her last visit. She enjoyed it with all the freshness of youth, sight-seeing and visiting without fatigue, even attending an opening of Parliament, which she protested had not tired her more than if she had been eighteen. Her prayer and hope was, as it had been her father’s, that her body might not survive her mind, and that she might leave a tender and not unpleasing recollection of herself in the hearts of her friends. Her letters certainly showed no falling-off in power, as is amply proved by one written during this visit to her Boston friends: —

  London, 1 North Audley street,

  }

  Grosvenor square, January 1, 1844.

  My Dear Friends Mr. and Mrs. Ticknor:

  I cannot begin this new year better, or more to my own heartfelt satisfaction, than by greeting you with my best wishes for many, many happy years to you of your domestic felicity and public estimation — estimation superior to celebrity, you know, Mr. Ticknor, disdaining notoriety, which all low minds run after and all high minds despise. How I see this every day in this London world, and hear it from all other worlds — loudly from your New World across the great Atlantic, where those who make their boast of independence and equality are struggling and quarreling for petty preëminence and “vile trash.”

  I have been here with my sister, Mrs. Wilson, in a peaceful, happy home these six weeks, and the rattle of Grosvenor square, at the corner of which her house is, never disturbs the quiet of her little library, which is at the back of the house, and looks out upon gardens and trees (such as they are!)....

  Among the pleasantest days I have enjoyed in London society, among friends of old standing and acquaintance of distinguished talents, I spent two days at my very good old friend Dr. Holland’s, where I heard your name and your letter to your countrymen on Sydney Smith’s memorial spoken of in the highest terms of just estimation! You know that Dr. Holland is married to Sydney Smith’s daughter. I hope you know Dr. Holland’s book, Medical Notes, which, though the title might seem exclusively professional, is full of such general and profound views of the human mind as well as body, that it could not but be interesting to you, and would prove to you for my present purpose that he is a person whose estimation and whose praise is worthy of you....

  I do not know whether you made acquaintance, when you were in London, with Sydney Smith’s brother, Mr. Robert S., or, as he is strangely cognomened (or nicknamed) Bobus Smith. He is well known as one of the celebrities of Holland House, where he has been figuring this half-century. But he no longer figures as a diner-out, and indeed, I believe from that notoriety he always seceded. He is now old and blind, but nevertheless has a most intelligent, energetic countenance, and I should almost say penetrating eye. When he turns and seems to look at me, I feel as if he looked into my face, and am glad so to feel,
as he encourages me to open my mind to him by opening his own at once to me. I saw him for the first time a few evenings ago at Dr. Holland’s, and sat between him and your American ambassador, Mr. Everett. I was much pleased by their manner towards each other, and by all they said of the letter of which I spoke. Mr. R. Smith has, in the opinion of all who know him and his brother, the strongest and highest and deepest powers of the two; not so much wit, but a more sound, logical understanding — superior might in the reasoning faculty. If the two brothers’ hands grasped and grappled for mastery, with elbows set down upon the table, in the fashion in which schoolboys and others try strength, Robert Smith’s hand would be uppermost, and Sydney must give way, laughing perhaps, and pretending that he only gave way to fight another day. But independently of victory or trials of strength, the earnestness for truth of the blind brother would decide my interest and sympathy in his favor.

  Mr. Everett and Mr. R. Smith seemed to me properly to esteem each other, and to speak with perfect courtesy and discretion upon the most delicate national questions, on which, in truth, they liberally agreed more than could have been or was expected by the bystanders of different parties. Oh, Party Spirit! Party Spirit! how many follies, how many outrages are committed in thy name, even in common conversation!

  Mr. Everett did me the honor to come to visit us a few mornings after I had first met him at Dr. Holland’s, and sat a good hour conversing as if we had been long known to each other. It is to me the most gratifying proof of esteem to be thus let at once into the real mind, the sanctum sanctorum, instead of being kept with ceremonials and compliments on the steps, in the ante-chamber, or even in the salle de reception, doing Kotoo Chinese or any other fashion.

  We went over vast fields of thought in our short hour, from America to France, and to England and to Ireland, Washington, Lafayette, Bonaparte, O’Connell. You may guess it could only be a vue d’oiseau, flying too, but still a pounce down upon a true point now and then, and agreeing in our general unchangeable view that moral excellence is essential to make the man really great; that the highest intellectual superiority that can be given by Omnipotence to mortal ought not and does not, even in human opinion, entitle him without moral worth to the character of great. Mr. Everett tells me that Washington Irving is going to publish another life of Washington. I fear his workmanship will be too fine and delicate for the main matter. Boldness, boldness, boldness — and brevity. Oh, the strength of brevity! Brevity keeps fast hold of the memory, and more fast hold of the judgment; the whole process, en petit compris, goes in a few words with the verdict to “long posterity,” while elegance only charms the taste, accords with the present fashion of literature, and passes away, gliding gracefully into “mere oblivion.”

  Lecture upon brevity well exemplified by present correspondent.

  A severe attack of erysipelas laid her low this summer; but if it weakened her body it did not depress her mental faculties. She writes to her cousin with all the buoyancy of youth: —

  I am right glad to look forward to the hope of seeing you again, and talking all manner of nonsense and sense, and laughing myself and making you laugh, as I used to do, though I am six years beyond the allotted age and have had so many attacks of illness within the last two years; but I am, as Bess Fitzherbert and poor dear Sophy used to say, like one of those pith puppets that you knock down in vain; they always start up the same as ever.... Sir Henry Marsh managed me with skill, and let me recover slowly, as nature requires at advanced age. I am obliged to repeat myself, “advanced age,” because really and truly neither my spirits nor my powers of locomotion and facility of running up and down stairs would put me in mind of it. I do not find either my love for my friends or my love of literature in the least failing. I enjoyed, even when flattest in my bed, hearing Harriet Butler reading to me till eleven o’clock at night.

  Her interest in the current literature was sustained; and though she had little sympathy with the romantic school of poetry and fiction that had arisen, her criticisms were both fair and acute. Of the modern French writers she said: —

  All the fashionable French novelists will soon be reduced to advertising for a new vice, instead of, like the Roman Emperor, simply for a new pleasure. It seems to me with the Parisian novelists a first principle now that there is no pleasure without vice, and no vice without pleasure, but that the Old World vices having been exhausted, they must strain their genius to invent new; and so they do, in the most wonderful and approved bad manner, if I may judge from the few specimens I have looked at.

  Henrietta Temple she condemns as “trash,” “morally proving that who does wrong should be rewarded with love and fortune.” Indeed, so eager was she over books, so ardently did she still enter into all adventures and details, that when she was ill her doctor found it needful to prescribe that her reading must be confined to some old, well-known work, or else something that should entertain and interest her without over-exciting her or straining her attention.

  During the whole of 1846 the long illness and death of her brother Francis absorbed all Miss Edgeworth’s interest. Next year came the terrible potato famine. She strained every nerve to help the sufferers; her time, her thoughts, her purse, her whole strength, were devoted to the poor. She could hardly feel or think on any other theme; plans to relieve the distress, petitions for aid, filled her letters. She even turned her attention once more to writing, in order to get more money for her starving countrymen. The result was Orlandino, a tale for children, relating the fortunes and reformation of a graceless truant. It was the last work she published — her literary career thus ending, as it began, with a tale to give gladness to childhood. She had her reward in a great pleasure that came to her from America. The children of Boston, hearing what pains their kind friend in Ireland was taking for her unhappy compatriots, as a recognition of their love for her and her writings, organized a subscription. At the end of a few weeks they were able to send her one hundred and fifty barrels of flour and rice. They came with the simple address, worth more to her than many phrases: “To Miss Edgeworth, for her poor.”

  She was deeply touched and grateful. It touched her also that the porters, who carried the grain down to the shore, refused to be paid; and with her own hands she knitted a woolen comforter for each man and sent them to a friend for distribution. Before they reached their destination the hands that had worked them were cold, and the beating of that warm, kind heart stilled forever.

  For scarcely was the famine over, and before Miss Edgeworth’s over-taxed strength had time to recoup, another and yet heavier blow was to befall her. Indeed, many deaths and sorrows as she had known, in some respects this was the severest that had for some years come upon her. It was natural to see the old go before her, but not so the young, and when in 1848 her favorite sister Fanny died rather suddenly, Miss Edgeworth felt that the dearest living object of her love had gone.

  The shock did not apparently tell on her health, as she continued to employ herself with her usual interest and sympathy in all the weal and woe of her family and many friends, but the life-spring had snapped, unknown perhaps even to her, certainly unknown to those around her. For she bore up bravely, cheerfully, and was to all appearances as bright as ever. Next to doing good, reading was still her greatest pleasure: —

  Our pleasures in literature do not, I think, decline with age. Last 1st of January was my eighty-second birthday, and I think that I had as much enjoyment from books as ever I had in my life.

  History gave her particular delight: —

  I am surprised to find how much more history interests me now than when I was young, and how much more I am now interested in the same events recorded, and their causes and consequences shown, in this history of the French Revolution, and in all the history of Europe during the last quarter of a century, than I was when the news came fresh and fresh in the newspapers. I do not think I had sense enough to take in the relations and proportions of the events. It was like moving a magnifying glass over the pa
rts of a beetle, and not taking in the whole.

  Macaulay’s history charmed her, and in all her first enthusiasm she wrote a long letter about it to her old friend, Sir Henry Holland. He showed it to Macaulay, who was so struck with its discrimination and ability that he begged to be allowed to keep it. Among all the incidents connected with the publication of his book, nothing, it is said, pleased Macaulay more than the gratification he had contrived to give Miss Edgeworth as a small return for the enjoyment which, during more than forty years, he had derived from her writings: —

  Trim, April 2nd, 1849.

  My dear Dr. Holland:

  I have just finished Macaulay’s two volumes of the History of England with the same feeling that you expressed — regret at coming to the end, and longing for another volume — the most uncommon feeling, I suppose, that readers of two thick octavo volumes of the history of England and of times so well known, or whose story has been so often written, ever experienced. In truth, in the whole course of reading or hearing it read I was sorry to stop and glad to go on. It bears peculiarly well that severe test of being read aloud; it never wearies the ear by the long resounding line, but keeps the attention alive by the energy shown. It is the perfection of style so varied, and yet the same in fitness, in propriety, in perspicuity, in grace, in dignity and eloquence, and, whenever naturally called forth, in that just indignation which makes the historian as well as the poet. If Voltaire says true that “the style is the man,” what a man must Macaulay be! But the man is in fact as much more than the style, as the matter is more than the manner. It is astonishing with what ease Macaulay wields, manages, arranges his vast materials collected far and near, and knows their value and proportions so as to give the utmost strength and force and light and life to the whole, and sustains the whole. Such new lights are thrown upon historic facts and historic characters that the old appear new, and that which had been dull becomes bright and entertaining and interesting. Exceedingly interesting he has made history by the happy use and aid of biography and anecdote. A word brings the individual before us, and shows not only his character, but the character of the times, and at once illustrates or condemns to everlasting fame. Macaulay has proved by example how false Madame de Staël’s principle was that biography and biographical anecdotes were altogether inadmissible in history — below the dignity or breaking the proportion or unity, I suppose she thought. But whatever might be her reasons, she gave this opinion to Dumont, who told it to me. Much good it did her! How much more interesting historical précis in painting or in writing, which is painting in word, are made by the introduction of portraits of celebrated individuals! Either as actors or even as spectators, the bold figures live, and merely by their life further the action and impress the sense of truth and reality. I have pleasure, my dear Dr. Holland, in pointing out to you, warm as it first comes, the admiration which this work has raised to this height in my mind. I know this will give you sympathetic pleasure.