Maria Edgeworth. Lady Morgan
"My real name is Thady Quirk, though in the family I have always been known by no other than 'honest Thady'; afterward, in the time of Sir Murtagh, diseased, I remember to hear them calling me 'old Thady,' and now I'm come to 'poor Thady.'" Thus the faithful servant of the Rackrent family introduces himself, before relating the history of the lords of the castle, where he and his had lived rent-free time out of mind. And what consummate art Maria Edgeworth showed in her first novel, Castle Rackrent, in letting "poor Thady" ramble with all the garrulity of old age. To him, who had never been farther than a day's tramp from the castle, there was nothing in the world's history but it and its owners. No servant but an Irish servant could have told the story as he did, judging the characters of his masters with shrewd wit and relating their worst failings with a "God bless them."
And where out of Ireland could Thady have found such masters, ready to spend all they had and another man's too, happy and free, and dying as merrily as they had lived! There was Sir Patrick, who, as Thady tells us, "could sit out the best man in Ireland, let alone the three kingdoms"; Sir Kit, who married a Jewess for her money; and Sir Condy, who signed away the estate rather than be bothered to look into his steward's accounts, and then feigned that he was dead that he might hear what his friends said of him at the wake. But he soon came to life, and a merry time they had of it. "But to my mind," says Thady, "Sir Condy was rather upon the sad order in the midst of it all, not finding there was such a great talk about himself after his death, as he had expected to hear." But Thady loved his master, and it is with genuine grief that he records his ultimate death, and with simple and unconscious wit he adds, "He had but a very poor funeral after all."
In The Absentee, the manners and customs of the Irish peasants are more broadly delineated than in Castle Rackrent. The Absentee was written to call the attention of the Irish landlords who were living in England to the wretched condition of their tenants left in the power of unscrupulous stewards. Lord Colambre, the son of Lord Clonbrony, an absentee, visits his father's estates, which he has not seen for many years, in disguise, and goes among the peasants, many of whom are in abject poverty. But the quick generosity of the nation speaks in the poor Widow O'Neil's "Kindly welcome, sir," with which she opens the door to the unknown lord, and its enthusiastic loyalty in the joyful acclamations of the peasants when he reveals himself to them,—a scene which Macaulay has pronounced the finest in literature since the twenty-second book of the Odyssey.
Ennui is another of her stories of Irish life, in which the supposed Earl of Glenthorn, after a long residence in England, returns to his Irish estates. The heroine of this tale is the old nurse, Ellinor O'Donoghoe. As the nurses of many stories are said to have done, she had substituted her own child for the rightful heir, and was frantic with joy when she saw him the master of Glenthorn Castle. Her devotion to the earl is pathetic, and her secret fears of the deception she had practised on the old earl may have prompted her strange speech that, if it pleased God, she would like to die on Christmas Day, of all days, "because the gates of heaven will be open all that day; and who knows but a body might slip in unbeknownst?" Ellinor is a woman of many virtues and many failings, but she is always pure Celt.
How well contrasted are the two cousins, friends of Ormond, Sir Ulick O'Shane, a wily politician and a member of Parliament, and Mr. Cornelius O'Shane, King of the Black Islands, called by his dependents King Corny. The latter, bluff, generous, brave, open as the day, is yet a match for his crafty kinsman. Sir Ulick's visit to King Corny is a masterpiece. He has a purpose in his visit and a secret to guard, which King Corny is watching to discover. Sir Ulick has been bantering his kinsman on the old-fashioned customs observed on his estate and ridicules his method of ploughing:
"'Your team, I see, is worthy of your tackle,' pursued Sir Ulick. 'A mule, a bull, and two lean horses. I pity the foremost poor devil of a horse, who must starve in the midst of plenty, while the horse, bull, and even mule, in a string behind him, are all plucking and munging away at their hay ropes.'
"Cornelius joined in Sir Ulick's laugh, which shortened its duration.
"''Tis comical ploughing, I grant,' said he, 'but still, to my fancy, anything's better and more profitable nor the tragi-comic ploughing you practise every sason in Dublin.'
"'I?' said Sir Ulick.
"'Ay, you and all your courtiers, ploughing the half-acre, continually pacing up and down that castle-yard, while you're waiting in attendance there. Every one to his own taste, but,
"'If there's a man on earth I hate,
Attendance and dependence be his fate.'"
King Corny has been studying his diplomatic kinsman carefully to learn his secret, until the wily politician, by unnecessary caution in guarding it, overreaches himself, when King Corny exclaims to himself:
"Woodcocked! That he has, as I foresaw he would."
While the trained diplomat murmurs as he takes his leave, "All's safe."
Native wit had got the better of artful cunning.
And when Sir Ulick dies in disgrace, how pithy is the remark of one of the men, as he is filling in the grave:
"There lies the making of an excellent gentleman—but the cunning of his head spoiled the goodness of his heart."
In the same book, how generous and how Irish is Moriarty, lying on the brink of death, as he thinks of Ormond, who had shot him in a fit of passion but bitterly repented his rash deed:
"I'd live through all, if possible, for his sake, let alone my mudther's, or shister's or my own—'t would be too bad, after all the trouble he got these two nights, to be dying at last, and hanting him, maybe, whether I would or no."
The quick kindness which so often twists an Irishman's tongue is humorously illustrated in the Essay on Irish Bulls, which Maria Edgeworth and her father wrote together. Mr. Phelim O'Mooney, disguised as Sir John Bull, accepts his brother's wager that he cannot remain four days in England without the country of his birth being discovered eight times. Whenever his speech betrays him, it is the result of his emotions. When he sees Bourke, a pugilist of his own country, overcome by an Englishman, he cries to him excitedly: "How are you, my gay fellow? Can you see at all with the eye that is knocked out?" A little later, in discussing a certain impost duty, he grows angry and exclaims: "If I had been the English minister, I would have laid the dog-tax upon cats." The humour of his situation increases to a climax, so that the fun never flags. Such stories as this in which the wit is simply sparkling good-nature, with no attempt to use it as a weapon against frail humanity as did Fielding and Thackeray, or to produce a smile by exaggeration as did Dickens, but simply bubbling fun, as free from guile as the sun's laughter on Killarney, show that Miss Edgeworth was a comedian of the first rank. Like all true comedians, she is also strong in the pathetic, but it is the Irish pathos, in which there is ever a smile amid the tears. This is found in the story of the return of Lady Clonbrony to her own country; the fall of Castle Rackrent; and the ruin by their sudden splendour of the family of Christy O'Donoghoe.
Whenever Miss Edgeworth writes of Ireland and its people, her pages glow with the inspiration of genius. There is no exaggeration, no caricature; all is told with simple truth. It has often been the fate of novelists whose aim has been to depict the manners and customs of a locality to win the ill-will of the obscure people they have brought into prominence. But not so with Maria Edgeworth. Her family, although originally English, had been settled for two hundred years in Ireland. She loved the country and always wrote of it with a loving pen. Before Castle Rackrent was written, Ireland had been for many centuries an outcast in literature, known only for her blunders and bulls. But, as one of her characters says, "An Irish bull is always of the head, never of the heart." Even though her characters are humorous, they are never clowns. All the men have dignity, and all the women grace. She gave them a respectable place in literature.
But her influence was felt outside of Ireland. Old Thady, in his garrulous description of the masters of Castle Rackrent, had introduced the first national novel, in which the avowed object is to represent traits of national character. Patriotic writers in other countries learned through her how to serve their own land, and she was one of the many influences which led to the writing of the Waverley novels. Scott says in the preface of these books:
"Without being so presumptuous as to hope to emulate the rich humour, pathetic tenderness, and admirable tact which pervade the work of my accomplished friend, I felt that something might be attempted for my own country, of the same kind with that which Miss Edgeworth so fortunately achieved for Ireland—something which might introduce her natives to those of the sister kingdom in a more favourable light than they had been placed hitherto, and tend to procure sympathy for their virtues and indulgence for their foibles."
As the reader realises the power of Maria Edgeworth's mind, her ability to describe manners and customs, to read character, and to depict comic and tragic scenes, he wishes that her father, Richard Lovell Edgeworth, had not so constantly interfered in her work, and insisted that every book she wrote must illustrate some principle of education. He was not singular in this respect. Rousseau, whom he greatly admired at one time, had taught educational methods by a novel. Madame de Genlis, the teacher of Louis Philippe, was writing novels that were celebrated throughout Europe, in which she expounded rules for the training of the young. Maria Edgeworth, with her father at her elbow, never lost sight of the moral of her tale. Vivian, in the story of that name, was so weak that he was always at the mercy of the artful. Ormond's passions led him into trouble. Beauclerc was almost ruined by his foolish generosity. Lady Delacour, with no object in life but pleasure, cast aside her own happiness that she might outshine the woman she hated. Lady Clonbrony squandered her fortune and health that she might be snubbed by her social superiors. Mrs. Beaumont played a deep diplomatic game in her small circle of friends, and finally overreached herself. Lady Cecilia, the friend of Helen, brought sorrow to her and infamy upon herself by her duplicity. In the analysis of motive, and the growth of Cecilia's wrong-doing from a small beginning, the book resembles the novels of George Eliot. But Maria Edgeworth could not know her own characters as she otherwise would, because the moral was always uppermost. When Mrs. Inchbald criticised her novel Patronage, she replied: "Please to recollect, we had our moral to work out." Mr. Edgeworth, in his preface to Tales of Fashionable Life, thus sets forth his daughter's purpose:
"It has been my daughter's aim to promote by all her works the progress of education from the cradle to the grave. All the parts of this series of moral fiction bear upon the faults and excellencies of different ages and classes; and they have all risen from that view of society which we have laid before the public in more didactic works on education."
Such a method of writing tended to kill emotion, yet emotion breaks out at times with genuine force, and always has a true ring. This is especially true in the Tales of Fashionable Life. There society women appear cold and heartless in the drawing-room, and so they have generally been represented in fiction. So Thackeray regarded them. But Maria Edgeworth followed them to the boudoir, and there reveals beneath the laces and jewels many beautiful womanly traits. As we see in tale after tale true feeling welling to the surface, and then choked up by the moral, we recognise the pathetic truth that Mr. Edgeworth's educational methods were fatal to genius.
But strong emotion sways only a small part of the lives of most men and women. Were it otherwise, like the great lyric poets, we should all die young. And she has written about the common, everyday, prosaic life with a truthfulness rarely excelled.
One of the most interesting studies in a novel is to observe the author's view of life. With the exception of those of Mademoiselle De Scudéri nearly all the novels of French women considered love as the ruling passion for happiness or woe, and all of the characters were under its sway. Even Mademoiselle De Scudéri in the preface to Ibrahim announced it as her distinct purpose that all her heroes were to be ruled by the two most sublime passions, love and ambition; but she was a humorist and unconsciously interested her readers more by her witty descriptions of people than by the loves of Cyrus and Mandane. But this passion has seldom held such an exaggerated place in the stories of English women. Maria Edgeworth in particular noticed that men and women were actuated by many motives or passions. A large income or a title was often capable of inspiring a feeling so akin to love that even the bosom that felt its glow was unable to distinguish the difference. Loss of respect could kill the strongest passion, and some of her heroines have even remained single, or else married men whom at first they had regarded with indifference, rather than marry the object of their first love after he had forfeited their esteem. Sometimes the tameness of her heroines shocked their author. While correcting Belinda for Mrs. Barbauld's "Novelists' Library," Miss Edgeworth wrote to a friend:
"I really was so provoked with the cold tameness of that stick or stone Belinda, that I could have torn the pages out."
Propinquity, opportunity, almost a mental suggestion are quite enough to produce a long chain of events affecting a lifetime. "Ask half the men you are acquainted with why they are married, and their answer, if they speak the truth, will be, 'Because I met Miss Such-a-One at such a place, and we were continually together.' 'Propinquity, propinquity,' as my father used to say, and he was married five times, and twice to heiresses." So speaks Mrs. Broadhurst, a match-making mother in The Absentee. And this is the reason why most of Miss Edgeworth's heroes and heroines love. But the advances of a designing woman are quite sufficient, as in Vivian, to make a fond lover forget his plighted troth to another, and the flattery of an unscrupulous man makes him suspicious of his real friends. Character is destiny, if the character is strong, but circumstances are destiny, if the character is weak. It is the aim of her novels to show how certain traits of character, as indecision, pride, love of luxury, indolence, lead to misfortune, and how these dangerous traits may be overcome.
Notwithstanding her moral, her plots are never hackneyed and never repeated. They are drawn from life and have the variety of life. In the story of Ennui, there is the twice-told tale of the nurse's son substituted for the real heir; but when he learns the true story of his birth, and resigns the castle, the title, and all its wealth to the rightful Earl of Glenthorn, who has been living in the village working at the forge, there is a great change from the usual story. The heir of the ancient family of Glenthorn accepts the earldom for his son, but with reluctance. The manners of the peasant remain with the earl, and the poor man, at last, begs the one who has been educated for the position to accept the title and the estates. In this she emphasised again what she constantly taught, that education and environment are more powerful than heredity.
As she taught that reason should be the guide of life, so she lived. Her fourscore years and three were spent largely at her ancestral home of Edgeworthstown. She assisted her father in making improvements to better the condition of the tenantry, and to promote their happiness. When in Paris, she met a Mr. Edelcrantz, a gentleman in the service of the king of Sweden. Admiration was succeeded by love. But he could not leave the court at Stockholm, and Miss Edgeworth felt that neither duty nor inclination would permit her to leave her quiet life in Ireland. Reason was stronger than love. So they parted like her own heroes and heroines. All that history records of him is that he never married. She resumed her responsibilities at home, and if the thought of this separation sometimes brought the tears to her eyes, as her stepmother once wrote to a friend, she was as cheerful, gay, and light-hearted in the home circle as she had always been.
Besides her moral tales for adults, which were read throughout Europe, Maria Edgeworth was always interested in the education of boys and girls. The eldest sister in a family of twenty-one children, the offspring of four marriages, she taught her younger brothers and sisters, and thus grew to know intimately the needs of childhood and what stories would appeal to them. As her father wrote, it was her "aim to promote by all her works the progress of education from the cradle to the grave." In her stories for children she inculcated lessons of industry, economy, thoughtfulness, and unselfishness.
If she helped to eradicate from the novel its false, highly colored sentimental pictures of life, still greater was her work in producing literature for young people. Hers were among the first wholesome stories written for children. Before this the chapman had carried about with him in his pack small paper-covered books which warned boys and girls of the dangers of a life of crime. One book was named An hundred godly lessons which a mother on her death-bed gave to her children. Another book of religious and moral Sunday reading was called The Afflicted Parent, or the Undutiful Child Punished. This gives the sad history of the two children of a gentleman in Chester, a son and a daughter. The daughter chided her brother for his wickedness, upon which he struck her and killed her. He was hanged for this, but even then his punishment was not completed. He came back to life, told the minister several wicked deeds which he had committed, and was hanged a second time. In most of these tales the gallows loomed dark and threatening.
In contrast to these morbid tales are the wholesome stories of Maria Edgeworth. The boys and girls about whom she writes are drawn from life. If they are bad, their crimes are never enormous, but simply a yielding to the common temptations of childhood. Hal, in Waste Not, Want Not, thinks economy beneath a gentleman's notice, and at last loses a prize in an archery contest for lack of a piece of string which he had destroyed. Fisher in The Barring Out, a cowardly boy, buys twelve buns for himself with a half-crown which belonged to his friend, and then gives a false account of the money. His punishment is expulsion from the school. Lazy Lawrence has a worse fate. He will not work, plays pitch farthing, is led by bad companions to steal, and is sent to Bridewell. But he is not left in a hopeless condition. After he had served his term of imprisonment he became remarkable for his industry.
But there are more good boys and girls than bad ones in her stories. The love of children for their parents, and the sacrifices they will make for those they love, are beautifully told. In the story of The Orphans, Mary, a girl of twelve, finds a home for her brothers and sisters, after her father and mother die, in the ruins of Rossmore Castle, where they support themselves by their labour. Mary finds that she can make shoes of cloth with soles of platted hemp, and by this industry the children earn enough for all their needs. As directions are given for making these shoes, any little girl reading the story would know how to follow the example of Mary. Jem in the story of Lazy Lawrence finds that there are many ways by which he can earn the two guineas without which his horse Lightfoot must be sold. He works early and late, and at last accomplishes his purpose.
Mrs. Ritchie says of this story: "Lightfoot deserves to take his humble place among the immortal winged steeds of mythology along with Pegasus, or with Black Bess, or Balaam's Ass, or any other celebrated steeds."
The story of Simple Susan with its pictures of village life has the charm of an idyl. The children by the hawthorn bush choosing their May Queen; Susan with true heroism refusing this honour, in order that she may care for her sick mother; the incident of the guinea-hen; Rose's love for Susan; the old harper, playing tunes to the children grouped about him—are all simply told. Susan's love for her pet lamb reminds one of Wordsworth's poem of that name.
And yet these children are not unusual. Most boys and girls have days when they are as good as Mary, or Jem, or Susan. Maria Edgeworth is not inculcating virtues which are impossible of attainment.
A hundred years ago, these stories, as they came from the pen of Maria Edgeworth, delighted boys and girls, and for at least fifty years were read by parents and children. Then for a time they were hidden in libraries, but a collection of them has lately been edited by Mr. Charles Welsh under the appropriate title Tales that never Die, which have proved as interesting to the children of to-day as to those of by-gone generations.
Whether Maria Edgeworth is writing for old or young, there is one marked trait in all her stories, her kind feeling for all humanity. The vices of her villains are recorded in a tone of sorrow. She seldom uses satire; never "makes fun" of her characters. Her attitude towards them is that of the lady of Edgeworthstown towards her dependents, or rather that of the elder sister towards the younger members of the family. Such broad and loving sympathy is found in Shakespeare and Scott, but seldom among lesser writers.
In Sydney Owenson, better known by her married name of Lady Morgan, Ireland found at this time another warm but less judicious friend. Her life was more interesting than her books. Her father, an Irish actor, introduced his daughter, while yet a child, to his associates, so that she appeared in society at an early age. But Mr. Owenson was improvident; debts accumulated, and Sydney at the age of fourteen began to earn her own living. The position of a governess, which she filled for a time, being unsuited to her gay, independent disposition, she began to write. Like Johnson a half century or more earlier, with a play in manuscript as her most valuable possession, she went alone to London. She did not wait so long as he did for recognition. New books by new authors were eagerly read. She earned money, a social position, fame, and with it some disagreeable notoriety. An independent, witty Irish woman of great charm, fearless in expressing her opinions, who had introduced herself into society and for whom nobody stood as sponsor, was looked upon by the old-fashioned English aristocracy as an adventuress; and later, when she came forth as the champion of Irish liberties, and upbraided England for tyranny, she was maliciously denounced by the Tory party.
She entered upon life with three purposes, to each of which she adhered: to advocate the interest of Ireland by her writings; to pay her father's debts; and to provide for his old age. All of these purposes she accomplished.
Besides plays and poems, and two or three insignificant stories, she wrote four novels upon Irish subjects: The Wild Irish Girl, O'Donnel, Florence Macarthy, and The O'Briens and the O'Flahertys. In all these books the beauty of Irish scenery is depicted as background; the fashionable life of Dublin is described, as well as the peasant life in remote hamlets; while the natural resources of the land and the native gaiety of the Celtic temperament are feelingly contrasted with the poverty and misery brought about by unjust laws.
She thus feelingly describes the condition of Ireland in the novel O'Donnel. Its sincerity must excuse its overwrought style: "Silence and oblivion hung upon her destiny, and in the memory of other nations she seemed to hold no place; but the first bolt which was knocked off her chain roused her from paralysis, and, as link fell after link, her faculties strengthened, her powers revived; she gradually rose upon the political horizon of Europe, like her own star brightening in the west, and lifting its light above the fogs, vapours, and clouds, which obscured its lustre. The traveller now beheld her from afar, and her shores, once so devoutly pressed by the learned, the pious, and the brave, again exhibited the welcome track of the stranger's foot. The natural beauties of the land were again explored and discovered, and taste and science found the reward of their enterprise and labours in a country long depicted as savage, because it had long been exposed to desolation and neglect."
In this book a party of travellers visits the Giant's Causeway and its scenery is described as an almost unfrequented place.
The new interest in Ireland of which she writes was very largely due to the novels of Maria Edgeworth, and partly to those of Lady Morgan herself.
Her last novel, The O'Briens and the O'Flahertys, is of historic value. Its plot was furnished by the stirring events which took place when the Society of United Irishmen were fighting for parliamentary reforms. Lord Edward Fitzgerald, the devoted patriot, is easily recognised in the brave Lord Walter Fitzwalter, and the life of Thomas Corbet furnished the thrilling adventures of the hero, Lord Arranmore. When Thomas Moore visited Thomas Corbet at Caen he referred to the account given of his escape from prison in Lady Morgan's novel as remarkably accurate in its details.
The style of Miss Owenson's earlier books was execrable and fully justified the severe criticism in the first number of the Quarterly Review. It gives this quotation from Ida, or the Woman of Athens: "Like Aurora, the extremities of her delicate limbs were rosed with flowing hues, and her little foot, as it pressed its naked beauty on a scarlet cushion, resembled that of a youthful Thetis from its blushing tints, or that of a fugitive Atalanta from its height." The wonder is that any serious magazine should have wasted two pages of space upon such nonsense. In ridiculing the book and the author, it gives her some serious advice, with the encouragement that if she follow it, she may become, not a writer of novels, but the happy mistress of a family.
Whether Lady Morgan took this ill-meant advice or not, her style improved with each book, until in The O'Briens and the O'Flahertys it became simple and clear, with only an occasional tendency to high colouring and bombast.
Maria Edgeworth has described the customs and manners of Ireland, and unfolded the character of its people in a manner that has never been equalled. But Lady Morgan, far inferior as an artist, has given fuller and more picturesque descriptions of the landscape of the country, and has made a valuable addition to the books bearing on the history of Ireland.