In Belford Regis we miss the fields, the brooks, the flowers, and the sky, which made the charm of Our Village. In some respects it is a more ambitious book, but it has not the perennial charm of Our Village.
Miss Mitford's favourite author, as we have seen, was Jane Austen. She had the same regard for her that Miss Austen felt for Fanny Burney. The two authors have many points of resemblance. Both have the same clear vision, and sunny nature; the same repugnance to all that is sensational, or coarse, or low; the same dislike of strong pathos or broad humour; and Miss Mitford has approached more closely than any other writer to the elegance of diction and purity of style of Miss Austen.
They have another point in common, they both show excellent taste in their writings. This quality of good taste is due to native delicacy and refinement, a sensitive withdrawal from what is ugly, and a quick feeling for true proportion; the very things which give to a woman her superior tact, which Ruskin has called "the touch sense." In the novel it is pre-eminently a feminine characteristic. Few men have it in a marked degree. It adds all the charm we feel in the presence of a refined woman to the novels of Miss Edgeworth, Miss Austen, and Miss Mitford.
But, while Miss Mitford and Miss Austen have many points of resemblance, they have many points of difference. Miss Austen liked the society of men and women, and during her younger days was fond of dinner-parties and balls. Miss Mitford preferred the woods and fields, liked the society of her dogs, and wrote to a friend before she was twenty that she would never go to another dance if she could help it. Miss Austen selects a small group of gentry, and by the intertwining of their lives forms a beautiful plot; Miss Mitford rambles through the village and the country walks of Three Mile Cross, and as she meets the butcher, the publican, the boys at cricket, she gleans some story of interest, and brings back to us, as it were, a basket in which have been thrown in careless profusion violets and anemones, cowslips and daisies, and all the other flowers of the field.
Mrs. Anna Maria Hall, a country-woman of Miss Edgeworth, wrote of her first novel: "My Sketches of Irish Character, my first dear book, was inspired by a desire to describe my native place, as Miss Mitford had done in Our Village, and this made me an author." Most of these sketches were drawn from the county of Wexford, her native place, whose inhabitants, she says in the preface, are descendants of the Anglo-Norman settlers of the reign of Henry the Second, and speak a language unknown in other districts of Ireland.
The book is a series of well-told stories of the poor people, whom we should have imagined to be pure Celt, if the author had not said they resembled the English. There is the tender pathos, the quick humour, the joke which often answers an argument, the guidance of the heart rather than the head; but she has dwelt upon one characteristic but lightly touched upon by Miss Edgeworth and Lady Morgan, the poetic feeling of the Celt, the imagery that so often adorns their common speech. The old Irish wife says to the bride who speaks disrespectfully of the fairies: "Hush, Avourneen! Sure they have the use of the May-dew before it falls, and the colour of the lilies and the roses before it's folded in the tender buds; and can steal the notes out of the birds' throats while they sleep."
The Irish Peasantry, and Lights and Shadows of Irish Life, won Mrs. Hall the ill-will rather than the love of her countrymen. She had lived for a long time in England, and upon returning to her native land was impressed by the lack of forethought which kept the country poor. Their early marriages, their indifference to time, their frequent visits to the public house, their hospitality to strangers even when they themselves were in extreme poverty and debt—all made so deep an impression upon her mind that she attempted to teach the Irish worldly wisdom. But the lesson was distasteful to the people and probably useless, as the characteristics which she would change were the very essence of the Irish nature, the traits which made him a Celt, not a Saxon. In these books, the wooings, weddings, and funerals are portrayed, and there is a little glimpse of fairy lore.
Midsummer Eve, a Fairy Tale of Love, grew out of the fairy legends of Ireland. It is said that a child whose father has died before its birth is placed by nature under the peculiar guardianship of the fairies; and, if born on Midsummer Eve, it becomes their rightful property; they take it to their own homes and leave in its place one of their changelings. The heroine of the story is a child of that nature, over whose birth the fairies of air, earth, and water preside. But at the will of Nightstar, Queen of the Fairies of the Air, she is left with her mother, but adopted and watched over by the fairies as their own. Their great gift to her is that of loving and being loved. The human element is not well blended with the fairy element. The entire setting should have been rural, for in the city of London, particularly in the exhibition of the Royal Academy, where part of the story is placed, it is not easy to keep the tranquil twilight atmosphere, which fairies love. The book is like a song in which the bass and soprano are written in different keys. But when we are back in Ireland, and the fairies again appear and disappear, it is charming. The old woodcutter, Randy, who sees and talks with the fairies, is a delightful creature, and gives to the story much of its beauty.
Mrs. Hall's novels have but little literary value, but she has brought to light Irish characteristics and Irish traditions which were overlooked by her predecessors, and for that reason they deserve to live.