She will not hear my music? So!
Break the string; fold music’s wing:
Suppose Pauline had bade me sing.
When he came back from France, cruel Elizabeth laughed in his face, and said she had liked him best as he was before. Notwithstanding all these unsuccessful attempts, Mr. Day found a wife at length. She was a lady of large fortune, which, of course, he “despised” and appropriated. She conformed to all her husband’s whims, and honestly believed him to be the best and most distinguished of men. “That’s what a man wants in a wife mostly,” as Mrs. Poyser says; “one who’d pretend she didn’t know which end she stood uppermost till her husband told her.” Mr. Day fell a victim at last to one of his numerous theories. He disapproved of the professional method of breaking in colts, and undertook to train one upon an improved plan of his own. The animal plunged violently and threw him; he had concussion of the brain, and died a few minutes after his fall. Poor Mrs. Day was so inconsolable that she took to her bed, and died two years later. She must have been a woman of the type of Milton’s Eve: “Herself, though fairest, unsupported flower.” When her prop was gone, she drooped and died.
During Mr. Edgeworth’s residence at Lyons his first wife, Maria’s mother, died, and in a few months he married the beautiful Honora Sneyd. The social circle at Lichfield, in which Honora had lived before her marriage, contained many distinguished persons, among them Dr. Darwin, and Miss Anna Seward, the poetess. Honora herself had been engaged, or partly engaged, to Major André, the unfortunate officer whose execution as a spy by the Americans, during the War of Independence, caused such deep indignation in England. Her marriage to Mr. Edgeworth in 1773, and her death in 1780, took place before the melancholy end of Major André’s life. The association of Honora’s name with that of Major André is mentioned here as an illustration of the way in which the Edgeworth family were connected, in some form or another, with many of the most interesting events of the times in which they lived. Another such incident is to be found in the fact that the Abbé Edgeworth, a relative who had become a Roman Catholic priest, and had lived many years in France, attended Louis XVI upon the scaffold, and received his last words.
Of the charm and goodness of the beautiful Honora there can be no doubt. She won all hearts. Her little step-daughter, Maria, loved her dearly, and admired her as much as she loved her. She remembered, in after years, standing at her step-mother’s dressing-table and looking up at her with a sudden thought, “How beautiful!” The second Mrs. Edgeworth became, under her husband’s tuition, a very good mechanic; and together they wrote a little book for children, called Harry and Lucy. Very few books for children had at that time been written, so that they were very early in a field which has since found so many labourers. Mrs. Honora discerned Maria’s remarkable qualities of mind. When the latter was only twelve years old her step-mother wrote to her expressing the pleasure she felt in being able to treat the young girl “as her equal in every respect but age.” Mr. Edgeworth, too, fully appreciated and studiously cultivated Maria’s gifts, and encouraged her in every way to treat him with openness and familiarity. This conduct was a very great contrast with the extreme stiffness and formality which then prevailed generally between parents and children. It was near this time, but a little later, that the well-known writer, William Godwin, was reproached by his mother with his too great formality in addressing her; he had been accustomed to speak and write to her as “Madam,” and she says in one of her letters to him that “Hon’d Mother” “would be full as agreeable.” Therefore the terms of friendly familiarity and equality between Maria and her parents were the more remarkable. The happiness of Mr. Edgeworth’s second marriage was unclouded, except by the symptoms of consumption in Honora, which warned them that an inevitable parting was at hand. She died in May 1780, when Maria was thirteen years old. By his dead wife’s side, Mr. Edgeworth wrote to Maria impressing upon her all the hopes that he and her step-mother had formed for her future. Very soon after he wrote again and bade her write a short story on the subject of generosity; “It must be taken,” he wrote, “from History or Romance, and must be sent the sennight after you receive this; and I beg that you will take some pains about it.” The story, when finished, was submitted to the judgment of Mr. William Sneyd, Honora’s brother, who said of it, “An excellent story, and extremely well written; but where is the generosity?”—a saying which afterwards became a household word with the Edgeworths.
When Honora was dying she had solemnly begged her husband and her sister Elizabeth to marry each other after her own death. Such marriages at that time were not illegal, and eight months after Honora’s death her sister and Mr. Edgeworth were married in St. Andrew’s Church, Holborn. Not long after this the first really important event of Maria’s life took place, when she went with her father and the rest of his family to take up her residence in her Irish home. At the impressionable age of fifteen, after having lived long enough in England to judge of the differences between the two countries, she was introduced to an intimate acquaintance with rural life in Ireland. Her father employed no agent for the management of his property, but invited and expected Maria to help him in all his business. In this way she acquired a thorough insight into the charm, the weakness and the strength, the humour and the melancholy of the Irish character.
From 1782, when Mr. Edgeworth and his family returned to live at their Irish home, dates not only Maria Edgeworth’s close observation of Irish character and customs, but also the very painstaking literary training which she began to receive from her father. Up to this time Maria had been much at school; owing to the delicate health of her first step-mother, it was considered best that her education should be mainly carried on elsewhere than at home. Now, however, Mr. Edgeworth divided his time between the management of his estates and the education of his children, and to Maria’s literary education in particular he devoted himself with singular zeal and assiduity. She was continually practised by him in systematic observing and writing; she was instructed to prepare stories in outline. “None of your drapery,” her father would say; “I can imagine all that. Let me see the bare skeleton.” At this stage her compositions would be altered, revised, and amended by him, and then returned to her for completion.
There is no doubt whatever of the immense pains which Mr. Edgeworth bestowed upon Maria’s literary training; and Maria herself felt that she owed everything to him. It may, however, very well be doubted whether his influence upon her was good from the literary point of view. He gave her method and system, and he cultivated her natural faculties for observation; but there was something very mechanical and pedantic in his mind—an affectation, a want of humour, and a want of spontaneity: she, when left to herself, was content with grouping the facts of life and nature as she saw them around her, without trying to be more instructive than they are. Castle Rackrent, which is the best of her Irish stories, was entirely her own, and bears no traces of her father’s hand. This is the only one of her tales of which she did not draw out a preliminary sketch or framework for her father’s criticism. She says herself of this story, “A curious fact, that where I least aimed at drawing characters I succeeded best. As far as I have heard, the characters in Castle Rackrent were, in their day, considered as better classes of Irish characters than any I ever drew; they cost me no trouble, and were made by no receipt, or thought of philosophical classification; there was literally not a correction, not an alteration, made in the first writing, no copy, and, as I recollect, no interlineation; it went to the press just as it was written. Other stories I have corrected with the greatest care, and remodelled and re-written.” If she had given the world more work of this kind, and less of the kind produced under her father’s methods, her name would to-day occupy a higher place than it does in the hierarchy of literature.
Maria Edgeworth may be said to have invented the modern novel, which gives the traits, the speech, the manners, and the thoughts of a peasantry instead of moving only among the upper ten thousand. Sir Walter Scott, with his usual frankness and generosity, stated in his preface to the Waverley Novels that what really started him in his career as a novelist was the desire to do for Scotland and the Scottish peasantry what Miss Edgeworth had done for Ireland and the Irish peasantry. “I felt,” he said, “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 to tend to procure sympathy for their virtues and indulgence for their foibles.” Another of the leading writers of this century has acknowledged his indebtedness to Miss Edgeworth. The great Russian novelist, Ivan Tourgenieff, told a friend that when he was quite young he was unacquainted with the English language, but he used to hear his elder brother reading out to his friends translations of Miss Edgeworth’s Irish stories, and the hope rose in his mind that one day he would be able to do for Russia and her people what Miss Edgeworth had done for Ireland.