“Cannot one see a uniform and a Cathedral both in one morning?”
Every other boy in the Edgeworth family was a Ben, and would endorse this catholicity of interest.
It is odd that Miss Edgeworth’s “little plays”[152] should be among the least dramatic of her works. They were, in fact, stories dramatised to fit the family “théâtre d’éducation,” and the dramatist, intent upon her lesson, trusted her little company to create their parts. The link with Madame de Genlis is of the slightest, for although the Edgeworth children were being educated more or less upon the model of St. Leu, their plays and stories were not in the least like any that Madame de Genlis had written.
To Miss Edgeworth, truth was the first law of writing, and she must have felt the want of sincerity that came between Madame de Genlis and her books.[153]
Her own stories are essentially dramatic; there is life in every word of dialogue,—but the characters need no artificial light. A painted background was a poor substitute for her usual settings, villages that rang with the sounds of honest labour, fields and orchards full of children: a realist’s Arcadia.
The little town of Somerville (in “The White Pigeon”), which in a few years had “assumed the neat and cheerful appearance of an English village”, is in fact a picture of Edgeworthstown. It is only when the writer allows her characters to stray outside the bounds of her own knowledge that the scenery begins to shake. Her school stories would hardly convince an outsider;[154] the Neapolitan setting of “The Little Merchants” is ludicrously out of keeping with so moral a community.
But all this is nothing to a child. His interest centres round the objects that make pictures in the mind, the business he can imitate.
Berquin understood the practical interests of children, but he had not Miss Edgeworth’s keen eye for things that “draw”. The purple jar in the chemists’ window, the coloured sugar-plums of the little merchants, the green and white uniform. Berquin’s children were never so independent as these. His orphans were adopted; Miss Edgeworth’s keep house by themselves in a ruined castle, and ply their trades of knitting and spinning and shoe-making with the rhythm of a singing game. The finding of a treasure among the ruins is a freak of romance that holds the imagination even while the coins are being weighed and marked.
Goody Grope, the old treasure-seeker who demands her share of the orphans’ luck, is the only Irish study, but other characters would connect these stories, if they were not so frankly acknowledged, with the author of Castle Rackrent and The Absentee: Mrs. Pomfret, that lesser Malaprop, with her “Villaintropic Society” and “drugs and refugees”; Mrs. Theresa Tattle; Mademoiselle Panache, the milliner-governess, betrayed by her mouthful of pins.