“I don’t want to trouble you to alter his habits or to teach him chemistry or any of those things.”
Yet here, as in Early Lessons, the persons walk gingerly, after the manner of Berquin’s little boy who kept the skirts of his coat under his arms, “for fear of doing any damage to the flowers”. The paths of the Edgeworth garden are purposely narrowed that their doings may “neither dissipate the attention nor inflame the imagination.”
Miss Edgeworth’s books fitted into her busy life as a natural occupation for long evenings. She wrote in the common sitting-room with the family about her, not one of them under any constraint, but talking freely, as if she had been sewing instead of novel-writing. It was characteristic of her that she could turn to children’s books in the midst of the Defender troubles. An Irish rising claimed no more attention than the play and laughter of the children. She could refer to it in a letter, and pass on to the next domestic detail without wasting a moment in “useless reflection”. That is precisely the mood of her stories. The Moral Tales, addressed to an emotional age, do not merely ignore the common forms of “Sensibility”; they take no account whatever of the stronger affections and more vigorous manifestations of life: a thing scarcely tolerable to generous youth. In the nursery books, this equanimity has its uses. It enables her to deal with one thing at a time, to select from a mass of details the particular things that a child would waste time in choosing. Nothing worries or puzzles her; she sees the world in clear and simple pictures, and reduces the inconsequent thoughts of children to a relentless order.
Her little figures stand out in firm outline and bright colour, and the background is interesting chiefly as it gives occupation or the means of life.
Madame de Staël was thinking of the Tales of Fashionable Life, when she said:
“Vraiment Miss Edgeworth est digne de l’enthousiasm; mais elle se perd dans votre triste utilité”[164]. But it is not less true of the children’s books.
Flowers in Miss Edgeworth’s garden (she is a true lover of flowers) are beautiful symbols of human care and industry; but they never encroach upon vegetables.
Rosamond was a rebel. “Mustard-seed, compared with pinks, carnations, sweet-peas or sweet-williams, did not quite suit Rosamond’s fancy.”[165]
Miss Edgeworth had chosen those flowers for Rosamond, but the Perfect Parent knew better. When the sweet thing planned a labyrinth of Crete “to go zig-zag—zig-zag” through one of her borders, she was reasoned out of it for the sake of some little green things that were going to be mignonette, and when she and Godfrey were thinking of digging a pond, a shocked voice cried:
“What! in the midst of your fine bed of turnips?”