There was no great danger, so long as Miss Edgeworth upheld the republic of common sense; but when at last she laid down her pen, all the spirits whose existence she had denied rose up and denounced her ineffectual successors.
Thus she brings the first century of children’s books to a natural close. She gathers up the loose ends of the old stories and weaves them into a bright and symmetrical design. The pattern is not wholly original: it was set by Marmontel, followed by Berquin, attempted by Madame de Genlis and the English Rousseauists; but Miss Edgeworth brought it to perfection, expressing traditional themes in terms of reason and benevolence.
The dramatic realism which marks her stories was the keynote of English ballads and folk-tales; she found a substitute for romance in the wonders of science. Roger Bacon, that wizard of the chap-books, appears as a forerunner of the Royal Society. Harry and Lucy know him as the discoverer of gunpowder, the inventor of the camera obscura, the prophet of flying-machines.[167]
In Miss Edgeworth’s tales, science has not merely succeeded to poetry; it has changed the enchanter’s instruments. The Balloon is the new Pegasus, or the Flying Horse of the Arabian Tales; the Magician still cries “New lamps for old;” but it is Davy’s lamp that he carries.
Rosamond, when she cannot explore the India Cabinet, is encouraged to look for wonderful things in her own house; which indeed was Miss Edgeworth’s own practice. Her “Enchanted Castle” was the home of her aunt, Mrs. Ruxton,[168] and Aboulcasem’s treasure was not more marvellous to her than a friend’s “inexhaustible fund of kindness and generosity.”
With the Lilliputians she had more in common than she would have acknowledged.
“When I was a child,” wrote Mr. Edgeworth in the third volume of Early Lessons, “I had no resource but Mr. Newbery’s little books and Mrs. Teachum.”[169] He is too conscious of the superiority of the new children’s books to do justice to Mistress Two-Shoes; yet she, with her little scholars and her weather-glass, was Miss Edgeworth’s Lilliputian prototype. Simple Susan could have compared notes with little Two-Shoes upon good and bad landlords, and in some of Miss Edgeworth’s stories there are prudential maxims that recall Giles Gingerbread and Primrose Prettyface.
Some of Rosamond’s features may be traced in the portraits by Miss Fielding, the Kilners and Mary Lamb. The quaint miniature of Goody Two-Shoes has the same grave intelligent look. If this little person, so wholly unconscious of her charm, can be regarded as an English type, then Emilie could not have been altogether French.
Like Madame d’Epinay, Miss Edgeworth let Rousseau’s lifeless image of the parent or tutor stand between her and her readers. They listened to the talk of other children, but seldom heard her voice. “Little touches” in the Letters[170] would have made them better acquainted, for here she spoke freely, showing both tenderness and humour, making adventures of common incidents,—a journey or a visit to friends.