To this letter Ballantyne replied; thus, even towards Miss Edgeworth, Scott kept up his anonymity. A little later she tells a friend: "Scott says upon his honor that he had nothing to do with Guy Mannering, though he had a little to do, he says, with Waverley."
The following winter was spent by the family at Dublin, for the sake of first-class medical advice for Mr. Edgeworth. That indefatigable, active-minded old man meantime, though far from well, made experiments on wheel carriages and published a report. There was much gaiety and some interesting society to enliven the winter, but nothing worthy of note is recorded by Miss Edgeworth. Anxiety on account of her beloved father was uppermost in her mind, yet she continued to write, and was busy upon some plays and upon preparing a third edition of Patronage. In this third edition she made some important alterations, changing the dénouement to gratify remonstrances that had reached her. She did not like this alteration, and doubted the propriety of making it after a work had gone through two editions. Her father, however, approved, and the public was more satisfied. There was certainly much that was unnatural in the previous course of the tale, in which the newly-married wife refuses to go abroad with her adored husband, but lets him go alone and remains with her father, who, it is true, was in grief, but who had another daughter to console him. This might be Edgeworthian, but it was not human nature; and the incident gave universal offense.
Every new book of value found its way to Edgeworthstown, and was eagerly read and discussed by the family. Miss Austen was soon an established favorite, while Mrs. Inchbald had long been valued. An occasional correspondence was maintained with her. Writing of the Simple Story, Miss Edgeworth says:—
By the force that is necessary to repress feelings we judge of the intensity of the feeling, and you always contrive to give us by intelligible but simple signs the measure of this force. Writers of inferior genius waste their words in describing feeling, in making those who pretend to be agitated by passion describe the effects of that passion and talk of the rending of their hearts, etc.—a gross blunder, as gross as any Irish blunder; for the heart cannot feel and describe its own feelings at the same moment. It is "being like a bird in two places at once." ... Did you really draw the characters from life, or did you invent them? You excel, I think, peculiarly, in avoiding what is commonly called fine writing—a sort of writing which I detest, which calls the attention away from the thing to the manner, from the feeling to the language, which sacrifices everything to the sound, to the mere rounding of a period, which mistakes stage effect for nature. All who are at all used to writing know and detect the trick of the trade immediately, and, speaking for myself, I know that the writing which has the least appearance of literary manufacture almost always pleases me the best. It has more originality in narration of fictitious events: it most surely succeeds in giving the idea of reality and in making the biographer for the time pass for nothing. But there are few who can in this manner bear the mortification of staying behind the scenes. They peep out, eager for applause, and destroy all illusion by crying, "I said it! I wrote it! I invented it all! Call me to the stage and crown me directly!"
Mrs. Inchbald had written praising Patronage, but she had also found some faults. To this Miss Edgeworth replied:—
My dear Mrs. Inchbald:
Nobody living but yourself could or would have written the letter I have just received from you. I wish you could have been present when it was read at our breakfast-table, that you might have seen what hearty entertainment and delight it gave to father, mother, author, aunts, brothers and sisters, all to the number of twelve. Loud laughter at your utter detestation of poor Erasmus "as nauseous as his medicines," and your impatience at all the variety of impertinent characters who distract your attention from Lord Oldborough. Your clinging to him quite satisfied us all. It was on this character my father placed his dependence, and we all agreed that if you had not liked him there would have been no hope for us. We are in the main of your opinion, that Erasmus and his letters are tiresome; but then please recollect that we had our moral to work out, and to show to the satisfaction or dissatisfaction of the reader how in various professions young men may get on without patronage. To the good of our moral we were obliged to sacrifice; perhaps we have sacrificed in vain. Wherever we are tiresome we may be pretty sure of this, and after all, as Madame de Staël says, "good intentions go for nothing in works of art"—much better in French, "La bonne intention n'est de rien en fait d'esprit."
You will make me foreswear truth altogether, for I find whenever I meddle with the least bit of truth I can make nothing of it, and it regularly turns out ill for me. Three things to which you object are facts, and that which you most abhor is most true. A nobleman whom I never saw and whose name I have forgotten, else I should not have used the anecdote—the word which you thought I could not have written and ought not to have known how to spell. But pray observe, the fair authoress does not say this odious word in her own proper person. Why impute to me the characteristic improprieties of my characters? I meant to mark the contrast between the niceness of his grace's pride and the coarseness of his expression. I have now changed the word severe into coarse to mark this to the reader. But I cannot alter without spoiling the fact. I tried if saliva would do, but it would not. So you must bear it as well as you can and hate His Grace of Greenwich as much as you will, but don't hate me. Did you hate Cervantes for drawing Sancho Panza eating behind the door?
My next fact, you say, is an old story. May be so, and may be it belonged to your writer originally, but I can assure you it happened very lately to a gentleman in Ireland, and only the parting with the servant was added. I admit the story is ill told and not worth telling, and you must admit that it is very natural or it would not have happened twice.
The sixpence under the seal is my third fact. This happened in our own family. One of my own grandfather's uncles forged a will, and my grandfather recovered the estate my father now possesses by the detection of the forgery of a sixpence under the seal.