the malicious Lady Beatrice and her silly, pretty sister; while Horace Churchill, the man about town, who is more modern in tone than Miss Edgeworth's earlier portraits of the same class, loses nothing by comparison with them. Despite his restless egotism, his spitefulness, his generally unpleasant character, he is a gentleman in all outside seeming, the old-fashioned, perfect tone of high breeding marks him, and he is even capable of a certain generosity that seems more an inherited instinct than a part of his individual nature. Esther, the general's sister, is one of the quaintest and most delightful characters in the book, drawn with kindliness and humor—a girl with the power of a noble woman hidden under the crust of a gruff and abrupt exterior, which springs half from shyness, half from a defiant love of truth and hatred of conventional chains. The purpose of Helen is to show how much the sufferings and dissensions of social life arise from the prevailing digressions from truth, often due in the first instance to small society politenesses. Its key-note lies in the ejaculation of Miss Clarendon: "I wish that word fib was out of the English language, and white lie drummed out after it. Things by their right names, and we should all do much better. Truth must be told, whether agreeable or not." Most perfectly and naturally is the imbroglio brought to pass, the entanglement caused by the love-letters, the way in which every fresh deceit on the part of Cecilia, meant to be harmless, tells in her husband's mind against the friend behind whom she is basely hiding her own fault. With Cecilia, whose failings were of the kind with which Miss Edgeworth had least mercy, she is singularly gentle. For once she lets us pity the offender while we condemn the crime. Life had probably taught her that consequences are so surely unpitying that she no longer felt the need to insist on this, as she had done in former years, when she would probably have sketched for us the whole course of Cecilia's punishment, whose nature she now only indicates. Helen is a charming heroine; no wax doll of impossible perfection, but a very woman, wayward and weak sometimes, but true, high-spirited, impulsively generous, staunch in her friendship and her love, with deep and passionate feelings controlled, not crushed, by duty.
Another marked change is shown in the manner in which Helen and Granville Beauclerc fall in love. Miss Edgeworth had always protested against the doctrine that love is a mere matter of personal beauty; she showed how it may enslave for a moment, but that a preference resting on so precarious a foundation was but a paltry tribute to her sex. Love, she rightly preached, must be founded on higher motives; but her heroes and heroines were too apt to fall in love in an edifying and instructive manner; they know too well why they succumbed to the tender passion. Until now she had almost denied the existence of romantic love, agreeing, it would seem, with her own Mrs. Broadhurst: "Ask half the men you are acquainted with why they are married, and their answer, if they speak the truth, will be: 'Because I met Miss Such-a-one at such a place, and we were continually together.'" "'Propinquity, propinquity,' as my father used to say—and he was married five times, and twice to heiresses." That amiable and respectable Bluebeard, Miss Edgeworth's father, had hitherto held final sway over her characters. Was it the removal of this influence that allowed Helen and Granville to fall in love in a more rational manner? Helen does not now wait to see whether Beauclerc has every virtue under the sun before she ventures to love him; indeed, she sees his foibles clearly, and it is just when she believes that he has shown a lack of honor and sincerity that in her burst of grief she discovers that she loves him; loves him whatever he is, whatever he does. As for Granville, he falls in love in a thorough-going, earnest manner, which increases our feeling of his reality. It has been objected to Miss Edgeworth's love-making that it is stiff as compared with that of the present day. It certainly presents a contrast to that of the Broughton school; but the loves of Helen and Granville, as told by her in so real and human a manner, reveal their feelings to be none the less tender that they are not hysterical, or any the less deep for their power of modesty, reverence and reserve.
Helen was suggested by Crabbe's tale, The Confidant, but that feeling which is sinfully gratified and severely punished in Crabbe's story becomes refined and reformed in Miss Edgeworth's crucible. It is, however, interesting to compare her romance with the rapid sketch of the stern original. Another new feature in Helen is a tendency to describe natural objects. Until now there had never been in Miss Edgeworth's writings a description of scenery or a sign of delight in it. She had, as we know, a contempt for the mere pleasures of the senses, and so little appreciation of the beautiful that she once condemns a character who buys something to gratify the eye, not recognizing that the eye, as well as the body and mind, must be fed. Yet in Helen, to our surprise, we encounter some lovingly detailed scenic bits; we even find her citing Wordsworth. It is clear she had not remained wholly untouched by the new influences surging around her. Another feature of Helen is the lack of a didactic tone. Speaking of Scott's novels, she remarks that his morality is not in purple patches, ostentatiously obtrusive, but woven in through the very texture of the stuff. She knew that her faults lay in the opposite direction, and it is evident she had striven to avoid them. A writer who can learn from criticism and experience, who can adopt a new method of writing when past the age of sixty, is a remarkable writer indeed.
The fears that Miss Edgeworth had felt concerning Helen were truly uncalled for, but the eagerness with which she listened to criticisms upon it showed how little confident she felt of it herself. To her friend Dr. Holland she wrote after its appearance:—
Dear Sir:
I am very glad that you have been pleased with Helen—far above my expectations! And I thank you for that warmth of kindness with which you enter into all the details of the characters and plan of the story. Nothing but regard for the author could have made you give so much importance to my tale. It has always been my fault to let the moral end I had in view appear too soon and too clearly, and I am not surprised that my old fault, notwithstanding some pains which I certainly thought I took to correct it, should still abide by me. As to Lady Davenant's loving Helen better than she did her daughter—I can't help it, nor could she. It is her fault, not mine, and I can only say it was very natural that, after having begun by mistake and neglect in her early education, she should feel afterwards disinclined to one who was a constant object of self-reproach to her. Lady Davenant is not represented as a perfect character. All, then, that I have to answer for is, whether her faults are natural to the character I drew, and tend in their representation to the moral I would enforce or insinuate.
Oh, thank you for telling me of my blunder in making the dean die of apoplexy with his eyes fixed on Helen. Absurd! How shall I kill him in the next edition, if ever I am allowed an opportunity? Would palsy do? May there not be a partial power of will surviving a stroke of palsy, which would permit the poor old man to die with his eyes directed to his niece? Please to answer this question; and if palsy will not do my business, please to suggest something that will, and with as little alteration of the text as maybe. Not because I am unwilling to take the trouble of correcting, but that I don't think it worth while to make alterations, even emendations, of great length. Better make a new one, according to Pope's hackney coachman's principle. (The punctuation shall be mended.)