ived, the
narrative hammered out _invita Minerva_, and, owing to their aim,
nothing capricious or accidental is permitted. Too obviously they are
the mature fruits of purpose and reflection, not happy effusions of the
fancy, and hence also not always successful. Sometimes the fault lay
with the subject that afforded too little scope, sometimes the moral
striven after did not admit of the embellishments requisite for a work
of amusement. One thing, however, is certain: that Miss Edgeworth
honestly endeavored to combine entertainment with instruction, and that,
taken as a whole, she succeeded. She did not shelter herself behind the
saying that _Il est permis d'ennuyer en moralites d'ici jusqu'a
Constantinople_. But it is the key to her writings, to their excellences
and their defects, that the duty of a moral teacher was always uppermost
in her mind. Her aim was not to display her own talents, but to make her
readers substantially better and happier, to show how easy and
agreeable to practice are high principles. Again and again she insists,
with irrefragable force, that it is the ordinary and attainable
qualities of life rather than the lofty and heroic ones on which our
substantial happiness depends, an insistance new in the domain of
fiction, which as a rule preaches other doctrines. With this end in view
she had necessarily to sacrifice some freedom and grace of invention to
illustrate her moral aphorisms, her salutary truths, and she yielded to
the temptation to exaggerate in order to make her work more impressive.
Her _Moral Tales_ are a series of climaces of instances, an enlargement
of La Bruyere's idea, a method allowable to creations of fancy, but not
quite justifiable when applied to the probable. Moreover, it was a
feature of the eighteenth century, to which in many respects Miss
Edgeworth belonged, that its tales and novels were not analytic.
Psychology based upon biology was as yet unknown, or in so empirical a
stage as to be remote from practical application. The writers of those
days depict their characters not as the complex bundles of good and bad
qualities and potentialities that even the veriest scribbler paints them
to-day, but as sharply good or bad, so that one flaw of character, one
vice, one folly, was made to be the origin of all their disasters. It
is, of course, always dangerous when the author plays the part of
Providence, and can twist the narrative to suit the moral; but this
censure applies