Maria Edgeworth. Helen Zimmern

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СКАЧАТЬ heart and imagination unduly, and to arouse disgust with the assigned lot in life, which is rarely romantic, but consists rather of common-place pleasure and pain.

      The Edgeworths' ambition was to write the history of realities in an entertaining manner; they held that it was better for purposes of education, and more suited to the tastes of children, than improbable fiction. The first proposition may, perhaps, be conceded, the second scarcely. In any case, however, Mr. Edgeworth, who had a special leaning to the jejune, had a particular dislike to this form of fiction. "Why," he asked, "should the mind be filled with fantastic visions? Why should so much valuable time be lost? Why should we vitiate their taste and spoil their appetite by suffering them to feed upon sweetmeats?" Even poetical allusions, he thought, should be avoided in books for children. On the other hand, with the happy intuition he often displayed, he recognized that the current children's books of his time erred in introducing too much that was purely didactic, too many general reflections. He urged his daughter to avoid these errors, to bear action in view, and that whether in morals or in science, the thing to be taught should seem to arise from the circumstances in which the little persons of the drama were placed. He saw that in order to prevent precepts from tiring the eye and mind, it was necessary to make the stories in which they were introduced dramatic, to keep alive hope, fear and curiosity by some degree of intricacy.

      Admirably did his daughter carry out the precepts he thus laid down. It was Miss Edgeworth who really inaugurated for England the reign of didactic fiction. Though never losing sight of her aim, she also never lost sight of the amusement of her young readers. She rightly comprehended that only by captivating their senses could she conquer and influence their reason. Her children's tales, written with motion and spirit, were told in the simple language of the young. She went straight to the hearts of her little readers because they could understand her; they needed no grown person to explain to them sesquipedalian words. There is a freshness about her stories that children are quick to respond to, and it arises from the fact that the children she depicts for her readers are real. Miss Edgeworth knew what children were like; she saw them not only from without but from within; she had lived all her life among little people. Their world never became a paradise from which she was shut out. The advantages she thus enjoyed were as rare as they are important for the due comprehension of the needs of childhood, and she utilized them to the utmost. The chief charm of her tales, that which makes them sui generis both now and then, is that she not only wrote in the language of children, but, what is even rarer, from the child's point of view.

      There are yet among us those who owe their earliest pleasures to Miss Edgeworth, and if of late she has been somewhat jostled out of the nursery and school-room because it is the tendency of the modern child to revolt against all attempts to teach it unawares, we are far from sure that the change is wholly for the better. It was a just perception of this that caused Miss Yonge to say in The Stokesley Secret that her heroes "would read any books that made no pretensions to be instructive, but even a fact about a lion or an elephant made them detect wisdom in disguise, and throw it aside." The modern child finds, it is said, Miss Edgeworth's tales dry; American books of a semi-novelistic character, rattling stories of wild adventure, are preferred.

      This may be so, but we cannot help thinking that, just in these days, when the ethical standard held up to children is not too high, a judicious admixture of these works with Miss Edgeworth's high-minded stories, inculcating self-sacrifice, unselfishness, obedience, and other neglected virtues, might be of great advantage. There are sundry of Miss Edgeworth's children's tales that are truly engrossing, veritable masterpieces of style and execution. Who is there, no matter how advanced his age, who cannot read with pleasure the tales of Lazy Lawrence, Tarlton, The Bracelets, Waste Not Want Not, Forgive and Forget, e tutti quanti? Who is there whom it much disturbs that the account of Eton Montem is not accurate, and that perhaps there could have been nothing more unfortunate than to lay the scene of action of The Little Merchants in Naples, the one spot in all the earth where the events therein described could not have happened? Change the name of the locality, the charm of the tale remains and the absurdity is removed. Nor must it be forgotten that children, less well read than their elders, are less alive to these blemishes, which are, after all, of no real import. Of Simple Susan, so great a person as Sir Walter Scott said that "when the boy brings back the lamb to the little girl, there is nothing for it but to put down the book and cry." Then as to Rosamond, who does not feel a true affection for that impetuous, impulsive little girl, and who is there (so greatly have our ideas of morality changed) that does not think that in the matter of the famous Purple Jar, an unjustifiable trick was played upon her by her mother? It was a part of the Edgeworth system to make misdirected or mistaken desires stultify themselves; but the child should have been informed of the nature of the jar, and if then she still persisted in her choice, she would have been fairly treated, which now she is not. Frank remains a capital book for little people, and if, occasionally, Miss Edgeworth's juvenile tales reflect too much of the stiff wisdom of her age, these are matters which children, not morally blasé, hardly remark. On the other hand, there is never anything mawkish in her pages, she never fills the mind with yearnings for the impossible, she never works too much upon the susceptibilities, which modern child-literature so often does. Her writings for children are certainly sui generis, not because she has attempted what has never been attempted before, but because she succeeded where others failed. She made even her youngest reader comprehend that virtue is its own reward, while avoiding the error invariably fallen into by writers for the young, of representing virtues as always triumphant, vice as uniformly punished—a fallacy even children are quick to detect. It has been objected to her that she checks enthusiasm, the source of some of the noblest actions of mankind. This is true; she has somewhat erred on the repressive side, but her purpose was right and good. She saw plainly that enthusiasm, generous in its origin, is but too often the source of misfortune, ill-judged effort, and consequent disappointment. Moderation, the duties of contentment and industry, are what she loves to uphold; the lower, humbler, but no less effective virtues of existence.

      On the other hand it is clear, from her letters, that she herself was not devoid of enthusiasm, and here, again, it was probably her father's influence that made her exclude it from her writings. In one of her letters she says:—

      Vive l'enthousiasme! Without it characters may be very snug and comfortable in the world, but there is a degree of happiness which they will never taste, and of which they have no more idea than an oyster can have.

      Harry and Lucy falls sharply into two parts. The earlier portion was intended to be read before Rosamond, and after Frank; the latter was the last of the juvenile series. The work had been begun by Mr. Edgeworth and his wife Honora, from the need of a book to follow Mrs. Barbauld's lessons, and as a story to be inserted in this work Mr. Day had originally written Sandford and Merton. Harry and Lucy was printed, but not published. It was kept, as originally meant, only for the Edgeworth children; but after more than twenty years Mr. Edgeworth passed the work on to his daughter, and bade her complete it and prepare it for publication. The first portion thus came out early in the century, while the last part did not appear till 1825.

      Harry and Lucy is unquestionably heavy in parts, especially the latter half, yet first principles are well explained and popularized, and instruction and tale so skillfully blended that the young reader cannot skip the one and read the other. The main idea and the chief merit of these volumes, not at once perhaps obvious, is that of enforcing in a popular form the necessity of exercising the faculties of children, so that they should be, in part, their own instructors, and of adding to those more common incentives to study, which consist of rewards and punishments, the far surer, nobler and more effective stimulus of curiosity kept alive by variety and the pleasure of successful invention. It was the desire of the authors to show with what ease the faculty of thinking may be cultivated in children, a point on which Miss Edgeworth insists in other of her tales. In Harry and Lucy are explained simply and familiarly, sometimes in conversations between the children and their parents and friends, sometimes in dialogue between the children themselves, the rudiments of science, principally of chemistry СКАЧАТЬ