Irish Books and Irish People | Page 5

long time spelling it over.' 'Won't you shave this morning, Sir Condy?'
says she, and put the letter into her pocket. 'I shaved the day before
yesterday,' says he, 'my dear, and that's not what I'm thinking of now;
but anything to oblige you, and to have peace and quietness, my
dear,'--and presently I had the glimpse of him at the cracked glass over
the chimney-piece, standing up shaving himself to please my lady."
However, the quarrel comes on in a delightful scene, where Sir Condy
shows himself at all events an amiable gentleman; and so my lady goes
home to her own people. There you have Miss Edgeworth at her very
best; and, indeed, Castle Rackrent received such a tribute as no other
novel ever had paid to it. Many people have heard how when Waverley
came to the Edgeworth household, Mr. Edgeworth, after his custom,
read it aloud almost, as it would appear, at one sitting. When the end
came for that fascinated circle, amid the chorus of exclamations, Mr.
Edgeworth said: "What is this? Postscript which ought to have been a
preface." Then there was a chorus of protests that he should not break
the spell with prose. "Anyhow," he said, "let us hear what the man has
to say," and so read on to the passage where Scott explained that he
desired to do for Scotland what had been done for Ireland: "to emulate
the admirable fidelity of Miss Edgeworth's portraits." What Maria
Edgeworth felt we know from the letter she posted off "to the Author of
'Waverley,' Aut Scotus aut Diabolus."
It would be unkind to compare Scott with his model. For the poetry and
the tragic power of his novels one would never think of looking in Miss
Edgeworth. Her work is compact of observation; yet the gifts she has
are not to be under-valued. She is mistress of a kindly yet searching
satire, real wit, a fine vein of comedy; and she can rise to such true
pathos as dignifies the fantastic figure of King Corny in Ormond,
perhaps the best thing she ever did. But she had in her father a literary
adviser, not of the negative but of the positive order, and there never
was a more fully developed prig than Richard Edgeworth. His view of
literature was purely utilitarian; to convey practical lessons was the
business of all superior persons, more particularly of an Edgeworth. In
Castle Rackrent his suggestions and comments are happily relegated to

the position of notes; in the other books they form part and parcel of the
novel. The Absentee, for instance, contains admirable dialogue and
many life-like figures; but the scheme of the story conveys a sense of
unreality. Every fault or vice has its counterbalancing virtue
represented. Lady Clonbroney, vulgarly ashamed of her country, is set
off by the patriotic Lady Oranmore; the virtuous Mr. Burke forms too
obvious a pendant to the rascally agents old Nick and St. Dennis. It is
needless to say that the exclusively virtuous people are deadly dull. It is
the novel with a purpose written by a novelist whose strength lies in the
delineation of character. Miss Edgeworth can never carry you away
with her story, as Charles Reade sometimes can, and make you forget
and forgive the virtuous intention.
What was unreal in Miss Edgeworth became mere insincerity in her
contemporary, Lady Morgan. Few people could tell you now where
Thackeray got Miss Glorvina O'Dowd's baptismal name; yet The Wild
Irish Girl had a great triumph in its day, and Glorvina stood sponsor to
the milliners' and haberdashers' inventions ninety years before the
apotheosis of Trilby. O'Donnell, which is counted Lady Morgan's best
novel, gives a lively ideal portrait of the authoress, first as the
governess-grub, then transformed by marriage into the
butterfly-duchess. But the book is a thinly-disguised political pamphlet.
"Look," she says in effect, "at the heroic virtues of O'Donnell, the
young Irishman, driven to serve in foreign armies, despoiled of his
paternal estates by the penal laws; look at the fidelity, the simplicity,
the native humour (so dramatically effective) of his servant Rory; and
then say if you will not plump for Catholic Emancipation." "My dear
lady," the reader murmurs, "I wondered why you were so set upon
underlining all these things. Can you not tell us a story frankly, and let
us alone with your conclusions?"
Unfortunately, very much the same has to be said of a far greater writer,
William Carleton, even in those tales which are based upon his own
most intimate experience. The Poor Scholar, his most popular story,
proceeds directly from an episode in his own life. He had himself been
a poor scholar, had set out from his northern home to walk to Munster,
where the best known schools