Maria Edgeworth; selections from her works

Preface

The purpose of this book is to present a selection from Maria Edgeworth's writings about Ireland, and the scheme necessitates a mutilation of the four novels from which excerpts are taken. But Castle Rackrent and The Absentee have been so often reprinted that, while it was impossible to neglect them, readers of this volume will find their full texts easily accessible. The presentation of isolated scenes from Ennui and Ormond may be justified on somewhat different grounds : neither of these novels, though both contain passages of great interest, would appeal to a reader to-day mainly by its plot. Reprints of what is really a complete short story from the Essay on Irish Bulky and of a letter written in 1834, complete the selection. The last was not written for publication ; it was an account of her tour in Connemara sent to her brother in India, and it not only afl^ords an excellent example of her familiar letters, but gives a most graphic picture of life eighty years ago in a part of Ireland now the haunt of many visitors, but then unfrequented by tourists and unknown to Government Boards. The selection thus attempts to cover all those of Miss Edgeworth's productions which were directly concerned with Ireland, except Popular Tales and Comic Dramas.

The footnotes to the passages selected are reproduced from the original texts : the editorial notes necessitated by the omission of passages in the text are printed in smaller type on the page.

The frontispiece is a reproduction of a family group

iii.

IV.

PREFACE.

in the possession of Mrs. Arthur Butler, a copy of which is in the National Gallery of Ireland. This gives the only authentic portrait of Maria Edgeworth, except an indifferent photograph taken in her old age. It is an odd fact that the portraits reproduced in Miss Oliver's and Mr. Hare's books are imaginary.

It is a great pleasure to express to Mrs. Butler my most cordial thanks for allowing me to extract the Connemara letter from the privately printed memoir which she was good enough to lend me, for showing me original manuscripts and unprinted letters of her aunt, and for her interest and help in a lecture on Maria Edgeworth that I gave some years ago before the Irish Literary Society of London, as well as in the introduction to the present volume. To Professor Edgeworth, the present head of the family, who remembers his aunt as a very old lady, I am similarly indebted for very kindly aid and encouragement. Without their help the Introduction could not have taken its present form, but, apart from this, they bear no responsibility for anything contained in it. Acknowledgment is made in the notes and the list of authorities to various books and articles consulted. To Mr. Alfred Perceval Graves, the general editor of this series, I am, like so many of his fellow-members of the Irish Literary Society, indebted for valuable advice. I have to thank Mr. J. E. Shuckburgh for most useful notes on references to Maria Edgeworth in Byron's Diaries and Letters and other writings of the period, while Dr. Crone, editor of the Irish Book Lover, has been so kind as to procure for me, through the good offices of Mr. F. J. Bigger, information on the translation into Irish of two of Miss Edgeworth 's tales.

M. C. C. S.

Contents

PAGE

Introduction vii.

Selections from *' Castle Rackrent '* i

I

It was at one time a commonplace of the politico-literary essayist to lament that Ireland has nothing to set beside the Waverley Novels ; that, in fact, there has been no Irish Walter Scott. The reflection, of course, is marked by that degree of truth which makes commonplaces so irritating. But it has not been so generally observed that most other countries to some extent suffer from the same disability. If a visitor from the planet Mars were to enquire the name of a single English writer of romance from whose pages it would be possible to study the national characteristics of the English people ; to acquire, half unconsciously, a knowledge of the more picturesque and dramatic periods of English history ; to accompany, in imagination, John Bull through his various metamorphoses from, let us say, Robin Hood to Sir Robert Walpole (the period of Ivanhoe to the period of Waverley), the answer would not be easy. A writer may express national aspirations, he may depict the local idiosyncrasies of a particular place or period, he may revive historical

Vlll. MARIA EDGEWORTH.

memories ; but he cannot present his own countrymen with a microcosm of their common country. It is only the stranger that hopes to be spared the trouble of research and observation by finding in conveniently compressed form a literary spokesman for a whole nation. It is convenient for a critic to say that Ibsen stands for Norway, but the Norwegian himself may prefer to be judged by Bjornsen. Fifty years ago most foreigners supposed that Goethe represented Germany. Yet to-day we are all complaining that Goethe has somehow disappeared and been submerged in the insistent and forcible problem furnished by the German people, and we begin to suspect that Goethe cannot really have summed up all the potentialities of German character.

All that is really meant, then, by a critic who laments the absence of an Irish Scott, is either that there is no Irish writer of romance who can fairly be compared with Scott — a reflection that does not take us much further than would the remark that there is no Spanish Dante or no Swedish Turgenev — or else that there is no Irish writer who has made Irish scenes and themes as familiar to the English mind as the subject-matter of the Waverley Novels, It is natural that there should be sought in stories written in the English language, whatever the nationality of the writer, some quality which will enable the average English reader to understand and become interested in the unfamiliar types of character presented on the page. So far as the English

INTRODUCTION IX.

View of Scotland goes — and it does not go far — Walter Scott did that work once for all. A nation that for some six centuries had been a troublesome, at times a dangerous, military and political opponent of England, and had, since the union of the Crowns, acquired an apparently disproportionate share of the good things going in the common storehouse, passed, under the hands of the Wizard of the North, through a magic crucible, and came forth in a garb of chivalry and romance. There is to this day in England a sentiment about the Highland Regiments of the British Army which is something more than recognition of their splendid achievements. Although the feeling does not extend, oddly enough, to the Lowland Regiments — except in so far as their possession of bagpipes causes mental confusion in the Southron — it is in great part a legacy from the Lowlander, Sir Walter Scott.

Ireland has no counterpart of this. Yet hear what Sir Walter himself wrote in the Postscript to Waverley :

'* It has been my object to describe those persons, not by a caricatured and exaggerated use of the national dialect, but by their habits, manners, and feelings ; so as in some distant degree to emulate the admirable Irish portraits drawn by Miss Edgeworth ; so different from the * Teagues ' and ' dear joys/ who so long with the most perfect family resemblance to each other, occupied the drama and the novel."

This was written in 1814, by which year Maria Edgeworth had published all the stories, except Ormond, which have been drawn on for the selections given in this volume. Waverley^ like Castle Rackrent, was published

X. MARIA EDGEWORTH.

anonymously, but when it was read aloud in the family circle at Edgeworthstown, Mr. Edge worth exclaimed, *' Aut Scotus aut Diabolus ! " and his daughter thanked the undeclared author in a letter that took his identity for granted.

It was not until 1823 ^^at Maria Edgeworth met Scott, after some years of friendly correspondence. Twenty years earlier the Edgeworths had visited Edinburgh, and seen much of Dugald Stewart, the philosopher, and other eminent Scotsmen, but had failed to meet the author of Waverley. As Sir Walter said, when his wife commented on this, " You forget, my dear. Miss Edgeworth was not a lion then ; and my mane was not grown at all ! " In his general preface to the Waverley Novels y published in 1829, Sir Walter expanded his eulogy :

'* Without being so presumptuous as to hope to emulate the rich humour, pathetic tenderness, and admirable tact, which pervade the works of my accomplished friend, I felt that something might be attempted for my own country, of the same kind with that which Miss Edgeworth so fortunately achieved for Ireland ; something which might introduce her natives to those of the sister Kingdom in a more favourable light than they had been placed hitherto, and tend to produce sympathy for their virtues, and indulgence for their foibles."

In a letter written to Miss Edgeworth in 181 8, he had already observed :

" You have had a merit, transcendent in my eyes, of raising your national character in the scale of public estimation, and making the rest of the British Empire acquainted with the peculiar and interesting character of a people too long neglected and too severely oppressed/*

INTRODUCTION. XI.

When Scott came to visit Ireland, he records :

" I never saw a richer country, or, to speak my mind, a finer people ; the worst of them is the bitter and envenomed dislike which they have to each other."

(This, of course, was ninety years ago.) The strange notion, which has occasionally made its way into print, that Ireland has no such romantic incidents in her past as to afford a good field for the historical novelist, finds some answer (apart from the actual work of Mr. Standish O'Grady and other Irish writers) in the fact, noted by Mr. O'Donoghue, that Scott himself thought of writing a novel on Redmond O'Hanlon, the Rapparee.

It will be noticed that in the first of these passages Scott laid particular stress on the fidelity of Miss Edgeworth's drawing of Irish character, and welcomed the appearance of her work as an antidote to the caricatures already prevalent. Miss Edgeworth, in fact, was hailed as an effectual enemy to what would now be called ** The Stage Irishman " * — a point that should be borne in mind by any reader who, without taking the pains to study for himself the real conditions of Irish life at the end of the eighteenth century, is inclined to assume that Miss Edgeworth distorts the figures of her countrymen. Sir Jonah Barrington, who professed to write doVn his real recollections, gives us scenes far more

* ** The Irishman and the Scot, long familiar as comic figures to the novelists of the eighteenth century, who had inherited them from the earUer comedy of manners, had never before Miss Bdgeworth's time ventured to claim serious treatment at the hands of writers of fiction " — Sir Walter Raleigh ; The English Novel,

Xli. MARIA EDGEWORTH.

extravagant than anything in her pages. The Stage Irishman is a figure about which much nonsense is talked to-day, partly because Ireland feels that many EngHsh people will insist on regarding as typical figures any odd individualities presented to their notice, and even on basing social and political opinions on notions gathered haphazard from the newspaper, the novel, and the stage. The point is well illustrated by the intense dislike with which the writers of the Young Ireland school regarded the works of Charles Lever. Thomas Davis and his friends devoted their lives to the attempt to develop all that was earnest, patriotic, and, in the best sense, serious in the Irish character. Meanwhile Lever was giving a wider publicity to all that was odd, rollicking, and devilmay-care in Irish life ; the popularity of his novels in England was perpetuating a set of ideas about Ireland which the Young Irelanders hoped to abolish as being a real obstacle to their political aims. Their obvious course was to declare, somewhat shrilly, that Lever libelled his country, and they took it. But it must be remembered that Lever, contending manfully with famine fever as a dispensary doctor at Carrigaholt — a far harder task than the composition of patriotic leading articles — acquired a fairly close acquaintance with the people of Clare. Corcabaskin produced few scholar-patriots like Eugene O 'Curry, whom Lever would never have caricatured. And surely there ought to be room, in any healthy community, for the writer of comedies, and even farces, as well as for the idealist. Philanthropists

INTRODUCTION. XUl.

of our own day who work for the improvement of the East End of London do not complain because Mr. W. W. Jacobs exhibits the denizens of the Docks in a frivolous aspect. And, after all, Young Ireland was bitterly conscious that some members of O'Conneirs *' Tail '' might have walked out of Lever's pages. Nor do absurd situations cease to present themselves merely because men take politics seriously ; it was not Charles Lever who was responsible for the fact — noted by the Viceroy, Lord Clarendon — that the Physical Force Party had to be protected by police from the violence of the advocates of Moral Suasion.

None the less, the Stage Irishman does stalk through much printed matter — literature we will not call it — on Irish subjects : ** his head is bloody but unbowed," as Henley would have said, beneath the bludgeonings of indignant critics. We all know and loathe the Irishman in a novel who is made to say ** Bejabers ! I would be afther bein' kilt " — or the like gibberish. Yet, in our protests against an offensive style of caricature, some of us lose all sense of proportion. It is, no doubt, a result of the political and social history of the country that many Irishmen should trouble themselves excessively about what English people may think or say of this, that, and the other Irish matter. If it were once realised that most Englishmen were far too busy earning their own living to take much notice of trivial matters on the other side of a channel which that famous maritime people has dways shown a marked disinclination to cross.

XIV. MARIA EDGEWORTH.

except on business, and further, that it is simply a symptom of want of self-respect for a nation to think more about its neighbours' possible criticisms than about its own work, complaints about the Stage Irishman would cease to be what they are to-day, as wearisome as the puppet himself. As a weapon in controversy the phrase is being blunted by much repetition. Critics who have taken exception, rather on political or theological than on artistic grounds, to certain features of the new Irish School of Drama, have pretended that the figures in the plays are " Stage Irishmen." Surely a phrase that has become so loose as to blend the whiskeybottle of the London music-halls with the " Shadowy Waters " of Mr. Yeats has effectually damned itself to every rational mind. It has become little more than the literary equivalent of the rotten egg of political argument.

At the same time it is right to scnitinise in an Irish novelist the fidelity of his national portraiture, and the essential point to mark is that we must ask ourselves not whether the Irish characters of fiction or drama might possibly cause a person who had never been in Ireland to form mistaken views about living Irishmen, but whether the author has observed faithfully and recorded without dishonesty or malice. This point, which it ought to be, but is not, unnecessary to set down, is obscured in the case of books about Ireland written in English, simply because books are generally written in order that they may be read, and in these islands

INTRODUCTION. XV

more books are read by English and Scottish than by Irish readers. The case of the drama is different, since twenty will go to a play at their doors for every halfdozen that will read, or for every one that will buy, a new book. It has been the experience of most Irish prose writers that their main public is to be found in England, since it would appear that Irish America, though very faithful to old favourites, is not, as a rule, very quick to discover new Irish writers. Even authors must live, and if Ireland will not support her own authors it is a little ungracious, though natural enough, that she should chide them for tuning their instruments to a foreign pitch. When one comes to think of it, writers are not the only figures in modern Irish public life who have to some extent depended for their living on oversea subscriptions.

That Irishmen and women should read Irish books, new and old, is a proposition that few will deny. They do read, or at any rate talk about, books that are immediately connected with practical issues ; the propagandist can count on an Irish public far larger than that of the artist. Any man who has lived, as so many Irishmen live, with scarcely a break, for many years in his own county likes, when he takes up a book for relaxation, to read of unfamiliar people and scenes. He is bored by a story that simply transfers to the printed page incidents and conversations that he can find in real life whenever he talks to his neighbours. And his neighbours' conversation is often far more amusing in real life

XVI MARIA EDGEWORTH.

than its reflection could be in print. He is glad to hear that someone belonging to his own part of the world is making a success in literature, but, if he has no personal or family interest in the writer, he is too often content to take that success for granted, and regard it with the detachment with which he would receive the news that a neighbour's son had made a fortune in America or got a good appointment in India. It simply does not occur to his mind that he himself, just as much as anyone living in England, is a member of the public to which the writer appeals. Still less does the thought suggest itself that the indifference or apathy of hundreds of people exactly like himself is a factor in the process that tends, generation after generation, to detach the Irish writer from that intimate touch with his own folk, that reliance upon their sympathy and interest, which is needed to keep his work sane, vigorous, and worthy of Ireland.

Miss Edgeworth noted in 1814 that during the last thirty years the habit of reading had increased remarkably in Ireland. But in this, as in many other matters, the Great Famine set back the hands of the clock. It has been truly observed that most large Irish country houses possess good libraries of books published before the middle of the nineteenth century, to which little has been added in later years. Agrarian movements, whatever their merits or their justifications, are not good for book-lovers.

As regards old books, books that time has preserved

INTRODUCTION. X\ U.

and dignified, it may be hoped that a worthy curiosity about the way our ancestors lived and spoke will increase steadily. Hazlitt said that whenever a new book appeared he read an old one, and this though he kept a very sharp eye on his own contemporaries. If every educated Irishman would follow his example, the nation would gain immeasurably. " God be with the old times ! " is a familiar saying which need not prevent man from taking an interest in them. And for an introduction to the everyday life of Ireland at the end of the eighteenth and beginning of the nineteenth century, the Ireland of Grattan and Castlereagh, of the Ninety-eight and the Union, of Lord Edward Fitzgerald and Robert Emmet, of Sheridan and Thomas Moore, it would be diffcult to find a more agreeable guide than Maria Edgeworth

XV ill. MARIx\ EDGEWORTH.

Maria Edge worth was the second child and eldest daughter of Richard Lovell Edge worth, of Edge worthstown, in the County Longford, a man of considerable note in his day. Her mother, Mr. Edgeworth's first wife, was Anna Maria Elers, the daughter of an Oxfordshire country gentleman, whose family was of German origin, and it was at Black Bourton in that county that Maria was born in 1767. She died at Edgeworthstown in 1849, her life thus covering a space almost as great as that of Fanny Burney (1752-1840). Born when the Penal Code was still in vigour, she lived through the horrors of the Great Famine. Thus she saw the establishment of Grattan's Parliament, the French Revolution and the Napoleonic Wars, the Ninety-eight, the Union, Catholic Emancipation, the Reform Bill, and the movement for Free Trade. In English literature she links the period of Dr. Johnson and Burke with that of Carlyle, Dickens, and Thackeray. She watched the literary careers of Byron, Scott, and Wordsworth — all of whom she knew personally. When asked by her publishers in 1847 to write new prefaces to her collected works she declined, because :

" As a woman my life, wholly domestic, cannot afford anything interesting to the public. I am like the needy knife-grinder — I have no story to tell. There is, indeed, one thing I should have wished to tell, but that Sir Walter Scott has so much better told it for me. I honestly glory in the thought that my name will go down to posterity as his friend."

INTRODUCTION. XlX.

But the world of letters has not shared her modest estimate of the interest of her own Hfe. The privately printed Memoir in three volumes, produced by her stepmother in 1867, is a quarry in which many industrious students have worked. The first detailed account of Miss Edgeworth's life given to the public was not published until 1882, when Miss Grace Oliver's Study of Maria Edgeworth came from Boston. Next year appeared Miss Helen Zimmern's little volume in the Eminent Women Series ^2cadm 1894 Mr. Augustus Hare's two-volume Life and Letters. Yet it was not until fifty-five years after Miss Edgeworth's death that any Irish writer produced a monograph on the earliest Irish novelist. In 1904 appeared the volume in the English Men of Letters series by Miss Emily Lawless. Maria, who in Irish Bulls had joined her father in arguing that Great Britain is a prolific home of the species, would have enjoyed the notion that she was being presented to the world by a Scottish publisher as an English Man of Letters. Miss Lawless was admirably qualified to write of her predecessor, for they had much in common besides their nationality. Each in her own day represented many of the best qualities of the Irish landed gentry. Both were novelists of distinction, and deeply interested in many things outside the circle of literary topics. And, best of all, each was a woman with a strong sense of humour — the point that most, perhaps, impresses itself on anyone who has studied Miss Edgeworth's familiar letters and had the privilege of meeting Miss

XX. MARIA EDGEWORTH.

Lawkss. Since these two writers approached Irish life from very much the same standpoint, so far as family circumstances and political prepossessions are concerned, it is of real interest to mark the change that a century has brought in the view that a cultivated Irishwoman is prone to take of her own country's past. In the interval the work of archaeologists like Petrie and O'Donovan, poets like Sir Samuel Ferguson, Celtic students like O' Curry, had disinterred a past Ireland that had been as completely hidden from modern eyes as were the remains of Troy and Myenae from students of Greek before the day of the excavating archaeologist. Miss Lawless, when she wrote her historical novels, With Essex in Ireland and, still more, Maelcho, was instinct with a spirit that did not exist in Miss Edgeworth's times. We shall see when we come to Ormond that Maria was interested in the Irish Brigade in France, as any intelligent and sympathetic observer must be interested in events that had deeply concerned his own country in his father's lifetime. But she had not the power to discern the romantic adventurousness and the spiritual bitterness that united to drive the flower of Irish CathoUcs to continental battlefields, nor that insight without which the artistic excellence of Emily Lawless's verse would have left With the Wild Geese a cold presentment of dead fires. It was left to a later day to give expression to that passionate love of Eire which so many of the Gall have learned from the Gael and treasured in their hearts, even though their lives may seemingly

INTRODUCTION. XXI.

have been spent in prosaic tasks and their judgments compelled them to oppose the facile enthusiasms of the obviously patriotic. It were unjust to complain that Maria Edgeworth did not pass on to the world something that she could not herself have known.

" When Miss Edgeworth wrote," observes Mr. Stephen Gwynn,* " she had all about her an Ireland still Irish-speaking, but in which the old order and tradition were shattered, an Ireland lying as if in paralysis, vegetant rather than alive, and she wrote of the Celtic Irish with the keen and not unkindly insight that a good mistress possesses into the virtues and foibles of her servants. Once or twice, as for instance, M. Ormond, she endeavoured to portray some survival of the old Celtic nobiHty, and King Corny is perhaps as well represented as he could have been by one who knew nothing of the history, language, and literature of his race. . . . For all that gave significance and value to the history of the Irish Celt she .... cared nothing."

This is, perhaps, a slightly misleading way of putting a patent truth ; for when Miss Edgeworth describes an Irish servant or peasant she does not generalise about the Celtic race. Her sketch of Count O'Halloran in The Absentee, a dignified figure whose quiet humour is so effectually contrasted with the foppishness of his visitors, stands witness for her ability to understand the Catholic gentry of the old stock. As for the peasantry, we find neither in her stories nor her letters a trace of the contempt with which Dean Swift, for all his political Irish patriotism, regarded three-fourths of the Irish people. It was not that Miss Edgeworth cared nothing ; she had no opportunity of knowing anything

* To-day and To-morrow in Ireland, 1904.

XXll. MARIA EDGEWORTH.

of Celtic tradition. Of the politicians and orators who made Dublin a brilliant centre before the Union, Flood alone seems to have shown any interest in the Irish language. Dr. Johnson, in fact, would appear to have thought more about the Gaelic language, provided it was not the Scottish Gaelic, than did either of his Irish friends, Edmund Burke or Oliver Goldsmith. As for history, where was a young lady in the reign of George III. to find any account of Anglo-Irish relations that was not written from the purely English point of view ? The Edgeworths had come to Ireland in Tudor times (1583), having before that date been settled, according to a family tradition which seems trustworthy, at Edgware, in Middlesex. They thus belonged to what Geoffrey Keating called the '' Nua-Gall," the New Strangers — as opposed to the " Sean Gall," the Anglo- Norman stock to which he himself belonged ; and for two stormy centuries their main line stood for Protestantism and the English connection, though it was a Catholic cadet branch of the same family that produced the Abbe Edgeworth, who stood by Louis XVI. on the scaffold. But it is absurd to represent Maria Edgeworth as considering herself an Englishwoman. Her most contemptuous satire, in The Absentee and elsewhere, is reserved for Irishwomen who fancied that by pretending to be English they would improve their social standing.

Her father had been sent as a child to a school in England, where he was buUied for his Irish brogue, and

INTRODUCTION. XXUl.

was removed to Drogheda School, only to be teased for his English accent. He was sent to Trinity, and later to Oxford, and read for the Bar in London (like all Irish Bar students, down to Daniel O'Connell's time and later). He lived for a time in France, where he fell under the influence of Rousseau, and attached himself later, before coming into the family property, to the literary set at Lichfield that paid court to Dr. Darwin, and admired, or, at any rate, listened to, the poems of Miss Anna Seward.^ Here he made friends with Thomas Day, author of Sandford and Merton, whose antipathy to feminine authors caused Maria Edgeworth to postpone pubHcation of her earliest work until Mr. Day was killed by a colt that he was breaking in according to an original and humane method. With a strong turn for practical mechanics Richard Edgeworth combined a lively interest in political philosophy of the Utilitarian school founded by Bentham, and in what would nowadays be called '' sociology." His daughter's correspondence with Ricardo shows that she inherited this interest. Mr. Edgeworth was a resident Irish landlord who devoted himself to the management of his estate and the material improvement of the neighbourhood. " I had always thought," he writes in his Memoirs, " that if it were in the power of any man to serve the country which gave him bread, he ought to sacrifice every inferior consideration and to reside where he could be most useful."