Heroines Of Fiction. William Dean Howells

      TWO HEROINES OF MARIA EDGEWORTH'S

      FEW figures in literary history appeal to the remembrance so pathetically as the author of " Evelina." She had many trials which she bore with sweetness and patience; her blessings were mainly from her gift of being content with little, and of overprizing any kindness people did her, as if it were the effect of extraordinary virtue in them. Indeed, Fanny Burney was Evelina. She had not only written herself into the character of that heroine, but she had so thoroughly written herself out in it, that she seemed not to have had the stuff for another heroine left in her nature. Or, if this is going too far, it is certain that neither Cecilia nor Camilla makes herself remembered like Evelina as a real personality.

      I

      " Cecilia " was written while the author of " Evelina " was still Miss Burney, and before she entered the service of the Queen; " Camilla " was written long after she had left that service, and was published after she had become the wife of the émigré noble D'Arblay. In " Cecilia" she was not yet so overweighted by the fear and favor of the great Dr. Johnson that she wished to write her novels as he would have written them, and the language, if not quite the language of life, is often easy, gay, and natural. The mighty lexicographer was not to do his worst with her diction till many years later in " Camilla, where he prevailed with an effect which the image of a fawn advancing with the gait of a hippopotamus feebly suggests, though in more vital things "Camilla" is far from a mistaken performance. All three of the Burney- D'Arblay novels are on the same ground. They have mainly to do with the London of rank and fashion, and the London of trade and vulgarity; but a good part of the action passes in the country, and another good part in the several English spas whose waters were then the mode, and whose pump-rooms are the scenes of so much love-making in contemporary fiction. But in both " Cecilia " and " Camilla," the nominal heroines are of a less engaging, a less amusing quality. Cecilia is a girl of much more sense than Evelina; she has wit and she has beauty; and yet somehow she fails to take the heart as Evelina does. She moves in a world much more ascertained in its characteristics, through a much more ingenious intrigue. A cloud of genteel company at a dozen different places is suggested; vivid and amusing figures swarm in the pages of the novel. There are, indeed, only too many of them for remembrance, though probably no one who has met such a type of " agreeable rattle" as Miss Lerolle will have quite forgotten her; or her anti-type of supercilious passivity, Miss Leeson. That Lady Honoria who likes getting her father angry because he makes such funny faces and swears so divertingly when he is in a temper, is perhaps not so justifiably dear to the fancy; but she outlives most of the serious personages in the reader's remembrance. In the handling of all, a sense of the author's maturing art grows upon the critic; and in fact the "Cecilia" as a novel is as much superior to the "Evelina" which preceded it as it is to the " Camilla ''which followed it.

      II

      It is always possible, of course, that " Evelina " might have eventuated in "Camilla," even if the author had not spent five or six years, as the Queen's tire-woman, in the narcotic neighborhood of royalty. The tendency which Richardson had given to the best English fiction, and which is so strongly felt in " The Vicar of Wakefield," might have persisted in Fanny Burney's novels, and overweighted them at last, though she had remained in the world of literature, and looked on uninterruptedly at the world of fashion. Society was then so bad, not in its standards, but in its indifference to them, that all decent writers had it on their consciences to better it to their utmost by the force of imaginary examples. Fiction had not yet conceived of the supreme ethics which consist in portraying life truly and letting the lesson take care of itself. After a hundred years this conception is not yet very clear to many novelists, or, what is worse, to their critics; and the novel, to save itself alive from the contempt and abhorrence in which the most of good people once held it, had to be good in the fashion of the sermon rather than in the fashion of the drama. It felt its way slowly and painfully by heavy sloughs of didacticism and through dreary tracts of moral sentiment to the standing it now has, and we ought to look back at its flounderings, not with wonder that it floundered so long, but that it ever arrived. In fact, it did not flounder so very long, and it arrived at what is still almost an ideal perfection in the art of Jane Austen. But first it had to pass through the school of Maria Edgeworth, who was as severe a disciplinarian as ever the lighter-minded muses came under. They have long since had their revenge, poor things, and she has had to pay for her severity in the popular superstition which still prevails that she was all precept, all principle, all preaching. Nothing could be more mistaken, as anyone may prove who will turn to her entertaining novels of English fashionable life, her faithful and sympathetic sketches of Irish character, high and low. It is known that Turgenev, from his pleasure in her Irish stories, conceived the notion of making like studies of Russian conditions; that to this influence the world owes the "Notes of a Sportsman,'' and that the Russian serfs, from the influence of that book with the Czar, finally owed their emancipation.

      Fame could have brought Maria Edgeworth's noble spirit no sweeter consolation than such an event; she would have counted such an indirect effect of her work infinitely beyond the inspiration of such a consummate artist as Turgenev, but her long life ended just before our century had reached its fiftieth year, and thirty years before the serfs were freed. She began author well back in the eighteenth century, but she began novelist distinctly within the nineteenth. As her "Castle Rackrent " appeared in 1801, there can be no dispute concerning this fact; and no one who will read that capital story, or almost any other novel of hers, can question her right to stand with the foremost in nineteenth-century fiction by virtue of many things besides her priority in time. Such a reader will feel it his privilege, his highest pleasure, to help reverse the sentence which relegates this artist to the sad society of the mere sermoners. She did preach, there is no denying that, but she also pictured life so faithfully that Scott could wish for nothing greater than " Miss Edgeworth's wonderful power of vivifying all her persons, and making them live as beings in your mind."

      She knew her Ireland closely, lovingly, humorously, down to the last whimsicality of the tatterdemalion peasantry and the last eccentricity of the reckless, jovial gentry; but she knew her England, too, and the scenes of London fashion in her books are as graphic as Fanny Burney's. Indeed, it cannot be said that those London stories which have Ireland for a background are better than those which deal solely with English interests and characters. " The Absentee " and its kind are of inferior aesthetic quality, for in these the author has a moral to enforce, a social principle to preach; and in the others she has only character to paint, and personal conduct to portray. For this reason such a novel as " Belinda " is a better test of her powers than " The Absentee." After all, there is no situation so universally appealing to the sympathy and the fancy as that which Miss Burney chose in "Evelina" and "Cecilia," and which Miss Edgeworth again chose in "Belinda." A young girl gently bred, and coming up for the first time from the country to view the world of London society with innocent, astonished eyes—what could be sweeter, more suggestive, more abundant in exciting chance than this?