THE death of her father was for Miss Edgeworth one of those turning-points in life which never leave the mind exactly as it had been before. Her powers of rebound were considerable, and her natural good spirits after a time returned, but we can see the traces of this sorrow up to the very end of her life. Nor is there anything surprising in this. Exasperating as was his interference with what, in our judgment, lay wholly outside his province, it would be unjust not to realise that the peculiar and very charming link which has so often united a daughter to a father has on the whole rarely found a better exemplification than in their case. Exceptionally open as she was to all the ties of affection, it is nevertheless evident that for Miss Edgeworth her father stood head and shoulders above every other object of affection whom she had ever known, or was ever destined to know. Now he was gone, and for a long time it seemed as if life itself was scarcely conceivable without him.
She had a physical discomfort which added to her other sources of depression. Her eyes had again become extremely painful. She told one of her relations that the tears, when she shed them, "cut like a knife," and [Page 147] she was not given to exaggerated expressions about herself. What at length, though not until after a considerable interval, roused her from her depression was the necessity under which she felt herself to lie of preparing this adored father's Memoirs for publication, a task to which she settled resolutely, as soon as her eyes had sufficiently recovered to make it possible.
It was an almost hopelessly difficult one, all the more because Mr. Edgeworth–changing his mind apparently at the last moment–had, as his dying injunction, left orders that his own share of the work was to be printed intact, with all its errors, inaccuracies, and solecisms, exactly as he had left it. The second volume was Miss Edgeworth's contribution to the work, and may be called the chief, no less than the last, tribute of devotion paid by her to her father, and for that very reason will never, unfortunately, be anything but a source of considerable discomfort to her admirers. So completely did she in writing it subordinate her own style to his, that she achieved what, without such an unmistakable piece of evidence, one would have been inclined to believe impossible–she succeeded in becoming excessively dull! In this undertaking she may be said to have actually surpassed her model, for Mr. Edgeworth's own autobiography is undoubtedly very much less dull than is the continuation by his daughter. The flood of anecdote with which this first portion is enlivened, as well as the intense–I may say contagious–exultation over his own achievements, which overflows the whole of it, would alone keep it from that reproach. In the second volume not only are the anecdotes fewer, but admiration for the subject of the book–no longer enlivened and made piquant by inno- [Page 148] cent vanity–becomes ponderous, and of the nature of an éloge funèbre, or solemn and wearisome panegyric.
That her own anxiety upon the subject was great is evident, and not, as has been shown, unnatural. As the book began to approach completion she grew eager to obtain some opinion upon it, more critical than the family circle could be expected to furnish. Her own and her father's friend, M. Dumont, was about to pay a lengthened visit to Bowood, and Lord and Lady Lansdowne wrote urgently, indeed affectionately, to beg of her to meet him there. This she agreed to do, and in the autumn of 1818, a year and a half after her father's death, she, for the first time since that event, left Ireland, taking with her her young half-sister, Honora. They reached Bowood upon the 7th of September.
From the description given to her relations, Bowood seems to have been quite the right house for an ardent worker to pay a visit in ! Immediately after breakfast the whole party are described by Miss Edgeworth as separating, each to his or her several tasks, and not being expected to meet again until luncheon time. Writing to her stepmother she is able presently to assure her that M. Dumont is greatly pleased with her father's manuscript–that is to say with the first volume, the autobiography. "He hates Mr. Day," the letter goes on–"in spite of all his good qualities. He says he knows 'he could not bear that sort of man, who has such pride and misanthropies about trifles, raising a great theory of morals upon an amour blessé.'" Lady Lansdowne is reported, on the other hand, to "admire and love Mr. Day as much as Dumont disliked him," an expression of opinion which it is permissible to set [Page 149] down rather to a friendly desire to please her guest, than to any very serious effort at criticism.
À propos of Mr. Day, an unpublished letter of this date is extant which gives a lively account of an expedition in search of a former residence of his. It seems to be worth inserting, if only as a proof that Miss Edgeworth was beginning once more to enjoy life, and to enter into its various incidents large or small:–
"We had a pleasant drive while at Epping with Mr. Lestock Wilson, to look for Mr. Day's old house. We stopped at cottages to inquire, but no man under forty knew more than that there had been such a person. Mr. Wilson was going to get down to inquire, and offered to leave the reins in my hands, to which I objected with an earnestness that diverted him and Honora much. At last we found a gentleman who was proud to tell us that the fee simple of the property, formerly Mr. Day's, was now his; a farmer Ainsworth now occupied the house. I had described the place to my companions, and as we drove up, missing the wood, and seeing a house quite unlike what I remembered, I thought it could not be the right place; but as we got to the top of the hill, the wood discovered itself below. I got out, and crossed the dirty road, in spite of a dog barking, and springing to the length of his chain. A woman and children appeared, staring as if stuck through with amazement. Then a charming old grey-headed man, leaning on crutches, but with ruddy cheeks and smooth forehead, and fine dark eyes, which lighted up and sparkled with pleasure and affection, when I mentioned the name of Day. [Page 150]
"'Day! know him? ay, sure I do, and have good reason for to do; for very good he was to me. Please to walk in !'–pointing with his crutch. 'The house he lived in was all pulled down, every bit, except yon brick wall.'
"We went in, and he seated himself in his elbow-chair by the kitchen fire, as you will see in Honora's sketch of him.
"'Oh! Mr. Day was a good man, and did a power of good to the poorer sort. I was one of his day's-men at first, and then he helped me on; and when he was tired of this here place, and wanted to settle at his other place, he offered me this; but I said, "Sir, I am not able for it," and he said, "But, Ainsworth, if I help you a bit, you 'll then be able, won't you ?"'
"It was quite touching to me to hear the manner in which this worthy old man spoke of Mr. Day. I asked him if he remembered the servant Mr. Day had who ploughed the sandy field sixteen times ?
"'George Bristow! Oh, ay, I remember him; an honest, good servant he was!'
"'He is now our servant.'
"'Why, I thought he went to live with a family in Ireland ?'
"'So he did–with our family.'
"'Oh, you comes from Ireland ?'
"So much for Farmer Ainsworth!"
Upon the same day, or the one following, Miss Edgeworth paid a visit to Mrs. Barbauld at Stoke Newington. Cheerful as she seemed to strangers, it is evident that the blow she had received still ached. In the following extract from a letter to her step- [Page 151] mother descriptive of that visit, there is a sense of the weariness, the underlying desolateness of life, very rare in one of her essentially light-hearted and unintrospective temperament:
"We waited some time before she" (Mrs. Barbauld) "appeared, and I had leisure to recollect everything that could make me melancholy–the very sofa that, you will remember, you and my father sat on. I was quite undone before she came in, but was forced to get through with it. She was gratified with our visit, and very kind and agreeable. Opposite to me sat Miss Hammond; I asked for her brother, who is well; and I felt as if I had lived three lives–as if I had lived a hundred years, and was left alive after everybody else."
Another, and a more cheerful visit, paid about the same date, was to Joanna Baillie. We have a lively picture of the still older authoress and one of her sisters "running down their little paved path" to meet their visitors. A few days later the two Miss Edgeworths returned to Bowood, but this second visit was marred by the sudden and tragic death of Sir Samuel Romilly, an event which was a source of such evidently acute sorrow to both Lord and Lady Lansdowne, that they considerately shortened their visit in order to leave them alone.
After leaving Bowood for the second time Miss Edgeworth paid a visit to her connections the Sneyds, and there set to work diligently at the Memoir, fortified by M. Dumont's general approval of it, and endeavouring, so far as was possible, to carry out his various criticisms. She does not seem to have returned to Ireland at all that year, but remained on in England till the following summer, paying a visit of some months at Berkeley Lodge, where her two Sneyd [Page 152] aunts had temporarily taken up their quarters with a brother. By the March following we hear that "the first part of the manuscript is in Hunter's hands," and before the end of that year the whole of it was completed, but Miss Edgeworth's own reluctance to publication was still strong, and the actual appearance of the book was delayed until the following Easter.
It is impossible not to sympathise with that hesitation. Indeed, if the postponement of the book had proved to be an eternal one, few critics would be prepared to say that the reputation of either the writer or subject of it would have suffered! Considering the whole tone of it; considering its flood of unstinted panegyric; considering the very ample openings which it afforded to criticism, especially as regards the first volume, it cannot be said that its reception was upon the whole other than friendly. In one case, but in one case only, the limits of fair criticism were unquestionably surpassed, and it is satisfactory to believe that this particular notice never met the eyes which it has every appearance of having been especially aimed at. The review in the Quarterly was couched in that peculiar style of unctuous piety which seems then, and for many years, to have been the special pride and glory of that review. Little doubt is allowed to rest upon the minds of its readers–one of which readers it was clearly hoped might be Mr. Edgeworth's own daughter–as to the destiny to which the subject of the Memoir in question had laid himself open. After a lengthened exposition of Mr. Edgeworth's opinions, real or supposed, "We wish," the reviewer goes on to observe, "that we could add that [Page 153] they"–i.e. the opinions–"gave us any reason to hope that they were founded in a spirit of Christian confidence. We regret to say that they do not. Moreover Mr. Edgeworth's life leads us to fear that the omissions of all expressions of devoutness in the productions of him and his daughter arise, neither from an opinion of their being extraneous to the subject, nor yet from accident, but . . ." etc., etc.
Further on in the same article Miss Edgeworth is personally and with inquisitorial solemnity adjured to lift a load from off the reviewer's soul, and at the same time to clear, if by any possibility she can do so, the guilt which rests upon that of her father. "Three words may yet clear up the difficulty"–so runs this amazing paragraph–"and if Miss Edgeworth is able in her next work to say 'My father was a Christian,' she will do a pious office to his memory, no inconsiderable good to mankind, and no one "–let us sit down for a moment, and ponder upon the charity of this remark–"no one will be better pleased than we shall ourselves."
Even to the charity of a Quarterly reviewer there had, however, obviously to be limits, and a reprobation which would in that case have been somewhat lightened as regards the rank heathenism of Miss Edgeworth, would have had to be transferred to the score of her carelessness and inexcusable inaccuracy. After a dissertation pregnant with the very darkest misgivings as regards the fate of her father–"We shall rejoice," the reviewer concludes by saying, "if we find that her inaccurate modes of expression had confirmed us in an error into which her father's own avowals had originally led us." [Page 154]
Studying this attractive production, and reflecting, moreover, upon its evident animus, it is not easy for a biographer to set bounds to his or her indignation. We must, however, in fairness remember that the inquisitorial note, which to the taste of to-day reads like the worst and most gratuitous form of impertinence, was, at the time it was penned, indeed long afterwards, the rule rather than the exception, on the part of critics who considered themselves to be the guardians, not of religion only, but of morality and decency. Readers of Mr. Morley's recent life of Mr. Gladstone can hardly have failed to be startled by the fashion in which, long after his entrance into public life, Mr. Gladstone himself not alone excused, but upheld, similar inquiries into the most private opinions of political contemporaries. It must, moreover, be remembered that the dogmatic tone adopted by the Edgeworth circle–especially by Mr. Edgeworth himself–was hardly less provocative, and was even fuller of the joy and zeal of self-righteousness than that of his critic, and that to this extent the intended castigation may be said to have fallen not wholly inappropriately.
Happily, so far as Miss Edgeworth was concerned, the only effect of the vituperation seems to have been to awaken a vehement outburst of affectionate indignation on the part of all her friends. M. Dumont wrote to her from Geneva, entreating her not to read that "infame article "–"cette attaque calomnieuse de la Quarterly Review. " Other friends wrote in the same sense, and, what was perhaps more surprising, she seems to have had the strength of mind to decide from the first that she had no intention of reading it, and to have kept to that resolution. [Page 155]
It was a resolution which was the easier to keep to owing to the fact that, long before she could have been tempted to break it, she was already far from England, and her attention fully occupied by new scenes and interests. She had returned to Edgeworthstown in the course of the summer of 1819, and after about eight or nine months there, she started again in the April following, taking with her her two young sisters, Fanny and Harriet, all three bound this time for the Continent. It was the first occasion upon which Miss Edgeworth had crossed the Channel in a steamer, and the innovation did not apparently please her, since she compares the motion of it, oddly enough, to the effect made upon any one sitting in a carriage, by "a pig scratching itself against the hind wheel." Their Swiss friends, M. and Madame Moilliet, accompanied them as far as Calais, but hastened on from there to their home in Geneva, while the Edgeworth sisters pursued their way to Paris, arriving there on April the 29th, 1820.
From the very first moment of their appearance, that, often inconstant, capital seems to have opened its arms widely to them. "Madame Maria Edgeworth et les demoiselles ses Soeurs " became at once the fashion, more so apparently than the family had even previously been in London. Miss Edgeworth's own excellent French was a passport, and the Abbé Edgeworth–no longer a source of peril or suspicion–had by that time become the object of a special cult on the part of every faithful Royalist. Nearly all her former acquaintances seem to have been still alive, hardly the worse for the intervening eighteen years, and one and all eager to meet and to greet her again. Amongst the [Page 156] warmest of her devotees seem to have been the whole of the French royal family. She tells her correspondents in Ireland that the Duchesse de Broglie, whom she met at the Embassy the very day after her arrival, was "quite tender." In fact, the attentions of the great at times became a trifle troublesome, and one of the few grumbles we find in her letters refers to a delightful conversation with Humboldt, in the course of which she was, she says, "twice called away to be introduced to Grandeurs, just as he had reached the most interesting point!" A lively account is given of a supper to which she and her sisters were invited by Cuvier, at the Collège de France, which they attained only after a drive of agony across the oldest part of the city. "Such streets! such turns! lamps strung out at great distances; coach and cart men bawling Ouais! Ouais! etc." When at last their destination was reached–"Cuvier himself came down to the carriage door to receive us, and handed us up the narrow, difficult stairs." Upstairs they found themselves landed in a small room, filled apparently with all the talents. "Prony, as like an honest water-dog as ever; Biot ('et moi aussi je suis père de famille '), a fat, double volume of himself–I could not see a trace of the young père de famille we knew–round-faced, with a bald head, a few black ringlets, a fine-boned skull, on which the tortoise might fall without cracking it." Presently came tea and supper together. "Only two-thirds of the company could sit down, but the rest stood or sat behind, and were very happy. Biot sat behind Fanny's chair, and talked of the parallax and Dr. Brinkley. Prony, with his hair nearly in my plate, was telling entertaining anecdotes [Page 157] of Buonaparte, while Cuvier, with his head nearly meeting him, was talking as hard as he could." Both of them assured her that Buonaparte "never could bear to have any answer but a decided answer." "One day," said Cuvier, "I nearly ruined myself by considering before I answered. He asked me, 'Faut-il introduire le sucre de betterave en France?' 'D'abord, sire, il faut songer si vos colonies. . . .' 'Faut-il avoir le sucre de betterave en France?' 'Mais, Sire, il faut examiner. . . .' 'Bah! Je le démanderai à Berthollet.'"
Even before this memorable supper, Miss Edgeworth had hastened to pay a visit to Madame Récamier in her convent. Although less rich and prosperous than of yore, she seems to have been still surrounded by a remnant at least of her former Court. The ex-Queen of Sweden was there, having been invited on purpose to meet them. Of Madame Récamier.–"She has not taken the veil any more than I have," Miss Edgeworth assures her correspondents, rather, one would have thought, unnecessarily. It is evident that fully half of her own pleasure in all these fine doings consisted in the enjoyment of her sisters. She chronicles, with all a mother's fulness of detail, the various compliments which were paid to them, relating amongst other matters that their début at Lady Granard's was an enormous success, and that their dresses on that occasion "were declared by the best judges to be perfection." For a little over two months the three sisters remained in Paris, seeing every one of note who was either living there or passing through it during the time. Then, after a short visit to their friend Madame Gautier at Passy, they started for Switzerland, to pay their long promised [Page 158] visit to M. and Madame Moilliet, reaching Geneva in the beginning of August.
The house in which they there found themselves lodged had belonged to the Empress Josephine, a fact which gave it a certain distinction. That it also commanded excellent views of the lake and the mountains was another commendable point, but scarcely perhaps one of equal importance. As Miss Edgeworth herself put it in one of her letters, "Fanny and I both prefer society–good society–to fine landscapes, or even to volcanoes." Upon what occasion she had been urged to make the acquaintance of volcanoes does not appear from the record of her travels, although of other and more desirable acquaintances there was undoubtedly no lack. Geneva is not somehow instinctively associated in the mind with brilliancy, yet there seems to have been enough of that quality at this period in and about the town, to have supplied half a dozen other towns of its size. Mr. and Mrs. Marcet; Arago; De Candolle the botanist; Von Stein; Sismondi–all are considerable names, and the owners of all five were at that moment to be found in or near Geneva. Other people of scarcely less note swelled the circle, and with all these the sociable Irish sisters seem to have been upon more or less intimate terms.
After leaving Geneva they paid a visit of some length to Madame de Staël's son and daughter-in-law at Coppet–Madame de Staël herself had died a few years previously, so that the two writers unfortunately never met. Naturally the visitors were deeply interested in all they saw and heard here, and not least in the little Rocca boy, Madame de Staël's seldom mentioned youngest son. He is described by Miss Edgeworth–a [Page 159] judge of children–as "an odd, cold, prudent, old-man sort of a child," and further on as "not in the least like Madame de Staël, and as unlike as possible to a son you would have expected from such parents." From Coppet they returned to Geneva, and in October paid a visit to Lyons, a town which, from its associations with her father, Miss Edgeworth had particularly wished to see. By the end of October the three sisters were back again in Paris, where they settled themselves into an appartement garni, with a valet de place, a femme de charge, and all else becoming. Here they remained for another three months, and again found themselves meeting and being received by every one who was worth the knowing. The account given by Miss Edgeworth of Madame de la Rochejaquelein–"with a broad, round, fair face–her hair cut short and perfectly grey, her form all squashed on a sofa," has been often quoted. "Je sais que je détruis toute illusion," the poor ci-devant Vendean heroine was in the habit of saying of herself. By December 1820 Maria and her two sisters were back again in London, and after a brief stay there, another visit to Bowood, and, a few visits to Badminton, Easton, and other houses of distinction, they reached home in February 1821.
By this time all the earlier fuss and excitement over the appearance of Mr. Edgeworth's Memoir had naturally subsided. Fortunately for herself Miss Edgeworth possessed, moreover, the invaluable quality of never fretting over the unalterable. All the doubts and anxieties which had so beset her while the appearance of the book was still in abeyance, were now at rest.–"You would scarcely believe the calm, and [Page 160] the sort of satisfied resignation I feel as to my father's life," she wrote to her stepmother a few months before her return home. To Mrs. Ruxton, who had evidently been seriously upset over the accusations of impiety–"Never lose another night's rest, or another moment's thought," she wrote, "over the Quarterly Review –I have not read it, and never intend to read it." She had done her best; she believed that her father, could he be consulted on the matter, would be satisfied; and that was enough. It was characteristic of her attitude towards that most masterful of parents, that the first task she set herself upon her return home was to finish the sequel of Harry and Lucy, a work which had been begun by him, but had been subsequently turned over to his daughter. On this account it was a sacred legacy. She could do nothing to please herself, she told those about her, till that was done.
The winter of 1821-22 found her and her two sisters again in London, seeing old friends, or making the acquaintance of others destined in the course of time to become so. She described to her correspondents at considerable length the scenes which she saw at Newgate, under Mrs. Fry's guidance. She took her sisters to Almack's, where, while they danced, she talked, amongst other people, to Lord Londonderry, who assured her that he had long desired the privilege of meeting her; an awed circle meanwhile standing round the minister and the lady whom he selected to honour. She became intimate with Mrs. Somerville, the astronomer, of whom she prettily said that "while her head is amongst the stars, her two feet are firm upon the earth." She saw Mrs. Siddons twice, once in "Lady Macbeth"; she paid a variety of pleasant visits; [Page 161] finally returned home again in June l822; from which date there appear to be no further visits nor any other special events to chronicle, till we come to the visit that was the most important of her life, the one which laid the foundations of the most memorable by far of her many friendships.
