ART. VIII. Tales of Fashionable Life. By Miss Edgeworth, Vols. 4, 5, and 6. Johnson. 1812.

WHEN the Tales of Fashionable Life' first came under our

consideration, we endeavoured to convey to the reader, our general impression of Miss Edgeworth's literary character; and, though we were not enabled to speak with equal approbation of all ⚫ her efforts, we did not hesitate to place her in the first rank of mo dern novelists, and to express our satisfaction at the promise then held out to us of a continuation of her amusing and instructive tales, In reference to the former volumes, we are inclined to pronounce these now offered to the public to have, perhaps, less striking pas sages, but certainly fewer faults, and to be, on the whole, superior in point of taste, interest, and above all, vraisemblance.'

We are well aware how difficult it is to keep a due medium between flatness and common-place on the one hand, and romance and improbabilities on the other; and we are ready to admit that in order to excite extraordinary interest, the novelist must be permitted the use of incidents less usual, and of characters less commou than are met with in the streets and society of London; but we cannot reconcile ourselves to the violent and unnecessary vicissitudes of fortune and feeling which disfigure, in a greater or less degree, every tale of the first livraison of this work. We have already stated that we are no enemies to a slight sprinkling of the extraordinary, but we cannot reconcile ourselves to extreme improbabilities, and events barely within the verge of nature, which excite wonder instead of interest, and disgust rather than surprise. We are therefore glad to be able to say that in the present volumes we find much less reason for complaint on this point; and we are satisfied that a more genuine and sustained interest is preserved by this attention to probability, than could have been excited by those more amazing incidents and transactions with which Miss Edgeworth has sometimes endeavoured to captivate our attention.

As we profess great respect for Miss Edgeworth's abilities, and the sincerest wishes for the successful effect of her labours, we shall be excused for saying a few monitory words on the subject of this failing which we think is in some degree characteristical, and which, though less obvious in the first and third of the tales now before us, is yet not altogether unobservable, and is, we think, a considerable blemish on the story of Emilie de Coulanges. That' le vrai n'est pas toujours vraisemblable,' we do not deny; but we are prepared to insist that, while the 'vrai is the highest recommendation of the historian of real life, the vraisemblable' is the only legitimate province of the novelist who aims at improving the understanding or touching the heart.

Violent

Violent catastrophes and strange vicissitudes occur now and then in the history of mankind; but they are so rare, that, as lessons of conduct, they have little effect on the mind. Buffon says somewhere that when a chance becomes so remote as to be ten thousand to one, it ceases to create any interest; and though Doctor Johnson observed that if among ten thousand men, lots were to be drawn for the death of one, none of the ten thousand would be perfectly at ease; yet we are quite sure that (however it might be in a real crisis of life and death) the reader of a novel will be indifferent to events, the probability of which rests on no better foundation than that they have happened once in an age, or to one man out of ten thousand.

Of this character are, the disgusting duel on which the whole drama of Belinda' turns; the change at nurse of the heir of Glenthorn for the son of the blacksmith which constitutes the plot and produces the denouement of Ennui;' the nauseous folly of the romantic friendship in Almeria;' the indelicate and unlikely incident which operates the conversion of Colonel Pembroke in the Dun;' and the threadbare improbability of Emilie de Coulanges' refusing to marry the son of her friend, because her heart was engaged to an interesting unknown, and the stale surprize of discovering this same interesting unknown to be the very son of her friend. All these (and we could still farther swell the list) appear to us defects of such magnitude and of such frequent recurrence in Miss Edgeworth's works, that we cannot refrain from animadverting upon them, though we hope that she will not excuse merely, but even take in good part, our observations upon the almost solitary fault of which we have to complain.

But, while the incidents of Miss Edgeworth's pieces are too often improbable, she is altogether exempt from a fault which, at first sight, one would expect to find allied to the former, and which we have to allege against almost the whole class of modern novel writers, the want of truth and nature in the manners of the persous of the story. In this department (if we may use the expres sion) of composition, Miss Edgeworth is eminently successful. We do not know that she has, in the whole circle of literature, a rival except the inimitable authors of Gil Blas and Don Quixote and the discrimination with which the individuality of her persons is preserved through all the varieties of rank, sex, and nation, gives to her story a combined charm of truth and novelty, creates an interest more acute than fiction (if fiction it can be called) ever excited, and strikes us (for the moment at least) blind to the incongruities of the scene on which these moving images, these living pictures are employed.

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But to this power of masterly and minute delineation of character Miss Edgeworth adds another, which has rarely been combined

with the former, that of interweaving the peculiarities of her persons with the conduct of her piece, and making them, without forgetting for a moment their personal consistency, conduce to the general lesson which she undertakes to inculcate.

In order to appreciate exactly the merit of this latter power, we must recollect how seldom it has been successfully employed. Even in the drama, whose particular province it is to combine the varieties of human character into one action, to draw them, as it were, into the vortex of one interest, and to produce, by means of conflicting passions, one common object, Shakespeare (we think we may say) alone, has been able to solve this great problem. Other dramatists have chosen their characters and their objects with a direct reference to one another, and arranged their whole chain of moral causes and effects with a precision, which being easily foreseen, is not easily admired. He alone takes men and women as he finds then in nature, and, blending their powers yet discriminating their motives, without difficulty, and apparently without effort, moulds the vast variety to the great purpose for which he had designed them.

Among the novelists, (whose duties, though of an inferior rank, are of a similar kind,) we cannot immediately recollect one who has this merit. In Tom Jones, Peregrine Pickle, and Amelia, we have a most accurate and vivid picture of real life; but it is, if we may venture to say so, too real. A novel, which is not in some degree a lesson either of morals or conduct, is, we think, a production which the world might be quite as well without, and, it must be admitted, that the personages of the (otherwise) excellent works which we have mentioned, are brought together, without any such leading object in the association-without reference to any particular principle, and without inculcating any specific system of moral duty. Towards the close, indeed, of the last volume of this class there is usually some attempt at moralizing the tale,' and executing a lame and tardy justice on the prominent offenders; but this produces little beneficial effect on the mind: there is generally no kind of relation between the punishment inflicted and the crimes of those upon whom it is visited, and the errors of the heroes and heroines have as little to do with the annoyance which they suffer, as their virtues with the happiness to which they are ultimately, and for the most part, undeservedly dismissed. This, we admit, is no more than occurs in the great book of the world; but the more accurately that book is copied, the less inclined we should be to recommend to young and ardent minds the perusal of the transcript. We doubt whether the ridicule of Thwackum and Trulliber, or the exposure of Squire Gam and Blifil, have ever stifled the seeds of brutality or vice in any

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mind; but we are convinced that the gay immoralities, the criminal levities, and the rewarded dissipation of Tom Jones and Peregrine Pickle have contributed to inflame, and we will venture to add, to debauch many a youthful imagination.

Another class of novelists, of later date and humbler pretensions to wit and powers of intellect, are nearly the antipodes of the former. Nothing in their drama is real; their scenes are fancy, and their actors mere essences. The hero aud heroine are generally paragons of courage, beauty, and virtue; they reside in such castles as never were built, in the midst of such forests as never grew, infested by such hordes of robbers and murderers as were never collected together. In the small number of these novels which have any plan or meaning, all is modelled on a certain principle, and every event predisposed to conduce to a certain object. Virtue is to be always persecuted, never overpowered, and at the close invariably rewarded; while vice, on the other hand, triumphant through all the previous scenes, is sure to be immolated in the last by the sword of retribution. This kind of novel is as useless, as the former may be pernicious; the lessons it teaches are mere enthusiasm and romance for the every day occurrences of life there is inculcated a magnanimous contempt; and the mind, taught to neglect or despise the common duties of society, is either wound up to a pitch of heroism which never can be tried, or fixed in erroneous principles of morality and duty from which it is not easily reclaimed.

Between these extremes, Miss Edgeworth, with great ability and proportionate effect, holds her way. Her characters are as natural as those of the class of novel writers to whom we first alluded, and they contribute to the object she has in view as regularly as those of the latter: her virtue and her vice, though copied exactly from nature, conduce, with perfect ease, to a moral conclusion, and are finally punished or rewarded by means, which (rare as retribution in this world is) appear for the most part neither inconsistent nor unnatural.

Having thus endeavoured to state what, in addition to our former observations, has occurred to us on the more prominent beauties or defects of Miss Edgeworth's stile, we shall proceed to a hasty sketch of the contents of the volumes now before us; not with the intention of making our readers acquainted with what they undoubtedly will read, or have already read in Miss Edgeworth's own words, but rather to direct the attention to the moral object of each tale, with reference to the machinery by which that object is accomplished.

The first, occupying the whole of the fourth volume, is entitled Vivian,' a story intended, as Mr. Edgeworth informs us,

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(in a preface which he contributes to this publication,) to 'expose one of the most common defects of mankind.' To be infirm of purpose,' he continues, is to be at the mercy of the artful, or at the disposal of accident. Look round, and count the numbers who have within your own knowledge failed from want of firmness. An excellent and wise mother gave the following advice with her dying breath; "My son, learn early how to say, No!" This precept gave the first idea of the story of Vivian.' (p. 2.)

Vivian is a young man of good family and of large estate, who having lost his father while yet an infant, had the good fortune to find in his mother, Lady Mary Vivian, who, though a woman of fashion, is remarkably well informed and domestic,' a sensible and affectionate guardian, and the very paragon of tutors in the Rev. Mr. Russel; but unhappily Vivian's disposition is of too ductile a nature to retain permanently the excellent impressions which these accomplished instructors endeavour to give him. Their precepts cling to his memory indeed, but only to occasion remorse at the facility with which he on all occasions departs from them. Lady Mary's notions on education, though perhaps pretty well fitted for general use, were rather ill-adapted to the weak, jealous, and nervous disposition of her son. 'She over-educated, over-instructed, over-dosed him with her mature lessons of prudence-so he gave up hearing with his ears, and seeing with his eyes, till she at length discovered that he had neither ears, eyes, or understanding of his own.' Then in a sudden panic, lest he should grow too yielding and undecided, she hurried him away from the soft discipline in which he lived, and plunged him at once into the cold bath of a public school, where his home-breeding and his school-breeding (assimilating but ill together) increased by their counteraction the weakness of his character. And here we must complain a little of the bold ignorance with which Miss Edgeworth selects Harrow as the school in which she represents Vivian as made 'ashamed of every thing valuable he had learned at home, and as there learning every thing bad and nothing good.' (p. 5.) If there is any school of which less perhaps than of another this charge can be truly made, it is, we believe, Harrow. From an author of less reputation in didactics, we should have treated this charge with contempt; but the authority of Miss Edgeworth, and the still graver authority of Mr. Edgeworth, who sanctions, by his 'imprimatur,' his daughter's judgment of a school of which she at least knows nothing, obliges us to express our disapprobation of such flippant injustice-of such inconsiderate depreciation of an institution, to which we look, with affectionate reverence, as the seminary of some of the best, the ablest, and the most eminent men that our country has ever produced, 7. 2

Vivian,