Page:Maria Edgeworth (Zimmern 1883).djvu/107

Rh her agents bad, as some writers would have done, indeed, one is a very model middle-man. She is always far more careful to be true than to be effective, she uses the sober colours of reality, she paints with no tints warmer than life. The chief and abiding; merit of her Irish scenes is not that of describing what had not been described before, but of describing well what had been described ill.

Vivian was written with extreme care, and by no means with the same rapidity, yet it cannot be compared to the Absentee. Here Miss Edgeworth was once more clogged by her purpose, and unable for a moment to lose sight of it. "I have put my head and shoulders to the business," she writes to her cousin, "and if I don't make a good story of it, it shall not be for want of pains." It proved no easy task, and only the fact that her father so much approved it, upheld her. "My father says Vivian will stand next to Mrs. Beaumont and Ennui, I have ten days more work on it, and then huzza! ten days more purgatory at other corrections, and then a heaven upon earth of idleness and reading, which is my idleness." Vivian is a particularly aggravating story, so excellent that it is hard to comprehend why it is not of that first-class merit which it just seems to miss. Its aim is to illustrate the evils and perplexities that arise from vacillation and infirmity of purpose, and it is rather a series of incidents than one well-rounded plot. Miss Edgeworth loves to paint, not an episode in a life, but the history of a whole life career. This permits her to trace out those gradual evolutions of some fault of character in which she displays such consummate ability, such precision, and metaphysical subtlety. The hero, Vivian, a man of good dispositions, but lacking firmness of purpose, cannot say "no,"