Page:Maria Edgeworth (Zimmern 1883).djvu/141

Rh fashion to over-rate the service works of imagination can render virtue.

It would be easy to bring forward testimony regarding the fervent admiration bestowed on Miss Edgeworth by her contemporaries. She certainly missed, but she only just missed, the highest greatness. Did Madame de Stael put her sure finger on the cause when she said, after reading Fashionable Tales and expressing her great admiration, "que Miss Edgeworth etait digne de l'enthousiasme, mais qu'elle s'est perdue dans la triste utilite?" Yet to preach utility was held by Miss Edgeworth as a duty; but for this she might perhaps never have written at all, since no pecuniary needs drove her to authorship. And allowing for this moral strain in her works, and the blemishes that result thence, which compared with all she achieved are but trivial, in estimating her work as a whole, we may well afford to change what Chateaubriand called "the petty and meagre criticism of defects, for the comprehensive and prolific criticism of beauties." We must not look for features such as she cannot furnish, any more than we should seek for figs upon an apple tree. There are certain things Miss Edgeworth can do, and do inimitably, there are others entirely foreign to her sphere. Her novels have been described as a sort of essence of common-sense, and even more happily it has been said that it was her genius to be wise. We must be content to take that which she can offer; and since she offers so much, why should we not be content? Miss Edgeworth wrote of ordinary human life, and not of tremendous catastrophes or highly romantic incidents. Hers was no heated fancy ; she had no comprehension of those fiery passions, those sensibilities that burn like tinder at contact with the feeblest spark; she does not