Page:Maria Edgeworth (Zimmern 1883).djvu/70

58 entertainment with instruction, and that, taken as a whole, she succeeded. She did not shelter herself behind the saying that Il est permis ď eunuyer en moralitiés ď ici jusqu'à Constantinople. But it is the key to her writings, to their excellencies and their defects, that the duty of a moral teacher was always uppermost in her mind. Her aim was not to display her own talents, but to make her readers substantially better and happier, to show how easy and agreeable to practice are high principles. Again and again she insists, with irrefragable force, that it is the ordinary and attainable qualities of life rather than the lofty and heroic ones on which our substantial happiness depends, an insistance new in the domain of fiction, which as a rule preaches other doctrines. With this end in view she had necessarily to sacrifice some freedom and grace of invention to illustrate her moral aphorisms, her salutary truths, and she yielded to the temptation to exaggerate in order to make her work more impressive. Her Moral Tales are a series of climaces of instances, an enlargement of La Bruyère's idea, a method allowable to creations of fancy, but not quite justifiable when applied to the probable. Moreover, it was a feature of the 18th century, to which in many respects Miss Edgeworth belonged, that its tales and novels were not analytic. Psychology based upon biology was as yet unknown, or in so empirical a stage as to be remote from practical application. The writers of those days depict their characters not as the complex bundles of good and bad qualities and potentialities that even the veriest scribbler paints them to-day, but as sharply good or bad, so that one flaw of character, one vice, one folly, was made to be the origin of all their disasters. It is,