about by most
_providential_ coincidences; and this, as we have already remarked, is
not merely faulty, inasmuch as it evinces a want of skill in the writer,
and gives an air of clumsiness to the fiction, but is a very
considerable drawback on its practical utility: the personages either of
fiction or history being then only profitable examples, when their good
or ill conduct meets its appropriate reward, not from a sort of
independent machinery of accidents, but as a necessary or probable
result, according to the ordinary course of affairs. Miss Edgeworth also
is somewhat too avowedly didactic: that seems to be true of her, which
the French critics, in the extravagance of their conceits, attributed to
Homer and Virgil; viz., that they first thought of a moral, and then
framed a fable to illustrate it; she would, we think, instruct more
successfully, and she would, we are sure, please more frequently, if she
kept the design of teaching more out of sight, and did not so glaringly
press every circumstance of her story, principal or subordinate, into
the service of a principle to be inculcated, or information to be given.
A certain portion of moral instruction must accompany every
well-invented narrative. Virtue must be represented as producing, at the
long run, happiness; and vice, misery; and the accidental events, that
in
real life interrupt this tendency, are anomalies which, though true
individually, are as false generally as the accidental deformities which
vary the average outline of the human figure. They would be as much out
of place in a fictitious narrative, as a wen in an academic model. But
any _direct_ attempt at moral teaching, and any attempt whatever to give
scientific information will, we fear, unless managed with the utmost
discretion, interfere with what, after all, is the immediate and
peculiar object of the novelist, as of the poet, _to please_. If
instruction do not join as a volunteer, she will do no good service.
Miss Edgeworth's novels put us in mind of those clocks and watches which
are condemned "a double or a treble debt to pay": which, besides their
legitimate object, to show the hour, tell you the day of the month or
the week, give you a landscape for a dial-plate, with the second hand
forming the sails of a windmill, or have a barrel to play a tune, or an
alarum to remind you of an engagement: all very good things in their
way; but so it is that these watches never tell the time so well as
t