for what was named the grandeur, beauty and mystery of crime. She
seldom devoted her attention to crimes at all, but gave it to those
minor virtues and vices that contribute more largely to our daily
sufferings or enjoyments. The novels of her day were too apt to bring
forward angels or monsters, and though she also erred at times in the
former respect, yet on the whole she departed from it, and was among the
first to strike out that path since so successfully trodden, especially
by female novelists, and notably by George Eliot--that of interesting us
in persons moving in the common walks of men. In her _Popular_ and
_Moral Tales_ she was encumbered like a clergyman in his sermon, and
hence a too solemn and rather stifling air of moral reflection is apt to
pervade. That she overcame it as much as she did, that her novels are as
attractive and readable as they are, is to the credit of her genius,
which not even Mr. Edgeworth could wholly overlay and stifle, and she
thus with few exceptions triumphed over that tendency to the "goody,"
from which it seems so difficult for works intended for edification to
keep themselves exempt. Next to her children's and Irish tales she is
most excellent in her studies from fashionable life. Her heroes and
heroines moving in the dismal round of inanities, miscalled diversions,
are portraits touched up with nice care in detail, with a keen eye for
subtleties and demi-tints. She loved to expose the false and mawkish
doctrines thought fit for women. Her fashionable heroines followed the
sentimental teachings of Rousseau and Mrs. Chapone, and held that the
highest mission of woman is to please, and that she should be not only
excused but commended if she employed every art to compass that end.
High-mindedness was a factor unknown or at least unadmitted in their
philosophy; fashion governed all; to be in the fashion was the main
object of their lives. Miss Edgeworth did not condemn this too
mercilessly or from too lofty a platform. Her morality, though
unexceptionable, is never austere; she allows and even sanctions worldly
wisdom within certain limits; she was too much a woman of the world
herself to set up Utopian or ascetic standards. To make conscience agree
with the demands of polite opinion was admitted to be a desirable and
important factor. After all, we are all more or less affected by the
mental atmosphere in which we live; none of us can wholly get outside
the spiritual air that envir