Page:Maria Edgeworth (Zimmern 1883).djvu/143

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, mis-called diversions, are portraits touched up with nice care in detail, with a keen eye for subtilties 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 environs us, and see things from different points of view; and Miss Edgeworth could do so less than many because she was less highly endowed with sympathetic imagination. Thus her short-comings are in her case, more than in that of many