Castle Rackrent(拉克伦特堡)

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Castle Rackrent

By Maria Edgeworth

Castle Rackrent

INTRODUCTION

The story of the Edgeworth Family, if it were properly told, should be

as long as the ARABIAN NIGHTS themselves; the thousand and one

cheerful intelligent members of the circle, the amusing friends and

relations, the charming surroundings, the cheerful hospitable home, all go

to make up an almost unique history of a county family of great parts and

no little character. The Edgeworths were people of good means and

position, and their rental, we are told, amounted to nearly L3000 a year.

At one time there was some talk of a peerage for Mr. Edgeworth, but he

was considered too independent for a peerage.

The family tradition seems to have been unconventional and spirited

always. There are records still extant in the present Mr. Edgeworth's

possession,--papers of most wonderful vitality for parchment,--where you

may read passionate remonstrances and adjurations from great-

grandfathers to great-great-grandfathers, and where great-great-

grandmothers rush into the discussion with vehement spelling and

remonstrance, and make matters no better by their interference. I never

read more passionately eloquent letters and appeals. There are also

records of a pleasanter nature; merrymakings, and festive preparations,

and 12s. 6d. for a pair of silk stockings for Miss Margaret Edgeworth to

dance in, carefully entered into the family budget. All the people whose

portraits are hanging up, beruffled, dignified, calm, and periwigged, on the

old walls of Edgeworthstown certainly had extraordinarily strong

impressions, and gave eloquent expression to them. I don't think people

could feel quite so strongly now about their own affairs as they did then;

there are so many printed emotions, so many public events, that private

details cannot seem quite as important. Edgeworths of those days were

farther away from the world than they are now, dwelling in the plains of

Longford, which as yet were not crossed by iron rails. The family seems to

have made little of distances, and to have ridden and posted to and fro

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from Dublin to Edgeworthstown in storm and sunshine.

When Messrs. Macmillan asked me to write a preface to this new

edition of Miss Edgeworth's stories I thought I should like to see the place

where she had lived so long and where she had written so much, and so it

happened that being in Ireland early this year, my daughter and I found

ourselves driving up to Broadstone Station one morning in time for the

early train to Edgeworthstown. As we got out of our cab we asked the

driver what the fare should be. 'Sure the fare is half a crown,' said he,

'and if you wish to give me more, I could keep it for myself!'

The train was starting and we bought our papers to beguile the road.

'Will you have a Home Rule paper or one of them others?' said the

newsboy, with such a droll emphasis that we couldn't help laughing.

'Give me one of each,' said I; then he laughed, as no English newsboy

would have done. . . . We went along in the car with a sad couple of people

out of a hospital, compatriots of our own, who had been settled ten years

in Ireland, and were longing to be away. The poor things were past

consolation, dull, despairing, ingrained English, sick and suffering and

yearning for Brixton, just as other aliens long for their native hills and

moors. We travelled along together all that spring morning by the

blossoming hedges, and triumphal arches of flowering May; the hills were

very far away, but the lovely lights and scents were all about and made our

journey charming. Maynooth was a fragrant vision as we flew past, of

vast gardens wall-enclosed, of stately buildings. The whole line of

railway was sweet with the May flowers, and with the pungent and

refreshing scent of the turf- bogs. The air was so clear and so limpid that

we could see for miles, and short-sighted eyes needed no glasses to admire

with. Here and there a turf cabin, now and then a lake placidly reflecting

the sky. The country seemed given over to silence, the light sped

unheeded across the delicate browns and greens of the bog-fields; or lay

on the sweet wonderful green of the meadows. One dazzling field we

saw full of dancing circles of little fairy pigs with curly tails. Everything

was homelike but NOT England, there was something of France,

something of Italy in the sky; in the fanciful tints upon the land and sea, in

Castle Rackrent

the vastness of the picture, in the happy sadness and calm content which is

so difficult to describe or to account for. Finally we reached our

journey's end. It gave one a real emotion to see EDGEWORTHSTOWN

written up on the board before us, and to realise that we were following in

the steps of those giants who had passed before us. The master of

Edgeworthstown kindly met us and drove us to his home through the

outlying village, shaded with its sycamores, underneath which pretty cows

were browsing the grass. We passed the Roman Catholic Church, the

great iron crucifix standing in the churchyard. Then the horses turned in

at the gate of the park, and there rose the old home, so exactly like what

one expected it, that I felt as if I had been there before in some other phase

of existence.

It is certainly a tradition in the family to welcome travellers! I thought

of the various memoirs I had read, of the travellers arriving from the North

and the South and the West; of Scott and Lockhart, of Pictet, of the

Ticknors, of the many visitants who had come up in turn; whether it is the

year 14, or the year 94, the hospitable doors open kindly to admit them.

There were the French windows reaching to the ground, through which

Maria used to pass on her way to gather her roses; there was the porch

where Walter Scott had stood; there grew the quaint old-fashioned bushes

with the great pink peonies in flower, by those railings which still divide

the park from the meadows beyond; there spread the branches of the

century-old trees. Only last winter they told us the storms came and

swept away a grove of Beeches that were known in all the country round,

but how much of shade, of flower, still remain! The noble Hawthorn of

stately growth, the pine-trees (there should be NAMES for trees, as there

are for rocks or ancient strongholds). Mr. Edgeworth showed us the oak

from Jerusalem, the grove of cypress and sycamore where the beautiful

depths of ground ivy are floating upon the DEBRIS, and soften the

gnarled roots, while they flood the rising banks with green.

Mr. and Mrs. Edgeworth brought us into the house. The ways go

upstairs and downstairs, by winding passages and side gates; a pretty

domed staircase starts from the central hall, where stands that old clock-

case which Maria wound up when she was over eighty years old. To the

Castle Rackrent

right and to the left along the passages were rooms opening from one into

another. I could imagine Sir Walter's kind eyes looking upon the scene,

and Wordsworth coming down the stairs, and their friendly entertainer

making all happy, and all welcome in turn; and their hostess, the widowed

Mrs. Edgeworth, responding and sympathising with each. We saw the

corner by the fire where Maria wrote; we saw her table with its pretty

curves standing in its place in the deep casements. Miss Edgeworth's

own room is a tiny little room above looking out on the back garden.

This little closet opens from a larger one, and then by a narrow flight of

stairs leads to a suite of ground- floor chambers, following one from

another, lined with bookcases and looking on the gardens. What a

strange fellow-feeling with the past it gave one to stand staring at the old

books, with their paper backs and old-fashioned covers, at the gray boards,

which were the liveries of literature in those early days; at the first editions,

with their inscriptions in the author's handwriting, or in Maria's pretty

caligraphy. There was the PIRATE in its original volumes, and

Mackintosh's MEMOIRS, and Mrs. Barbauld's ESSAYS, and Descartes's

ESSAYS, that Arthur Hallam liked to read; Hallam's CONSTITUTIONAL

HISTORY, and Rogers's POEMS, were there all inscribed and dedicated.

Not less interesting were the piles of Magazines that had been sent from

America. I never knew before how many Magazines existed even those

early days; we took some down at hazard and read names, dates, and

initials. . . . Storied urn and monumental bust do not bring back the past as

do the books which belong to it. Storied urns are in churches and stone

niches, far removed from the lives of which they speak; books seem a part

of our daily life, and are like the sound of a voice just outside the door.

Here they were, as they had been read by her, stored away by her hands,

and still safely preserved, bringing back the past with, as it were, a

cheerful encouraging greeting to the present. Other relics there are of

course, but, as I say, none which touch one so vividly. There is her silver

ink-stand, the little table her father left her on which she wrote (it had

belonged to his mother before him). There is also a curious trophy--a

table which was sent to her from Edinburgh, ornamented by promiscuous

views of Italy, curiously inappropriate to her genius; but not so the

Castle Rackrent

inscription, which is quoted from Sir Walter Scott's Preface to his

Collected Edition, and which may as well be quoted here: 'WITHOUT

BEING SO PRESUMPTUOUS AS TO HOPE TO EMULATE THE RICH

HUMOUR, THE PATHETIC TENDERNESS, AND ADMIRABLE

TRUTH WHICH PERVADE THE WORKS OF MY ACCOMPLISHED

FRIEND,' Sir Walter wrote, I FELT THAT SOMETHING MIGHT BE

ATTEMPTED FOR MY OWN COUNTRY OF THE SAME KIND AS

THAT WHICH MISS EDGEWORTH SO FORTUNATELY ACHIEVED

FOR IRELAND.'

In the MEMOIRS of Miss Edgeworth there is a pretty account of her

sudden burst of feeling when this passage so unexpected, and so deeply

felt by her, was read out by one of her sisters, at a time when Maria lay

weak and recovering from illness in Edgeworthstown.

Our host took us that day, among other pleasant things, for a

marvellous and delightful flight on a jaunting car, to see something of the

country. We sped through storms and sunshine, by open moors and fields,

and then by villages and little churches, by farms where the pigs were

standing at the doors to be fed, by pretty trim cottages. The lights came

and went; as the mist lifted we could see the exquisite colours, the green,

the dazzling sweet lights on the meadows, playing upon the meadow-

sweet and elder bushes; at last we came to the lovely glades of Carriglass.

It seemed to me that we had reached an enchanted forest amid this green

sweet tangle of ivy, of flowering summer trees, of immemorial oaks and

sycamores.

A squirrel was darting up the branches of a beautiful spreading beech-

tree, a whole army of rabbits were flashing with silver tails into the

brushwood; swallows, blackbirds, peacock- butterflies, dragonflies on the

wing, a mighty sylvan life was roaming in this lovely orderly wilderness.

The great Irish kitchen garden, belonging to the house, with its seven

miles of wall, was also not unlike a part of a fairy tale. Its owner, Mr.

Lefroy, told me that Miss Edgeworth had been constantly there. She was

a great friend of Judge Lefroy. As a boy he remembered her driving up

to the house and running up through the great drawing-room doors to greet

the Judge.

Castle Rackrent

Miss Edgeworth certainly lived in a fair surrounding, and, with Sophia

Western, must have gone along the way of life heralded by sweetest things,

by the song of birds, by the gold radiance of the buttercups, by the varied

shadows of those beautiful trees under which the cows gently tread the

grass. English does not seem exactly the language in which to write of

Ireland, with its sylvan wonders of natural beauty. Madame de Sevigne's

descriptions of her woods came to my mind. It is not a place which

delights one by its actual sensual beauty, as Italy does; it is not as in

England, where a thousand associations link one to every scene and

aspect--Ireland seems to me to contain some unique and most impersonal

charm, which is quite unwritable.

All that evening we sat talking with our hosts round the fire (for it was

cold enough for a fire), and I remembered that in Miss Edgeworth's

MEMOIRS it was described how the snow lay upon the ground and upon

the land, when the family came home in June to take possession of

Edgeworthstown.

As I put out my candle in the spacious guest-chamber I wondered

which of its past inhabitants I should wish to see standing in the middle of

the room. I must confess that the thought of the beautiful Honora filled

me with alarm, and if Miss Seward had walked in in her pearls and satin

robe I should have fled for my life. As I lay there experimentalising

upon my own emotions I found that after all, natural simple people do not

frighten one whether dead or alive. The thought of them is ever welcome;

it is the artificial people who are sometimes one thing, sometimes another,

and who form themselves on the weaknesses and fancies of those among

whom they live, who are really terrifying.

The shadow of the bird's wing flitted across the window of my

bedroom, and the sun was shining next morning when I awoke. I could

see the cows, foot deep in the grass under the hawthorns. After breakfast

we went out into the grounds and through an arched doorway into the

kitchen garden. It might have been some corner of Italy or the South of

France; the square tower of the granary rose high against the blue, the gray

walls were hung with messy fruit trees, pigeons were darting and flapping

their wings, gardeners were at work, the very vegetables were growing

Castle Rackrent

luxuriant and romantic and edged by thick borders of violet pansy;

crossing the courtyard, we came into the village street, also orderly and

white-washed. The soft limpid air made all things into pictures, into

Turners, into Titians. A Murillo-like boy, with dark eyes, was leaning

against a wall, with his shadow, watching us go by; strange old women,

with draperies round their heads, were coming out of their houses. We

passed the Post- Office, the village shops, with their names, the

Monaghans and Gerahtys, such as we find again in Miss Edgeworth's

novels. We heard the local politics discussed over the counter with a

certain aptness and directness which struck me very much. We passed

the boarding-house, which was not without its history--a long low building

erected by Mr. and Miss Edgeworth for a school, where the Sandfords and

Mertons of those days were to be brought up together: a sort of

foreshadowing of the High Schools of the present. Mr. Edgeworth was,

as we know, the very spirit of progress, though his experiment did not

answer at the time. At the end of the village street, where two roads

divide, we noticed a gap in the decent roadway--a pile of ruins in a garden.

A tumble-down cottage, and beyond the cottage, a falling shed, on the

thatched roof of which a hen was clucking and scraping. These cottages

Mr. Edgeworth had, after long difficulty, bought up and condemned as

unfit for human habitation. The plans had been considered, the orders

given to build new cottages in their place, which were to be let to the old

tenants at the old rent, but the last remaining inhabitant absolutely refused

to leave; we saw an old woman in a hood slowly crossing the road, and

carrying a pail for water; no threats or inducements would move her, not

even the sight of a neat little house, white-washed and painted, and all

ready for her to step into. Her present rent was 10d. a week, Mr.

Edgeworth told me, and she had been letting the tumble- down shed to a

large family for 1s. 4d. This sub-let was forcibly put an end to, but the

landlady still stops there, and there she will stay until the roof tumbles

down upon her head. The old creature passed on through the sunshine, a

decrepit, picturesque figure carrying her pail to the stream, defying all the

laws of progress and political economy and civilisation in her feebleness

and determination.

Castle Rackrent

Most of the women came to their doors to see us go by. They all

looked as old as the hills--some dropt curtseys, others threw up their arms

in benediction. From a cottage farther up the road issued a strange, shy

old creature, looking like a bundle of hay, walking on bare legs. She

came up with a pinch of snuff, and a shake of the hand; she was of the

family of the man who had once saved Edgeworthstown from being

destroyed by the rebels. 'Sure it was not her father,' said old Peggy,' it

was her grandfather did it!' So she explained, but it was hard to believe

that such an old, old creature had ever had a grandfather in the memory of

man.

The glebe lands lie beyond the village. They reach as far as the

church on its high plateau, from which you can see the Wicklow Hills on a

fine day, and the lovely shifting of the lights of the landscape. The

remains of the great pew of the Edgeworth family, with its carved canopy

of wood, is still a feature in the bare church from which so much has been

swept away. The names of the fathers are written on the chancel walls,

and a few medallions of daughters and sisters also. In the churchyard,

among green elder bushes and tall upspringing grasses, is the square

monument erected to Mr. Edgeworth and his family; and as we stood there

the quiet place was crossed and recrossed by swallows with their beating

crescent wings.

III

Whatever one may think of Mr. Edgeworth's literary manipulations

and of his influence upon his daughter's writings, one cannot but respect

the sincere and cordial understanding which bound these two people

together, and realise the added interest in life, in its machinery and

evolutions, which Maria owed to her father's active intelligence. Her

own gift, I think, must have been one for perceiving through the minds of

others, and for realising the value of what they in turn reflected; one is

struck again and again by the odd mixture of intuition, and of absolute

matter of fact which one finds in her writings.

It is difficult to realise, when one reads the memoirs of human beings

who loved and hated, and laughed and scolded, and wanted things and did

without them, very much as we do ourselves, that though they thought as

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we do and felt as we do (only, as I have said, with greater vehemence),

they didn't LOOK like us at all; and Mr. Edgeworth, the father of Maria

Edgeworth, the 'gay gallant,' the impetuous, ingenious, energetic

gentleman, sat writing with powdered hair and a queue, with tights and

buckles, bolt upright in a stiff chair, while his family, also bequeued and

becurled and bekerchiefed, were gathered round him in a group,

composedly attentive to his explanations, as he points to the roll upon the

table, or reads from his many MSS. and note- books, for their edification.

To have four wives and twenty-two children, to have invented so many

machines, engines, and curricles, steeples and telegraph posts, is more

than commonly falls to the lot of one ordinary man, but such we know was

Mr. Edgeworth's history told by his own lips.

I received by chance an old newspaper the other day, dated the 23rd

July 1779. It is called the LONDON PACKET, and its news, told with

long s's and pretty curly italics, thrills one even now as one looks over the

four short pages. The leading article is entitled 'Striking Instance of the

PERFIDY of France.' It is true the grievance goes back to Louis XIV.,

but the leader is written with plenty of spirit and present indignation.

Then comes news from America and the lists of New Councillors elected:

'Artemus Ward, Francis Dana, Oliver Prescott, Samuel Baker, while a

very suitable sermon on the occasion is preached by the Rev. Mr. Stillman

of Boston.' How familiar the names all sound! Then the thanks of the

Members of Congress are given to 'General Lee, Colonel Moultrie, and the

officers and soldiers under their command who on the 28th of June last

Repulsed with so much Valour the attack that was made that day on the

State of South Carolina by the fleet and army of his Britannic Majesty.'

There is an irresistible spirit of old-world pigtail decorum and dash

about it all. We read of our 'grand fleet' waiting at Corunna for the

Spanish; of 80,000 men on the coast of Brittany supposed to be ready for

an invasion of England; of the Prince of Conde playing at cards, with

Northumberland House itself for stakes (Northumberland House which he

is INTENDING to take). We read the list of Lottery Prizes, of the L1000

and L500 tickets; of the pressing want of seamen for His Majesty's Navy,

and how the gentlemen of Ireland are subscribers to a bounty fund. Then

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CastleRackrent1CastleRackrentByMariaEdgeworthCastleRackrent2INTRODUCTIONIThestoryoftheEdgeworthFamily,ifitwereproperlytold,shouldbeaslongastheARABIANNIGHTSthemselves;thethousandandonecheerfulintelligentmembersofthecircle,theamusingfriendsandrelations,thecharmingsurroundings,thecheerfulhospitablehome...

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