cynicism, she was past question a woman exquisitely lovable and one who
craved and appreciated love, even when she made least show of doing
so. How pathetic is the tenderness of her last letter! “As to what I
owe her, and the anxious affection of all my beloved family on this
occasion, I can only cry over it, and pray God to bless them more and
more.” And again: “If ever you are ill, may you be as tenderly nursed
as I have been. May the same blessed alleviations of anxious friends be
yours; and may you possess, as I dare say you will, the greatest blessing
of all, in the consciousness of not being unworthy of their love. _I_
could not feel this.” Surely those with such a longing and with such a
sense of unworthiness are not the least worthy of love in this harsh,
self-absorbed, and loveless world.
Nevertheless, what remains most characteristic of Miss Austen is her
singular and inexhaustible delight in the observation of humanity. No
one illustrates better than she the odd paradox that it is possible to
love mankind as a whole, or, at any rate, to take the greatest interest
in them, while finding most individual specimens unattractive and even
contemptible. I think she would have understood perfectly that wonderful
passage in a letter of another novelist not unlike her, Mrs. Craigie:
“I live in a world and among beings of my own creation, and when I hear
of tangible mortals, what they do, what they say, and what they think,
I feel a stranger and a pilgrim; life frightens me; humanity terrifies
me; perhaps that is why it is real suffering for me to be in a room with
more than one other. I believe I am a lover of souls, but people scare
me out of my wits: it is not that I am nervous. I have only a sensation
of being, as it were, in ‘the wrong Paradise.’ I am not at home: I talk
about things I do not believe in to people who do not believe me: I
become constrained, artificial.”
“I am a great wonderer,” says one of Miss Austen’s characters. I think
she was a great wonderer herself.
How fertile this interest in human nature was, what endless and richly
varied entertainment it afforded, is made manifest in many passages
throughout both novels and letters. “I did not know before,” says
Bingley to Elizabeth, “that you were a studier of character. It must be
an amusing study.” Elizabeth’s creatress found it so. When she visits
picture galleries, she confesses that she cannot look at the pictures
for the men and women. In trying social situations the watchful critical
instinct remains imperturbable and revels in the unguarded display of
emotions commonly concealed. “Anything like a breach of punctuality was
a great offense, and Mr. Moore was very angry, which I was rather glad
of. I wanted to see him angry.” Even in the most solemn crises the habit
of curious observation cannot be wholly extinguished. Writing to her
sister, with deep and genuine sympathy, on occasion of a sister-in-law’s
death, she interjects this query, which strikes you like a flat slap on
an unexpectant cheek. “I suppose you see the corpse? How does it appear?”
Finally, like all profound, minute observers of character, she realizes
how far from perfect her knowledge is, that she cannot predict, cannot
foresee. “Nobody ever feels or acts, suffers or enjoys, as one expects.”
Miss Austen alone would be sufficient to disprove the contention that
age and wide knowledge of the world are necessary for the understanding
of the human heart. She had neither of these qualifications. Yet, though
she may have missed many superficial varieties of experience, who knew
better the essential motives that animate us all? She lived in a quiet
neighborhood and saw comparatively few specimens; but those were enough.
As she says, through Elizabeth, “people alter so much, that there is
something new to be observed in them forever.”
Thus she herself enjoyed and pointed out to others the simplest, the most
available, the most inexhaustible of all earthly distractions. Only, I
could wish she might have seen mankind a little more constantly by the
amiable side. As Lamb well observed, the great majority of Shakespeare’s
characters are lovable. How few of Miss Austen’s are! Yet it may be that
at twenty-one she knew better than Shakespeare.
IV
MADAME D’ARBLAY
CHRONOLOGY
Frances Burney.
Born June 13, 1752.
“Evelina,” published January, 1778.
“Cecilia,” published July, 1782.
At Court 1786-1791.
Married General D’Arblay July 31, 1793.
“Camilla,” published 1796.
“The Wanderer,” published 1814.
Died January 6, 1840.
[Illustration: _Madame D’Arblay_]
IV
MADAME D’ARBLAY
Frances Burney (Madame D’Arblay) wrote a diary or diary-like letters
almost from the cradle to the grave. For reasons which will appear later
we do not know so much about her intimate self as might be expected from
such minuteness of record; but her external life, the places she dwelt
in, the people she saw, the things she did, are brought before us with a
full detail which is rare in the biography of women and even of men.
She was by no means a Bohemian in soul. Yet her career has something of
the nomadic, kaleidoscopic character which we are apt to call Bohemian.
She met all sorts of people and portrayed all sorts, from the top of
society to the bottom. And through this infinite diversity of spiritual
contact she carried an eager eye, an untiring pen, and a singularly
amiable heart.
Her father, Dr. Charles Burney, the musician and historian of music, had
an excellent stock of what is nowadays called temperament. He was witty,
gay, and charming. Everybody went to his house and he to everybody’s.
Thus Fanny in her youth (she was born in 1752) had the opportunity of
seeing many of the distinguished men and women of eighteenth-century
London: Johnson and Goldsmith, Sir Joshua Reynolds, Händel, Garrick and
Sheridan, Bruce the traveler, actors, singers, beaux, divines, ladies
with blue stockings, and with stockings of other colors. It was a gay and
variegated world for a quick-eyed girl to make merry in. She made merry
in it, she studied it, and as a certain literary gift was born in her,
she profited.
Then, when she was twenty-five, she wrote and published anonymously an
epistolary novel called “Evelina.” Even to-day, though its charm is of
a peculiarly perishable order, the book may be read with pleasure and
some laughter. But its freshness, its ease, and its rollicking spirits
must have commended it highly to an age whose own speech and manners were
reflected in it. Fanny had first the delicious satisfaction of hearing
genuine praise from those who had no idea of her authorship. And when
the authorship was confessed—as who, under such circumstances would have
concealed it?—the praise became universal, more high-pitched still,
and perhaps no less delicious. The book was read everywhere, commended
everywhere. Fanny’s father, whom she adored, was bewitched with it. No
less so was that odd personage Samuel Crisp, almost equally adored, who,
like some others, having made a notable failure in literature himself,
felt especially qualified to advise those who had succeeded.
In the houses where Fanny had before been a minor personage, a petted
child, watching great doings and bewigged celebrities with wide-eyed
curiosity from quiet corners, she now appeared as a celebrity herself,
not bewigged, but with the wigs bowing down to her. Titles of honor
begged for an introduction and titles of learning. She was pointed out
in the streets and in the theatres. Her characters were cited, her wit
quoted, her sentiments applied by daily personages to daily life. London
was all the English world then and a book read by ten thousand people in
London had a sort of personal success which no book could have anywhere
to-day.
Best of all, Fanny was praised to her face by those whose praise she knew
to be really worth having. Sir Joshua said he would give fifty pounds to
know the author of “Evelina.” Burke sat up all night to finish it. Murphy
and Sheridan entreated her to write a comedy and Sheridan agreed to take
it before a word was put on paper. To a girl of twenty-five, up to that
day merely one of the babes and sucklings, all this must have seemed like
a golden dream.
But the best was Johnson. Fanny was brought into intimate contact with
him in Mrs. Thrale’s hospitable house at Streatham. Something of the
Doctor’s enthusiasm must doubtless be laid to the influence of grace,
beauty, and feminine charm on that ogrish and susceptible heart.
But, whatever the cause, he set no bounds to an outcry of admiration
sufficient to turn the head of an older and sedater woman. Nothing like
“Evelina,” he said, had appeared for years. And of its author “I know
none like her—nor do I believe there is, or ever was, a man who could
write such a book so young.” And the literary praise was mingled with
expressions of personal affection. “Afterwards, grasping my hand with the
most affectionate warmth, he said: ‘I wish you success! my dear little
Burney!’ When, at length, I told him I could stay no longer, and bid him
good night, he said, ‘There is none like you, my dear little Burney!
there is none like you!—good night, my darling!’”
In such a highly-flavored atmosphere did the girl live until the
publication of her second novel, “Cecilia,” in 1782. This, though more
elaborate, more Johnsonian, and less freshly entertaining than “Evelina,”
was equally well received, and Miss Burney continued to be idolized by
all the literary set of London.
Then there came an extraordinary change. Mrs. Thrale married the Italian
musician, Piozzi, and the Streatham circle was broken up. Miss Burney’s
greatest supporter, Johnson, died in 1784, and in the following year
Fanny was transplanted, elevated or degraded, as you please, from the
free, fascinating life of a popular author to be a personal attendant
on the queen. Dr. Burney thought his daughter’s future assured in the
most promising fashion. She herself entered upon her new career with
anxiety and regret and found nothing in it to contradict her unpleasant
expectations.
The queen and princesses were, indeed, kind to her; but their hangers-on
were not, or not all of them. She had been born free, had grown up
in freedom, had been accustomed to indulge her fancies, to have them
indulged by others, limiting them only by love and the affectionate wish
to comply with the fancies of those dear to her. Now she was cramped in
every movement, what was far worse, in every thought. To do servant’s
work for a servant’s stipend was hateful. To run at bell-call for an
idle bidding was more hateful. But these were nothing compared to having
no home, no time, no life, of one’s own. To move by the clock, some
one else’s clock, to be thrown into any quarters that could be spared
from the needs of those higher, to dress and undress at stated times in
stated fashions, to be never, never Dr. Burney’s daughter, but always
the handmaid of the queen—what a change from the caresses of Johnson
and the compliments of Burke! Even pastimes not unwelcome in themselves
become so in such surroundings. What a wail does she utter over the
daily infliction of piquet with the tyrannous Mrs. Schwellenberg: “And—O
picquet—life hardly hangs on earth during its compulsion, in these months
succeeding months, and years creeping, crawling after years.”
And then another change, quite as violent as the preceding. Miss Burney’s
health fails under the strain, she leaves the court, is thrown among
a group of French _émigrés_, meets General D’Arblay, marries him, and
settles down in a quiet country cottage, with a bit of an income and a
garden full of cabbages. No Burkes or Johnsons here, no kings or queens
or saucy gentlemen in waiting; just quiet. One would think she would
miss it all, even what was hateful. Charles Lamb sighed to be rid of
his India House slavery, and when he was rid of it, could not tell what
to do with his freedom. So it is apt to be with all of us. But Madame
D’Arblay apparently knew when she was well off. She adored her husband.
She was absorbed in her son. She wrote another novel, “Camilla,” less
readable than the others, but well paid for. She entertained with perfect
simplicity any friend who could come to her. She had but one dread—lest
some call of military or political duty in France might draw away her
husband and break up her Paradise. “Ah, if peace would come without, what
could equal my peace within!”
The call of duty did come. Her husband went and she followed him, into
other scenes, still totally different from what had gone before. She
saw the France of the first Napoleon and Napoleon himself. She saw the
restoration of the Bourbons. She was hurried along in the mad bustle of
the flight from Paris. She waited in Brussels through the suspense of
Waterloo. With husband and son, and alone, she had adventures and perils
by land and sea. Surely she had need of a good stock of peace within, for
peace without seemed very far away.
But the last act passed quietly at home in England. She was not fêted
or flattered any more, as she had been. Yet enough of old glory clung
about her to bring her a large price for one more very indifferent novel,
“The Wanderer.” Her husband died, her son died. Not much was left to
her but memories and these, when she was nearly eighty, she wove into a
life of her father, which Macaulay condemned, but which has at least the
merit of being sweet and sunshiny. To recall such a golden past, such a
tangled web of fortune, at eighty, without a word of bitterness for the
present, shows a heart worth loving, worth studying. Let us study Madame
D’Arblay’s.
She will not help us so much as we could wish. “Poor Fanny’s face tells
what she thinks, whether she will or no,” said Dr. Burney. Her face
might. Her Diary does not. To be sure, she herself asserts repeatedly
that she writes nothing but the truth. “How truly does this Journal
contain my real, undisguised thoughts ... its truth and simplicity are
its sole recommendation.” No doubt she believed so. No doubt she aimed
to be absolutely veracious. No doubt she avoids false statements and
perversion of fact. Her diary may be true, but it is not genuine. It is
literary, artificial, in every line of it. She sees herself exactly as a
man—or woman—sees himself in a mirror: the very nature of the observation
involves unconscious and instinctive posing.
Macaulay, in his rhetorical fashion, draws a violent contrast between
Madame D’Arblay’s Memoirs of her father and her Diary. The Diary, he
says, is fresh and natural, the Memoirs tricked up with all the artifice
of a perfumer’s shop. Neither is fresh and natural. The Memoirs are
overloaded with Johnsonian ornament; but the simpler style of the Diary
is not one bit more spontaneous or more genuine. It was impossible for
the woman to look at herself from any but a literary point of view.
Take, for instance, the address to “Nobody,” with which the Diary opens.
It sets the note at once. There is not the slightest suggestion of a
sincere, direct effort to record the experiences of a soul; merely an
airy, literary coquetting with somebody, everybody, under the Nobody mask.
A single breath of fresh air is enough to blast the artificiality of
the whole thing. Turn from a page of the Diary to any letter of Mrs.
Piozzi—some of them are given in the Diary itself. A coarse woman, a
passionate woman, a jealous woman—but, oh, so genuine in every word.
Her loud veracity sweeps through Fanny’s dainty nothings like a salt
sea breeze. And do not misunderstand the distinction. Fanny could not
have told a lie to save her life. Mrs. Piozzi probably tossed them
about like cherries or bonbons. But Mrs. Piozzi, laughing or lying,
was always herself, without thinking about herself. Fanny was always
thinking—unconsciously, if one may say so—of how she would appear to
somebody else.
Thus I cannot agree with Mr. Dobson that her Diary is to be classed
with the great diaries. A page of Pepys is enough to put her out of the
count. She may be more decorous, more varied, even more entertaining. As
a portrayer of her own soul or of the souls of others, between her and
Pepys there is no comparison.
Take the mere matter of conversations. In these Miss Burney is
inexhaustible. She gives an evening’s talk of half a dozen personages,
tricked out with the neatness of finished comic dialogue. She may keep
the general drift of what was said. But who supposes her record can be
exact? Exact enough, you say. In a sense, yes. Yet she turns humanity
into literature. When Pepys quotes a sentence, you know you have the
gross reality.
So, I repeat, our diarist helps us less than she ought. Yet even she
cannot write two thousand pages, nominally about herself, without telling
something. The very fact of such literary self-consciousness is of deep
human interest. It is to be noted, also, that she does not conceal
herself from any instinct of reserve. She is willing to drop pose and
tell all, if she could; but she cannot. Such thoughtless self-confession
as Pepys’s would have been impossible to her. I do not think that once,
in all her volumes, does she show herself in an unfavorable light.
But we can detect what she does not show. We can read much, much that she
did not mean us to read. And lights are thrown on her by others as well
as by herself.
To begin with, how did she bear glory? For a girl of twenty-five to be
thrown into such a blaze of it was something of an ordeal. She herself
disclaims any excessive ambition. She could almost wish the triumph might
“happen to some other person who had more ambition, whose hopes were more
sanguine, who could less have borne to be buried in the oblivion which I
even sought.” She records all the fine things that are said of her, the
surmises of eager curiosity, the ardent outbursts of family affection,
the really tumultuous enthusiasm of ripened critical judgment. But she is
rather awed than inflated by it, at least, so she says. “I believe half
the flattery I have had would have made me madly merry; but _all_ serves
only to depress me by the fulness of heart it occasions.” “Steeped as she
was in egotism,” is the phrase used of her by Hayward, the biographer
of Mrs. Piozzi. If she was so steeped, it certainly did not appear in
outward obtrusiveness, pretense, or self-assertion. She repeatedly
complains of her own shyness; and others, who knew her in very various
surroundings, bear witness to it as strongly. “She was silent, backward,
and timid, even to sheepishness,” writes her father. “Dr. Burney and
his daughter, the author of ‘Evelina’ and ‘Cecilia’ ... I always thought
rather avoided than solicited notice,” says Wraxall. And Walpole,
assuredly never inclined to minimize defects, speaks with an enthusiasm
which is absolutely conclusive. Miss Burney “is half-and-half sense and
modesty, which possess her so entirely, that not a cranny is left for
pretense or affectation.”
No. The author of “Evelina” may, must, have reveled in the praise which
was showered upon her in such intoxicating measure. But she kept her
head, and few men or women ever lived who were less spoiled by flattery
than she.
Indeed, her extreme shyness probably prevented her being brilliantly
successful in general society. She herself disposes summarily of her
qualifications in this regard. A hostess, she says, should provide
for the intellectual as well as the material wants of her guests. “To
take care of both, as every mistress of a table ought to do, requires
practice as well as spirits, and ease as well as exertion. Of these four
requisites I possess not one.”
This is the sort of thing one prefers saying one’s self to having others
say it. There can be no doubt that Miss Burney had tact, grace, charm,
and above all, that faculty of taking command of and saving a difficult
situation which is one of the most essential of social requisites. There
is character in the pretty little anecdote of her childhood. She and her
playmates had soaked and ruined a crusty neighbor’s wig. He scolded. For
a while Fanny—ten years old—listened with remorse and patience. Then she
walked up to him and said. “What signifies talking so much about an
accident? The wig is wet, to be sure; and the wig was a good wig, to be
sure; but ’tis of no use to speak of it any more, because what’s done
can’t be undone.”
Still, she was doubtless at her best in companies of three or four
friends, where she felt at her ease. She loved society and conversation,
but it was of the intimate, fireside order. How fine is her remark on
this point. “I determined, however, to avoid all tête-à-têtes with him
whatsoever, as much as was in my power. How very few people are fit for
them, nobody living in trios and quartettos can imagine!” She studied
her interlocutors and adapted herself to them. “As soon as I found by
the looks and expressions of this young lady, that she was of a peculiar
cast, I left all choice of subjects to herself, determined quietly to
follow as she led.” She had also that charming gift for intimate society,
the power—rather, the instinctive habit—of drawing confidences. Young
and old, men and women, told her their hopes, their sorrows, their
aspirations, and their difficulties. This, I think, does not commonly
happen to persons steeped in egotism.
As it is delightful to turn from one trait in a character to another that
seems quite incompatible with it, we must not assume that, because Miss
Burney was shy and retiring, therefore she wanted spirits and gayety. On
the contrary, she assures us, and the Diary and her other writings and
her friends confirm it, that in good company she could carry laughter
and hilarity to the pitch of riot. What a delicious picture does Crisp
paint of her in childhood, dancing “Nancy Dawson on the grass-plot, with
your cap on the ground, and your long hair streaming down your back, one
shoe off, and throwing about your head like a mad thing.” She was always
ready to dance Nancy Dawson, and eager in sympathy when others danced. In
the lively parts of “Evelina” there is a Bacchic boisterousness almost
Rabelaisian, and again and again throughout the Diary scenes of pure,
wild fun diversify the literary gravity of Streatham and the dull decorum
of the court of George the Third.
But if Miss Burney could mock her friends, she could also love them,
and to study her friendships is to study the woman herself. Mrs.
Thrale-Piozzi does, indeed, write of her young protégée in rather harsh
terms. Like all the rest of the Streatham world, Fanny was bitterly
opposed to the Piozzi marriage, and her attitude provoked her former
hostess to indignant criticism. Even in the earlier days of ardent
affection, Mrs. Thrale notes some flaws in the relationship. Fanny was
independent. Mrs. Thrale was patronizing. Fanny accepted favors a little
as her due. Mrs. Thrale showered them, but wished them recognized. “Fanny
Burney has kept her room here in my house seven days, with a fever or
something that she calls a fever; I gave her every medicine and every
slop with my own hand; took away her dirty cups, spoons, etc.; moved her
tables; in short, was doctor, nurse, and maid—for I did not like the
servants should have additional trouble, lest they should hate her for
it. And now, with the true gratitude of a wit, she tells me that the
world thinks the better of me for my civility to her. It does? does it?”
Can you not understand how Fanny felt? And how Mrs. Thrale felt? And that
they loved each other, nevertheless, as Mrs. Thrale indeed eagerly admits?
Then came the Piozzi trouble and the lady speaks harshly of “the
treacherous Burneys.” Yet I do not think Fanny deserved it. She loved Dr.
Johnson and she loved Mrs. Thrale. Between them her course was difficult.
Also, she was undeniably conventional by nature and Mrs. Thrale’s
irregularities shocked her. Yet she did the best she could.