Fanny Burney
A noteworthy transformation took place in the English novel during the
late years of the eighteenth century and the early part of the
nineteenth. This change cannot be explained by the great difference in
manners only. The mode of life described by the early novelists was in
existence sixty years after they wrote scenes typical of the customs and
manners of their day, just as the quiet home life described by Miss
Austen was to be found in England a hundred years before it graced the
pages of a book. This new era in the English novel was due not to a
change of environment, but to the new ideals of those who wrote.
In 1778, English fiction was represented by the work of Miss Burney, and
for thirty-six years, until 1814, when _Waverley_ appeared, this rare
plant was preserved and kept alive by a group of women, who trimmed and
pruned off many of its rough branches and gave to the wild native fruit
a delicacy and fragrance unknown to it before. English women writers
did at that time for the English novel what French women had done in
the preceding century for the French novel; they made it so pure in
thought and expression that Bishop Huet was able to say of the French
romances of the seventeenth century, "You'll scarce find an expression
or word which may shock chaste ears, or one single action which may give
offence to modesty."
This great change in the English novel was inaugurated by a young woman
ignorant of the world, whose power lay in her innocent and lively
imagination. At his home in Queen Square and later in St. Martin's
Street, Charles Burney, the father of Frances, entertained the most
illustrious men of his day. Johnson, Reynolds, Garrick, Burke, and
Colman were frequent guests, while members of the nobility thronged his
parlours to listen to the famous Italian singers who gladly sang for the
author of the _History of Music_. Here Fanny, a bashful but observant
child, saw life in the drawing-room. But as Dr. Burney gave little heed
to the comings and goings of his daughters, they played with the
children of a wigmaker next door, where, perhaps, Fanny became
acquainted with the vulgar side of London life, which is so humorously
depicted in _Evelina_. She received but little education, nor was she
more than a casual reader, but she was familiar with _Pamela_, _Betsey
Thoughtless_, _Rasselas_, and the _Vicar of Wakefield_. Such was her
preparation for becoming a writer of novels.
From her earliest years, she had delighted in writing stories and
dramas, although she received little encouragement in this occupation.
In her fifteenth year her stepmother proved to her so conclusively the
folly of girls' scribbling that Fanny burned all her manuscripts,
including _The History of Caroline Evelyn_. She could not, however,
banish from her mind the fate of Caroline's infant daughter, born of
high rank, but related through her grandmother to the vulgar people of
the East End of London. The many embarrassing situations in which she
might be placed haunted the imagination of the youthful writer, but it
was not until her twenty-sixth year that these situations were
described, when _Evelina or a Young Lady's Entrance into the World_ was
published.
The success of the book was instantaneous. The name of the author, which
had been withheld even from the publishers, was eagerly demanded. All
agreed that only a man conversant with the world could have written such
accurate descriptions of life both high and low. The wonder was
increased when it was learned that the author was a young woman who had
drawn her scenes, not from a knowledge of the world, but from her own
intuition and imagination. Miss Burney became at once an honoured
member of the literary circle which Mrs. Thrale had gathered at
Streatham, and a favourite of Dr. Johnson, who declared that _Evelina_
was superior to anything that Fielding had written, and that some
passages were worthy of the pen of Richardson. The book was accorded a
place among English classics, which it has retained for over a century.
"It was not hard fagging that produced such a work as _Evelina_," wrote
Mr. Crisp to the youthful author. "It was the ebullition of true
sterling genius--you wrote it because you could not help it--it
came--and so you put it down on paper."
The novel, following the form so common in the eighteenth century, is
written in the form of letters. The plot is somewhat time-honoured;
there is the nurse's daughter substituted for the real heiress, and a
mystery surrounding some of the characters; it is unfolded slowly with a
slight strain upon the readers' credulity at the last, but it ends to
the satisfaction of all concerned. In many incidents and in some of the
characters the story suggests _Betsey Thoughtless_, but Miss Burney had
greater powers of description than Mrs. Haywood.
The plot of the novel is forgotten, however, in the lively, witty manner
in which the characters are drawn and the ludicrous situations in which
they are placed. So long had these men and women held the mind of the
author that they are intensely real as they are presented to us at
assemblies, balls, theatres, and operas, where we watch their oddities
with amusement.
Indeed no woman has given so many graphic, droll, and minute
descriptions of life as Miss Burney. Her genius in this respect is
different from that of other women novelists. She has made a series of
snap-shots of people in the most absurd situations and ridicules them
while she is taking the picture. Few women writers can resist the
temptation of peeping into the hearts of their men and women, and the
knowledge thus gained gives them sympathy, while it often detracts from
the strong lines of the external picture; a writer will not paint a
villain quite so black if he believes he still preserves some remnants
of a noble nature. But Miss Burney has no interest in the inner life of
her men and women. She saw their peculiarities and was amused by them,
and has presented them to the reader with minute descriptions and lively
wit.
She also makes fine distinctions between people. Sir Clement Willoughby,
the West End snob, and Mr. Smith, the East End beau, are drawn with
discrimination. With what wit Miss Burney describes the scene at the
_ridotto_ between Evelina and Sir Clement. He had asked her to dance
with him. Unwilling to do so, because she wished to dance with another
gentleman, if he should ask her, she told Sir Clement she was engaged
for that dance. He did not leave her, however, but remained by her side
and speculated as to who the beast was so hostile to his own interests
as to forget to come to her; pitied the humiliation a lady must feel in
having to wait for a gentleman, and pointed to each old and lame man in
the room asking if he were the miscreant; he offered to find him for her
and asked what kind of a coat he had on. When Evelina did not know, he
became angry with the wretch who dared to address a lady in so
insignificant a coat that it was unworthy of her notice. To save herself
from further annoyance she danced with him, for she now knew that Sir
Clement had seen through her artifice from the beginning.
But the portrait of Mr. Smith, the East End snob, is even better than
that of Sir Clement Willoughby. Evelina is visiting her relatives at
Snow Hill, when Mr. Smith enters, self-confident and vulgar. His aim in
life, as he tells us, is to please the ladies. When Tom Branghton is
disputing with his sister about the place where they shall go for
amusement, he reprimands Tom for his lack of good breeding.
"O fie, Tom,--dispute with a lady!" cried Mr. Smith. "Now, as for me,
I'm for where you will, providing this young lady [meaning Evelina] is
of the party; one place is the same as another to me, so that it be but
agreeable to the ladies. I would go anywhere with you, Ma'm, unless,
indeed, it were to church;--ha, ha, ha, you'll excuse me, Ma'm, but,
really, I never could conquer my fear of a parson;--ha, ha, ha,--really,
ladies, I beg your pardon, for being so rude, but I can't help laughing
for my life."
Mr. Smith endeavoured to make himself particularly pleasing to Evelina,
and for that purpose bought tickets for her and her relatives to attend
the Hampstead Assembly. When he observed that Evelina was a little out
of sorts, he attributed her low spirits to doubts of his intentions
towards her. "To be sure," he told her, "marriage is all in all with the
ladies; but with us gentlemen it's quite another thing." He advised her
not to be discouraged, saying with a patronising air, "You may very well
be proud, for I assure you there is nobody so likely to catch me at last
as yourself."
Both Sir Clement Willoughby and Mr. Smith are selfish and conceited; but
the former had lived among the gentlemen of Mayfair, the latter among
the tradespeople of Snow Hill, and this difference of environment is
shown in every speech they utter.
It is the contrast between these two distinct classes of society that
saves the book from becoming monotonous. Evelina visits the Pantheon
with her West End friends. When Captain Mirvan wonders what people find
in such a place, Mr. Lovel, a fashionable fop, quickly rejoins: "What
the ladies may come hither for, Sir, it would ill become _us_ to
determine; but as to we men, doubtless we can have no other view, than
to admire them." At another time Evelina visits the opera with the
vulgar Branghtons, who all rejoiced when the curtain dropped, and Mr.
Branghton vowed he would never be caught again. The Branghtons at the
opera is hardly inferior to Partridge at the play. Tom Branghton is a
good representative of his class. He describes with glee the last night
at Vauxhall: "There's such squealing and squalling!--and then all the
lamps are broke,--and the women skimper scamper;--I declare I would not
take five guineas to miss the last night!"
All the characters, even the heroine, take delight, in boisterous mirth.
Much of the humour of the book consists rather in ludicrous situations
than in any real delicacy of wit. Too often the laugh is at another's
discomfiture, and so fails to please the present age with its kindlier
feeling towards others. Such are the practical jokes which Captain
Mirvan plays upon Madame Duval. In one instance, disguised as a robber,
he waylays the lady's coach, and leaves her in a ditch with her feet
tied to a tree. The many tricks which the doughty Salt plays upon this
lady so much resemble some of the humorous scenes in _Joseph Andrews_,
and _Tom Jones_ that we may infer the readers of that century found
them laughable. The Captain and the French woman are two puppets which
serve to introduce much of this horse-play. They are not even
caricatures; they are entirely unlike anything in human life. With the
exception of these two characters, all the men and women who provoked
the mirth of the heroine are well portrayed.
Miss Burney is less felicitous in her descriptions of serious
characters. Lord Orville, the same type of man as Sir Charles Grandison,
is true only in the sense that Miss Burney announces the truth of the
entire book. "I have not pretended to show the world what it actually
_is_, but what it _appears_ to a girl of seventeen," she wrote in the
preface to _Evelina_. Lord Orville, all dignity, nobility, charm, and
perfection, is but the ideal of a young girl.
Evelina was a new woman in literature, a revelation to the men of the
time of George the Third. The sincerity of the book could not be
doubted. "But," they asked, "did Evelina represent the woman's point of
view of life? Surely no man ever held like views." The Lovelaces and Tom
Joneses are not so attractive as when seen through the eyes of their own
sex, and the heroines are not so soft and yielding as a man would create
them. Evelina, like all Miss Burney's heroines, is independent,
fearless, and witty, with scarcely a trace of the traditional heroine
of fiction. Saints and Magdalenes have always appealed to the masculine
imagination. _La donna dolorosa_ has occupied a prominent place in the
art and literature of man's creation. Here he has revealed his sex
egoism in all its nudity: the woman weeping for man, either lover,
husband, or son; man the centre of her thoughts, her hopes and fears.
This new heroine with a new regard towards man was a revelation to them.
Evelina was the first woman to break the spell, to show them woman as
woman, in lieu of woman as parasite and adjunct to man. Evelina is not
always pleasing; she hasn't always good manners; she sometimes laughs in
the faces of the dashing beaux who are addressing her. But she is a
woman of real flesh and blood; such women have existed in all time, and,
liked many women we meet every day and whom men in all ages have known,
Evelina insists on being the centre of every scene.
In July, 1782, Miss Burney's second book, _Cecilia, or Memoirs of an
Heiress_, was published. This novel met with as enthusiastic a reception
as _Evelina_. Gibbon read the whole five volumes in a day; Burke
declared they had cost him three days, though he did not part with the
story from the time he first opened it, and had sat up a whole night to
finish it; and Sir Joshua Reynolds had been fed while reading it,
because he refused to quit it at the table.
The book shows more care and effort than _Evelina_. That was an outburst
of youthful vivacity and spirits, but in _Cecilia_ the author is
striving to do her best. This is particularly revealed in the style,
which shows the influence of Doctor Johnson, for it has lost the
simplicity of _Evelina_. The diction is more ambitious, and the
sentences are longer, many of them balanced. Even some of the inferior
characters from their speech, appear to have received a lesson in
English composition from Dr. Johnson.
But the novel owes its place among English classics to the varieties of
characters portrayed and the vivid pictures of English life. Here again
the gaieties of Vauxhall, Ranelagh, Marylebone and the Pantheon have
become immortal, drawn with colours as vivid and enduring as Hogarth
used in painting the sadder sides of London life. No other writer has
brought these places before our eyes as clearly and as fully as Fanny
Burney.
The plot of _Cecilia_, like that of _Evelina_, is so arranged as to
present different classes of society. _Cecilia_ has three guardians,
with one of whom she must live during her minority. First she visits Mr.
Harrel, a gay, fashionable man, a spendthrift and a gambler, who lives
in a fashionable house in Portman Square, where Cecilia, during a
constant round of festivities, meets the fashionable people of London.
Next she visits Mr. Briggs in the City, "a short thick, sturdy man, with
very small keen black eyes, a square face, a dark complexion, and a snub
nose." He was so miserly that when Cecilia asked for pen, ink, and a
sheet of paper, he gave her a slate and pencil, as he supposed she had
nothing of consequence to say. He was as sparing of his words as of his
money, and used the same elliptical sentences in his speech as Dickens
afterwards put into the mouth of Alfred Jingle, the famous character in
_Pickwick Papers_. He thus advises Cecilia in regard to her lovers:
"Take care of sharpers; don't trust shoe-buckles, nothing but Bristol
stones! tricks in all things. A fine gentleman sharp as another man.
Never give your heart to a gold-topped cane, nothing but brass gilt
over. Cheats everywhere: fleece you in a year; won't leave you a groat.
But one way to be safe,--bring 'em all to me." Lastly she visits Mr.
Delvile, her third guardian, a man of family, who despised both the men
associated with him as trustees of Cecilia; he lived in such gloomy
state in his magnificent old house in St. James's Square that it
inspired awe, and repressed all pleasure. Pride in their birth and
prejudice against all parvenus were the faults of Mr. and Mrs. Delvile.
Besides these characters, there were many others whose names were for a
long time familiar in every household. Sir Robert Floyer was as vain as
Mr. Smith. Mr. Meadows was constantly bored to death; it was
insufferable exertion to talk to a quiet woman, and a talkative one put
him into a fever. At the opera the solos depressed him and the full
orchestra fatigued him. He yawned while ladies were talking to him, and
after he had begged them to repeat what they had said, forgot to listen.
"I am tired to death! tired of everything," was his constant expression.
In his critical essay on Madame D'Arblay, Fanny Burney's married name,
under which her later works were published, Macaulay has thus dealt with
her treatment of character:
"Madame D'Arblay has left us scarcely anything but humours. Almost every
one of her men and women has some one propensity developed to a morbid
degree. In _Cecilia_, for example, Mr. Delvile never opens his lips
without some allusion to his own birth and station; or Mr. Briggs
without some allusion to the hoarding of money; or Mr. Hobson, without
betraying the self-indulgence and self-importance of a purse-proud
upstart; or Mr. Simkins, without uttering some sneaking remark for the
purpose of currying favour with his customers; or Mr. Meadows, without
expressing apathy and weariness of life; or Mr. Albany, without
declaiming about the vices of the rich and the misery of the poor; or
Mrs. Belfield, without some indelicate eulogy on her son; or Lady
Margaret, without indicating jealousy of her husband. Morrice is all
skipping, officious impertinence, Mr. Gosport all sarcasm, Lady Honoria
all lively prattle, Miss Larolles all silly prattle; if ever Madame
D'Arblay aimed at more, as in the character of Monckton, we do not think
that she succeeded well.... The variety of humours which is to be found
in her novels is immense; and though the talk of each person separately
is monotonous, the general effect is not monotony, but a most lively and
agreeable diversity."
While the character of Monckton is not strongly drawn, one or two scenes
in which he figures have great power. Mr. Monckton, who had married an
aged woman for her money, lived in constant hope of her dissolution. He
planned to keep Cecilia from marrying until that happy event, when he
schemed to make her his bride, and thus acquire a second fortune. He had
used his influence as a family friend to prejudice her lovers in her
eyes, and had just succeeded in breaking up an intimacy which he feared:
"A weight was removed from his mind which had nearly borne down even his
remotest hopes; the object of his eager pursuit seemed still within his
reach, and the rival into whose power he had so lately almost beheld her
delivered, was totally renounced, and no longer to be dreaded. A
revolution such as this, raised expectations more sanguine than ever;
and in quitting the house, he exultingly considered himself released
from every obstacle to his view,--till, just as he arrived home, he
recollected his wife!"
Cecilia, the heroine of the novel, is only Evelina grown a little older,
a little sadder, a little more worldly wise. The humour is, too, a
little kindlier. The practical jokes so common in _Evelina_ do not mar
the pages of _Cecilia_. At times the latter novel becomes almost tragic.
The scene at Vauxhall where Mr. Harrel puts an end to his life of
dissipation is dramatic and thrilling. But Miss Burney had lost the
buoyancy and lively fancy which made the charm of _Evelina_.
Miss Burney's last two novels, _Camilla, or a Picture of Youth_ and _The
Wanderer, or Female Difficulties_, have no claim to a place among
English classics. It is strange that, as she saw more of life, she
depicted it with less accuracy. This might seem to show that her first
novels owe their excellence to her vivid imagination rather than to her
powers of observation. Her weary life at court as second keeper of the
robes to Queen Charlotte; her marriage to Monsieur D'Arblay, and the
sorrows that came to her as the wife of a French refugee; all her
deeper experiences of life during the fourteen years between the
publication of _Cecilia_ and _Camilla_--these had completely changed her
light, humorous view of externals, and with that loss her power as an
artist disappeared.
_Camilla_ has several heroines whose love affairs interest the reader.
It thus bears a resemblance to Miss Austen's novels, who speaks of it
with admiration and was, perhaps, influenced by it. Eugenia, who has
received the education of a man, is pleasing. Clermont Lynmere, like Mr.
Smith and Sir Robert Floyer, imagines that all the ladies are in love
with him. Sir Hugh Tyrold, with his love for the classics and his regret
that he had not been beaten into learning them when he was a boy, his
strict ideas of virtue and his desire to make everybody happy, is well
conceived, but the outlines are not strong enough to make him a living
character. _Camilla_ shows more than _Cecilia_ the style of Dr. Johnson.
It is heavy and slow, the words are long, and many of them of Latin
derivation.
It was not until the year 1814, the year of _Waverley_, that her last
novel, _The Wanderer, or Female Difficulties_, was published, which,
following the style of _Camilla_, was in five volumes. It was partly
founded on incidents arising out of the French Revolution. The book was
eagerly awaited; the publishers paid fifteen hundred guineas for it;
but even the friendliest critic pronounced it a literary failure.
To sum up, Macaulay in the essay before quoted makes clear Miss Burney's
place in fiction:
"Miss Burney did for the English novel what Jeremy Collier did for the
English drama; and she did it in a better way. She first showed that a
tale might be written in which both the fashionable and the vulgar life
of London might be exhibited with great force and with broad comic
humour, and which yet should not contain a single line inconsistent with
rigid morality, or even with virgin delicacy. She took away the reproach
which lay on a most useful and delightful species of composition. She
vindicated the right of her sex to an equal share in a fair and noble
province of letters ... we owe to her not only _Evelina_, _Cecilia_, and
_Camilla_, but also _Mansfield Park_ and _The Absentee_."