all enumeration. But the cases in which the deviation from the common
standard is striking and grotesque are very few. In one mind avarice
predominates; in another, pride; in a third, love of pleasure; just as
in one countenance the nose is the most marked feature, while in others
the chief expression lies in the brow, or in the lines of the mouth. But
there are very few countenances in which nose, brow, and mouth do not
contribute, though in unequal degrees, to the general effect; and so
there are very few characters in which one overgrown propensity makes
all others utterly insignificant.
It is evident that a portrait painter, who was able only to represent
faces and figures such as those which we pay money to see at fairs,
would not, however spirited his execution might be, take rank among the
highest artists. He must always be placed below those who have skill to
seize peculiarities which do not amount to deformity. The slighter those
peculiarities, the greater is the merit of the limner who can catch them
and transfer them to his canvas. To paint Daniel Lambert or the living
skeleton, the pig-faced lady or the Siamese twins, so that nobody can
mistake them, is an exploit within the reach of a sign-painter. A
third-rate artist might give us the squint of Wilkes, and the depressed
nose and protuberant cheeks of Gibbon. It would require a much higher
degree of skill to paint two such men as Mr. Canning and Sir Thomas
Lawrence, so that nobody who had ever seen them could for a moment
hesitate to assign each picture to its original. Here the mere
caricaturist would be quite at fault. He would find in neither face
anything on which he could lay hold for the purpose of making a
distinction. Two ample bald foreheads, two regular profiles, two full
faces of the same oval form, would baffle his art; and he would be
reduced to the miserable shift of writing their names at the foot of his
picture. Yet there was a great difference; and a person who had seen
them once would no more have mistaken one of them for the other than he
would have mistaken Mr. Pitt for Mr. Fox. But the difference lay in
delicate lineaments and shades, reserved for pencils of a rare order.
This distinction runs through all the imitative arts. Foote's mimicry
was exquisitely ludicrous, but it was all caricature. He could take off
only some strange peculiarity, a stammer or a lisp, a Northumbrian burr
or an Irish brogue, a stoop or a shuffle. "If a man," said Johnson,
"hops on one leg, Foote can hop on one leg." Garrick, on the other hand,
could seize those differences of manner and pronunciation, which, though
highly characteristic, are yet too slight to be described. Foote, we
have no doubt, could have made the Haymarket Theatre shake with laughter
by imitating a conversation between a Scotchman and a Somersetshireman.
But Garrick could have imitated a conversation between two fashionable
men, both models of the best breeding, Lord Chesterfield, for example,
and Lord Albemarle, so that no person could doubt which was which,
although no person could say that, in any point, either Lord
Chesterfield or Lord Albemarle spoke or moved otherwise than in
conformity with the usages of the best society.
The same distinction is found in the drama and in fictitious narrative.
Highest among those who have exhibited human nature by means of
dialogue, stands Shakespeare. His variety is like the variety of nature,
endless diversity, scarcely any monstrosity. The characters of which he
has given us an impression, as vivid as that which we receive from the
characters of our own associates, are to be reckoned by scores. Yet in
all these scores hardly one character is to be found which deviates
widely from the common standard, and which we should call very eccentric
if we met it in real life. The silly notion that every man has one
ruling passion, and that this clue, once known, unravels all the
mysteries of his conduct, finds no countenance in the plays of
Shakespeare. There man appears as he is, made up of a crowd of passions,
which contend for the mastery over him, and govern him in turn. What is
Hamlet's ruling passion? Or Othello's? Or Harry the Fifth's? Or
Wolsey's? Or Lear's? Or Shylock's? Or Benedick's? Or Macbeth's? Or that
of Cassius? Or that of Falconbridge? But we might go on forever. Take a
single example, Shylock. Is he so eager for money as to be indifferent
to revenge? Or so eager for revenge as to be indifferent to money? Or so
bent on both together as to be indifferent to the honor of his nation
and the law of Moses? All his propensities are mingled with each other,
so that, in trying to apportion to each its proper part, we find the
same difficulty which constantly meets us in real life. A superficial
critic may say that hatred is Shylock's ruling passion. But how many
passions have amalgamated to form that hatred? It is partly the result
of wounded pride: Antonio has called him dog. It is partly the result of
covetousness: Antonio has hindered him of half a million; and, when
Antonio is gone there will be no limit to the gains of usury. It is
partly the result of national and religious feeling: Antonio has spit on
the Jewish gaberdine; and the oath of revenge has been sworn by the
Jewish Sabbath. We might go through all the characters which we have
mentioned, and through fifty more in the same way; for it is the
constant manner of Shakespeare to represent the human mind as lying, not
under the absolute dominion of one despotic propensity, but under a
mixed government, in which a hundred powers balance each other.
Admirable as he was in all parts of his art, we most admire him for
this, that while he has left us a greater number of striking portraits
than all other dramatists put together, he has scarcely left us a single
caricature.
Shakespeare has had neither equal nor second. But among the writers who,
in the point which we have noticed, have approached nearest to the
manner of the great master, we have no hesitation in placing Jane
Austen, a woman of whom England is justly proud. She has given us a
multitude of characters, all, in a certain sense, commonplace, all such
as we meet every day. Yet they are all as perfectly discriminated from
each other as if they were the most eccentric of human beings. There
are, for example, four clergymen, none of whom we should be surprised to
find in any parsonage in the kingdom, Mr. Edward Ferrars, Mr. Henry
Tilney, Mr. Edmund Bertram, and Mr. Elton. They are all specimens of the
upper part of the middle class. They have all been liberally educated.
They all lie under the restraints of the same sacred profession. They
are all young. They are all in love. Not one of them has any hobbyhorse,
to use the phrase of Sterne. Not one has a ruling passion, such as we
read of in Pope. Who would not have expected them to be insipid
likenesses of each other? No such thing. Harpagon is not more unlike to
Jourdain, Joseph Surface is not more unlike to Sir Lucius O'Trigger,
than every one of Miss Austen's young divines to all his reverend
brethren. And almost all this is done by touches so delicate, that they
elude analysis, that they defy the powers of description, and that we
know them to exist only by the general effect to which they have
contributed.
A line must be drawn, we conceive, between artists of this class, and
those poets and novelists whose skill lies in the exhibiting of what Ben
Jonson called humors. The words of Ben are so much to the purpose that
we will quote them:--
"When some one peculiar quality
Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw
All his affects, his spirits, and his powers,
In their confluxions all to run one way,
This may be truly said to be a humour."
There are undoubtedly persons in whom humors such as Ben describes have
attained a complete ascendency. The avarice of Elwes, the insane desire
of Sir Egerton Brydges for a barony to which he had no more right than
to the crown of Spain, the malevolence which long meditation on
imaginary wrongs generated in the gloomy mind of Bellingham, are
instances. The feeling which animated Clarkson and other virtuous men
against the slave trade and slavery is an instance of a more honorable
kind.
Seeing that such humors exist, we cannot deny that they are proper
subjects for the imitations of art. But we conceive that the imitation
of such humors, however skilful and amusing, is not an achievement of
the highest order; and, as such humors are rare in real life, they
ought, we conceive, to be sparingly introduced into works which profess
to be pictures of real life. Nevertheless, a writer may show so much
genius in the exhibition of these humors as to be fairly entitled to a
distinguished and permanent rank among classics. The chief seats of all,
however, the places on the dais and under the canopy, are reserved for
the few who have excelled in the difficult art of portraying characters
in which no single feature is extravagantly overcharged.
If we have expounded the law soundly, we can have no difficulty in
applying it to the particular case before us. Madame D'Arblay has left
us scarcely anything but humors. 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 favor 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, we do not think that she
succeeded well.
We are, therefore, forced to refuse to Madame D'Arblay a place in the
highest rank of art; but we cannot deny that in the rank to which she
belonged, she had few equals, and scarcely any superior. The variety of
humors 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 very lively and agreeable diversity. Her plots are
rudely constructed and improbable, if we consider them in themselves.
But they are admirably framed for the purpose of exhibiting striking
groups of eccentric characters, each governed by his own peculiar whim,
each talking his own peculiar jargon, and each bringing out by
opposition the oddities of all the rest. We will give one example out of
many which occur to us. All probability is violated in order to bring
Mr. Delvile, Mr. Briggs, Mr. Hobson, and Mr. Albany into a room
together. But when we have them there, we soon forget probability in the
exquisitely ludicrous effect which is produced by the conflict of four
old fools, each raging with a monomania of his own, each talking a
dialect of his own, and each inflaming all the others anew every time he
opens his mouth.
Madame D'Arblay was most successful in comedy, and indeed in comedy
which bordered on farce. But we are inclined to infer from some
passages, both in Cecilia and Camilla, that she might have attained
equal distinction in the pathetic. We have formed this judgment, less
from those ambitious scenes of distress which lie near the catastrophe
of each of those novels, than from some exquisite strokes of natural
tenderness which take us here and there by surprise. We would mention as
examples, Mrs. Hill's account of her little boy's death in Cecilia, and
the parting of Sir Hugh Tyrold and Camilla, when the honest baronet
thinks himself dying.
It is melancholy to think that the whole fame of Madame D'Arblay rests
on what she did during the earlier half of her life, and that everything
which she published during the forty-three years which preceded her
death lowered her reputation. Yet we have no reason to think that at the
time when her faculties ought to have been in their maturity they were
smitten with any blight. In The Wanderer we catch now and then a gleam
of her genius. Even in the Memoirs of her father there is no trace of
dotage. They are very bad; but they are so, as it seems to us, not from
a decay of power, but from a total perversion of power.
The truth is, that Madame D'Arblay's style underwent a gradual and most
pernicious change, a change which, in degree at least, we believe to be
unexampled in literary history, and of which it may be useful to trace
the progress.
When she wrote her letters to Mr. Crisp, her early journals, and her
first novel, her style was not indeed brilliant or energetic; but it was
easy, clear, and free from all offensive faults. When she wrote Cecilia
she aimed higher. She had then lived much in a circle of which Johnson
was the centre; and she was herself one of his most submissive
worshippers. It seems never to have crossed her mind that the style even
of his best writings was by no means faultless, and that even had it
been faultless it might not be wise in her to imitate it. Phraseology
which is proper in a disquisition on the Unities, or in a preface to a
Dictionary, may be quite out of place in a tale of fashionable life. Old
gentlemen do not criticise the reigning modes, nor do young gentlemen
make love, with the balanced epithets and sonorous cadences which, on
occasions of great dignity, a skilful writer may use with happy effect.
In an evil hour the author of Evelina took The Rambler for her model.
This would not have been wise even if she could have imitated her
pattern as well as Hawkesworth did. But such imitation was beyond her
power. She had her own style. It was a tolerably good one; and might,
without any violent change, have been improved into a very good one. She
determined to throw it away, and to adopt a style in which she could
attain excellence only by achieving an almost miraculous victory over
nature and over habit. She could cease to be Fanny Burney; it was not so
easy to become Samuel Johnson.
In Cecilia the change of manner began to appear. But in Cecilia the
imitation of Johnson, though not always in the best taste, is sometimes
eminently happy; and the passages which are so verbose as to be
positively offensive are few. There were people who whispered that
Johnson had assisted his young friend, and that the novel owed all its
finest passages to his hand. This was merely the fabrication of envy.
Miss Burney's real excellences were as much beyond the reach of Johnson,
as his real excellences were beyond her reach. He could no more have
written the Masquerade scene, or the Vauxhall scene, than she could have
written the Life of Cowley or the Review of Soame Jenyns. But we have
not the smallest doubt that he revised Cecilia, and that he retouched
the style of many passages. We know that he was in the habit of giving
assistance of this kind most freely. Goldsmith, Hawkesworth, Boswell,
Lord Hailes, Mrs. Williams were among those who obtained his help. Nay,
he even corrected the poetry of Mr. Crabbe, whom, we believe, he had
never seen. When Miss Burney thought of writing a comedy, he promised to
give her his best counsel, though he owned that he was not particularly
well qualified to advise on matters relating to the stage. We therefore
think it in the highest degree improbable that his little Fanny, when
living in habits of the most affectionate intercourse with him, would
have brought out an important work without consulting him; and, when we
look into Cecilia, we see such traces of his hand in the grave and
elevated passages as it is impossible to mistake. Before we conclude
this article, we will give two or three examples.
When next Madame D'Arblay appeared before the world as a writer, she was
in a very different situation. She would not content herself with the
simple English in which Evelina had been written. She had no longer the
friend who, we are confident, had polished and strengthened the style of
Cecilia. She had to write in Johnson's manner without Johnson's aid. The
consequence was, that in Camilla every passage which she meant to be
fine is detestable; and that the book has been saved from condemnation
only by the admirable spirit and force of those scenes in which she was
content to be familiar.
But there was to be a still deeper descent. After the publication of
Camilla, Madame D'Arblay resided ten years at Paris. During those years
there was scarcely any intercourse between France and England. It was
with difficulty that a short letter could occasionally be transmitted.
All Madame D'Arblay's companions were French. She must have written,
spoken, thought, in French. Ovid expressed his fear that a shorter exile
might have affected the purity of his Latin. During a shorter exile,
Gibbon unlearned his native English. Madame D'Arblay had carried a bad
style to France. She brought back a style which we are really at a loss
to describe. It is a sort of broken Johnsonese, a barbarous _patois_,
bearing the same relation to the language of Rasselas, which the
gibberish of the negroes of Jamaica bears to the English of the House of
Lords. Sometimes it reminds us of the finest, that is to say, the vilest
parts, of Mr. Gait's novels; sometimes of the perorations of Exeter
Hall; sometimes of the leading articles of the Morning Post. But it most
resembles the puffs of Mr. Rowland and Dr. Goss. It matters not what
ideas are clothed in such a style. The genius of Shakespeare and Bacon
united would not save a work so written from general derision.
It is only by means of specimens that we can enable our readers to
judge how widely Madame D'Arblay's three styles differed from each
other.
The following passage was written before she became intimate with
Johnson. It is from Evelina:--
"His son seems weaker in his understanding, and more gay in his
temper; but his gayety is that of a foolish overgrown schoolboy,
whose mirth consists in noise and disturbance. He disdains his
father for his close attention to business and love of money, though
he seems himself to have no talents, spirit, or generosity to make
him superior to either. His chief delight appears to be in
tormenting and ridiculing his sisters, who in return most cordially
despise him. Miss Branghton, the eldest daughter, is by no means
ugly; but looks proud, ill-tempered, and conceited. She hates the
city, though without knowing why; for it is easy to discover she has
lived nowhere else. Miss Polly Branghton is rather pretty, very
foolish, very ignorant, very giddy, and, I believe, very
good-natured."
This is not a fine style, but simple, perspicuous, and agreeable. We now
come to Cecilia, written during Miss Burney's intimacy with Johnson; and
we leave it to our readers to judge whether the following passage was
not at least corrected by his hand:--
"It is rather an imaginary than an actual evil, and though a deep
wound to pride, no offence to morality. Thus have I laid open to you
my whole heart, confessed my perplexities, acknowledged my
vainglory, and exposed with equal sincerity the sources of my doubts
and the motives of my decision. But now, indeed, how to proceed I
know not. The difficulties which are yet to encounter I fear to
enumerate, and the petition I have to urge I have scarce courage to
mention. My family, mistaking ambition for honor, and rank for
dignity, have long planned a splendid connection for me, to which,
though my invariable repugnance has stopped any advances, their
wishes and their views immovably adhere. I am but too certain they
will now listen to no other. I dread, therefore, to make a trial
where I despair of success. I know not how to risk a prayer with
those who may silence me by a command."
Take now a specimen of Madame D'Arblay's later style. This is the way in
which she tells us that her father, on his journey back from the
Continent, caught the rheumatism:--
"He was assaulted, during his precipitated return, by the rudest
fierceness of wintry elemental strife; through which, with bad
accommodations and innumerable accidents, he became a prey to the
merciless pangs of the acutest spasmodic rheumatism, which barely
suffered him to reach his home, ere, long and piteously, it confined
him, a tortured prisoner, to his bed. Such was the check that almost
instantly curbed, though it could not subdue, the rising pleasure of
his hopes of entering upon a new species of existence--that of an
approved man of letters; for it was on the bed of sickness,
exchanging the light wines of France, Italy, and Germany, for the
black and loathsome potions of the Apothecaries' Hall, writhed by
darting stitches, and burning with fiery fever, that he felt the
full force of that sublunary equipoise that seems evermore to hang
suspended over the attainment of long-sought and uncommon felicity,
just as it is ripening to burst forth with enjoyment!"
Here is a second passage from Evelina:--
"Mrs. Selwyn is very kind and attentive to me. She is extremely
clever. Her understanding, indeed, may be called masculine; but
unfortunately her manners deserve the same epithet; for, in studying
to acquire the knowledge of the other sex, she has lost all the
softness of her own. In regard to myself, however, as I have neither
courage nor inclination to argue with her, I have never been
personally hurt at her want of gentleness, a virtue which
nevertheless seems so essential a part of the female character, that
I find myself more awkward and less at ease with a woman who wants
it than I do with a man."
This is a good style of its kind; and the following passage from Cecilia
is also in a good style, though not in a faultless one. We say, with
confidence, either Sam Johnson or the Devil:--
"Even the imperious Mr. Delvile was more supportable here than in
London. Secure in his own castle, he looked round him with a pride
of power and possession which softened while it swelled him. His
superiority was undisputed: his will was without control. He was
not, as in the great capital of the kingdom, surrounded by
competitors. No rivalry disturbed his peace; no equality mortified
his greatness. All he saw were either vassals of his power, or
guests bending to his pleasure. He abated, therefore, considerably
the stern gloom of his haughtiness, and soothed his proud mind by
the courtesy of condescension."
We will stake our reputation for critical sagacity on this, that no such
paragraph as that which we have last quoted can be found in any of
Madame D'Arblay's works except Cecilia. Compare with it the following
sample of her later style:--
"If beneficence be judged by the happiness which it diffuses, whose
claim, by that proof, shall stand higher than that of Mrs. Montagu,
from the munificence with which she celebrated her annual festival
for these hapless artificers who perform the most abject offices of
any authorized calling, in being the active guardians of our blazing
hearths? Not to vainglory, then, but to kindness of heart, should be
adjudged the publicity of that superb charity which made its jetty
objects, for one bright morning, cease to consider themselves as
degraded outcasts from all society."
We add one or two shorter samples. Sheridan refused to permit his lovely
wife to sing in public, and was warmly praised on this account by
Johnson. "The last of men," says Madame D'Arblay, "was Doctor Johnson to
have abetted squandering the delicacy of integrity by nullifying the
labors of talents."
The Club, Johnson's Club, did itself no honor by rejecting on political
grounds two distinguished men, one a Tory, the other a Whig. Madame
D'Arblay tells the story thus: "A similar ebullition of political rancor
with that which so difficultly had been conquered for Mr. Canning foamed
over the ballot box to the exclusion of Mr. Rogers."