faces and figures such as those which we pay money to see at fairs,
would not, however spirited {305}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 canvass. 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
signpainter. A thirdrate 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
any thing 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.” {306}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 Shakspeare. 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
Shakspeare. 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 Shy-lock’s? Or Benedick’s? Or Macbeth’s? Or that
of Cassius? Or that of Falconbridge? But we might {307}go on for ever.
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 honour 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 on through all the characters which we have
mentioned, and through fifty more in the same way; for it is the
constant manner of Shakspeare 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.
Shakspeare 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. {308}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 instance, 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 He 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 humours. 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 humours {309}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 venerated 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 honourable kind.
Seeing that such humours exist, we cannot deny that they are proper
subjects for the imitations of art. But we conceive that the imitation
of such humours, however skilful and amusing, is not an achievement
of the highest order; and, as such humours 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 humours 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 any thing 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 selfindulgence
and selfimportance of a {310}purseproud 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, 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
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 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 {311}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 He 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 every
thing 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 {312}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 criticize 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 {313}to his hand. Tins 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 {314}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 hears to the English of the House of
Lords. Sometimes it reminds us of the finest, that is to say, the vilest
parts, of Mr. Galt’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 Shakspeare 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. {315}”_His son seems weaker in his
understanding, and more gay in his temper; but his gaiety 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 Folly Branghton is rather pretty, very foolish,
very ignorant, very giddy, and, I believe, very goodnatured_.”
This is not a fine style, but simply 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 honour, 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 immoveably 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 {316}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 seemed 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. Selwvn 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 front
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 whieh 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 {317}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 those
hapless artificers who perform the most abject offices of any authorized
calling, in being the active guardians of our blazing hearths? Not
to vain glory, 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 labours
of talents.”
The Club, Johnson’s Club, did itself no honour 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
rancour with that which so difficultly had been conquered for Mr.
Canning foamed over the ballot box to the exclusion of Mr. Rogers.”
An offence punishable with imprisonment is, in this language, an offence
“which produces incarceration.” To be starved to death is “to sink from
inanition into nonentity.” Sir Isaac Newton is “the developer of the
skies in their embodied movements;” and Mrs. {318}Thrale, when a party
of clever people sat silent, is said to have been “provoked by
the dulness of a taciturnity that, in the midst of such renowned
interlocutors, produced as narcotic a torpor as could have been caused
by a dearth the most barren of all human faculties.” In truth, it is
impossible to look at any page of Madame D’Arblay’s later works without
finding flowers of rhetoric like these. Nothing in the language of
those jargonists at whom Mr. Gosport laughed, nothing in the language of
Sir Sedley Clarendel, approaches this new Euphuism.