* * * * *
“Oh if you were to see what a Beau they have made of me here! — but [I] sh in my present dress, figure at a Birth Day in England, yet here I am not near so fine as a Tradesman, who have all fine figured or [ ] silk Coats, and Laced Ruffles, — while mine are only plain. Adieu, adieu, I shall present Hetty with this bit of paper to write down her dream upon, for she is now fast asleep at my Elbow.”
“Dear Fanny, “You must not expect anything very clever now, as you have sometimes, from me, because I am hardly awake yet. Papa talks of his being a Beau, I am sure if you were to see me you’d say I was an old woman, but shorter, for papa beg’d the favour of Lady Clifford to Buy for me and Susey a silk thing a-piece, and her Ladyship has Bought the silk for a Negligée for me, and a slip for Sukey. Mine was finish’d to night, and I have had it on. The Girls at nine and ten years old weare sacks and Coats here, and have seen severall about my size in Hoops, and if little Charley was here he might wear a Bag and Sword, for he wou’d be thought big enough.
“I shall write often to you dear Fanny when we are plac’d, and am, in the most affecte manner, your Loving sister and Friend,
“E. BURNEY.”
Paris dispersed much of Dr. Burney’s melancholy. He began to read and write without an effort. With the encouragement of Garrick he translated the words and adapted the music of Rousseau’s little piece, “Le Devin du Village,” for the English stage, under the infelicitous title of “The Cunning Man.” Hetty and Susan he left with Mme. St. Mart, who had some English pupils of rank. Little Susan, in her tenth year, began what so far as we know was the first of the many Burney diaries. None of it has been found, but a leaf exists which Susan, in a quaint, business-like manner, styles an “Appendix to follow April 19, 1767, in my journal written in this year of our Lord, 1770.” As in it Susan mentions Hetty’s marriage and her father’s journey to France and Italy, this must have been written in the latter half of 1770. It is so delicately written that we could exclaim with Pacchieroti in later years — Come scrive bene quella creatura! As to the composition, even in the year before, 1769, Fanny very truly wrote, “that Susan’s letters would not disgrace a woman of forty.” It contains a summary of what had befallen her schoolfellows and the friends, French and English, whom she left in Paris, not without a note that two of her English schoolfellows did not return Hetty’s call and her own when they came back, not merely to England, but to Poland Street, where they as well as the Burneys lived. The leaf ends thus, “I went to Chesington, Monday, April 20 (1767), and was conducted to the coach by my two elder sisters, and Cousin Dick. The company contained in the leather conveniency were an old lady, and a young man who entertained me very much by his ridiculous account of a passion which he had conceived for my sister Fanny, whom he saw at the inn. I found him to be a lieutenant — his name Williams — a whimsical, clever young man. I have never seen him since.”
Some time after the death of Mrs. Burney, Mr. Crisp and Charles Burney met by accident at the house of their common friend Mr. Vincent. The next day Mr. Crisp went to Poland Street, and at once made all the children his firm friends. Such was their fervour, that (as they did in after days to their dear Mr. Twining) Fanny and Susan used to follow Mr. Crisp “jointly” to the door, going “like supporters on each side, and never losing a quarter of an instant that we could spend with him — our most beloved Mr. Crisp! — who arrived in our hearts the first, and took the place of all!”
Fanny’s love for Dr. Burney was no ordinary filial love; it was a passion. Her loyalty, enthusiasm, and devotion extended from him to his friends, even to those least likely to please a girl. See how she writes, for instance, of two able but very ungainly men, — Christopher Smart and William Bewley; the latter of whom was even repulsive in appearance. Mr. Crisp, a handsome, agreeable, highly-bred bachelor of fifty-five, was at once taken into the heart of the shy and silent little girl of nine. But for the great difference of years, one can have no doubt that it would have been love on her part. Dr. Burney hinted as much when, in the very beginning of these journals, he calls Mr. Crisp “Fanny’s flame? To visit Mr. Crisp, to please him, to be approved by him, to write to him, to receive his letters, was Fanny’s chief aim, until on her list of his letters she notes the fatal year which deprived her of him, 1783. As she read and revised her papers of fifty years ago, in handwriting cramped and tremulous through age she added to her old tender phrases fresh words of praise of Mr. Crisp. By her love she won his. For some years there is no sign that he distinguished her more than Hetty, who also wrote to him, but in the end she was “Fannikin, the dearest thing to me on earth.” Though out of date here, the following touching letters written when Mr. Crisp was very ill, while Fanny was staying with the Thrales, are not out of place. No words of another can tell of the love between Mr. Crisp and Fanny like their own.
[MR. CRISP TO MISS BURNEY.]
“My dear Fannikin,
“My weak state of health can never destroy my sense of your kindness; or prevent, while I am able, my acknowledging it. Your sending over a Messenger on purpose to enquire after an old, sick, obscure Daddy, surrounded as you are, with every thing that is splendid, gay, bright, happy, shews a heart not of the common sort; — not to be chang’d by a change of Situation, and Circumstances; the favour & smiles of the World: — tho’ I always esteem’d it, I did not perfectly know its full value till Now. — You are to be envied for the possession of such a warm Muscle; for though it may occasion you some palpitations which other people escape, yet upon the whole, it is amply its own reward, and so I wish you joy of it.” — He then gives some account of the weakness and infirmities of his “crazy constitution.” He expects a visit from Dr. Lewis, “an excellent Physician,” and adds that “either Kate, or I, (if I am able,) shall, (since you seem really to be anxious for your old Daddy,) let you know how I go on — and if you will, in return, let me hear some of your proceedings when your time will permit it will be most acceptable to me; for weak as I am, both in Body & Mind, I still interest Myself in whatever regards a Fannikin, and shall so continue to do to my last hour. Such in those moments, as in all the past, your most affectionate Daddy,
“S. C.
“Chesington, Friday, May 15, 1779.”
Miss BURNEY “to SAMUEL CRISP, Esqr., at Chesington, near Kingston, Surrey.”
“Streatham, May 20/79, credo.
“My dear Daddy! Your last sweet Letter was the most acceptable I almost ever received in my life, — your extreme kindness to me nearly equalled the joy I had from hearing you were getting better. I do long to see you most eagerly, and will, with my first power, contrive it — indeed, I have made everybody here long to see you too, but I would not for any bribery be as little likely to have my longing gratified as their’s is. Your exculpation of me was like yourself, liberal and unsuspicious; — and indeed, my dear Daddy, my heart was as unalterably and gratefully attached to you as it could be, and so it must ever remain, — for, for many, many years, you have been more dear to me than any other person out of my immediate family in the whole world; — and this, though I believe I never was so gross before as to say it to you, is a notorious fact to all others; — and Mrs. Thrale is contented to come next you, and to know she cannot get above you. — I am half ashamed of this undelicacy, — but your Illness & kindness joined put me off my guard. However, I hope you will make no bad use of my confession,.... believe me, ever and ever yours,— “F. B.”
A later letter runs in the same strain, —
[MR. CRISP TO MISS BURNEY.]
“June 26, 1781.
“How could you have the face to say to Miss Gregory what you did, about me? — it is well for Us both, that I live out of the way, and out of the knowledge of the World; otherwise, how could I hope to escape the disgrace of being weigh’d in the balance & found wanting, & you the imputation of a most partial and egregious Puffer of an old, worn-out, insignificant Daddy, that never was a quarter of what you pretend, & now less so than ever? — I
am not only well content, but delighted, that your Judgment should be warp’d in my favor by your kindness; but if the Report of an Evelina should bring on a scrutiny into the merits of the Cause, what must I do then? — Well! — love me on! — Continue in your blindness, & I will take my Chance for the rest, & depend upon my Obscurity for my security.”
To go back; on Mr. Crisp’s return from Rome, where he had lived some years, in order “to indulge his passion for music, painting, and sculpture,” after living some time in London, he fitted up a house at Hampton with the objects of art which he had collected in Italy. As we write, we learn that among these there was probably the first pianoforte ever brought to England. He had inherited the hospitable bent of his great-grandfather, Dr. Tobias, who entertained at his Wiltshire rectory all who came, “many more than a hundred persons at a time, and ample provision made for man and horse.” [This was a solid basis to his great popularity as a preacher.] Our Mr. Crisp made his house so pleasant, that the number of his guests began to tell upon his income, which Fanny says was not more than “easy,” nay, “small, but unincumbered.” He lived with people who had the habits of high station, with means of living much greater than his own, and through such friends he next sought “an honourable place with a good salary,” but he had not taken part enough in politics to have claims upon any faction. He abhorred the furious factions of his day, and had brought back from the continent of Europe opinions less in agreement with those of Dr. Tobias Crisp than with those of Sir Nicholas, as, for instance, that “an arbitrary government mildly administered (as France is, and has been of late years...), is, upon the whole, the most permanent and eligible of all forms.” Mr. Crisp got no place (not even one in the Custom House!), but was seized by a fit of the gout, after looking at his bills; and in great fear of debt, sold his collections, gave up housekeeping, and joined an old friend whose purse and health were in a worse plight than his own, in what Madame D’Arblay calls “some pic-nic plan of sharing expenses.” This friend, Mr. Christopher Hamilton, was the owner of Chesington Hall, in Surrey, a house much too spacious for his income. It was by no means Mr. Crisp’s first stay at Chesington, so it may be that he withdrew to the old house, and shunned his old associates, not merely as a means of keeping within his income, but of improving his health, since Dr. Burney (who knew him well for nearly forty years) wrote in his epitaph on Samuel Crisp how great a part he might have played —
Had he through life been blest by Nature kind,
With health robust of body, as of mind.
After the death of Mr. Hamilton (who was the last male of his branch of the Hamilton family), Mr. Crisp still clung to the old Hall, partly perhaps out of kindness, and even charity, to Mr. Hamilton’s spinster-sister, and her niece Miss Cooke. By becoming her first boarder, he helped Mrs. Hamilton to maintain herself. He read, he rode on horseback, he kept up his accomplishments by practice; he went to London for some time every spring, but when past sixty, by degrees it became his habit to go less and less to London, and (as Fanny put it to him), “to shun new, and shirk most of his old, acquaintances.” This is what Macaulay describes as “losing his temper and his spirits; becoming a cynic and a hater of mankind,” and “hiding himself like a wild beast in his den.” Chesington was no den, but a kind of sanatorium, without doctors; a country boarding-house for the convalescent, a “Liberty Hall” for the young and healthy. It stood (it now stands only in a drawing by Edward Burney) in pure air, on high ground rising gradually from a wide common. It had many and spacious rooms, large gardens, wide “prospects” over a charming country, ample supplies of milk and chickens, eggs and fruit. “Dear, ever dear Chesington,” cries Fanny, “whereat passed the scenes of the greatest ease, gaiety, and native mirth that have fallen to my lot.”
It was to many more than Fanny “a place of peace, ease, freedom, and cheerfulness.” Thither went Dr. Burney to arrange the notes of his French and Italian tour, under the eye of Mr. Crisp, to whom he played upon the harpsichord, or with whom he played at whist, or backgammon. There the future Admiral threw down his cards, and sang and laughed for joy, whirling Kitty Cooke about the room in a frenzied dance, when an express brought the news of his appointment to the “Latona” frigate of eight and thirty guns; there Hetty took her babies and herself for change of air, and, with her husband, made music to Mr. Crisp; there Edward Burney took Fanny in a post-chaise “loaded with painting materials.” There Fanny and Maria Allen, with Jenny Barsanti, played Cibber’s “Careless Husband,” amid “outrageous mirth”; there Mr. Crisp and Hetty danced a minuet, as Madame Duval and Mr. Smith in Fanny’s novel. This we must extract from Susan’s diary; to show “the gloom” in which Mr. Crisp ended his life, “the same gloom in which, during more than a quarter of a century, it had been passed”: “Monday night after supper we were all made very merry by Mr. Crisp’s suffering his wig to be turn’d the hind part before, and my cap put over it — Hetty’s cloak — and Mrs. Gast’s apron and ruffles — in this ridiculous trim he danced a minuet with Hetty, personifying Madame Duval, while she acted Mr. Smith at the Long Room, Hampstead! — The maids were call’d in to see this curious exhibition, and we all thought poor Mutty would have snigger’d away all her strength.”
As a matter of fact, we commonly find Mr. Crisp laughing in these letters, and with a laugh quite his own. A gentleman whom Fanny met at Brighton in 1770, reminded her (she says) of Mr. Crisp. “He has not so good a face, but it is that sort of face, and his laugh is the very same: for it first puts every feature in comical motion, and then fairly shakes his whole frame, so that there are tokens of thorough enjoyment from head to foot.” Fun-making, with Fanny, was a frequent form of his melancholy. However, as he was well read in Moliére, we do catch echoes of the “Misanthrope” in his letters and conversation, but rather of Philinte, than of Alceste himself. Look at that letter to Fanny on young ladies being, as it were, “ferae naturoe,” and men “animals of prey,” and then read Philinte’s answer to the Misanthrope, Alceste:
Oui, je vois ces defauts dont votre áme murmure,
Comme vices unis á l’humaine nature,
Et mon esprit enfin n’est pas plus offensé,
De voir un homme fourbe, injuste, interessé,
Que de voir des vautours affamés de carnage,
Des singes mal faisants, et des loups plein de rage.
As Philinte spoke to Alceste, so Mr. Crisp wrote to Fanny.
He saw, and divined, that her youthful enthusiasm was far beyond even the enthusiasm natural to generous youth. The century of Moliére had had good reason to distrust and dread enthusiasm. With the century of Mr. Crisp, it had, wrongfully, yet naturally, become a synonym with fanaticism.
Mr. Crisp desired only that Fanny should learn to restrain her warmth of feeling before the movement of her life drew her among circumstances in which its exaltation might have endangered her happiness. She was so young, and even with him so timid, that he could not duly calculate the general justness of her perceptions, and clearness of her judgement.
Allowance must be made beside for Mr. Crisp’s own vein of humorous exaggeration, of which there are many instances in these volumes. His affection it will be found, often showed itself in railing at his friends, old or young, and giving them hard names of playful abuse. He made out the world to be worse than it was in order to lead Fanny into making the best of it by practising discreet control of her feelings as a duty, not as a hateful self-suppression forced upon her by suffering from the results of too great openness of heart. To Mr. Crisp, Chesington was a contracted, and too often monotonous little world, but we see no token that he was ever gloomy unless he had the gout, or despondent except about the safety of England in the troubled years of the American War.
Mr. Crisp far too well knew himself beloved by a few ever to be morbid as he has been pictured. He smiles at the warmth of his young admirers towards a man of seventy. He tells the Burney girls that they are his “virtuous seraglio.” Once, when he is writing on Susan’s en
gagement, or approaching engagement, which was, perhaps, not yet made known to the elders, he says to Fanny, “when I do put her [Susan] to the cost of a Penny,... it will be directed... to Hetty’s house, because of becauses — besides it looks so like an intrigue, and consequently I must be an Homme á bonne fortune with a young girl.” Chesington was not dull except in winter. Often very droll people were to be met among Mrs. Hamilton’s boarders; such as the odd group of foreigners, and Mrs. Simmons, and her sister, in 1774, who, with Kitty Cooke, were treasures of quaintness of speech. The “den” had strange animals in it, of the very kind Fanny loved, as she said, “for sport.” That Chesington could not be reached by any carriage-road; that there was only one tolerable track across the common for Dr. Burney’s occasional post-chaises; that Hook Lane and Gascoign Lane lay deep in mud all winter; that Mr. Thrale must use four horses when he drove to Chesington, from which his own Streatham could be seen with a telescope, as Chesington could be from Epsom when Fanny used her glass; that there was no regular delivery of letters except by the baker, that “The Parson” brought them, or anyone else who came from Kingston, were grievances not peculiar to Chesington: Streatham, with its wits and its men of wealth, had what Mr. Crisp calls an “odious post.” A letter which he wrote to Fanny on the 28th of March did not reach Streatham until the 2nd of April. Yet they came to Mr. Crisp somehow, those letters and journals of the girls: he knew more of their joys and their troubles than did Dr. Burney, who was either “passing from scholar to scholar,” and dining in his coach on the road or writing in his study, — a “chaos” which his daughters felt to be peculiarly inaccessible to suitors for their hands. Their inclination or disinclination to this or that wooer seems to have been made known to Mr. Crisp, before it was timidly hinted to the busy Dr. Burney. We find Hetty desirous that Mr. Crisp should persuade Fanny to accept a very good offer of marriage; we find Fanny praying him not to press her to marry a man whom she could not love. Susan’s engagement with her brother’s comrade, Captain Phillips, is a subject of other letters, in which the lover is given a fictitious name. They were but anticipating their father, for on all points, as to books, or music, the education of his sons and the establishment of his daughters, Dr. Burney likewise consulted Mr. Crisp. The adopted father of eight Burneys could lack no interest in his life. It ended in severe suffering, but in no other gloom. He was almost worshipped by his kind nurses, Mrs. Hamilton and Kitty Cooke. Fanny, and Susan watched his bed, and it was with difficulty that Hetty and Charlotte were prevailed upon to keep away. His sister, too, was there, a woman of the old Crisp fervour of character, who was devoted to her only brother, from whom circumstances had parted her early and long.
Complete Works of Frances Burney Page 447
