The “dolcissima voce” of Susan was praised by Baretti; her critical knowledge of music was such that Pacchieroti declared her to be “capable de juger en professeur” The same celebrated singer said to her, “You are attached to Miss Fanny, and she to you, more than [to] the rest. There seem but one soul — but one mind between you; — you are two in one” To write Fanny charming letters, full of finely-touched sketches of things and people, and of happy turns of expression; to bring London before Fanny’s eyes when she was at Chesington or with the Thrales, satisfied Susan. Perhaps she was not, like Fanny, compelled to write. We know not if she could have found — we were about to write “invented,” but “Evelina” was more of a “trouvaille” than of an invention — such a book as “Evelina,” or constructed such a book as “Cecilia.” Perhaps she had not the intense pleasure in perceiving, the delight in giving to paper, words and traits from which characters may be inferred, which is manifest throughout the following diaries; or the power of imagining circumstances from which tragic or comic consequences must ensue, which was shown by her sister in her early novels. We know only that she could put before Fanny all that she knew Fanny wished to know, in a manner which was her own, not that of Fanny.
Hetty, James, and Susan were, writing strictly, all of her family who were of ages to influence Fanny. Others are brought in simply to show how considerable was the amount of ability in those of her own blood. Her own younger brother, the second Dr. Charles, was (as we have said) a school-boy when these diaries begin; her own youngest sister, Charlotte, a lively and affectionate girl, was in 1777 just beginning to show her pretty face at parties, and to write of them with a glee and a sense of what was absurd, which can amuse readers of whom she never thought. She had been in certain ways left much to herself, and there are some who think that because of that “her state was the more gracious.” Fanny’s half brother, Richard, had not been long at school when these early journals end. Sarah Harriet, her halfsister, who grew up to write several successful novels, was a droll and clever child, but scarcely out of the nursery. As Pacchieroti said, “All, all! very clever girls! Sense and witta (sic) inhabit here. Sensibility has taken up its abode in this house — All I meet with at Dr. Burney’s house are superior to other people. I am myself the only Bestia that enters the house. I am indeed, a truly Beast!”
If to be of such a family, in such a household, among such friends and acquaintances as those of her father, was not education, we hardly know to what to give that name. There were many more educated ladies in the eighteenth century than it is customary to think there were, but it would be difficult to overstate the poorness of teaching in the schools for girls. Fanny might have left no book behind her had she been sent to a boarding-school. That she never had any regular teacher was no dire misfortune, if it were some loss. By bringing her father the books he needed while writing for the press, she earned the name of his “Librarian,” and learned to find on his shelves others which suited her fancy, or fitted into her schemes for self-improvement. She was throughout her life a masterly listener to others, and had her reward. Not a word or gesture escaped the observation of the shy, silent, demure little girl. Her early progress in the study of character is very perceptible in these diaries. Putting aside some hasty opinions at first sight, her judgements of the people whom she met are often correct, and could not have been bettered when her mind was mature. In fact, there is nothing more remarkable in Fanny than the continuity of her way of thinking from sixteen to eighty-eight. In 1768, when these early diaries begin, she was at an age most susceptible of impressions, but was endowed with a steadiness of character, marred by no taint of obstinacy, which gave unity to all she said and did throughout a long life. This is the more remarkable as she shared, in no mean degree, the power of her family for acting, which, in many cases, implies more mobility than that of countenance, gesture, bearing, and utterance.
The superficial form of acting, mimicry (“imitations” was the name she gave it), was also a gift of hers, but she never displayed it. It was spontaneous when she was with those she loved and thoroughly at ease.
A singular proof of unity of character is given in her finding at seventy the pleasure which she had anticipated in reading her old diaries when she began to write in them at sixteen, the very age of dreams. No greater proof of purity of heart could be shown. She had many for whom to mourn; — nothing on her own part to lament, her days having been “bound, each to each, by natural piety.” Herself endowed with a very warm heart, she was much beloved by her warm-hearted family, who were very far from being unconscious of her gifts of mind. Even in her backward childhood, there is no sign that Fanny was ever thought a dunce by any one who knew her well. Her early writings had an audience, if it were but of one sister. In 1767, Susan bewailed the burning of Fanny’s papers. Next year, in the very first letter addressed to Fanny by Maria Allen (her correspondent for fifty years afterwards), Fanny is taxed with pedantry, rather than with backwardness; with a love of hard words and fine phrases, not with “poor language,” or “inelegance” of diction. “I have no doubt,” says Maria, “of your letters being so very much above our comprehension, that we shall adore you for a Divinity, for you know people almost always have a much greater opinion of a thing they don’t understand, than what is as plain and simple as the nose in their faces. Now Hetty’s letters and your Papa’s — why they are common entertaining lively witty letters, such as Dr. Swift might write or People who prefer the beautiful to the sublime, but you now why I dare say will talk of Corporeal Machines, Negation fluid, matter and motion and all those pretty things — Well well, Fanny’s letters for my money.”
In 1769, Dr. Burney was proud enough of his daughter’s playful verses on his doctor’s degree at Oxford, to show them to at least one of his friends. Not long afterwards she drew Mr. Crisp into that correspondence by letters which became the chief pleasure of his later years. In 1773, her Teignmouth journal was passed by Susan to Mr. Crisp, who not only delayed to return it that he might (as the girls said) “browse on its contents,” but pressed Fanny to allow him to lend it to his sister in Oxfordshire. After the close of 1774, there seems to have been a continuous passing by Mr. Crisp to Mrs. Gast of Fanny’s less private letters. In, and after 1778, Mr. Crisp copied Fanny’s letters to Susan (which are now called “The Diary of Mme. D’Arblay”), with his own hand, that he might enjoy them often at his leisure, and Fanny found that Mrs. Gast was rather too willing to share the pleasure she took in them with her Oxfordshire friends. The good Aunts Rebecca and Ann craved also for their dear girl’s journals. Thus Fanny may be said to have had, from a very early age, a little public audience of few but fond admirers, which extended in and after 1778, to the great public of three kingdoms, and, through translations, to France, Italy, and Germany.
It is according to rule that a heroine should be described before she begins to narrate her own adventures, as Fanny is about to do. Was Fanny beautiful, — lovely, — or, at least, pretty? Neither pretty nor plain, we incline to think, but capable of looking charming from variety and force of expression rather than from beauty of complexion and regularity of features. There are proofs in these diaries that, when a girl, Fanny was attractive, and she looked like a girl long after she was a woman. Mrs. Piozzi, when an unfriendly witness, tells us that she was much admired at Bath when eight-and-twenty; and Miss Berry (who does not seem to have met her until she was Madame D’Arblay, and not far from fifty years of age) says, that at sixty, after her absence in France, she had “wonderfully improved in good looks in ten years, which have usually a very different effect at an age when people begin to fall off. Her face has acquired expression, and a charm which it never had before. She has gained an embonpoint very advantageous to her face.” It was the restoration, rather than the acquisition of a charm, as we have ample proof that Fanny’s earlier, as well as later, power of pleasing lay in her variability of expression. Her countenance reflected her feelings, or (as her father said), “poor Fanny�
�s face tells us what she thinks, whether she will or no.” Mr, Thrale repeatedly pressed her to read a tragedy to him, because she had what he termed “such a marking face.” She herself wrote, “Nobody, I believe, has so very little command of countenance as myself — I could feel my whole face on fire.” When, in 1802, she went to live in Paris among what was left unguillotined of the best French Society, it was said by Mme de Tessé that “Mme. D’Arblay’s looks filled up what her words left short,” in her efforts to speak French. Fanny was short in stature, and slightly made. Once Mr. Crisp cries out, “Why, what a small cargo for the Chesington coach!” At another time, “What a slight piece of machinery is the terrestrial part of thee, our Fannikin! — a mere nothing; a blast, a vapour disorders the spring of thy watch; and the mechanism is so fine that it requires no common hand to set it a going again.” He often warns her against a habit which was due to her shortness of sight, “that murtherous stooping, which will one day be your bane.” Her mother had been consumptive, and Fanny, like her sister Susan, was liable to very severe colds and coughs; some of which may be attributed to their practice of stealing away from warm parlours to write their long letters in fireless chambers. But like her father, Fanny was wiry; her “slight piece of machinery” withstood rude shocks. What blistering, bleeding, and lowering of diet it resisted!
In 1781, she says, “Sir Richard Jebb ordered me to be blooded again — a thing I mortally dislike, — asses’ milk, also, he forbids, as holding it too nourishing! and even potatoes are too solid food for me! He has ordered me to live wholly on turnips, with a very little dry bread, and what fruit I like: but nothing else of any sort — I drink barley-water and rennet-whey.” Mrs. Piozzi wrote to her in 1821: “A slight frame escapes many evils that beset a robust one; water-gruel and spinach were all you ever wanted.” It may be said for the doctors, that while two of her brothers died long before her of apoplexy, Fanny, surviving all her sisters except the youngest, who was nearly twenty years her junior, lived, like her father, to eighty-eight years of age. What she called her “easy temperature as to food” (meaning her indifference as to what she ate, and how it was cooked), is not uncommon with those born to live longer than their brethren. Her “temperature” as to dress was no less “easy,” or indifferent. Twice only in these volumes does she tell us what she wore. It is only when she plays a part that she thinks it worth while to mention her gowns. One is the “pink Persian” worn at the masquerade in 1770; the other, her “green and grey” dress as Mrs. Lovemore in “The Way to Keep Him.”
“Quels habits,” cries Mme de Sevigné from Brittany to her beautiful daughter in Provence, “quels habits aviez-vous á Lyon, á Arles, á Aix? Je ne vous vois que cet habit bleu!” In another place, she completes the sense of these words by saying “Qui n’a qu’un habit, n’en a pas du tout” The cares and toils of dress were not the least part of Fanny’s sufferings at court. It was with joy that she laid by her sacque, court-hoop, and long ruffles. She records, as if she shared it, Mr. Batt’s pleasure in seeing her “no more dressed than other people.” We have somewhere seen her described in later life as “changing her lodgings oftener than her gown.” That is quite beyond the mark, but it is certain that she was much more indifferent to her apparel than were many of the bas bleus with whom she shrank from being classed. Their Queen, Mrs. Montagu, crowned her toupet, and circled her neck with diamonds, when she received an assembly of foreigners, literati, and maccaronis, in her dressing-room, the walls of which were newly painted with “bowers of roses and jessamines, entirely inhabited by little Cupids.”
“I long” (wrote Mr. Crisp to Fanny in 1778) “to see your Abord with Mrs. Montagu, and Sir Joshua Reynolds. I hope he will take your picture; — who knows, but the time may come when your image may appear,
Fair as before your works you stand confest,
not
In Flowers and Pearls, by bounteous Kirkall drest,
like Garrick with the Comic and Tragic Muse, contending for you?” Fanny never sat to Sir Joshua, who had had two strokes of paralysis before she knew him. Hoppner, painted a portrait of her, and her cousin Edward two. In an engraving of one of them she “stands confess’d” before “The Diary of Mme. D’Arblay.” It is said that Edward saw her by the light of love, and in this picture somewhat flattered her. In his first raptures over “Evelina,” Dr. Burney wrote to her: “I never yet heard of a novel-writer’s statue; — yet who knows?” Who knew indeed? The man whose name was given to the Brissotin party, Brissot de Warville, urged Dr. Burney to permit a portrait, or bust, or statue of his celebrated daughter to be set up in that desecrated church in Paris, which is still called the Pantheon, but was as firmly refused by Dr. Burney, at the entreaty of Fanny, as common sense and propriety dictated that he should be.
The toil needed to bring these early diaries into order of time cannot be guessed even by the few who have seen the original manuscripts with their mutilations and defacements, but the wearisome labour has been lightened by living in such pleasant company for so long. By degrees we have grown not only familiar with the Burney family, but with the ways of the house, and the way about their different houses; first, with that in Poland Street, and the wig-maker’s next door, and Mrs. Pringle’s close by, where Hetty and Fanny were made so welcome and happy for a while. We know Maria Allen’s room, in which the girls “browsed” by the fire upon dainties brought out of “Allen’s” cupboard; and Fanny’s “pretty little neat cabinet, that is in the bedchamber, — where I keep all my affairs, — whenever yet was there a heroine without one?” We know “the children’s play-room,” a closet up two flights of stairs, in which the younger children kept their toys, and Fanny wrote plays and novels, and the paved court below, in which she burned them all at fifteen. We see Lord Mayor Barber’s house in Queen Square, which Pope, Swift, and Bolingbroke may have frequented, and in which Carte, the Jacobite, was put into a damp bed, to the sore damage of his health and the great hindrance of the publication of his “Life of the Duke of Ormonde.” We see the pompous painted ceilings of Newton’s house in St. Martin’s Street, which, Dr. Burney explained, that he himself was not “such a coxcomb” as to have commissioned any painter to execute; nor, perhaps, was Sir Isaac such a coxcomb, — he who sneered at my Lord Arundel’s famous “Marbles,” as so many “stone dolls.”
We know the three parlours, and the cabinets and commodes in the dining-parlour, with Mrs. Burney’s bureau, and that of the Doctor, into which he thrust his private papers and his fees, until both bureaux were broken open by a former footman of theirs, who knowing far too well the; ways of the house, was able to rob his old master and mistress of three hundred pounds. We know what music was lying upon the harpsichord one day in August, 1779, when Susan sent from Chesington for “a set of Motezuma, a set of Aprile’s duets in M.S. given me by Lady Clarges, the set of Didone which contains ‘Son’ regina? the second number of Sacchini’s ‘Tamerlano,’ and of his duets.” All these were to be played to, or with Mr. Crisp.
Mr. Boone breaks his sword in going up the steep stairs, and wonders that he did not break his neck. “I am afraid,” replies Dr. Burney, not without complacency, “that speaks ill for my stairs! — but they were constructed by Sir Isaac Newton, not by me.” Looking over London, Fanny writes a novel in the Observatory of a man who we may be pretty sure never read a romance. When Fanny, as Baretti said with a sneer, was “exalted to the Thralic Majesty,” Susan sent to her at Streatham, or Brighton, or Bath, delightful (as yet unpublished) chronicles of all that went on at home. We see Aunt Ann come in from York Street to tea, “in hopes that she should meet with no foreigner, as I had told her that we had seen Merlin, Piozzi, and Baretti, all so lately. However, our tea-things were not removed, when we were alarmed by a rap at our door, and who should enter but l’imperatore del canto” (Pacchieroti) “and his treasurer” (Bertoni). “I leave you to guess who was charmed, and who looked blank. They stayed with us full three hours.” Susan corrects Pacchieroti’s English exercises,
and stops his sending that letter to “the object of his particular despise,” Sheridan, in which he had drawn that slippery manager as swinging on a gallows for not paying the money due to Pacchieroti as his first singer at the opera.
Or we see Piozzi arrive, “in excellent spirits and humour,” from a country-house where he had been spending two months. He plays “two or three of his new lessons,” which Susan does not like, but he sings “some songs divinely.” At another time Susan is very glad that Piozzi just misses Pacchieroti, of whom he is so jealous that “he walked off from me at a concert on seeing him approaching, — which, indeed, I was not sorry for.” Piozzi, that almost historical character, appears on Susan’s pages as touchy, and jealous of his betters in song. To be told that any one was not at home when he knocked at the door, he took as an insult. “Not d torn!” he cried to the Burneys, complaining that at the door of some great house he had again had “la cattiva sorte del not á torn!” But if Dr. Burney were in his study, or “abroad,” (as they said then,) Mrs. Burney and the three girls made English and foreign friends welcome in St. Martin’s Street. Mrs. Burney, who was not unconscious of her reading and power of speech, had favourites who shared her love of a thorough discussion of subjects. These were not always acceptable to her step-daughters. Mrs. Burney loved to see Baretti, or Mr. Penneck of the British Museum, or James Barry, R.A., enter the parlour. Fanny and Susan had favourites of another kind, from “Aristotle Twining” to Pacchieroti. It must be owned that their raptures concerning Pacchieroti’s manners and voice were only surpassed by the downright ravings of some girls, as recorded by Susan.
Complete Works of Frances Burney Page 449
