Hence may each orphan hope, as chance directs,
To find a parent where he least expects.
At the plot of Evelina, too, I venture to think, posterity must be pardoned for an indulgent smile.
It is, however, much easier to bestow praise upon the delineation of character in this story. It is the farcical element in Evelina that has been most freely and frequently praised: Johnson loved to talk of the Smiths and the Branghtons, and of impossible old Mme. Duval (for whom, in spite of her vulgarity and worldliness, one cannot but feel a touch of affection); Macaulay praised her for “her variety of humors,” but would allow her little more; and even Mr. Dobson appears still to prefer the “broad” treatment of the farcical personages to the quieter characterizations. There are probably no more famous scenes in the book than the ducking of Mme. Duval and the attack of the monkey upon Beau Lovel’s ear; and, though we may wonder how a young woman like Miss Burney was able to describe such scenes, it must certainly be admitted that they are successful — so successful, in truth, as to challenge comparison with some of the lesser scuffles in the pages of Smollett. It is surely a fact of significance that critics have chosen to speak of Mme. Duval and the Branghtons rather than of the hero and heroine, Evelina and Orville, who absorb more of our time and attention. But there have been readers who felt differently. Orville and Evelina were, and are still no doubt, the chief attraction to many a devoted reader who thinks of Duvals and Branghtons merely as obscuring that fine old issue whether the hero can be brought to unite himself in matrimony with the heroine; but the critics appear to have been rather too willing to allow the lovers to be thus obscured. It was hardly to be expected, even by Dr. Johnson, that Miss Burney should equal Fielding in the depiction of an agreeable rake, Sir Clement Willoughby, or surpass Richardson in the depiction of a perfect man, Orville. When all is said, it is to be feared that the comparative indifference of the critics to these gentlemen means that Orville is a prig and a bore, and that Willoughby, obviously more likeable than the peer, is, nevertheless, only an echo.
But the chief distinction of Evelina has yet to be mentioned. Whatever we may think of its plot or of its farcical characters, or of its hero and its rake, we must admit that it possesses an interest truly unique in its intimate revelation of the mind of young womanhood. It is remarkable that this characteristic has not been more enthusiastically discussed by those who wish to praise Evelina, for this novel contains the first great analysis in English literature of the mind of a young woman, produced by a young woman. There is nothing in earlier English literature quite comparable with it; for apt comparisons we must go to Miss Austen or Miss Bronte, and even then the wonder of it is hardly diminished. But if there is no earlier woman’s achievement that can be fairly compared with this story, there is of course a man’s achievement which completely overshadows it, and that is the work of Richardson. The parallel between Pamela’s constant “scribbling” and Evelina’s devotion to her correspondence is too obvious to have escaped notice; it is too obvious, indeed, to enable the reader to regard Evelina as quite free from a rather conscious imitation of Pamela. There is at times in Miss Burney’s heroine a suspicion of servility, a fluttering admiration of rank, which one might wish away; but when, as a last letter, Evelina records, “This morning, with fearful joy and trembling gratitude, your Evelina united herself for ever with the object of her dearest, her eternal affection,” then the likeness to Richardson’s heroine almost evokes a cry of pain. But there is nothing merely repetitious in the fine portrayal of maidenly simplicity, of bewildered innocence in its first contact with the disillusionizing world, its mauvaise honte, its all-embracing faith in the simple maxims of the nursery. Here, at last, there is perfect knowledge. Here is a figure to oppose to the colorless stupidity of a Narcissa or to the studied cleverness of a Lady Teazle.
And yet I cannot but feel that in testing Evelina by the standard of its great predecessors, the chief interest of the comparison is to reveal the elements in Richardson’s young women to which Miss Burney, as a young woman speaking for her kind, was willing to give, as it were, her official sanction. And thus the chief interest of Evelina is likely often to remain just what it was in 1778, an interest in Miss Burney herself. “ She is herself the great sublime she draws,” wrote Sir Joshua Reynolds to Mrs. Thrale, and despite all protest to the contrary, it is probable that the worth of Evelina will be ultimately measured by the truth of its portrayal of young womanhood — that is to say, by the truth of its portrayal of Miss Burney.
That most of what went into the characterization of Evelina came from Miss Burney’s knowledge of herself is not, I imagine, likely to be very strongly denied. Evelina is of course her idealized self. She had, to be sure, no Orville, much less a Willoughby, but under similar circumstances she would have done — who can doubt it? — precisely what Evelina did. Miss Burney gave to Evelina her own passion for recording her life, her own abounding modesty, something, though not full measure, of her sanity and her keen penetration into character, and above all, something of her own pride. There is, I take it, no real inconsistency between Miss Burney’s intense pride and her intense modesty. The link between them was her sensitiveness. Of this she seems to be fully conscious herself; for in speaking of a certain “high lady” at Bath, she says,
“Characters of this sort always make me as proud as they are themselves; while the avidity with which Mrs. Byron honors, and the kindness with which Mrs. Thrale delights me, makes me ready to kiss even the dust that falls from their feet.”
So extreme was her sensitiveness that she could hardly endure to overhear the mention of her name; at the voice of praise she almost swooned — but it was from delight. She herself speaks of praise as a “delicious confusion.” When the victim of such adulation, she must have felt that now more than ever it were rich to die. But destructive criticism assumed to her the proportions of cosmical disaster. And yet withal she knew her deserts; she knew the kind of company in which it was her right to move. She is often described as filled with a horror of the limelight, a sitter in corners, content to be a quiet observer of others. And this is, in a measure, true; but her favorite station was a corner in the salons of the Great. To realize this we have but to remind ourselves of some of those whom she might fairly call friends, — her King and her Queen; Burke, the greatest of England’s statesmen, and his enemy Warren Hastings; the greatest of actors and the best-loved of painters, bluestockings like Mrs. Montagu and Mrs. Ord, Mrs. Vesey, Mrs. Thrale, Mrs. Cholmondeley, and Mrs. Delany. A policy of complete self- effacement is surely inconsistent with such a host of acquaintances as that. These are not the friends of a recluse. The true recluse of the following pages is not the author of Evelina, but Mr. Crisp of Chessington, whose first meeting with Johnson affords some interesting contrasts with Miss Burney’s. Miss Burney’s pride and modesty are most likely to be understood if we conceive of both as a sensitive dread of not living up to what is expected of a proclaimed genius. Praise distressed her because praise is almost always a challenge, and Miss Burney had a young woman’s dread of a challenge. It was much easier to disclaim ability than to “talk for victory.” Miss Burney’s ability to justify the enthusiasm of her friends was so exclusively confined to her hours of solitude that there are times when her modesty seems a studied affectation, the ostentatious humility of a Miss Esther Summerson, rather than the inexperience of an Evelina. These meek young women who are for ever retiring to their “chambers,” to escape the voice of the flatterer or to record his words in interminable letters, seem at times possessed of a remarkable sanity which detects the market value of this favorite virtue. They exhibit a surprising facility in contracting successful engagements, in publishing novels (though without fame or fortune), or an almost Boswellian faculty for scraping acquaintance with the distinguished folk of their time. It is all very innocent; and in Miss Burney, at least, there is enough sincerity to give her pages an authentic note of guilelessness, unfrequent in eighteenth-centur
y literature, a characteristic which blends pleasantly with real literary skill. The pages of the Journal here laid before the reader are simple, unpremeditated even, at times, casual, after the very best manner of occasional composition; but underneath it all there is art. Miss Burney was by no means inexperienced with her pen. She began writing diaries at the age of fifteen, but, by her own confession, she had been for five years before this an inveterate scribbler of romances, all of which came to a timely end in flames. These years of practice had given her ease and rapidity of style, and the ability and habit of seeing things in the large. This unpremeditated skill (if I may be allowed the expression) may perhaps be more easily discerned if the reader will compare with some one of the earlier of Miss Burney’s records the gay and careless chatter of her younger sister Susan, here given in the Appendix. Both accounts have the charm of naivete, but the latter is totally deficient in the experienced craftsmanship that so delightfully characterizes the former. Not that there is any trace of self-consciousness. In Fanny’s record there is art, but it is unstudied, such unstudied art as may result only from long practice. Thus I believe that we may find in Miss Burney’s diary, not only a truer portrait of herself than is to be discovered in Evelina, but a style and, indeed, a dramatic skill surpassing any that can be found in her novels.
And first of her style. Lord Macaulay, with that magnificent ease which has been alternately the disgust and despair of his successors, distinguishes three totally different styles. The first is her natural style, “perspicuous and agreeable the second displays the stiffening influence of Johnson, and was perhaps produced under his immediate influence; the third represents a “new Euphuism,” in which pomposity has gone mad. Now this analysis, touching the high points in the development of Miss Burney’s style, is like much of Macaulay’s work, most useful, and yet, if accepted as literal truth, somewhat misleading. It is a late day to be saying that Lord Macaulay’s criticism is lacking in chiaroscuro; but, commonplace as is the observation, it is yet necessary to give one more illustration of it here. Miss Burney did not suddenly adopt a new style when she came to the composition of Cecilia; she did not submit that work to the revision of Samuel Johnson; it is not even true that in Evelina she exhibited a charming simplicity of style which she thereafter unaccountably corrupted.
In short, there is no impassable gulf fixed between her earliest and her latest style. To begin with the matter of “agreeable perspicuity,” Evelina is by no means a well of simple diction undefiled. There are sentences in it that display so prim a sense of decorum that they already indicate a strong tendency towards the pomposity of the Memoirs of Doctor Burney. Here are three specimens from Evelina which would have no unfamiliar ring if found in her latest work, and might, indeed, easily be mistaken for quotations from it:
“Indeed, had you, like me, seen his respectful behaviour, you would have been convinced of the impracticability of supporting any further indignation.”
“Can you wonder I should seek to hasten the happy time... when the most punctilious delicacy will rather promote than oppose my happiness in attending you?”
“Suffer, therefore, its acceleration, and generously complete my felicity by endeavouring to suffer it without repugnance.”
Sentences such as these show that Miss Burney’s passion for dignity of language was from the beginning in danger of becoming inflamed. The more prominent she became, the more did the sense of her importance exhibit itself in this false dignity of diction which issued at last in mere bombast. The reader who is interested in this gradual development toward an unfortunate conclusion may follow it from Evelina through Cecilia, Camilla, and The Wanderer, to the delicious absurdities of the Memoirs; he will find in it no sudden breaks; but rather a development as natural as it was unfortunate. It is such a result as might normally be expected from a lady whose innate tendency to formality was fostered in the dull pomposities of the court of King George III.
I have said so much of Miss Burney’s style in Evelina and other books not represented in the following pages, because I believe that it is in the pages of the Diary alone — and in its earlier pages at that — that Miss Burney’s work is seen at its best. Here she is simple; here her style flows swift and limpid. There is no affectation of dignity in this pleasant converse with her sisters, no suspicion of pomposity in this spirited account of Dr. Johnson. Here she is what she is “by art as well as by nature.” In respect of style, as in so many respects, the Diary emerges as Miss Burney’s supreme achievement.
If the Journal, then, is superior to Miss Burney’s works of fiction in this, it is also, I believe, at least equal to them in dramatic quality. When we have taken into account all other aspects, it perhaps remains the chief distinction of the Diary that it exhibits a sense for a dramatic scene which goes far to justify Mrs. Thrale in her conviction that Miss Burney’s genius should be devoted to the service of the Comic Muse. The author grasps life with the instincts of a novelist, and although plot is necessarily absent from her work, she exhibits a series of scenes that fairly deserve the much abused adjective “dramatic.” We are unfortunately accustomed to speak of any scene that reads brightly and easily as “dramatic.” Boswell’s Life of Johnson, for example, is almost always so described; but in spite of all its superiority in other ways, that marvelous biography is not dramatic in the same sense as are the following selections. Here and there in Boswell, no doubt, in passages like the famous account of the Wilkes dinner and the conversation with King George, there are scenes as truly dramatic as any in the present volume; but the general aspect of Boswell’s Life is not dramatic. Whoever is satisfied with that adjective as a description of the great biography has either never read it, or is but ill acquainted with the drama. If, in the infinite variety of that great book, there can be said to be any strict method, its unit is rather the sentence, the Johnsonian pronouncement, than the dramatic scene. One recalls the Life as a series of trenchant utterances, now magnificent, now trivial; one recalls the Diary as a succession of glimpses into Mrs. Thrale’s drawing-room. Boswell is too concerned with the demands of literal truth to permit himself to “write up” a scene after the manner of the author of Evelina. His book is the greatest piece of realism in English; Miss Burney’s is only a book of dramatic sketches. And in this one respect, I cannot but think that Miss Burney has surpassed the incomparable one himself, and this for the very simple reason that her lesser task gave her the greater freedom in the treatment of her material. Be this as it may, you will find it difficult to discover anywhere in the vast mass of Johnsonian reminiscence anything which, for dramatic vividness, surpasses the scene in which the Streathamites discuss Johnson’s kitchen, or that which describes the quarrel with Pepys, or the conversazione in which Dr. Johnson announces that he prefers Burney to Siddons. Or, to pass for a moment beyond the strictly Johnsonian material, where is there a neater specimen of dialogue than that scene in which two ladies, summoned by a bluestocking to partake in high literary converse, reveal their genuine interests by flying at once to the congenial subjects of clothes? Surely it has not its superior in Evelina.
“‘ How disagreeable these sacques are! I am so incommoded with these nasty ruffles! I am going to Cumberland House — are you?’
“‘To be sure,’ said Mrs. Hampden; ‘what else, do you think, would make me bear this weight of dress? I can’t bear a sacque.’
“‘Why, I thought you said you should always wear them?’
“‘Oh yes, but I have changed my mind since then — as many people do.’
“‘Well, I think it vastly disagreeable indeed,’ said the other; ‘you can’t think how I’m encumbered with these ruffles!’
“‘Oh, I am quite oppressed with them,’ said Mrs. Hampden; ‘I can hardly bear myself up.’ “‘And I dined in this way!” cried the other; ‘ only think — dining in a sacque!’
“‘Oh,’ answered Mrs. Hampden, ‘it really puts me quite out of spirits.’
“Well, have you enough? — and h
as my daddy raved enough?”
Now, with all this dramatic quality, is Miss Burney reliable? May we depend upon the scenes which she represents us as essentially truthful? How far is her charm due to a skillful manipulation of facts? It is a question to be asked. It is, therefore, not very reassuring to be told that Miss Burney’s accuracy is by no means unassailable. She was careless about dates. She often prefers, with true feminine instinct, to mention the day of the week rather than the day of the month. Even then, it is often difficult to follow the order of events through the week. Later in life, she showed a shocking carelessness in dealing with her own records—” ancient manuscripts” she calls them — which is most reprehensible. She cut, tore, and destroyed, “ curtailed,” to use her own words, “and erased of what might be mischievous from friendly or Family Considerations.” In addition to all this, new sources of error and confusion appear in the work of her first editor, Mrs. Barrett, the only editor of her Diary who has had access to the original manuscript, a lady who, far from ascertaining and correcting Miss Burney’s errors, seems to have shared some of Miss Burney’s indifference to mere detail. But this critical distrust may easily be caried too far. When we have made all necessary allowance for error, Miss Burney’s slips and omissions remain of the slightest importance. It is quite true that she has not the accuracy of a Boswell; but it is because we have a Boswell that her errors are so very negligible. In his pages we have, in all conscience, a sufficiency of details and dates — more than in any other biography in existence. We go to Miss Burney’s records for something else, for intimate scenes from Johnson’s daily life with the Thrales; and, in this respect, we may feel comfortably confident that our record is truthful. The question of the accuracy of such a record is a large matter, and it is not to be permanently settled by the enumeration of a few unimportant errors in chronology, or even by producing evidence that the author late in life occasionally made verbal changes that are obviously for the worse. The question of the truthfulness of the whole portrayal of Johnson can only be tested by the standard of witnesses of acknowledged reliability.
Complete Works of Frances Burney Page 675
