Fanny Burney
Page 28
By the turn of the year, Fanny was using a metaphor which, unknown to her, was current among the princesses at Windsor, too, and resolving
to relinquish, without repining, frequent intercourse with those I love; – to settle myself in my monastery, without one idea of ever quitting it; – to study for the approbation of my lady abbess, and make it a principal source of content, as well as spring of action; – and to associate more cheerily with my surrounding nuns and monks.15
If she willed herself to do so, she could – surely? – get used to this horrible new life. It might just be a matter of practice, like the ability to walk backwards out of the King’s presence, which she watched Lady Charlotte Bertie perform with consummate elegance:
For me, I was also, unluckily, at the upper end of the room […] However, as soon as I perceived what was going forward, – backward, rather, – I glided near the wainscot, (Lady Charlotte, I should mention, made her retreat along the very middle of the room,) and having paced a few steps backwards, stopped short to recover, and, while I seemed examining some other portrait, disentangled my train from the heels of my shoes, and then proceeded a few steps only more; and then, observing the King turn another way, I slipped a yard or two at a time forwards; and hastily looked back, and then was able to go again according to rule, and in this manner, by slow and varying means, I at length made my escape. […]
Since that time, however, I have come on prodigiously, by constant practice, in the power and skill of walking backwards, without tripping up my own heels, feeling my head giddy, or treading my train out of the plaits […] and I have no doubt but that, in the course of a few months, I shall arrive at all possible perfection in the true court retrograde motion.16
Fanny’s unhappiness at Court was exacerbated by her anxiety about protocol. The many small mistakes she made in her first six months of service loomed as large in her anxious mind as capital offences, and she became abnormally alert and unforgiving about other people’s lapses, too. On a royal visit to Oxford in August 1786, she took profound offence at not being formally received by any of the hosts at Nuneham Courtney (who were all, of course, engaged receiving the King and Queen), and cut Lady Harcourt when she finally met her. Wandering disconsolately round the Harcourts’ house with Miss Planta, she became mildly hysterical and refused to speak to anyone to whom she had not been introduced by a suitable host. Mrs Thrale’s former scorn of ‘such dignity!’ comes to mind, but now it had taken on a manic edge. The lack of welcome at Nuneham simply rubbed in the fact that Fanny was no longer a guest in such houses, but a servant. Like the bell that called her at Windsor and her first wages, it was a symptom of a ‘strange degradation’.17
She experienced an even worse panic on the Queen’s birthday in January 1787, when a ball was held at St James’s Palace. Fanny left the assembly at the appointed time, in order to attend the Queen, but got lost in the palace’s labyrinthine courtyards and corridors almost immediately. Blind, lost, unprotected, uninformed and late (again) for the Queen of England, whose jewels she was meant to take charge of, Fanny gave herself over to a sort of hysterical despair. She couldn’t find her own chair-men so had to hire a hackney-chair, manned (in her opinion) by two drunkards. When she asked to be taken to St James’s Palace (where she already was) the cabbies decided that the lady meant South Audley Street, and set off. Fanny thought she was being abducted and began to scream. She was rescued and helped to the right part of the palace (eventually) by a young clergyman who had been trying to assist her earlier, but whom she had repulsed because he was a stranger. This bizarre incident, written up at great length in the diary, is disturbing to read because so much of Fanny’s distress (not to say all of it) seems to have been self-inflicted. She panicked and ran into risk immediately (her account strongly emphasises the likelihood of assault, rape or murder) rather than accept the assistance of a clergyman to whom she had not been properly introduced.
Any reader of Cecilia will be struck at once by the parallels between this scene and that in the novel when the heroine runs away from an ‘inebriated’ coach driver and, lost in London streets at night, has her pockets picked, is locked into an attic by strangers and descends rapidly into madness. The episode in the novel is effective because the reader knows of Delvile’s mortal danger and the heroine’s incommunicable anxiety on his behalf; the contrast between her secret knowledge and the infuriating unconcern of ordinary observers (or their exploitation of her) is credible and highly dramatic. In Fanny Burney’s real-life ‘mad scene’, however, the only contrast is between her idea of her own sense of extreme vulnerability and the actual dangers faced. The story is all effect and no cause – or at least the cause is irrational. The incident underlines the fragility of Fanny’s state of mind just a few months into her long incarceration at Court; it also suggests some of the damage that was being done to her imaginative processes. Both her later novels, but especially The Wanderer, show a deteriorating grasp on how to make a crisis plausible in fiction.
Had Fanny not admired the Queen so much she might have found some release for her overwrought feelings in a spirit of rebellion, but the only outlet she allowed herself was in her communications with Susan and Mrs Locke, both of whom were unsympathetic to the Queen. To everyone else she presented a subdued but uncomplaining front. Inwardly, Fanny felt herself dwindling away, both physically and mentally, and at the turn of the New Year in 1787 made the desperate resolution to ‘wean myself from myself – to lessen all my affections – to curb all my wishes – to deaden all my sensations’.18
She was losing her ability to deal with even simple matters, such as what to do about a letter from the distinguished French novelist, Madame de Genlis. Fanny had been immensely impressed by de Genlis when they met in 1785, but dark rumours about her morals now seemed to make her a dangerous associate. When Fanny tried to ask the Queen’s advice (i.e. permission) on whether to answer the letter or not, she was so nervous that her voice failed and she had to retreat behind her mistress’s chair, ‘that she might not see a distress she might wonder at’. Fanny knew this was strange, even psychotic, behaviour, and that her mind was ‘enfeebled […] by a long succession of struggling agitations’.19 Her Majesty, predictably, told her to have nothing to do with Madame de Genlis.
The challenge to convey to Susan and Fredy her mental sufferings at Court produced some of Fanny Burney’s most acute writing – her description of Fredy Locke bringing her ‘almost piercingly near what she has not power to make me reach’ was one example, another was her novel expression to describe Mrs Schwellenberg’s effect on her ego, ‘little i am fairly as one annihilated’.20 Fanny could evoke the symptoms of her ‘forcible emotions’ powerfully, but didn’t want to analyse their cause, and in contrast all her language about the Royal Family is vacuous and sentimental. The word that recurs with nauseating frequency is ‘sweetness’, but there are quantities of ‘charming’ and ‘gracious’ too. It was as if – just as with her father – Fanny’s critical faculties were being deliberately suspended in this special instance, and the vacuum filled with hyperbole.
Fanny was one of the few people who genuinely admired Queen Charlotte (another, surprisingly, was Susan’s husband Molesworth Phillips21): she considered her a model of propriety and was impressed by her lack of airs and graces. This partly explains her readiness to solicit and defer to the Queen’s advice on personal relationships (which was severely cautious), manners (cold) and taste in literature (stodgy). Asking the Queen’s advice, even on trivial matters, was a fail-safe way to avoid the blame and opprobrium Fanny had begun to fear from the exercise of free will.
Of the various things that gradually impelled Fanny Burney to adopt ‘the worst [prose style] that has ever been known among men’22 for grand or formal performances, the Queen’s influence cannot be discounted. During the long years at Court, Fanny’s anxieties were focused on pleasing this highly conventional, non-intellectual German woman who didn’t like novels. To begin with, the anxiety was a
bout practicalities, movement, manners and procedure, then about morals and later about the moral value of writing. After Fanny had left Court service in 1791, with a pension dependent on the Queen’s pleasure, the anxiety persisted. She knew that everything she wrote from then on would have to pass muster with her patroness, whose taste was for ‘improving’ literature. The first novel that Fanny wrote after leaving the Queen’s service was dedicated to the consort, and the nervous convolution of the dedication demonstrates what she had come to feel was required on such occasions, a development of the ‘white hand’ that Dr Johnson had once found so objectionable:
MADAM,
That goodness inspires a confidence, which, by divesting respect of terror, excites attachment to Greatness, the presentation of this little Work* to Your Majesty must truly, however humbly, evince; and though a public manifestation of duty and regard from an obscure Individual may betray a proud ambition, it is, I trust, but a venial – I am sure it is a natural one.23
The Court did not offer any models of good English. The King himself was bilingual, but few courtiers were. German was the language used intimately and as a blocking device for private conversations (as Fanny experienced often in the Queen’s dressing room). There were also factional registers that performed the same function in English: the Prince of Wales’s friends had their own form of code to conceal their Whiggishness (not that they were heard much at Court), and no doubt a lot of what the equerries were saying to each other derived from public-school jargon and other exclusive cant. In these conditions, Court rhetoric, traditionally florid and enervated, served as the only common currency. It expressed perfectly the artificiality of Court life: its rhetorical affectations mirrored the repetitiousness, rodomontade and retrogression of courtly behaviour itself. As Fanny recognised in a line of a ballad she wrote at this time for the Lockes’ son William – ‘Void was the scene, blank, vacant, drear!’ – there was a direct connection between her state of mind and the rhetorical style she happened to use. She disliked the line she had written, but implies that she actually couldn’t change it. It was ‘a tautology so expressive of the tautology of my life and feelings’.24
Fanny was constantly hearing another sort of bad English, too: the Queen’s. Her Court diary respectfully ignores the Queen’s foreign accent – a courtesy not extended to ‘Schwelly’ or any other German-speakers around the Court, whom Fanny satirised freely. Earlier diary entries about her first meetings with the Royal Family at Mrs Delany’s in 1785 showed her alert to all the Queen’s peculiarities of speech, accent, idiom and cadence. ‘Her language is rather peculiar than foreign’, Fanny noted then;25 ‘She speaks English almost perfectly well, with great choice and copiousness of language’, but ‘her emphasis has [a] sort of changeability’.26 Few examples remain of Queen Charlotte’s speech in this objective phase of Fanny’s diary, but they betray an essential lack of elegance; for instance:
‘For me, I never have half time enough for things. But what makes me most angry still, is to see people go up to a window and say, “What a bad day! – dear, what shall we do such a day as this?”’27
or
‘I am always quarrelling with time! It is so short to do something, and so long to do nothing.’28
The Court entries smooth over these oddities, endowing Queen Charlotte with perfect grammar and syntax. Here is the Queen’s opinion, as reported by Fanny in her more reverential period, of the recently published Letters to and from the late Samuel Johnson, LL.D:
[O]nce I said to the Bishop of Carlisle that I thought most of these letters had better have been spared the printing; and once to Mr Langton, at the Drawing-Room, I said, ‘Your friend Dr. Johnson, sir, has had many friends busy to publish his books, his memoirs, and his meditations, and his thoughts; but I think he wanted one friend more.’ ‘What for? ma’am’, cried he; ‘A friend to suppress them’, I answered.29
This is an unlikely speech from the woman who another time asked Fanny to check her private diary ‘to tell her if it was English’.30 The Dedication of Camilla, and so much of Fanny’s subsequent public writing, addresses someone who could appreciate the meaning and moral of a book in English, but on whom purity of diction and delicacy of expression were almost entirely lost.
Fanny had taken up her position at Court in the hope that her real function would be to read to the Queen and discuss literature. Her first request to read, however, was marred by her usual stage-fright at any sort of performance: ‘my voice was less obedient than my will, and it became so husky, and so unmanageable, that nothing more unpleasant could be heard’.31 A month later, in a ill-conceived attempt to bring her father’s work to the Queen’s notice, she requested from home a copy of The Present State of Music in Germany, probably thinking that the passages about Handel, the King’s obsession, would go down well. Charles Burney, who had vehemently defended his book in 1773 against those who accused him of anti-German prejudice, thought rather differently about it now it was suggested as reading-matter for the Queen. But the opportunity was too good to miss, and he sent Fanny a copy straight away, with all the ‘sensitive’ passages about German lack of genius marked in pencil, so she could avoid them when reading aloud.
This plan backfired unpleasantly when the Queen asked to borrow the book for the Princess Royal. ‘It is all over with us for ever!’ Fanny wrote dramatically, fearing her father’s imminent disgrace. She made up an elaborate lie to explain the markings, saying they were proposed revisions which he had sent for her to inspect. Nothing awful came of the incident because evidently none of the Royal Family bothered to read the book – not even the Princess Royal, who thought the marked sections indicated Fanny’s favourite passages! – but Fanny’s profound unease about soliciting patronage seemed fully justified. Later in her Court career she appealed to the Queen on behalf of both her brothers, and though the petitions were heard with ‘some concern & compassion’32 they were not successful, and laid open to scrutiny James’s and Charles’s past sins and present failures. The net effect, felt most acutely by Fanny, was not to raise the Burneys up but to expose their shortcomings.
Though Fanny longed to be rescued from her situation at Court, Charles Burney clearly thought of the arrangement as permanent. In 1787 the organist’s apartments at Chelsea College became vacant and Dr Burney decided to move his wife and remaining unestablished child, fifteen-year-old Sarah Harriet, out of St Martin’s Street at last (although he kept the lease on until 1789.33) Sarah was a gawky and unhappy girl who had been brought up, according to Maria Rishton, in ‘a perpetual state of Warfare’ with her mother.34 Her brother Richard, reputedly the most handsome and charming of Charles Burney’s children, had not stayed long at Winchester College, despite his early patronage by Dr Johnson and Mrs Thrale. Between 1781 and 1783 he and Sarah had been sent to Switzerland to learn some French; little else is known of his adolescent years until the summer of 1787, by which time he had removed to India. Mystery and whiffs of scandal surround the circumstances of this, but as nothing has been left in the Burney archive to elucidate ‘beautiful Dick’s virtual disappearance from the family, it is impossible to define the nature of ‘all his transgressions’, cryptically referred to in Susan’s journal of 1789.35* In July 1787, Charles Burney received ‘a letter fm India – which he told us [the Phillipses] he dreaded to unseal’.39 Dr Burney and his wife were clearly anxious about their son, and almost certainly disappointed in their expectations of him. Dick’s marriage to one Jane Ross on her fifteenth birthday in November 1787 (he was an elderly nineteen) cannot have gone down well at home; he was the fourth of Mrs Burney’s five children to make a clandestine teenage match.† Dr Burney later revealed that his youngest son was ‘one of those who have married natives’.40 This does not necessarily mean that Jane Ross had any Indian blood; she was a Christian,41 and likely to have been connected with the Indian Civil Service, which Dick Burney joined when he first reached Calcutta. One of their numerous children was described by Fanny in 1820 as having a ‘Co
mplection a little Indian’,42 which could indicate anything from being half-caste to having a suntan. Initially at least, the union was considered by Susan a ‘very faulty step, & very probable to be not only his own ruin but that of his poor Companion’,43 but though he died at the early age of forty, Dick’s exemplary career as headmaster of the Orphan School at Kidderpore, earnest Christianity (he converted to Methodism) and apparently happy marriage seem to have proved her fears wrong.*
Mrs Schwellenberg, who suffered from asthma, stayed in town for several months in 1787, and during her absence Fanny became much better acquainted with the equerries and left lively sketches of their conversation in her diary. These vignettes are the first signs that she was becoming relaxed enough to observe her surroundings in the way that had previously been second nature. A holiday atmosphere broke out whenever ‘Schwelly’ was absent; there were even fits of laughter and flashes of wit around the tea-table from time to time – nothing to that of Mrs Thrale, Garrick, Johnson or Walpole, of course, but welcome in the chilly ‘monastery’. The equerries worked on three-month shifts, so the company was always changing, and in January 1788 one of them, Colonel Stephen Digby, came back into duty after nursing his wife in her fatal illness the previous summer. By a strange coincidence his wife, Lady Lucy Fox-Strangways, had been the very child at Mrs Sheeles’s boarding school in Queen’s Square who had taken Fanny under her wing in the months following Esther Sleepe Burney’s death in 1762. These poignant recollections helped draw Fanny closer to Colonel Digby, who despite his gouty foot, ruined teeth and taste for melancholic literature appealed strongly to her. His sensibilities seemed much finer than other men’s, and his sorrows made him interestingly vulnerable. Soon the damaged widower was visiting her as often as he could.