La Pensee! Elle seule atteste ta Puissance
Roi du Monde et des Dieux!
Plus que de ces Rochers l’Amphitheatre immense,
Plus que le Firmament, et la magnificence
De ses points radieuse.59
The quantity of Alex’s poetry that has survived in the family archive and, more tellingly, the meticulous care with which he reworked, revised and rewrote it, suggests that he had serious ambitions in this field. In Paris, he had alarmed Madame de Maisonneuve by saying that he would like two more years of ‘wandering’ before even looking for a curacy. His mother was naturally ‘not quite easy’ at all the ‘wandering’ that had gone on already: ‘If you repeat on those summits 3 or 400 lines of DeLille, or 3 or 4 odes of Le Brun’, she wrote to him, using an all-too-appropriate metaphor, ‘your Enthusiasm may make you bound too high or leap too low for your Equilibrium’.60
Fanny was desperate for her son to come home, secure a job and find ‘some distinguished Fair one’61 to marry. Having protested for years that he was too young and immature to marry, she now saw marriage as one of the only possible remaining cures for Alex’s ‘oddity’.62 Since the death of her husband, too, she had developed a strong desire to see the family secure in another generation, and fantasised about grandchildren reading her journals and set-piece memoirs in some ‘Fire-side Rectory’ in the future. The task of memorialising, which became her main work and raison d’être, depended of course on there being heirs to hand it down to. ‘Look me out a fair Belle Fille who may gently be my Friend’, she told Alex, with shameless selfishness, ‘as well as delightingly yours, & fix permanently your Happiness, your Character, & your Fame’.63
Over the next ten years Alex fixed on at least three young women whom he said he wanted to marry, but nothing came of his ardent and fleeting passions. Two were granddaughters of Fredy Locke, Cecilia Locke and her cousin Caroline Angerstein, the other was a Miss Sarah White. It is not surprising that the Reverend d’Arblay, dandified, poetry-spouting curate-in-theory, was not considered an appropriate suitor by the Locke family or the wealthy Whites. Even his own family had their doubts about ‘poor dear Alex’ as a potential husband. When Marianne Francis detected that he was ‘deeply smitten’ with her niece Julia Barrett (Charlotte Barrett’s daughter), she wrote to warn her sister about it. ‘For all his cleverness’, she didn’t think that Alex was ‘at all nice enough’ for his beautiful cousin.64
In 1824 Alex was appointed to a curacy at last, of the new Camden Chapel, with a salary of only £150 per year and accommodation in the parish. The Cambridges were present with Madame d’Arblay on the day in August 1824 when Alex was to preach the inaugural sermon at the consecration of the chapel. The Bishop had completed the consecration, the morning service was over, but the congregation waited in vain for the appearance of the preacher. ‘I felt myself tremble all over’, Fanny reported to Charlotte:
The Archdeacon […] quite shook, himself, with apprehension, – he thought Alex had lost his Sermon – or had suddenly conceived a new end for it! – & Mrs Moore believed he was siezed [sic] with affright, & could not conquer it – Finally – the last verse finished – & no Alex! Mr Wesley* ran & re-ran over the Keys, with fugish perseverance – & I was all but fainting – when, at length, – the New Camdenite appeared. I was never more relieved.65
This was characteristic of Alex’s behaviour in general – ‘always just in time to be too late’, as he said himself66 – and of his performance as a minister in particular. Typically, he didn’t begin writing his sermons until the last moment and would stay up all night to finish them. Once his servant had to wake him on a Sunday morning as the chapel bell tolled, and there were to be many unscheduled absences from his duties at Camden which did not endear the new curate to his flock. Alex’s insouciance about his duties contrasted violently with his mother’s embarrassingly thorough brand of worrying. She had visited St Paul’s Cathedral three times in the weeks prior to Alex giving a sermon there in 1823, just to look at the pulpit from which her son would speak.
The fusspot side of Madame d’Arblay’s nature seemed mostly reserved for Alex. To her nieces and friends she often appeared remarkably lively and cheerful for a woman in her seventies. Julia Barrett described to her grandmother the ‘pleasantest possible evenings’ with Aunt d’Arblay. ‘She tells such amusing stories as you well know – sometimes repeats poetry – takes off all the curious people she used to know &c that you can easily imagine how pleasant it is’.67 Charlotte Barrett remarked how her aunt was ‘in excellent health & spirits, takes long walks without fatigue, puns & jokes, & enters into all our little intrigues, & is as Mama says, one of the youngest in our party’.68 Marianne Francis, a slightly less charitable observer than her sister or niece, left another valuable description of her aunt from this period, the only one to remark on Madame d’Arblay’s acquired Frenchness and the fact that even when ill the old lady was an almost unstoppable talker:
I called on Aunt d’Ary, & found her very kind & willg to see me, & pleased at my comg & waitg on her a little, but very feeble & full of cough, & would talk so much, & in her animated, handclaspg, energetic french way, that I was quite alarmed, & findg she expected her Dr every moment, left her, the moment there was a knock at the door, on purpose that she might cease to talk, the worst thg that she can do but impossible, I see, to prevent.69
The mid-1820s seem to have been relatively happy years for Fanny because of the frequent company of Charlotte, her daughters and granddaughters. She had been called ‘the Old Lady’ when she was a child on account of her reserve, but as a real old lady Fanny became an accomplished raconteur and seems to have developed a taste for being the centre of attention. ‘All her merry stories set her, & us laughing for the hour together,’ Julia Barrett wrote to her sister Henrietta,
but sometimes in the midst of her grave ones, Grandmama [Charlotte] falls asleep, & when she wakes again, Aunt d’Arblay insists upon my telling all the story over again, up to the point where Grandmama fell asleep – Only fancy how appalling! to have to tell Aunt d’Arblay’s stories before her face!70
The comical picture of Charlotte nodding off during the grave tales and her sister obligingly running through them all again when she woke up also gives a hint of how forceful – even, Julia implies, intimidating – Fanny had become. Having to tell ‘Aunt d’Arblay’s stories before her face’, and get them right, and match her skills as an entertainer was clearly no laughing matter.
Madame d’Arblay had lived long enough to enjoy a second wave of celebrity as the survivor of a bygone literary age. Among the visitors at Bolton Street who were introduced by her friend and neighbour Samuel Rogers (probably the most ardent literary networker of his day) were the poet George Crabbe and Sir Walter Scott, the latter an admirer of Fanny’s ‘uncommonly fine’ first two novels (though he had rated The Wanderer ’a miss’). Rogers was surprised that Madame d’Arblay hadn’t heard of Scott’s lameness: ‘when he limped towards a chair, she said, “Dear me, Sir Walter, I hope you have not met with an accident?” He answered, “An accident, madam, nearly as old as my birth.”’71 Scott was impressed with Madame d’Arblay’s ‘simple and apparently amiable manners with quick feelings’ and her old-world agrémens, as he recorded in his diary:
[She is] an elderly lady with no remains of personal beauty but with a gentle manner and a pleasing expression of countenance. She told me she wished to see two persons – myself of course being one, the other Geo. Canning. This was really a compliment to be pleased with, a nice little handsome pat of butter made up by a neat-handed Phillis of a dairy maid instead of the grease fit only for cart-wheels which one is dosed with by the pound.72
The reference to the Foreign Secretary, Canning, was probably connected with Fanny’s concern about the progress of the Greek War of Independence.* For all her talk about retirement, Fanny liked to keep abreast of events. Being sought out by the most famous novelist of the day was highly gratifying to the elderly authoress, who t
ook the opportunity to recount to her guests the history of the publication of Evelina. The mulberry tree story (purportedly from 1778) makes its first appearance in Scott’s record of the day: ‘The delighted father [Charles Burney] obtained a commission from Mrs Thrale to purchase his daughter’s work and retired the happiest of men’, he wrote in his diary. ‘Made. D’Arblay said she was wild with joy at this decisive evidence of her literary success and that she could only give vent to her rapture by dancing and skipping round a mulberry tree in the garden.’74 If Madame d’Arblay had told this story before, it is odd that it hadn’t seeped into print earlier, or got into circulation in the way that the less memorable (and untrue) story of Dr Burney ‘having brought home [Fanny’s] own first work and recommended it to her’ had done already. When the mulberry tree incident appeared in the Memoirs six years later, it had changed in one significant way from the version told to Scott, and had become even more ‘tellable’. The revised reason for Fanny’s ‘rapture’ is given as the fact that ‘Doctor Johnson himself had deigned to read the little book.’
It was in this year, 1826, and very probably on this visit by Walter Scott and Samuel Rogers, that Madame d’Arblay ‘received an intimation’75 that the publishers of Chalmers’ General Biographical Dictionary were intending to include an article on Dr Burney in their next volume: ‘they had only forborne to do [so earlier]’, her informant told her, ‘from respect to intelligence […] that I [Madame d’Arblay] always intended bringing the work to light.’ This startled Fanny into action. She began preparing her father’s correspondence for the press immediately (they were mostly letters to him), and was ready to have the text copied before she found out that a legal precedent in an 1813 copyright case disallowed the publication of letters without their writer’s permission. Most of the material she had intended for her book – letters from Johnson, Twining, Greville, Mrs Thrale and others to her father – was not hers to publish, unless she contacted the heirs, which she seemed to think was impossible.76 She was therefore in a quandary, convinced on one side that ‘rivals’ were likely to bring out a biography of Charles Burney ‘mangled in a manner disagreeable to all his Race’,77 and on the other side having little to go on for a book of her own apart from her own memories, since she had destroyed so many of her father’s papers.
The fact that Madame d’Arblay felt pressured to write something – anything – about her father as quickly as possible goes a long way towards explaining why Memoirs of Doctor Burney is such an awful book. That she knew it was faulty is evident from the fact that she considered deferring publication till after her death. Alex and Charles Parr Burney both objected to a delay, on the grounds that none of the younger generation would be qualified to defend the ‘many things’ in the book ‘that might be disputed’.78 But as the date of publication approached, Fanny’s misgivings increased. ‘O I was so tired of my Pen!’ she wrote of the effort it had cost her; ‘Should my Readers be as fatigued of its product! – And nothing is more likely, for Ennui is as contagious as Yawning’.79
When the Memoirs were published in November 1832 it was to almost universal scorn. ‘Surely such a quantity of unmixed nonsense never was written before’, Baroness Bunsen wrote to her mother,80 while Maria Edgeworth deplored the book’s ‘pedantry and affectation’: ‘Whenever [Madame d’Arblay] speaks of herself some false shame, some affectation of humility or timidity, or I know not what, […] spoils her style’.81 It was obvious to everyone that the author’s portrait of Charles Burney was absurdly idealised, and the book did nothing but harm the reputation Fanny had been so keen to foster. The Doctor was presented as a heroic figure whose achievements were almost unrivalled: ‘allowed throughout Europe to have risen to the head of his profession; and thence, setting his profession aside, to have been elevated to an intellectual rank in society, as a Man of Letters […] with most of the eminent men of his day’.82 Bleached of the very things that gave Burney his charm – his natural gaiety, vulgarity, energy and unstoppable drive – he came over as a faultless, bloodless prig. Fanny’s apology in the closing pages of her work for the potential dullness of her father’s perfection is an astonishing admission of her own delusions on this subject:
to delineate the character […], with its FAILINGS as well as its EXCELLENCIES, is the proper, and therefore the common task for the finishing pencil of the Biographer. Impartiality demands this contrast; and the mind will not accompany a narrative of real life of which Truth, frank and unequivocal, is not the dictator.
And here, to give that contrast, Truth is not wanting, but, strange to say, vice and frailty! The Editor, however, trusts that she shall find pardon from all lovers of veracity, if she seek not to bestow piquancy upon her portrait through artificial light and shade.83
The note of surprise suggests that the only person Fanny was in danger of convincing was herself. She seems to have made a mental shift from thinking that there were things the public had no right to know about her father to believing that those things actually were not. The deliberate suppression of many facts and the distortion of others in the Memoirs went far beyond what filial piety could excuse. And as with Fanny’s self-censorship of her judgement of Queen Charlotte, what rushed into the vacuum was hyperbole and a form of grandiloquent euphemism, a style which Macaulay roundly denounced as ‘the worst […] that has ever been known among men. No genius, no information, could save from proscription a book so written’.84 Fanny’s description of the meeting of her parents (which, it might be remembered, took place at a ‘hop’ in Hatton Garden) illustrates both the otiose style and the hagiographical approach:
Who shall be surprised, that two such beings, where, on one side, there was so much beauty to attract, and on the other so much discernment to perceive the value of her votary, upon meeting each other at the susceptible age of ardent youth, should have emitted, spontaneously, and at first sight, from heart to heart, sparks so bright and pure that they might be called electric, save that their flame was exempt from any shock?85
The convolutions of the Memoirs seem symptomatic of Fanny’s unease with the project as a whole. As Macaulay said when he wrote on this painful subject later, the book revealed ‘not […] a decay of power, but […] a total perversion of power’.86 There is, indeed, something almost deranged about a biographer who claims that her work represents ‘[not] a thought’ by her subject ‘that I knew not to be authentic’,87 when she has tampered with all the evidence. ‘It can be stated with confidence that hardly a single quotation from Burney’s papers in her Memoirs escaped her interference’, Roger Lonsdale has said in his biography of Fanny’s father. And as he has demonstrated, the ‘interference’ often takes the form of ludicrously exaggerating Fanny’s own importance in her father’s life; Lonsdale gives the example of the King and Queen asking after the Doctor’s family in 1802, ‘particularly of Made d’Arblay, & Miss Phillips’, which Fanny adjusted so that it read ‘Their Majesties then both condescended to make some inquiries after my family, though by name only after my daughter d’Arblay’.88
Such crimes were hidden, but the author’s egotism and ‘affectation of humility’ were obvious to any reader. Maria Edgeworth had noted Madame d’Arblay’s ‘strange notion that it is more humble or prettier or better taste to call herself the Recluse of West Humble or your unworthy humble servant or the present memorialist than simply to use the short pronoun I’.89 To the charge of personal vanity, John Wilson Croker added that of ‘literary vanity’, accusing Madame d’Arblay of the deliberate suppression of dates to insinuate that she was much younger than twenty-six when Evelina was published. Croker had gone as far as applying for Fanny’s baptismal certificate from the vicar of St Margaret’s, King’s Lynn. He found a willing accomplice there, for Stephen Allen was still the incumbent, and very much resented Fanny’s portrait of his mother in the book. The issue of Fanny’s birthdate became something of a red herring, however. It was easy to prove that Madame d’Arblay had never deliberately lied about her age in the Memoirs,
and her supporters used this to dismiss Croker’s criticisms as a whole. But much of what he had said was valid, especially on the subject of Fanny’s suppression of original documents. Macaulay realised the justice of some of Croker’s remarks and politely passed by the opportunity to defend Madame d’Arblay in print in 1833, even though he detested Croker and might have been expected to jump at the chance to score against him.* Macaulay reserved his opinions on Madame d’Arblay until after her death when, in his essay on the Diary and Letters, he felt free both to criticise her shortcomings and praise her real achievements.
What were the reasons for Fanny’s deplorable performance in the Memoirs? Senility is out of the question; she could still write perfectly naturally in her private correspondence long after 1832. Bad taste and bad judgement are part of the answer, as is her residual terror of her father. But it also seems to me significant that the Memoirs represent the nether end, almost the logical conclusion, of Fanny’s persistent neurosis about authorship. Though it was her last published work, it was in one important respect a long-deferred, long-dreaded debut. With the exception of the pamphlet Brief Reflections, the dedication to Camilla and the preface to The Wanderer (all notably stilted), Fanny had always been able to hide her own voice in fictional forms, whether poetry, novels or plays. The nearer these were to her natural modes of expression – such as the correspondence in Evelina – the more comfortable she felt, but the important thing was that they were fiction. When she had to speak unequivocally in her own voice, the same sorts of terrors and inhibitions afflicted her that had disabled her at every public performance throughout her life. It was like the moment when the curtain went up on those amateur dramatics long ago, and Fanny was ‘discovered Drinking Tea’ alone on stage. She knew she looked unnatural, she suffered, but couldn’t do anything to save herself.
Fanny Burney Page 48
