Page images
PDF
EPUB

order; and, as such humours are rare | tonous, the general effect is not mo in real life, they ought, we conceive, to notony, but a very lively and agreeable be sparingly introduced into works diversity. Her plots are rudely conwhich profess to be pictures of real life. Nevertheless, a writer may show so much genius in the exhibition of these humours as to be fairly entitled to a distinguished and permanent rank among classics. The chief seats of all, however, the places on the dais and under the canopy, are reserved for the few who have excelled in the difficult art of portraying characters in which no single feature is extravagantly overcharged.

structed and improbable, if we consider them in themselves. But they are admirably framed for the purpose of exhibiting striking groups of eccentric characters, cach governed by his own peculiar whim, each talking his own peculiar jargon, and each bringing out by opposition the oddities of all the rest. We will give one example out of many which occur to us. All probability is violated in order to bring Mr. Delvile, Mr. Briggs, Mr. Hobson, and If we have expounded the law Mr. Albany into a room together. But soundly, we can have no difficulty in when we have them there, we soon forapplying it to the particular case before get probability in the exquisitely luus. Madame D'Arblay has left us dicrous effect which is produced by the scarcely any thing but humours. Al- conflict of four old fools, each raging most every one of her men and women with a monomania of his own, cach has some one propensity developed to talking a dialect of his own, and each a morbid degree. In Cecilia, for ex-inflaming all the others anew every ample, Mr. Delvile never opens his time he opens his mouth. lips without some allusion to his own Madame D'Arblay was most successbirth and station; or Mr. Briggs, with-ful in comedy, and indeed in comedy out some allusion to the hoarding of which bordered on farce. But we money; or Mr. Hobson, without bc-are inclined to infer from some pastraying the selfindulgence and selfim-sages, both in Cecilia and Camilla, that portance of a purse proud upstart; or she might have attained equal disMr. Simkins, without uttering some tinction in the pathetic. We have sneaking remark for the purpose of formed this judgment, less from those currying favour with his customers; or Mr. Meadows, without expressing apathy and weariness of life; or Mr. Albany, without declaiming about the vices of the rich and the misery of the poor; or Mrs. Belfield, without some indelicate eulogy on her son; or Lady Margaret, without indicating jealousy of her husband. Morrice is all skipping, officious impertinence, Mr. Gosport all sarcasm, Lady Honoria all lively prattle, Miss Larolles all silly prattle. If ever Madame D'Arblay aimed at more, we do not think that she succeeded well.

We are, therefore, forced to refuse to Madame D'Arblay a place in the highest rank of art; but we cannot deny that, in the rank to which she belonged, she had few equals, and scarcely any superior. The variety of humours which is to be found in her novels is immense; and though the talk of each person separately is mono

ambitious scenes of distress which lie near the catastrophe of each of those novels, than from some exquisite strokes of natural tenderness which take us here and there by surprise. We would mention as examples, Mrs. Hill's account of her little boy's death in Cecilia, and the parting of Sir Hugh Tyrold and Camilla, when the honest baronet thinks himself dying.

It is melancholy to think that the whole fame of Madame D'Arblay rests on what she did during the earlier half of her life, and that every thing which she published during the forty-three years which preceded her death, lowered her reputation. Yet we have no reason to think that at the time when her faculties ought to have been in their maturity, they were smitten with any blight. In the Wanderer, we catch now and then a gleam of her genius. Even in the Memoirs of her father, there is no trace of dotage. They are very bad;

but they are so, as it seems to us, not from a decay of power, but from a total perversion of power.

who whispered that Johnson had assisted his young friend, and that the novel owed all its finest passages to his hand. This was merely the fabrication of envy. Miss Burney's real excellences were as much beyond the

He

lences were beyond her reach.
could no more have written the Mas-
querade scene, or the Vauxhall scene,
than she could have written the Life of
Cowley or the Review of Soame Jenyns.
But we have not the smallest doubt
that he revised Cecilia, and that he re-
touched the style of many passages.
We know that he was in the habit of
giving assistance of this kind most
freely. Goldsmith, Hawkesworth, Bos-
well, Lord Hailes, Mrs. Williams, were
among those who obtained his help.
Nay, he even corrected the poetry of
Mr. Crabbe, whom, we believe, he had
never seen. When Miss Burney thought
of writing a comedy, he promised to
give her his best counsel, though he
owned that he was not particularly well
qualified to advise on matters relating
to the stage. We therefore think it in
the highest degree improbable that his
little Fanny, when living in habits of
the most affectionate intercourse with
him, would have brought out an im-
portant work without consulting him
and, when we look into Cecilia, we see
such traces of his hand in the grave
and elevated passages as it is impossi-
ble to mistake. Before we conclude
this article, we will give two or three
examples.

The truth is, that Madame D'Arblay's style underwent a gradual and most pernicious change, a change which, in degree at least, we believe to be unex-reach of Johnson, as his real excelampled in literary history, and of which it may be useful to trace the progress. When she wrote her letters to Mr. Crisp, her early journals, and her first novel, her style was not indeed brilliant or energetic; but it was easy, clear, and free from all offensive faults. When she wrote Cecilia she aimed higher. She had then lived much in a circle of which Johnson was the centre; and she was herself one of his most submissive worshippers. It seems never to have crossed her mind that the style even of his best writings was by no means faultless, and that even had it been faultless, it might not be wise in her to imitate it. Phraseology which is proper in a disquisition on the Unities, or in a preface to a Dictionary, may be quite out of place in a tale of fashionable life. Old gentlemen do not criticize the reigning modes, nor do young gentlemen make love, with the balanced epithets and sonorous cadences which, on occasions of great dignity, a skilful writer may use with happy effect. In an evil hour the author of Evelina took the Rambler for her model. This would not have been wise even if she could have imitated her pattern as well as Hawkesworth did. But such imitation was beyond her power. She had her own style. It was a tolerably good one; and might, without any violent change, have been improved into a very good one. She determined to throw it away, and to adopt a style in which she could attain excellence only by achieving an almost miraculous victory over nature and over habit. She could cease to be Fanny Burney; it was not so easy to become Samuel Johnson.

In Cecilia the change of manner began to appear. But in Cecilia the imitation of Johnson, though not always in the best taste, is sometimes eminently happy; and the passages which are so verbose as to be positively offensive, are few. There were people

;

When next Madame D'Arblay appeared before the world as a writer, she was in a very different situation. She would not content herself with the simple English in which Evelina had been written. She had no longer the friend who, we are confident, had polished and strengthened the style of Cecilia. She had to write in Johnson's manner without Johnson's aid. The consequence was, that in Camilla every passage which she meant to be fine is detestable; and that the book has been saved from condemnation only by the admirable spirit and force of those scenes in which she was content to be familiar.

"It is rather an imaginary than an actual evil, and though a deep wound to pride, no offence to morality. Thus have I laid open to you my whole heart, confessed my perexposed with equal sincerity the sources of plexities, acknowledged my vainglory, and my doubts, and the motives of my decision. But now, indeed, how to proceed I know counter I fear to enumerate, and the petition not. The difficulties which are yet to enI have to urge I have scarce courage to mention. My family, mistaking ambition for honour, and rank for dignity, have long planned a splendid connection for me, to which, though my invariable repugnance has stopped any advances, their wishes and too certain they will now listen to no other. their views immoveably adhere. I am but I dread, therefore, to make a trial where I despair of success. I know not how to risk a prayer with those who may silence me by a command."

But there was to be a still deeper This is not a fine style, but simple, descent. After the publication of Ca- perspicuous, and agreeable. We now milla, Madame D'Arblay resided ten come to Cecilia, written during Miss years at Paris. During those years Burney's intimacy with Johnson; and there was scarcely any intercourse be- we leave it to our readers to judge tween France and England. It was whether the following passage was not with difficulty that a short letter could at least corrected by his hand. occasionally be transmitted. All Madame D'Arblay's companions were French. She must have written, spoken, thought, in French. Ovid expressed his fear that a shorter exile might have affected the purity of his Latin. During a shorter exile, Gibbon unlearned his native English. Madame D'Arblay had carried a bad style to France. She brought back a style which we are really at a loss to describe. It is a sort of broken Johnsonese, a barbarous patois, bearing the same relation to the language of Rasselas, which the gibberish of the Negroes of Jamaica bears to the English of the House of Lords. Sometimes it reminds us of the finest, that is to say, the vilest parts, of Mr. Galt's novels; sometimes of the perorations of Exeter Hall; sometimes of the leading articles of the Morning Post. But it most resembles the puffs of Mr. Rowland and Dr. Goss. It matters not what ideas are clothed in such a style. The genius of Shakspeare and Bacon united, would not save a work so written from general derision.

It is only by means of specimens that we can enable our readers to judge how widely Madame D'Arblay's three styles differed from each other.

The following passage was written before she became intimate with Johnson. It is from Evelina.

Take now a specimen of Madame D'Arblay's later style. This is the way in which she tells us that her father, on his journey back from the Continent, caught the rheumatism.

"He was assaulted, during his precipi tated return, by the rudest fierceness of wintry elemental strife; through which, with bad accommodations and innumerable pangs of the acutest spasmodic rheumatism, accidents, he became a prey to the merciless which barely suffered him to reach his home, ere, long and piteously, it confined him, a tortured prisoner, to his bed. Such was the check that almost instantly curbed, though it could not subdue, the rising pleasure of his hopes of entering upon a new species of existence -that of an approved man of letters; for it was on the bed of sickness, ex"His son seems weaker in his under-changing the light wines of France, Italy standing, and more gay in his temper; but his gaiety is that of a foolish overgrown schoolboy, whose mirth consists in noise and disturbance. He disdains his father for his close attention to business and love of money, though he seems himself to have no talents, spirit, or generosity to make him superior to either. His chief delight appears to be in tormenting and ridiculing his sisters, who in return most cordially despise him. Miss Branghton, the eldest daughter, is by no means ugly; but looks proud, illtempered, and conceited. She hates the city, though without knowing why; for it is easy to discover she has lived nowhere else. Miss Polly Branghton is rather pretty, very foolish, very ignorant, very giddy, and I believe, very goodnatured."

and Germany, for the black and loathsome potions of the Apothecaries' Hall, writhed by darting stitches, and burning with fiery fever, that he felt the full force of that sublunary equipoise that seems evermore to hang suspended over the attainment of longsought and uncommon felicity, just as it is ripening to burst forth with enjoyment!"

Here is a second passage from Evelina.

"Mrs. Selwyn is very kind and attentive to me. She is extremely clever. Her understanding, indeed, may be called masculine; but unfortunately her manners deserve the same epithet; for, in studying to acquire the knowledge of the other sex, she

[merged small][ocr errors]

This is a good style of its kind; and the following passage from Cecilia is also in a good style, though not in a faultless one. We say with confidence, either Sam Johnson or the Devil.

"Even the imperious Mr. Delvile was more supportable here than in London. Secure in his own castle, he looked round

grounds two distinguished men, one a Tory, the other a Whig. Madame D'Arblay tells the story thus: "A similar ebullition of political rancour with that which so difficultly had been conquered for Mr. Canning foamed over the ballot box to the exclusion of Mr. Rogers."

An offence punishable with imprisonment is, in this language, an offence "which produces incarceration." To be starved to death is "to sink from inanition into nonentity." Sir Isaac Newton is "the developer of the skies in their embodied movements;" and him with a pride of power and possession Mrs. Thrale, when a party of clever which softened while it swelled him. His people sat silent, is said to have been superiority was undisputed: his will was" provoked by the dulness of a taciwithout control. He was not, as in the great capital of the kingdom, surrounded turnity that, in the midst of such reby competitors. No rivalry disturbed his nowned interlocutors, produced as narpeace; no equality mortified his greatness. cotic a torpor as could have been caused All he saw were either vassals of his power, by a dearth the most barren of all or guests bending to his pleasure. Не abated, therefore, considerably the stern human faculties." In truth, it is imgloom of his haughtiness, and soothed his possible to look at any page of Madame proud mind by the courtesy of condescen- D'Arblay's later works without finding flowers of rhetoric like these. Nothing in the language of those jargonists at whom Mr. Gosport laughed, nothing in the language of Sir Sedley Clarendel, approaches this new Euphuism.

sion."

We will stake our reputation for critical sagacity on this, that no such paragraph as that which we have last quoted, can be found in any of Madame D'Arblay's works except Cecilia. Compare with it the following sample of her later style.

"If beneficence be judged by the happiness which it diffuses, whose claim, by that proof, shall stand higher than that of Mrs. Montagu, from the munificence with which she celebrated her annual festival for those hapless artificers who perform the most abject offices of any authorized calling, in being the active guardians of our blazing hearths? Not to vain glory, then, but to kindness of heart, should be adjudged the publicity of that superb charity which made its jetty objects, for one bright morning, cease to consider themselves as degraded outcasts from all society."

We add one or two shorter samples. Sheridan refused to permit his lovely wife to sing in public, and was warmly praised on this account by Johnson.

[blocks in formation]

It is from no unfriendly feeling to Madame D'Arblay's memory that we have expressed ourselves so strongly on the subject of her style. On the contrary, we conceive that we have really rendered a service to her reputation. That her later works were complete failures, is a fact too notorious to be dissembled: and some persons, we believe, have consequently taken up a notion that she was from the first an overrated writer, and that she had not the powers which were necessary to maintain her on the eminence on which good luck and fashion had placed her. We believe, on the contrary, that her early popularity was no more than the just reward of distinguished merit, and would never have undergone an eclipse, if she had only been content to go on writing in her mother tongue. If she failed when she quitted her own province, and attempted to occupy one in which she had neither part nor lot, this reproach is common to her with a crowd

of distinguished men. Newton failed | people, took without scruple liberties when he turned from the courses of the which in our generation seem almost stars, and the ebb and flow of the incredible. ocean, to apocalyptic seals and vials. Bentley failed when he turned from Homer and Aristophanes, to edite the Paradise Lost. Inigo failed when he attempted to rival the Gothic churches of the fourteenth century. Wilkie failed when he took it into his head that the Blind Fiddler and the Rent Day were unworthy of his powers, and challenged competition with Lawrence as a portrait painter. Such failures should be noted for the instruction of posterity; but they detract little from the permanent reputation of those who have really done great things.

Yet one word more. It is not only on account of the intrinsic merit of Madame D'Arblay's early works that she is entitled to honourable mention. Her appearance is an important epoch in our literary history. Evelina was the first tale written by a woman, and purporting to be a picture of life and manners, that lived or deserved to live. The female Quixote is no exception. That work has undoubtedly great merit, when considered as a wild satirical harlequinade; but, if we consider it as a picture of life and manners, we must pronounce it more absurd than any of the romances which it was designed to ridicule.

Indeed, most of the popular novels which preceded Evelina were such as no lady would have written; and many

Miss Burney did for the English novel what Jeremy Collier did for the English drama; and she did it in a better way. She first showed that a tale might be written in which both the fashionable and the vulgar life of London might be exhibited with great force, and with broad comic humour, and which yet should not contain a single line inconsistent with rigid morality, or even with virgin delicacy. She took away the reproach which lay on a most useful and delightful species of composition. She vindicated the right of her sex to an equal share in a fair and noble province of letters. Several accomplished women have followed in her track. At present, the novels which we owe to English ladies form no small part of the literary glory of our country. No class of works is more honourably distinguished by fine observation, by grace, by delicate wit, by pure moral feeling. Several among the successors of Madame D'Arblay have equalled her; two, we think, have surpassed her. But the fact that she has been surpassed gives her an additional claim to our respect and gratitude; for, in truth, we owe to her not only Evelina, Cecilia, and Camilla, but also Mansfield Park and the Absentee

of them were such as no lady could| THE LIFE AND WRITINGS OF

without confusion own that she had

ADDISON.

(JULY, 1843.)

read. The very name of novel was
held in horror among religious people.
In decent families, which did not pro- The Life of Joseph Addison.
fess extraordinary sanctity, there was a
strong feeling against all such works.
Sir Anthony Absolute, two or three
years before Evelina appeared, spoke
the sense of the great body of sober
fathers and husbands, when he pro-
nounced the circulating library an ever-
green tree of diabolical knowledge.
This feeling on the part of the grave
and reflecting, increased the evil from
which it had sprung. The novelist
having little character to lose, and
having few readers among serious

BY LUCY
AIKIN. 2 vols. 8vo. London: 1843.

SOME reviewers are of opinion that a lady who dares to publish a book renounces by that act the franchises appertaining to her sex, and can claim no exemption from the utmost rigour of critical procedure. From that opinion we dissent. We admit, indeed, that in a country which boasts of many female writers, eminently qualified by their talents and acquirements to influence the public mind, it would be of

« PreviousContinue »