Fanny Burney (Madame D'Arblay)

As regards situation, the change from Queen Square to St. Martin’s Street was not entirely for the better. It was no small loss to substitute an “unpleasant site,” “confined air,” and a “shabby immediate neighbourhood” for the unobstructed view of “Hampstead’s breezy Heath” which the Bloomsbury home afforded.13 But in the way of convenience, and a central position, the difference was great, in addition to which, compared with its predecessor, the new residence was “large and good.” It is true that the stairs were so steep and narrow that one of Fulke Greville’s friends broke his sword in climbing them; but, on the other hand, most of the rooms were panelled, and one, at least, of the ceilings “prodigiously painted and ornamented,” not, as the Doctor was careful to explain, by him, but by previous occupants. The chief glory of the house, however, was the unpretentious structure at the top, which passed for Sir Isaac’s observatory. It is perhaps safest to say “passed,” because, between 1725 and 1774, there must have been other dwellers in No. 1, St. Martin’s Street, and many things may have happened. But the Burneys seem to have devoutly believed in the small-paned, wooden turret, with the leaden roof and tiny fireplace, which embodied so respectable a tradition. They exhibited it religiously to their visitors; and one of its new owner’s first acts was to put it into repair. When, four years later, it was all but whirled away by the hurricane of 1778, he practically rebuilt it. And it was unquestionably Fanny’s chosen retreat and scriptorium. “His [Newton’s] observatory is my favourite sitting place, where I can retire to read or write any of my private fancies or vagaries.” And then follows what – having regard to some of her previous utterances – is more interesting than unexpected.14 “I burnt all up to my fifteenth year – thinking I grew too old for scribbling nonsense, but as I am less young, I grow, I fear, less wise, for I cannot any longer resist what I find to be irresistible, the pleasure of popping down my thoughts from time to time upon paper.”

Whatever may have been her exact age at the date of the famous auto-da-fé in the paved court at Poland Street, she must have been nearing two and twenty when she “popped down” the foregoing passage; and the moment, taken in connection with the change of scene from Bloomsbury to Leicester Fields is a favourable one for reviewing the Burney family circle in 1774-5. Dr. Burney’s second or German Tour, as we know, had been published in 1773; and in the same year he had been made a Fellow of the Royal Society. At present, in the intervals of rheumatism, he was working, with Fanny’s aid, at his History of Music. By his second wife he had two children, – Richard, and Sarah Harriet, the latter of whom eventually, like her gifted half-sister, became a novelist. But both Richard and Harriet, at this date, were in the nursery. Esther, or Hetty, the eldest daughter, had been married for some time to her cousin, Charles Rousseau Burney, afterwards of Bath, a musician and former pupil of her father; while Maria Allen, the daughter of Dr. Burney’s second wife, was married to a Mr. Rishton. James Burney, the sailor, having sailed with Cook in his second voyage, and been made a lieutenant, had now returned home. In 1775 he was serving on the North American Station, when he was recalled to accompany Cook on his third and fatal expedition. Of the rest, Susan and Charlotte were now grown up, Charlotte being about fifteen, and Susan some years older. Charles, after having enjoyed the reputation of being “the sweetest-tempered boy in the Charterhouse School,” was now, in all probability, pursuing at Cambridge those studies for which he was eventually to be classed with Porson and Parr. The only one of the Queen Square frequenters no longer to be encountered at St. Martin’s Street was “Daddy” Crisp. By this date he was sixty-eight, and his fits of gout had become so severe, that he had ceased to make his annual descents upon London from his Surrey hermitage. But his interest in all that befell his friends at Leicester Fields remained unabated; and in this he was kept carefully posted up by his favourite “Fannikin,” who, what with acting as librarian and amanuensis to her indefatigable father, writing periodical news-letters of “from six to twelve large quarto pages” to Chessington, and keeping her own voluminous journal besides – must have been very actively employed both in the Observatory and out of it. Not without reason can it have been that she acquired the “murtherous stooping” which her Mentor deplored, nor was it entirely chargeable to the shortness of sight which she shared with Charlotte Brontë. It is from her bright and graphic despatches to Mr. Crisp that we propose to draw most of the material for this chapter. Often these are repeated in her Diary, and they are also expanded in the Memoirs of Dr. Burney which she wrote in later years; but they are at their best and freshest in her letters, – letters which, in many cases, must have been scribbled off immediately after the occurrence of the events they described. From one of them it is clear that their writer thought nothing of setting to work at what would now be considered a very lengthy epistle, when the entertainment of the evening had come to an end.

The Queen Square circle had already been sufficiently diversified; but it grew wider and even more varied at Leicester Fields. Some of the Doctor’s friends were now in his immediate vicinity. The family of Mr. (afterwards Sir Robert) Strange, the engraver, – old Paris acquaintances, – were, for the moment, lodging close by. Reynolds, who had just painted the beautiful Eliza Linley (Mrs. Sheridan) as “St. Cecilia,” lived only just across the Fields at No. 47; and Garrick, in the new house recently built for him by the brothers Adam at the Adelphi, was not too far off to be a frequent looker-in. Another artistic friend was the sculptor, Joseph Nollekens, whom Burney had met in Italy. James Barry, the eccentric and pugnacious Irish painter from Castle Street, then engaged in decorating the Meeting Room of the Society of Arts with vast designs (in one of which Dr. Burney, in a queue and tye-wig, figures incongruously among the nymphs of the Thames), – was also among the familiar faces. But the majority were naturally persons who were more or less attracted to the Historian of Music. In this category comes James Harris of Salisbury, “a most charming old man,” – says Fanny, not only the author of Hermes, but a writer upon Music, and a composer whose pastoral of Daphnis and Amaryllis had actually been produced at Drury Lane. With him was his wife, the delightful Mrs. Harris whose gossiping letters to her son, the first Earl of Malmesbury, are some of the most charming in their kind. Then there was another new friend, whom the Burney girls grew to love almost as much as “Daddy” Crisp himself, the Rev. Thomas Twining of Fordham, near Colchester, afterwards the translator of Aristotle’s Treatise on Poetry. His acquaintance with Dr. Burney had begun over the German Tour, for Twining, too, had meditated a History of Music, which he abandoned in favour of Burney’s. “They were far from young when they met,” – says Twining’s brother and biographer referring to the new friends, – “and they could ill afford to lose time.”15 Besides these, there were the foreign professionals who regarded the author of the Tours as the supreme arbiter in matters musical: – the celebrated soprano, Lucrezia Agujari, otherwise the Bastardini; the almost equally celebrated Caterina Gabrielli, and the Inglesina, Cecilia Davies; while the men were represented by the singer and composer, Rauzzini, who is so much commended in the German Tour, by Gasparo Pacchieroti and others. Finally, there were the “Lyons,” – as the diarist calls them, – the Otaheitan Omai, who had come from the Society Islands with Lieutenant Burney; and the Abyssinian traveller, James Bruce of Kinnaird; and last, but by no means largest, for Bruce was six feet four, the Russian “man-mountain,” Alexis Orloff, who had certainly helped to strangle his Imperial Master, Peter iii., and was also – though not so surely – the reputed favourite of that terrible Czarina who, according to Walpole, had even more teeth than the famous Wild Beast of the Gévaudan. The goings and comings of these, and other notables and notorieties, – for those mentioned by no means exhaust the list, – must have been an unexampled school of character to a budding novelist, whose gift lay especially in seizing upon the peculiarities of human nature, whose perceptions were at their freshest and keenest, and whose singularly retentive memory was not yet perplexed and bewildered by too prolonged an experience of the very variegated patchwork of Eighteenth Century society.

Among the first visits to St. Martin’s Street that Fanny chronicles is one from that “most entertaining of mortals, Mr. Garrick.” He arrived, as usual, very early in the morning, marching straight into the study where Dr. Burney, “surrounded by books and papers innumerable,” was having his hair dressed. Fanny was making breakfast; Charlotte reading the paper. Nobody else was a-stir. “My father,” – says Miss Burney, – “was beginning a laughing sort of apology for his litters, and so forth, but Mr. Garrick interrupted him with ‘Aye now; do be in a little confusion; it will make things comfortable!’ ” He then began to look gravely at the hairdresser. (Dr. Burney, it may be stated in parenthesis wore his own hair, – a crop so bushy and luxuriant that Frances Reynolds persisted in regarding it as artificial.) “He (Garrick) was himself in a most odious scratch-wig, which nobody but himself could dare to be seen in. He put on a look in the Abel Drugger style of envy and sadness, as he examined the hairdresser’s progress; and, when he had done, he turned to him with a dejected face, and said, ‘Pray Sir, could you touch up this a little?’ taking hold of his own frightful scratch.” At which the hairdresser only grinned, and left the room. But Garrick continued his proceedings in the same mirthful spirit. He made enquiries as to the progress of the History of Music, protesting that he was only waiting to blow the trumpet of Fame, which he forthwith proceeded to do with a stick, after the fashion of a Raree-Show-man. “Here is the only true History, Gentlemen; please to buy, please to buy. Sir, I shall blow it in the very ear of yon scurvy magistrate” – by whom he meant Sir John Hawkins of Twickenham, whom Horace Walpole had incited to a rival performance. His final exploit, after mimicking the Spanish traveller, Twiss, and Dr. Arne, Burney’s old master, was to give a dramatic rendering of an interview he had recently had with Johnson, – not yet personally known to the young ladies. Johnson had asked Garrick to lend him a book, and Johnson’s carelessness about books was notorious. “ ‘David, will you lend me Petra[r]ca?’ ‘Yes, Sir.’ ‘David, you sigh.’ ‘Sir, you shall have it.’ Accordingly, the book, finely bound, was sent, but scarce had he received it, when uttering a Latin ejaculation (which Mr. Garrick repeated) in a fit of enthusiasm, – over his head goes poor Petra[r]ca, – Russia leather and all!”16 After this the mercurial actor bustled off to give breakfast to Boswell, promising to come soon, and plague them again. By the Burney household Garrick was idolised; but Miss Burney hints that where he was not on cordial terms, he could contrive to make himself extremely disagreeable.

Other early visitors were Bruce, the already mentioned Abyssinian traveller, and the Otaheitan Omai. We will take the traveller first. At this time he had been twelve years abroad, four of which had been spent in unexplored parts of Africa. “His figure is almost gigantic! he is the tallest man I ever saw,” writes Fanny, – who adds elsewhere that he almost frightened Mr. Twining. “I cannot say I was charmed with him; for he seems rather arrogant, and to have so large a share of good opinion of himself, as to have nothing left for the rest of the world but contempt. Yet his self-approbation is not that of a fop; on the contrary, he is a very manly character, and looks so dauntless and intrepid, so that I believe he could never in his life know what fear meant.” Despite his hauteur, Bruce seems to have taken to the Burneys. He liked music, and he lodged in Leicester Fields, so he came often to their social evenings. He even favoured the Doctor with two drawings, a Theban harp and an Abyssinian lyre, which were copied for the History of Music. The latter instrument prompted some rather obvious gibes about Abyssinian liars from Walpole and Selwyn. Bruce, as Johnson said, was “not a distinct relater,” added to which his large, imperious and rather swaggering manner prejudiced people against his stories, and had the effect of delaying his account of his exploits until a few years before his death in 1794. One of his last appearances at St. Martin’s Street was in 1776, when he stayed to supper “which, you know, with us, is nothing but a permission to sit over a table for chat, and roast potatoes, or apples.” But “his Abyssinian Majesty,” as Fanny calls him, neither discoursed on this occasion upon the Abyssinian lyre, nor the merits of raw beef-steaks as a diet. He only told a long and rather stupid story of a practical joke at a masquerade.

Omiah, Omai, Omy, or familiarly, Jack, – the other “lyon of lyons” – came to St. Martin’s Street upon the invitation of James Burney, whose sister gives detailed accounts of his visits. At the time of the first, the Society Islander, of whom, in his native state, there is a portrait in Cook’s Voyages, can only have been a few months in England. But although he had not learned English, he had already acquired all the externals of a fine gentleman. He arrived betimes, after a preliminary note in due form, arrayed splendidly in a Court suit of Manchester velvet lined with white satin, a bag, laced ruffles (on his tattooed hands), and a very handsome sword which had been given him by King George the Third. Though not handsome, he was tall and well proportioned. “He makes remarkable good bows – not for him but for anybody, however long under a Dancing Master’s care,” writes Miss Burney. “Indeed he seems to shame Education, for his manners are so extremely graceful, and he is so polite, attentive, and easy, that you would have thought he came from some Foreign Court,” – a sentiment which seems later to have prompted a comparison between the lamentable failure of Lord Chesterfield’s precepts to make of Philip Stanhope anything but a “pedantic booby,” and the exemplary rapidity with which Otaheitan Omiah had contrived to “cultivate the Graces.” Miss Burney saw Omiah again before he returned to Ulietea. Upon this occasion, he obliged the company with “a song of his own country,” which, from his subsequent analysis, must have comprised the entire scenario of a comic opera. But his audience were too musical, and it was not a success. “So queer, wild, strange a rumbling of sounds never did I before hear, and very contentedly can I go to the grave, if I never do again. His [Omiah’s] song is the only thing that is savage about him.”17

But it is time – looking to the limitations of our space – to turn from the specific to the general, and give some account of the St. Martin’s Street musical evenings. Already at Poland Street and Queen Square these entertainments had been the rule; and at Newton’s house, with the Doctor’s increasing popularity, they attained their greatest importance. Moreover, they found, as they had not before found, their faithful chronicler in Daddy Crisp’s correspondent. The chief performers on ordinary occasions seem to have been Esther Burney and her husband, their pièce de résistance being Müthel’s Duet for two harpsichords. Another famous harpsichord player was the Baroness Deiden, the wife of the Danish Ambassador, whose reputation is said to have been European. But the “peacock’s brains” of the record was certainly the Agujari, and Miss Burney’s enthusiasm overflows. Carestini, Farinelli, Senesino, all Mr. Crisp’s old idols, – ’twas to these only that the Bastardini could be compared. And she seems certainly to have done her best. She arrived for tea before seven, stayed till twelve, sang almost all the time, permitted her hearers to encore nearly every song, and sang moreover in twenty different styles, minuets, cantabiles, church-music, bravuras and even that popular Vauxhall misère, the rondeau, growing at last so excited over an aria parlante from the Didone Abbandonata (“Son Regina, e sono Amante”) that “she acted it throughout with great spirit and feeling.” This was pretty well for the lady whom Macaulay qualifies as the “rapacious” Agujari, apparently because, at this date, she was earning fifty pounds a song – which she thoroughly deserved, since people went to hear her and no one else – at the Oxford Street Pantheon.18 But she had an exceedingly appreciative audience, limited by her own request to the Burney family; she was tired of singing at concerts, book in hand, “comme une petite écolière,” and most of all, she was anxious to give the Historian of Music, who was also all-powerful in matters operatic, a taste of her real quality. It does not appear that she ever repeated her performances at St. Martin’s Street, so that it would be inaccurate to represent her as figuring habitually and gratuitously at the Burney “conversations.”

One of the next things which Fanny recounts to Mr. Crisp is the production, at the Opera House in the Haymarket, of that very Didone of Metastasio from which Agujari had borrowed her aria parlante. But the diva upon this occasion (Saturday, Nov. 11, 1775) was Caterina Gabrielli, who seems to have behaved with all her traditional caprice. The Burney family, who occupied the front row of the first gallery, are terribly divided as to her merits. “She was most impertinently easy,” says Fanny, “visibly took no pains, and never in the least exerted herself.” Elsewhere she writes, “Her voice is feeble, but sweetly toned. She has great powers of execution; but – she is no Agujari!” And thereupon, in the contest and confusion of opinion, the writer turns to a little concert that has just taken place in St. Martin’s Street, “at which assisted a most superb party of company.” It originated in the desire of Dr. King, sometime chaplain to the British factory at St. Petersburg, that the famous Prince Orloff,19 before he left England, should hear Hetty and her husband in Müthel’s duet. Both in her Diary and Letters, Fanny has treated this exceptional entertainment at considerable length; and she subsequently “embroidered” the record in the Memoirs of her father. We shall depend, by preference, upon her account to Mr. Crisp. After introducing the guests as they arrive: – Dr. Ogle, the musical Dean of Winchester; Dr. King, who announces consequentially that the Prince, having dined at Lord Buckingham’s, is coming as soon as he has been to Lady Harrington’s rout; the virtuosa, Lady Edgecumbe (“all condescension, repartee (and yet) good humour”); Mr. Charles Boone, the fine gentleman who broke his sword in the staircase; Mrs. Brudenel; Mr. Anthony Chamier – all of whose conversation turns upon the Gabrielli and her performance of the evening before, – one of the rat, tat, tats with which the diarist diversifies her narrative, announces M. le Baron de Demidoff, thin, long-nosed, with a most triste and foreign countenance. M. de Demidoff travels with the Prince, whose avant-coureur he is. He brings the gratifying intelligence that His Highness is detained at Lady Harrington’s, but may be expected with the least possible delay. Then follow Mr. Harris of Salisbury, Lord Bruce, a younger brother of the Duke of Montague (who has been to St. Martin’s Lane by mistake) – and so forth. At last – like Charlemagne after his Paladins – appears Prince Orloff, accompanied by General Bawr, a Hessian, stern, martial, who has seen service in the Turkish war. And here we most willingly surrender the pen to Miss Burney. “The Prince is another Mr. Bruce, being immensely tall and stout in proportion. He is a handsome and magnificent figure. His dress was very superb. Besides a blue Garter he had a star of diamonds of prodigious brilliancy; he had likewise a shoulder knot of the same precious jewels, and a picture of the Empress hung from his neck, which was set round with diamonds of such magnitude and lustre that, when near the candle, they were too dazzling for the eye. His jewels, Dr. King says, are valued at above £100,000. He was extremely gracious and polite, and appears to be addicted to pleasantry. He speaks very little English but knows French perfectly. He was received by my father in the drawing-room. The library, where the music was, was so crowded, he only shewed himself at the door, where he bowed to Mr. Chamier, who had met with him elsewhere.”

The Müthel duet, which had been postponed for the Prince’s arrival, was then played with prodigious applause, relaxing even the “sorrowful countenance” of the Baron de Demidoff, who clapped his snuff box rapturously, calling out in broken English, “Dis is so pretty as ever I heard in my life!” Lord Bruce, turning to Prince Orloff, told him the performers were man and wife. His Highness seemed surprised, and walking up to Mrs. Burney, made her many compliments; and, expressing his wonder that two such executants should chance to be united, added “Mais, qu’a produit tant d’Harmonie?” To this Hetty, in a flutter, could find no fitter reply than “Rien, Monseigneur, que trois enfants,” – that being the extent of her family, – an artless and unexpected answer at which Monseigneur laughs immoderately, and, being “addicted to pleasantry,” retails freely to those about him, with many “droll comments and observations” on Mrs. Burney’s words. “When the room was a good deal thinned” – Fanny goes on – “Mr. Harris told me he wished some of the ladies would express a desire of seeing the Empress’s picture nearer. ‘I, you know,’ said he, ‘as a man, cannot, but my old eyes can’t see it at a distance.’ ” [The truth was, Mr. Harris wished to be able to compare Orloff’s picture of Catherine II. with his son James’s (Lord Malmesbury’s) portrait of the King of Spain.] “I went up to Dr. King, and made the request to him. He hesitated some time, but afterwards hinted the demand to General Bawr, who boldly made it to the Prince. His Highness laughed, and with great good humour, desired the General to untie the picture from his neck, and present it to us; and he was very facetious upon the occasion, desiring to know if we wanted anything else? and saying that if they pleased, the ladies might strip him entirely! Not very elegant, methinks, his pleasantry! When we got it there was hardly any looking at the Empress for the glare of the diamonds. Their size is almost incredible. One of them, I am sure, was as big as a nut-meg at least. When we were all satisfied it was returned, and the Prince most graciously made a bow to, and received a curtsie from, everyone who looked at it.”20

In the remainder of Fanny’s letters to Mr. Crisp, she gives an account of a further concert arising out of the famous duet. This time the principal guest was the Count (afterwards the Duke) de Guines, the French Ambassador, who was not only a virtuoso of the first order, but an accomplished flute-player, who had the reputation of having dared to beard that other distinguished performer on the same instrument, Frederick the Great. His Majesty had said to him impatiently and impertinently – “Je vous prie, qu’est-ce que fait votre maître quand il ne peut pas chasser De Guisnes?” The Count – a typical aristocrat of the pre-Revolution days – shrugged his shoulders, and made answer, “Il est vrai, Sire, que mon maître n’a pas le bonheur de savoir jouer de la flûte,”21 a retort more dexterous than deserved, since Frederick, whom Dr. Burney had listened to at Potsdam, was not by any means a mere amateur. Lady Edgecumbe had talked so much to M. de Guines about the duet, that he expressed a great desire to hear it, and a second concert had to be arranged. The company convened on this occasion included Lord Ashburnham, “Groom of the Stole, and First Lord of the Bedchamber,” the Baron and Baroness Deiden, Lord Barrington, Lord Sandwich (“Jemmy Twitcher,” to wit), and Signor Venanzio Rauzzini, the “pius Æneas” to the Dido of Gabrielli. Rauzzini was vainly implored to indulge the company with a Rondeau de sa façon—i. e. from his own Piramo e Tisbe; but he pleaded the professional cold. Fanny is enchanted with the young Roman’s appearance. “He looked like an angel,” she writes. “Nothing can be more beautiful than this youth. He has the complection of our Dick, – the very finest white and red I ever saw: his eyes are the sweetest in the world, at once soft and spirited: all his features are animated and charming.” “ ‘Avez vous une Assemblée chez vous tous les Dimanches,’22 cried he, to my father. ‘Je viendrai une autre fois quand je pourrai chanter!’ Only think how we were let down! ‘Une autre fois!’ cried Hetty; ‘Une autre fois!’ echoed Susette; ‘Une autre fois!’ still more pathetically echoed your humble servant.” But he contributed his quota to the gossip about the Gabrielli; and when the oft-told story was repeated as to the extraordinary ceremonial parade she observed in quitting the Opera House on Saturdays, with first a running footman to clear the way, then her sister, then herself, then a page for her train, then another footman, and then a man out of livery to carry her lap-dog in her muff, – Rauzzini interjected, “Et puis, une autre pour un singe, et un autre pour un perroquet!” As to “Mrs. Gabrielle” (for so she styled herself on her Golden Square doorplate), it is manifest that her reputation for whim had created considerable prejudice against her. But in the History of Music Dr. Burney, who knew her intimately, is much milder in his expressions than the more excitable members of his family. He says that despite her low origin (she was the daughter of a Cardinal’s cook at Rome), she had extraordinary grace and dignity of gesture. She was, moreover he declared, the most intelligent and best bred virtuosa with whom he ever conversed, speaking like a well-educated woman, who had seen the world, not only on music, but on other subjects. “In youth,” he writes, “her beauty and caprice had occasioned an universal delirium among her young countrymen, and there were still remains of both sufficiently powerful, while she was in England, to render credible their former influence.”