Fanny Burney (Madame D'Arblay)

CHAPTER V

CECILIA– AND AFTER

Either from Mr. Crisp’s injunctions as to secrecy, or from suppressions in the Diary as we now have it, Miss Burney’s record contains but few references to the progress of Cecilia– which was the name of the new book. And these references occur chiefly in her letters to her critic at Chessington. As already stated, there had been a shadowy “Cecilia,” with an imperilled fortune, in the comedy of The Witlings. In December, 1779, Miss Burney had shown her “Daddy” a sketch of a fresh heroine (then apparently called “Albina”); and he speaks of this fresh heroine’s story in the following April as a “new and striking” idea, affording, among other advantages, “a large field for unhackneyed characters, observations, [and] subjects for satire and ridicule.” It further appears that the Cecilia or Albina in question was to be “unbeautiful” but “clever,” – a deviation from the conventional in which (whether she carried it out or not) Miss Burney must have anticipated some of her distinguished successors. Ten months later, in February, 1781, she is hard at work. “I think I shall always hate this book which has kept me so long away from you, as much as I shall always love Evelina, who first comfortably introduced me to you,” – she tells Mrs. Thrale. Then, – a year later still, – after the long interruption in her task following upon Mr. Thrale’s death, there are groanings over the labour of transcription, – a volume (and there are five) takes a fortnight, – impatience on her father’s part for publication, – the usual nervous apprehensions of hopeless failure, and much defence and discussion of detail with “Daddy” Crisp. At last, – when Mrs. Thrale has declared that Evelina was but a baby to the new venture; and the cautious critic of Chessington, protesting that there had been nothing like it since Fielding and Smollett, has rashly proclaimed his willingness to ensure its rapid and universal success for half-a-crown, – on Friday the 12th July, 1782, Cecilia; or, Memoirs of an Heiress: By the Author of Evelina, price 12s. 6d., sewed, is published by Messrs. Payne and Cadell, in five duodecimo volumes. The first edition was of two thousand copies; and the price paid to the author for the copyright, £250.49 As the Payne above mentioned was none other than the friend of the family, “Honest Tom Payne” of the Mews’ Gate, afterwards James Burney’s father-in-law, it may fairly be assumed that this amount, trifling as it must seem, – contrasted with the sums received modern authors addressing larger audiences under different conditions, – was not considered inadequate by Fanny’s advisers. Indeed, from a chance reference in the Memoirs to the arrangement of “the Cecilian business,” we may conclude that, upon this occasion, Dr. Burney himself took charge of the negotiations.

Neither for ingenuity nor novelty had the plot of Miss Burney’s first story been remarkable. The plot of her second attempt, though still conventional, was somewhat more ambitious. Miss Cecilia Beverley, a young lady in her twenty-first year, is heir, not only to ten thousand pounds from her father, but to three thousand per annum from her uncle, the Dean of – , to which latter inheritance is attached the restrictive condition that, should she marry, the happy man must take her name as well as her money. This turns out to be a very material detail in the novel. When the story begins, the Dean of – is just dead; and Miss Beverley and her fortune, during the brief remainder of her minority, are left in the hands of three guardians – a fashionable and extravagant Mr. Harrel, a vulgar and miserly Mr. Briggs, and a very proud and pompous Mr. Delvile (of Delvile Castle). In the first chapter of the story, Cecilia is quitting Mrs. Charlton, with whom she has been staying, to take up her quarters in town with the Harrels, – Mrs. Harrel, in her green and salad days, having been the heroine’s “most favourite young friend.” In London, where would-be suitors – most of them attracted to the beaux yeux de sa cassette– cluster about her like flies round a honey pot, she speedily becomes aware that the playmate of her youth is terribly “translated” by the dissipations of a London life, that her friend’s husband is an irredeemable gamester, and that both are palpably on the down-grade. Her available means become speedily involved in Harrel’s ever-urgent necessities; and the crisis of this part of the narrative is reached, about the middle of volume three, by his suicide in a very melodramatic fashion at Vauxhall Gardens, where, for the nonce, the chief personages in the book are ingeniously assembled. After Harrel’s death, Cecilia goes to stay at Delvile Castle. Here an attachment already begun with the son, Mortimer Delvile, a young man at once excitable and irresolute, is further developed. But now the dead hand comes in. The haughty Delviles cannot bring themselves to consent to the change of the family name, even “for a consideration” of £3000 per annum. There are consequently scenes, in one of which Mrs. Delvile, after using extremely exaggerated expressions, exclaims “my brain is on fire!” – and breaks a blood vessel. Eventually, after she has been softened by illness, a suggestion is made that Cecilia shall surrender her uncle’s fortune, with its vexatious obligations, and content herself with her Mortimer and her patrimony of ten thousand pounds. Unfortunately for this proposition, the ten thousand pounds in question are now non-existent, having been absorbed by the creditors of Harrel and others, – that is to say, by the Jews. After this, a private marriage takes place, with the connivance of Mrs. Delvile. But Cecilia’s troubles are not yet at an end. Fresh and very unforeseen complications arise, and, for a brief period, she goes as mad as Clementina or Clarissa. At length the curtain comes down upon a Johnsonian passage in which she is left exhibiting the pensive and reluctant optimism of Rasselas.

If, in the foregoing rapid summary, it has not always been possible to speak with uniform gravity, it is that, to-day, the main issue of Cecilia’s story has become – as the author’s own Captain Aresby would now have said – a little démodé. In the present year of grace, it is difficult to comprehend the social conditions which should prevent a sensible man from marrying the woman he loves (particularly if that woman have £3,000 a year) simply because the concomitant surrender of his family name would – as Mrs. Delvile puts it – bring “the blood of his wronged ancestors into his guilty cheeks.” But when Cecilia was written, this was an other-guess matter; and the point was not only seriously argued by bishops, peers and ladies of quality, but was thought by no means undeserving of anxious consideration. A noble Lord, who descended from Elfrida, and had a castle in Warwickshire, was distinctly of opinion that the obstructive attitude of Mr. Delvile père was a correct one; while Mrs. Thrale, who dated from Adam of Salzburg – one of the companions of the Conqueror – was equally convinced that her mother, Mrs. Salusbury, would have done just what Mrs. Delvile did. But this debatable point apart, Cecilia’s story is unquestionably clever. The characters – and there are a crowd of them – are clearly drawn and discriminated; the pictures of contemporary social life are varied and very lively, while the famous Vauxhall episode, if it be not precisely the tragic masterpiece which it seemed to the fond eyes of admiring “Daddy” Crisp, certainly contrives to hold the reader in a genuine suspense of curiosity until the final event is reached. The discussion between the mother and son, – the other “crack scene” of the book – that, indeed, for which the author declares she wrote the whole, Mr. Crisp did not approve so much, and he was right. If it did not impress him, it impresses us still less. Mrs. Delvile’s stormy heroics seem out of all proportion to the gravity of the matter in hand, and an unsympathetic reader, bewildered by the hail of commination, may well be forgiven for wondering whether the cause is worthy of the clamour. Nevertheless Miss Burney, in clinging to her convictions in regard to “name-compelling” ills, as well as in declining to end her book “like the hack Italian operas, with a jolly chorus that makes all parties good and all parties happy,” was only acting in strict accordance with the injunctions, received from more than one adviser, to rely upon her own instincts, and not to depart from them, when her mind was made up. And it is a feature of her character, that, notwithstanding her undoubted distrust of her powers, she was sometimes as restive and intractable under criticism as Richardson himself.

The two scenes above indicated are those which are most frequently referred to by Miss Burney’s critics. But there are others which, if not as highly-wrought, are as worthy of praise. The opera rehearsal, – at which it was said the book always opened, – the description of the ton parties, the long masquerade chapter, and the dialogue between Albany, Briggs and Hobson on Charity (which may be compared with that on the same subject between Parson Adams and Mr. Peter Pounce in Joseph Andrews), are well worth reading. But the names remind us that Miss Burney is, primarily, what Johnson called her, a “character-monger,” and that her plot is subordinate to her personages. Some of these, in spite of her protests, she had evidently seen in the flesh; some she had half-seen or overheard; some she had wholly invented from current social characteristics. Mr. Meadows, the absent-minded and affectedly-indifferent, and Captain Aresby, who interlards his conversation with French words like the coming Silver Fork School and the lady in Thackeray’s Almack’s Adieu– are probably examples from the last category. Mr. Monckton and the supercilious Sir Robert Floyer, the caustic Mr. Gosport and the voluble Miss Larolles, she had doubtless met; while in those days of gaming and E.O. tables, she had probably heard of many Mr. Harrels. As to the miserly and penurious Briggs (and the facility with which one can label Miss Burney’s characters with defining adjectives indicates one of her limitations), the consensus of contemporary criticism seems to have decided that he was overdrawn. But he is certainly not more exaggerated than some of the later characters of Dickens, and he is distinctly amusing, especially in his encounters with “Don Pedigree,” as he calls his colleague, Mr. Delvile. Hobson the builder, with his large and puffy presence, his red waistcoat, and his round curled wig, is a capital specimen of the bumptious prosperous tradesman; while the thin, mean-looking, cringing and obsequious Mr. Simkins (the hosier) is another excellently observed and contrasted variety. Morrice, the pushing and officious young lawyer, the versatile Belfield, and that vivacious “agreeable Rattle” of rank, Lady Honoria Pemberton, can only be named. Lastly – for we must omit others altogether – comes Johnson’s favourite Albany, – a cross between Apemantus and Solomon Eagle, – whose stagy denunciations certainly warrant the ingenuous inquiry of Mr. Hobson whether “the gentleman might be speaking something by heart.” There should be an original for Albany; but he has not been definitely revealed.

Cecilia is more elaborate and much more mature than Evelina. It is also more skilfully constructed, and more carefully, though not so naturally, written. But it is certainly too long; and towards the close suggests something of the hurry imposed upon the author by her eager father. It must also be confessed that the last chapters are scarcely as interesting as their forerunners. As to the success of the book with its first audience, however, there can be no doubt. Anxiously awaited, it was welcomed with the warmest enthusiasm by numbers of readers; and by no one more splendidly and royally than by Edmund Burke, whose acquaintance Fanny had made at Sir Joshua’s not very long before it appeared. When it came out, Burke wrote her a long letter, which was reprinted with subsequent editions. Few (he told her), let their experience in life and manners be what it might, would not find themselves better informed concerning human nature, and their stock of observation enriched, by reading Cecilia. “You have,” he went on, “crowded into a few small volumes an incredible variety of characters; most of them well planned, well supported, and well contrasted with each other. If there be any fault in this respect, it is one in which you are in no great danger of being imitated. Justly as your characters are drawn, perhaps they are too numerous. But I beg pardon; I fear it is quite in vain to preach economy to those who are come young to excessive and sudden opulence.” Praising her humour, her pathos, her “comprehensive and noble moral,” and her sagacious observations, he concluded, – “In an age distinguished by producing extraordinary women, I hardly dare to tell you where my opinion would place you amongst them. I respect your modesty, that will not endure the commendations which your merit forces from everybody.” A few months later, she met Burke at the house of the Hon. Miss Monckton (the “Lydia White” of that age), when he was equally kind, though he ventured upon some criticisms. He thought the masquerade scene too long, and that something might be spared from Harrel’s grand assembly; he did not like Morrice’s part at the Pantheon;50 and he wished the conclusion “either more happy or more miserable.” With this last Fanny – as we have already seen – could not coincide; but he promptly consoled her by another compliment. Nothing had struck him so much as the admirable skill with which her ingenious characters made themselves known by their own words; and he congratulated her upon her conquest of some of the old wits, because of the difficulty of giving satisfaction to those who piqued themselves on being past receiving it. Also, he touched upon the amount she had obtained from Payne and Cadell for the copyright, which he evidently knew. “Why did you not send for your own friend out of the city [i. e. Mr. Briggs]? He would have taken care you should not part with it [Cecilia] so much below par.”

Her older admirers were as kind. Sir Joshua was perpetually bringing her intelligence of something which had been said to her advantage; and Johnson came no whit behind. Instructing Susy Thrale, who had just put up her hair, and assumed womanly garb, he directed her, with mock solemnity, how to “increase her consequence” by censuring Cecilia– much in the manner in which the author of the Female Quixote had recommended his own Rambler: “Tell the world how ill it was conceived, and how ill executed. Tell them how little there is in it of human nature, and how well your knowledge of the world enables you to judge of the failings in that book. Find fault without fear; and if you are at a loss for any to find, invent whatever comes into your mind, for you may say what you please, with little fear of detection, since of those who praise Cecilia not half have read it, and of those who have read it, not half remember it. Go to work, therefore, boldly; and particularly mark that the character of Albany is extremely unnatural, to your own knowledge, since you never met with such a man at Mrs. Cummyn’s School.” A year later, his enthusiasm was still unabated. “Sir” – he said to Boswell – “if you talk of Cecilia, talk on.” From other sources came commendations as pleasant. Mrs. Chapone, who, as Miss Mulso, had cried over Clarissa, could not, for very excess of eagerness, cry at all over Cecilia. “I was in an agitation that half killed me, that shook all my nerves,” – she told the author, – “and made me unable to sleep at nights from the suspense I was in.” Mrs. Walsingham, the witty daughter of the wit Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, related how Queen Charlotte herself had spoken of the book, and criticised Mr. Briggs; while, from another source, came tidings that Gibbon had read it in a day, which was a third of the time that even Burke had taken. But Miss Burney’s supreme and full dress laureation came at Mrs. Ord’s in Queen Anne’s Street from that ancient bel esprit and conversationist, Soame Jenyns, then nearing eighty, who, arriving by arrangement, attired in a Court suit of apricot-coloured silk lined with white satin, regaled the author of Cecilia with a magnificent and magniloquent harangue upon the merits of her work, to which the rest of the distinguished company respectfully listened – standing!

But if Cecilia pleased the old wit, Soame Jenyns, it did not equally please the old wit, Horace Walpole, to whom it suggested many of the inconvenient objections of the incorruptible. He thought it “immeasurably long”; he disliked the end (as Burke did); he found most of the personages outrés; he said (and, in this instance, unanswerably) that they spoke too uniformly in character to be true to the complexity of human life; and he wished Albany suppressed altogether. The book, also, he complained, “was written in Dr. Johnson’s unnatural phrase.” Other people – either in praise or blame – had made the same discovery. “The particularly nervous and perspicuous style” – wrote the Monthly Review– “appears to have been framed on the best model of Dr. Johnson.” But even among Fanny’s friends, there were those to whom this was scarcely a merit. “The writing here and there” – wrote Mr. Twining of Colchester to Fanny’s father – “is not the better for a little imitation (probably involuntary) of Dr. Johnson.” That there are traces of the Johnsonian manner in Evelina has already been observed, especially where Miss Burney writes in her own person. In Cecilia these evidences would naturally be more manifest, since the narrative form is substituted for the epistolary. Still there is little of the Doctor in the many conversations, and the point may easily be overlaboured. There is enough, however, to warrant Boswell in claiming Miss Burney as one of Johnson’s many imitators; and Lord Macaulay picked out one passage in special which has the very trick and turn of the great man’s pen. But when it led Lord Macaulay to say, as he did, that he had not the smallest doubt that Johnson had “revised” Cecilia, and “retouched the style of many passages,” he was demonstrably in error. “I never saw one word of it before it was printed,” – the Doctor told a gentleman who wished “to make out some credit to him from the little rogue’s book”; and the disclaimer must surely be accepted as decisive.51 At the same time, Johnson was undoubtedly the reigning model; and, consciously or unconsciously, Miss Burney copied him. “Fanny carries bird-lime in her brains” – said her father – “for everything that lights there sticks.” As the writer of Evelina, she had remembered the writer of the Rambler; and nothing is more reasonable than that she should remember him all the more in Cecilia, when, by personal contact and personal admiration, she had absorbed and assimilated his method and vocabulary. Whether she would not have done better to copy herself, is another matter.

In July, 1782, when Cecilia was published, Fanny Burney was thirty, – that critical age before which, according to a discouraging dictum, those who are not doomed to failure, must have contrived to succeed. Hitherto, she had succeeded; and if a bard in the Morning Herald was to be believed, had now taken her place permanently in that galaxy of which Burke had written, for

was duly bracketed

with with the “pathetic pen” of Hannah More, the “pointed wit” of Mrs. Cowley (of The Belle’s Stratagem), with

and all the varied virtues of Mrs. Chapone, Mrs. Boscawen, Mrs. Thrale, and Mrs. Montagu.52 Her friends were naturally anxious that she should pursue her triumphs; and “Daddy” Crisp, while piously enjoining her not “to remit her ardour and industry to be perfect,” and sagaciously observing “that there had been more instances than one, where writers have wrote themselves down, by slovenliness, laziness, and presuming too much on public favour for what is past,” – was still very practically alive to the necessities of taking the tide at the flood. “This is the harvest time of your life,” – he wrote; “your sun shines hot; lose not a moment, then, but make your hay directly. ‘Touch the yellow boys,’ – as Briggs says – ‘grow warm’; make the booksellers come down handsomely – count the ready – the chink.” Nevertheless, it was fourteen years before Miss Burney published another novel; and we must now revert to the chronicle of her life.

There can be little doubt that the publication of Cecilia largely extended the circle of her acquaintance; and that the paternal coach must often have been in requisition to convey her to the houses of the “lyon-hunters.” “I begin to grow most heartily sick and fatigued” – she writes in December, 1782 – “of this continual round of visiting, and these eternal new acquaintances.” Elsewhere there are indications that, for one who was not able to run milliners’ bills, the question of costume must have been an absorbing one. “Miss Burney” – said Mr. Cambridge – “had no time to write, for she was always working at her clothes.” Mr. Richard Owen Cambridge of Twickenham, – Walpole’s “Cambridge the Everything,” – now an elderly gentleman, was one of the new friends who seem to have specially attracted her; and there is an account in the Diary of a visit she made in the summer of 1783 to that pleasant house of his in the meadows by Richmond Bridge, to which so many old-world notabilities were wont to resort. One of the things she recalls is her host’s testimony – in spite of the Préjugé à la mode– to his love for his wife. “There is no sight so pleasing to me,” he told her, “as seeing Mrs. Cambridge enter a room; and that after having been married to her for forty years.” At Mrs. Vesey’s she met Cambridge’s near neighbour, Horace Walpole, whom she found extremely entertaining. Dr. Parr, Jonas Hanway, Tasso Hoole, Benjamin West, the Wartons, Mrs. Ord, Mrs. Buller, Mrs. Chapone, Mrs. Garrick, also flit through her pages, though it would be impossible to make record of them here. But among the “fair females” – as “the General” of the last chapter would have said, – may be mentioned, chiefly because she must be mentioned hereafter, Mme. de Genlis, then in this country. To this most fascinating and insidious personage, Miss Burney was at first much attracted. But the acquaintance – her niece and editor tells us – was not maintained; and Fanny afterwards made nearer and dearer French friends for whom the multifarious author of Adèle et Théodore was only “cette coquine de Brulard.”