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The prejudices which Frances had conceived against the constitutional royalists
of France rapidly vanished. She listened with rapture to Talleyrand and Madame
de Stael, joined with M. D'Arblay in execrating the Jacobins and in weeping for
the unhappy Bourbons, took French lessons from him, fell in love with him, and
married him on no better provision than a precarious annuity of one hundred
pounds.
Here the Diary stops for the present. We will, therefore, bring our narrative to
a speedy close, by rapidly recounting the most important events which we know to
have befallen Madame D'Arblay during the latter part of her life.
M. D'Arblay's fortune had perished in the general wreck of the French
Revolution; and in a foreign country his talents, whatever they may have been,
could scarcely make him rich. The task of providing for the family devolved on
his wife. In the year 1796, she published by subscription her third novel,
Camilla. It was impatiently expected by the public; and the sum which she
obtained for it was, we believe, greater than had ever at that time been
received for a novel. We have heard that she cleared more than three thousand
guineas. But we give this merely as a rumor. Camilla, however, never attained
popularity like that which Evelina and Cecilia had enjoyed; and it must be
allowed that there was a perceptible falling off, not indeed in humor or in
power of portraying character, but in grace and in purity of style.
We have heard that, about this time, a tragedy by Madame D'Arblay was performed
without success. We do not know whether it was ever printed; nor indeed have we
had time to make any researches into its history or merits.
During the short truce which followed the treaty of Amiens, M. D'Arblay visited
France. Lauriston and La Fayette represented his claims to the French
Government, and obtained a promise that he should be reinstated in his military
rank. M. D'Arblay, however, insisted that he should never be required to serve
against the countrymen of his wife. The First Consul, of course, would not hear
of such a condition, and ordered the general's commission to be instantly
revoked.
Madame D'Arblay joined her husband in Paris, a short time before the war of 1803
broke out, and remained in France ten years, cut off from almost all intercourse
with the land of her birth. At length, when Napoleon was on his march to Moscow,
she with great difficulty obtained from his Ministers permission to visit her
own country, in company with her son, who was a native of England. She returned
in time to receive the last blessing of her father, who died in his
eighty-seventh year. In 1814 she published her last novel, the Wanderer, a book
which no judicious friend to her memory will attempt to draw from the oblivion
into which it has justly fallen. In the same year her son Alexander was sent to
Cambridge. He obtained an honorable place among the wranglers of his year, and
was elected a fellow of Christ's College. But his reputation at the University
was higher than might be inferred from his success in academical contests. His
French education had not fitted him for the examinations of the Senate House;
but, in pure mathematics, we have been assured by some of his competitors that
he had very few equals. He went into the Church, and it was thought likely that
he would attain high eminence as a preacher; but he died before his mother. All
that we have heard of him leads us to believe that he was a son as such a mother
deserved to have. In 1832, Madame D'Arblay published the Memoirs of her father;
and on the sixth of January, 1840, she died in her eighty-eighth year.
We now turn from the life of Madame D'Arblay to her writings. There can, we
apprehend, be little difference of opinion as to the nature of her merit,
whatever differences may exist as to its degree. She was emphatically what
Johnson called her, a character-monger. It was in the exhibition of human
passions and whims that her strength lay; and in this department of art she had,
we think, very distinguished skill.
But, in order that we may, according to our duty as kings at arms, versed in the
laws of literary precedence, marshal her to the exact scat to which she is
entitled, we must carry our examination somewhat further.
There is, in one respect, a remarkable analogy between the faces and the minds
of men. No two faces are alike; and yet very few faces deviate very widely from
the common standard. Among the eighteen hundred thousand human beings who
inhabit London, there is not one who could be taken by his acquaintance for
another; yet we may walk from Paddington to Mile End without seeing one person
in whom any feature is so overcharged that we turn round to stare at it. An
infinite number of varieties lies between limits which are not very far asunder.
The specimens which pass those limits on either side, form a very small
minority.
It is the same with the characters of men. Here, too, the variety passes all
enumeration. But the cases in which the deviation from the common standing is
striking and grotesque, are very few. In one mind avarice predominates; in
another, pride; in a third, love of pleasure; just as in one countenance the
nose is the most marked feature, while in others the chief expression lies in
the brow, or in the lines of the mouth. But there are very few countenances in
which nose, brow, and mouth do not contribute, though in unequal degrees, to the
general effect; and so there are very few characters in which one overgrown
propensity makes all others utterly insignificant.
It is evident that a portrait painter, who was able only to represent faces and
figures such as those which we pay money to see at fairs, would not, however
spirited his execution might be, take rank among the highest artists. He must
always be placed below those who have skill to seize peculiarities which do not
amount to deformity. The slighter those peculiarities, the greater is the merit
of the limner who can catch them and transfer them to his canvas. To paint
Daniel Lambert or the living skeleton, the pig-faced lady or the Siamese twins,
so that nobody can mistake them, is an exploit within the reach of a
sign-painter. A third-rate artist might give us the squint of Wilkes, and the
depressed nose and protuberant cheeks of Gibbon. It would require a much higher
degree of skill to paint two such men as Mr. Canning and Sir Thomas Lawrence, so
that nobody who had ever seen them could for a moment hesitate to assign each
picture to its original. Here the mere caricaturist would be quite at fault. He
would find in neither face anything on which he could lay hold for the purpose
of making a distinction. Two ample bald foreheads, two regular profiles, two
full faces of the same oval form, would baffle his art; and he would be reduced
to the miserable shift of writing their names at the foot of his picture. Yet
there was a great difference; and a person who had seen them once would no more
have mistaken one of them for the other than he would have mistaken Mr. Pitt for
Mr. Fox. But the difference lay in delicate lineaments and shades, reserved for
pencils of a rare order.
This distinction runs through all the imitative arts. Foote's mimicry was
exquisitely ludicrous, but it was all caricature. He could take off only some
strange peculiarity, a stammer or a lisp, a Northumbrian burr or an Irish
brogue, a stoop or a shuffle. "If a man," said Johnson, "hops on one leg, Foote
can hop on one leg." Garrick, on the other hand, could seize those differences
of manner and pronunciation, which, though highly characteristic, are yet too
slight to be described. Foote, we have no doubt, could have made the Haymarket
theatre shake with laughter by imitating a conversation between a Scotchman and
a Somersetshireman. But Garrick could have imitated a conversation between two
fashionable men, both models of the best breeding, Lord Chesterfield, for
example, and Lord Albemarle, so that no person could doubt which was which,
although no person could say that, in any point, either Lord Chesterfield or
Lord Albemarle spoke or moved otherwise than in conformity with the usages of
the best society.
The same distinction is found in the drama and in fictitious narrative. Highest
among those who have exhibited human nature by means of dialogue, stands
Shakespeare. His variety is like the variety of nature, endless diversity,
scarcely any monstrosity. The characters of which he has given us an impression,
as vivid as that which we receive from the characters of our own associates, are
to be reckoned by scores. Yet in all these scores hardly one character is to be
found which deviates widely from the common standard, and which we should call
very eccentric if we met it in real life. The silly notion that every man has
one ruling passion, and that this clue, once known, unravels all the mysteries
of his conduct, finds no countenance in the plays of Shakespeare. There man
appears as he is, made up of a crowd of passions, which contend for the mastery
over him, and govern him in turn. What is Hamlet's ruling passion? Or Othello's?
Or Harry the Fifth's? Or Wolsey's? Or Lear's? Or Shylock's? Or Benedick's? Or
Macbeth's? Or that of Cassius? Or that of Falconbridge? But we might go on for
ever. Take a single example, Shylock. Is he so eager for money as to be
indifferent to revenge? Or so eager for revenge as to be indifferent to money?
Or so bent on both together as to be indifferent to the honor of his nation and
the law of Moses? All his propensities are mingled with each other, so that, in
trying to apportion to each its proper part, we find the same difficulty which
constantly meets us in real life. A superficial critic may say, that hatred is
Shylock's ruling passion. But how many passions have amalgamated to form that
hatred? It is partly the result of wounded pride: Antonio has called him dog. It
is partly the result of covetousness: Antonio has hindered him of half a
million; and, when Antonio is gone, there will be no limit to the gains of
usury. It is partly the result of national and religious feeling: Antonio has
spit on the Jewish gabardine; and the oath of revenge has been sworn by the
Jewish Sabbath. We might go through all the characters which we have mentioned,
and through fifty more in the same way; for it is the constant manner of
Shakespeare to represent the human mind as lying, not under the absolute
dominion of one despotic propensity, but under a mixed government, in which a
hundred powers balance each other. Admirable as he was in all parts of his art,
we most admire him for this, that while he has left us a greater number of
striking portraits than all other dramatists put together, he has scarcely left
us a single caricature.
Shakespeare has had neither equal nor second. But among the writers who, in the
point which we have noticed, have approached nearest to the manner of the great
master, we have no hesitation in placing Jane Austen, a woman of whom England is
justly proud. She has given us a multitude of characters, all, in a certain
sense, commonplace, all such as we meet every day. Yet they are all as perfectly
discriminated from each other as if they were the most eccentric of human
beings. There are, for example, four clergymen, none of whom we should be
surprised to find in any parsonage in the kingdom, Mr. Edward Ferrers, Mr. Henry
Tilney, Mr. Edmund Bertram, and Mr. Elton. They are all specimens of the upper
part of the middle class. They have all been liberally educated. They all lie
under the restraints of the same sacred profession. They are all young. They are
all in love. Not one of them has any hobbyhorse, to use the phrase of Sterne.
Not one has a ruling passion, such as we read of in Pope. Who would not have
expected them to be insipid likenesses of each other? No such thing. Harpagun is
not more unlike to Jourdain, Joseph Surface is not more unlike to Sir Lucius
O'Trigger, than every one of Miss Austen's young divines to all his reverend
brethren. And almost all this is done by touches so delicate, that they elude
analysis, that they defy the powers of description, and that we know them to
exist only by the general effect to which they have contributed.
A line must be drawn, we conceive, between artists of this class, and those
poets and novelists whose skill lies in the exhibiting of what Ben Jonson called
humors. The words of Ben are so much to the purpose that we will quote them:
"When some one peculiar quality Doth so possess a man, that it doth draw All his
affects, his spirits, and his powers, In their confluxions all to run one way,
This may be truly said to be a humor."
There are undoubtedly persons, in whom humors such as Ben describes have
attained a complete ascendancy. The avarice of Elwes, the insane desire of Sir
Egerton Brydges for a barony to which he had no more right than to the crown of
Spain, the malevolence which long meditation on imaginary wrongs generated in
the gloomy mind of Bellingham, are instances. The feeling which animated
Clarkson and other virtuous men against the slave-trade and slavery, is an
instance of a more honorable kind.
Seeing that such humors exist, we cannot deny that they are proper subjects for
the imitations of art. But we conceive that the imitation of such humors,
however skilful and amusing, is not an achievement of the highest order; and, as
such humors are rare in real life, they ought, we conceive, to be sparingly
introduced into works which profess to be pictures of real life. Nevertheless,
the writer may show so much genius in the exhibition of these humors 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.
If we have expounded the law soundly, we can have no difficulty in applying it
to the particular case before us. Madame D'Arblay has left us scarcely anything
but humors. Almost every one of her men and women has some one propensity
developed to a morbid degree. In Cecilia, for example, Mr. Delvile never opens
his lips without some allusion to his own birth and station; or Mr. Briggs,
without some allusion to the hoarding of money; or Mr. Hobson, without betraying
the self-indulgence and self-importance of a purse-proud up start; or Mr.
Simkins, without uttering some sneaking remark for the purpose of currying favor
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 humors which is to be
found in her novels is immense; and though the talk of each person separately is
monotonous, the general effect is not monotony, but a very lively and agreeable
diversity. Her plots are rudely constructed and improbable, if we consider them
in themselves. But they are admirably framed for the purpose of exhibiting
striking groups of eccentric characters, each 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 Mr. Albany into a room together. But when we have them there, we
soon forget probability in the exquisitely ludicrous effect which is produced by
the conflict of four old fools, each raging with a monomania of his own, each
talking a dialect of his own, and each inflaming all the others anew every time
he opens his mouth.
Madame D'Arblay was most successful in comedy, and indeed in comedy which
bordered on farce. But we are inclined to infer from some passages, both in
Cecilia and Camilla, that she might have attained equal distinction in the
pathetic. We have formed this judgment, less from those 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 everything 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.
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
unexampled 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 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
reach of Johnson, as his real excellences were beyond her reach. He could no
more have written the Masquerade 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 retouched the style of
many passages. We know that he was in the habit of giving assistance of this
kind most freely. Goldsmith, Hawkesworth, Boswell, 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 important 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 impossible to mistake. Before we conclude this article, we will give two or
three examples.
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.
But there was to be a still deeper descent. After the publication of Camilla,
Madame D'Arblay resided ten years at Paris. During those years there was
scarcely any intercourse between France and England. It was with difficulty that
a short letter could 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 Shakespeare 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:
"His son seems weaker in his understanding, 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,
ill-tempered, 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
good-natured."
This is not a fine style, but simple, perspicuous, and agreeable. We now come to
Cecilia, written during Miss Burney's intimacy with Johnson; and we leave it to
our readers to judge whether the following passage was not at least corrected by
his hand:
"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 perplexities, acknowledged my vainglory, and exposed with equal
sincerity the sources of my doubts, and the motives of my decision. But now,
indeed, how to proceed I know not. The difficulties which are yet to encounter I
fear to enumerate, and the petition I have to urge I have scarce courage to
mention. My family, mistaking ambition for honor, 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 their views immovably
adhere. I am but too certain they will now listen to no other. 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."
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 precipitated return, by the rudest fierceness of
wintry elemental strife; through which, with bad accommodations and innumerable
accidents, he became a prey to the merciless pangs of the acutest spasmodic
rheumatism, which barely suffered him to reach his home, ere, long and
piteously, it confined him, a tortured prisoner, to his bed. Such was the cheek
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, exchanging the light wines of
France, Italy, 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 long-sought 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 has lost all the softness of her own, In regard to myself, however, as
I have neither courage nor inclination to argue with her, I have never been
personally hurt at her want of gentleness, a virtue which nevertheless seems so
essential a part of the female character, that I find myself more awkward and
less at case with a woman who wants it than I do with a man."
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 him with a pride of power and possession
which softened while it swelled him. His superiority was undisputed: his will
was without control. He was not, as in the great capital of the kingdom,
surrounded by competitors. No rivalry disturbed his peace; no equality mortified
his greatness. All he saw were either vassals of his power, or guests bending to
his pleasure. He abated, therefore, considerably tile stern gloom of his
haughtiness, and soothed his proud mind by the courtesy of condescension."
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 vainglory, 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.
"The last of men," says Madame D'Arblay, "was Doctor Johnson to have abetted
squandering the delicacy of integrity by nullifying the labors of talents."
The Club, Johnson's Club, did itself no honor by rejecting on political grounds
two distinguished men, one a Tory, the other a Whig. Madame D'Arblay tells the
story thus: "A similar ebullition of political rancor 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 Mrs. Thrale, when a party of clever people sat silent, is said
to have been "provoked by the dulness of a taciturnity that, in the midst of
such renowned interlocutors, produced as narcotic a torpor as could have been
caused by a dearth the most barren of all human faculties." In truth, it is
impossible to look at any page of Madame 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.
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 when he turned from the courses of the
stars, and the ebb and flow of the ocean, to apocalyptic seals and vials.
Bentley failed when he turned from Homer and Aristophanes, to edit 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 honorable 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 of them were such as no lady could without
confusion own that she had read. The very name of novel was held in horror among
religious people. In decent families, which did not profess 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 pronounced the circulating
library an evergreen 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
people, took without scruple liberties which in our generation seem almost
incredible.
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 humor, 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
honorably distinguished by fine observation, by grace, by delicate wit, by pure
moral feeling. Several among the successors of Madame D'Arblay have equaled 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.
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