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 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 criticise 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.