Chapter M: D’Arblay is one of the most singularly interesting characters

that can ever have been formed. He has a sincerity, a frankness, an ingenuous openness of nature, that I had been unjust enough to think could not belong to a Frenchman. With all this, which is his military portion, he is passionately fond of literature, a most delicate critic in his own language, well versed in both Italian and German, and a very elegant poet. He has just undertaken to become my French master for pronunciation, and he gives me long daily lessons in reading. Pray expect wonderful improvements! In return, I hear him in English.

FRANCES BURNEY: _Letter to Dr. Burney_, February, 1793, in ‘Diary and Letters.’

* * * * *

[Sidenote: At work on ‘Camilla,’ after her marriage.]

I have a long work, which a long time has been in hand, that I mean to publish soon--in about a year. Should it succeed ... it may be a little portion to our Bambino. We wish, therefore, to print it for ourselves in this hope; but the expenses of the press are so enormous, so raised by these late Acts, that it is out of all question for us to afford it. We have, therefore, been led by degrees to listen to counsel of some friends, and to print it by subscription. This is in many--many ways unpleasant and unpalatable to us both; but the real chance of real use and benefit to our little darling overcomes all scruples, and, therefore, to work we go!

FRANCES D’ARBLAY: _Letter to a friend_, 1795, in ‘Diary and Letters.’

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Its success.]

I am quite happy in what I have escaped of greater severity [from the reviews], though my mate cannot bear that the palm should be contested by ‘Evelina’ and ‘Cecilia’; his partiality rates the last as so much the highest.... The essential success of ‘Camilla’ exceeds that of the elders. The sale is truly astonishing. Five hundred only remain of four thousand, and it has appeared scarcely three months.

FRANCES D’ARBLAY: Letter to Dr. Burney, 1796, in ‘Diary and Letters.’

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Walpole’s criticism.]

I will only reply by a word or two to a question you seem to ask; how I like ‘Camilla’? I do not care to say how little. Alas! she has reversed experience, which I have long thought reverses its own utility by coming at the wrong end of our life when we do not want it. This author knew the world and penetrated characters before she had stepped over the threshold; and, now she has seen so much of it, she has little or no insight at all.

HORACE WALPOLE: _Letter to Hannah More_, 1796.

* * * * *

Dr. Burney asked me about deplorable ‘Camilla.’ Alas! I had not recovered of it enough to be loud in its praise.

HORACE WALPOLE: _Letter to Miss Berry_, 1796. ‘The Letters of Horace Walpole, Earl of Oxford.’ London: Henry G. Bohn, 1867.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: ‘The Hermitage,’ West Hamble.]

We are going immediately to build a little cottage for ourselves. We shall make it as small and as cheap as will accord with its being warm and comfortable. We mean to make this a property salable or lettable for our Alex.

FRANCES D’ARBLAY: _Letter to Dr. Burney_, 1796, in ‘Diary and Letters.’

* * * * *

I need not say how I shall rejoice to see you again, nor how charmed we shall both be to make a nearer acquaintance with Mr. Broome; but, for Heaven’s sake, my dear girl, how are we to give him a dinner?--unless he will bring with him his poultry, for ours are not yet arrived; and his fish, for ours are still at the bottom of some pond we know not where; and his spit, for our jack is yet without one; not to mention his table-linen;--and not to speak of his knives and forks, some ten of our poor original twelve having been massacred in M. D’Arblay’s first essays in the art of carpentering;--and to say nothing of his large spoons, the silver of our plated ones having feloniously made off under cover of the whitening brush;--and not to talk of his cook, ours being not yet hired;--and not to start the subject of wine, ours, by some odd accident, still remaining at the wine-merchants!

With all these impediments, however, to convivial hilarity, if he will eat a quarter of a joint of meat (his share, I mean), tied up by a packthread, and roasted by a log of wood on the bricks, and declare no potatoes so good as those dug by M. D’Arblay out of our garden--and protest our small beer gives the spirits of champagne--and pronounce that bare walls are superior to tapestry--and promise us the first sight of his epistle upon visiting a new-built cottage--we shall be sincerely happy to receive him in our Hermitage.

FRANCES D’ARBLAY: _Letter to Mrs. Francis_, 1797, in ‘Diary and Letters.’

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Poverty.]

[Sidenote: Generosity.]

For a considerable time the income on which she, her husband, and her child subsisted, did not exceed £125 a year. They were too independent in spirit to accept assistance from friends; too upright to rely on contingencies; and Madame D’Arblay pursued, in all the minutiæ of domestic life, a course of self-denial such as, she wrote to her Susanna, “would make you laugh to see, though perhaps cry to hear.” With all this, her mind and thoughts were never shut up in her economy. It was at this period that she originated the invitation sent by her and M. D’Arblay to his friend the Comte de Narbonne, to make their cottage his home; and it was also during these straitened circumstances that she withdrew her comedy of ‘Love and Fashion’ from rehearsal, in dutiful compliance with the wishes of her father; although the management of Covent Garden had promised her £400 for the manuscript.

[Sidenote: Fidelity.]

Queen Charlotte’s expression, that she was “true as gold,” was abundantly verified in her friendship.

SARAH CHAUNCEY WOOLSEY, Edr.: ‘Diary and Letters of Frances Burney, Mme. D’Arblay.’

* * * * *

The novels give an impression of a singularly keen, clever, observant woman, with a sense of the ridiculous too much developed to be a very sympathetic, or even safe, friend....

She is seen to best advantage in the book where she appears as daughter, sister, friend, servant (there is really no other word for the position she held at court), and finally wife and mother. In the ‘Diary and Letters’ we not only learn how largely voluntary were the restrictions she imposed upon her literary work, but how much her private life gained in charm and usefulness by the subordination of the author’s part; and, learning this, we forgive her the more easily for having partially hidden the talent which, well husbanded, might have given us more ‘Evelinas’ and ‘Cecilias.’... Delightful as ‘Evelina’ and ‘Cecilia’ are to those whose taste they suit, it is doubtful whether we should get more enjoyment out of a dozen novels of the same quality than we do out of these two. And ... at the present moment these two are more than enough for most people.

MARY ELIZABETH CHRISTIE: ‘Miss Burney’s Novels.’

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Her old age.]

I attended her during the last twenty years of her long life. She lived in almost total seclusion from all but a few members of her own family; changed her lodgings more frequently than her dresses and occupied herself laboriously in composing those later works which retain so little of the charm of her earlier writings. Mr. Rogers was the only literary man who seemed to know of her existence.

SIR HENRY HOLLAND: ‘Recollections of Past Life.’ New York: D. Appleton & Co., 1872.

* * * * *

Was introduced by Rogers to Mme. D’Arblay, the celebrated authoress of ‘Evelina’ and ‘Cecilia’--an elderly lady, with no remains of personal beauty, but with a simple and gentle manner, a pleasing expression of countenance, and apparently quick feelings.

SIR WALTER SCOTT: _Diary_, November, 1826, in ‘Memoirs,’ by J. G. Lockhart.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Miss Mitford’s criticism.]

I do not think very highly of Mme. D’Arblay’s books. The style is so strutting. She does so stalk about on Dr. Johnson’s old stilts. What she says wants so much translating into common English, and when translated would seem so commonplace, that I have always felt strongly tempted to read all the serious parts with my fingers’ ends.... A novel should be as like life as a painting, but not as like life as a piece of wax-work. Mme. D’Arblay has much talent, but no taste. Another fault is the sameness of her characters; they all say one thing twenty times over.... They have but one note.

MARY RUSSELL MITFORD: _Letters to Sir W. Elford_, in ‘Life,’ edited by Rev. A. G. L’Estrange. London: Richard Bentley, 1870.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: ‘A very woman.’]

Madame D’Arblay is quite of the old school, a mere common observer of manners, and also a very woman. It is this last circumstance which forms the peculiarity of her writings. She is a quick, lively, and accurate observer of persons and things; but she always looks at them with a consciousness of her sex, and in that point of view in which it is the particular business and interest of women to observe them. There is little in her works of passion or character, or even manners, in the most extended sense of the word, as implying the sum total of our habits and pursuits; her _forte_ is in describing the absurdities and affectations of external behavior, or _the manners of people in company_. Her characters, which are ingenious caricatures, are, no doubt, distinctly marked, and well kept up; but they are slightly shaded, and exceedingly uniform. Her heroes and heroines, almost all of them, depend upon the stock of a single phrase or sentiment, and have certain mottoes or devices by which they may always be known. They form such characters as people might be supposed to assume for a night at a masquerade.... The Braughtons are the best. Mr. Smith is an exquisite city portrait. ‘Evelina’ is also her best novel, because it is the shortest; that is, it has all the liveliness in the sketches of character, and smartness of comic dialogue and repartee, without the tediousness of the story, and endless affectation of sentiment which disfigures the others.

WILLIAM HAZLITT: _Lecture on the English Novelists_, in ‘Lecture on the English Poets, and the English Comic Writers,’ edited by Wm. Carew Hazlitt. London: Bell & Daldy, 1869.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Accused of superficiality.]

She is sometimes accused of being superficial, because she dares so little in the direction of the stronger and deeper passions and interests of human nature. But this criticism is itself superficial: the truer word for her is _reserved_. She shut the door upon the whole range of bold speculation and unconventional feeling, because she considered these things unfit for the novelist, and especially for the female novelist, to treat of. But her own feelings were deep, and her own interests and sympathies were wide; and in drawing her characters, though she seldom attempts to paint much--save in conventional outline--that goes below the surface, she yet shows at all times, by the firmness and consistency of her creations, that she possessed the root of the matter in understanding, if not in creative power and courage of execution.

MARY ELIZABETH CHRISTIE: ‘Miss Burney’s Novels.’

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Her art not the highest.]

We are forced to refuse 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 peculiar oddities of all the rest.

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 these novels than from some exquisite strokes of natural tenderness which take us here and there by surprise.

[Sidenote: Unique position of ‘Evelina.’]

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. 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. 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. 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. 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.’

LORD MACAULAY: ‘Essay on Mme. D’Arblay.’

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Plan of work.]

[Sidenote: Her heroes and heroines.]

The very gift that first made Miss Burney’s reputation now stands in the way of her popularity. She was so completely mistress of the art of letting her personages reveal their own characters, that she could afford to dispense to an unusual extent with the showman’s part. She constructed her personages not from within (as is the modern fashion) but by means of a thousand minute touches showing their conversation and behavior in an infinite variety of such small circumstances as make up the daily round of existence. She positively reveled in descriptive _minutiæ_ of this sort. Nothing was too trivial for her, nothing too intricate in the web of petty embarrassments and mortifications and misunderstandings, that make the sum of a vast majority of human lives, and a tremendous factor of the remainder. Thanks to unusually buoyant spirits and a never-flagging sense of the ridiculous, she was constantly amused where others are only bored; and according to the infallible rule that, given the necessary powers of expression, authors never bore till they are bored themselves, she was able to make amusing to others the commonplace things that afforded entertainment to herself. Moreover, her success in her own day was quite as much due to the fact that her material was commonplace as to the keen perception of character, and the racy humor she displayed in working it up. Only the chosen few might appreciate her literary skill, but it needed no special gifts of culture to enter into the agitations of Evelina’s first ball. However, it is necessary to understand a situation or a character before we can be amused by it. And as nothing in life changes so fast as its surface, the author who gives most pains to the finish of this, is also the first to become obsolete. Fashions in manner and dress and speech are proverbially ephemeral, and except for those in whom the antiquarian taste has been somehow developed, they lose charm and even meaning in passing out of date. Heroes and heroines, whose coats and gowns, and courtesies and bows, are all behind the time, of whom the colloquial talk is a forgotten jargon, and the ceremony as strange as the ritual of a foreign religion, stand no chance in competition with the crowd of ladies and gentlemen who are daily turned out by contemporary novelists, wearing costumes and talking a language of which every fold and every phrase makes a claim upon the reader’s sympathy, and an item in the general index to the author’s meaning. Miss Burney’s personages, once so fashionable and so familiar, have grown strange now that a century has passed over their heads; and though underneath the disguise of their Old World costumes they are still fresh and human, this is a secret only to be discovered at the cost of more careful reading than the modern world is apt to give to novels.

MARY ELIZABETH CHRISTIE: ‘Miss Burney’s Novels.’

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT (GODWIN).

1759-1797.

MARY WOLLSTONECRAFT (GODWIN).

Mary Wollstonecraft was born, it is supposed, in Epping Forest, on the 27th of April, 1759. The unhappy circumstances of her childhood and youth are sufficiently sketched in the following extracts. In 1778 she obtained a position as companion to a widow in Bath, where she continued for two years. In 1780, while the family were residing in Enfield, her mother died, leaving six children: Edward, Mary, Everina, Eliza, James and Charles. The younger ones were all, at some period of their lives, indebted to Mary for sisterly encouragement and pecuniary aid, for which they do not appear to have been duly grateful.

After her mother’s death Mary lived for a short time at the home of her friend, Fanny Blood, at Walham Green, supporting herself by needle-work, but was soon called to the care of her sister Eliza, (then Mrs. Bishop), who was temporarily insane. On Mrs. Bishop’s recovery she left her husband, and the two sisters went to Islington, where they endeavored to live by teaching. In a few months Mary removed to Newington Green, where she was successful in setting up a school. In the autumn of 1785, however, she was summoned to Fanny Blood (then Mrs. Skeys), who was ill in Lisbon; and on her return, after Fanny’s death, she found that it was impossible to regain her pupils. At this time she wrote a small pamphlet called _Thoughts on the Education of Daughters_, for which Mr. Johnson, a bookseller in Fleet Street, gave her ten guineas. She applied the money to the relief of Fanny Blood’s parents. A situation as governess being offered her, she went to Ireland, where she remained until the autumn of 1788; she then came to London to earn her living by her pen. At this period she wrote _Mary_, a tale drawn from her own friendship with Fanny Blood, and not now to be found; _Original Stories from Real Life_, a book for children, published with cuts by William Blake; translated for Mr. Johnson ‘Necker on Religious Opinions,’ Salzman’s ‘Elements of Morality,’ and Lavater’s ‘Physiognomy,’ and contributed to the Analytical Review. In 1791 she put forth an answer to Burke’s ‘Reflections on the French Revolution,’ entitled _A Vindication of the Rights of Man_; this was followed by her _magnum opus_, A VINDICATION OF THE RIGHTS OF WOMAN.

In December, 1792, she went to Paris; was detained there by the state of public affairs; and in 1793 became, says Mr. C. Kegan Paul, “the wife” of Gilbert Imlay. Her modern biographer and defender has chosen thus to mark unmistakably his fine reverence for her purity of motive; but more than half the significance of the tragedy that followed is lost by regarding Mary as Imlay’s wife. Their daughter, Fanny Imlay, was born in the spring of 1794. Imlay gradually disengaged himself from Mary; and on her return to London from a voyage to Norway and Sweden, undertaken to assist him in business affairs, she had poignant proof of his unfaithfulness and his intention to desert her. She attempted to drown herself in the Thames. She was rescued, took up the burden of life again for Fanny’s sake, and lived to marry William Godwin, the author of ‘Caleb Williams’ and ‘Political Justice.’ On the 30th of August, 1797, was born Mary Wollstonecraft Godwin, afterwards the wife of Shelley; and on the 10th of September the mother died.

Mary had previously published (1794) the first volume of _An Historical and Moral View of the Origin and Progress of the French Revolution_, and _Letters Written During a Short Residence in Sweden, Norway and Denmark_. After her death Godwin published _Posthumous Works by the Author of A Vindication, etc._, comprising a horrible unfinished novel called _Maria; or, the Wrongs of Woman_, her LETTERS TO IMLAY, and to her friend, Mr. Johnson, an incomplete tale called _The Cave of Fancy_, an _Essay on Poetry_, a series of _Lessons in Spelling and Reading_, and a few fragmentary _Hints_ on various subjects.

Mary Wollstonecraft has a three-fold claim on our attention. She was “the first of the new genus” of professional literary women, in contradistinction to the old race of “blue-stockings.” She was the author of the VINDICATION, which, despite its faults, is “remarkable as the herald of the demand not even yet wholly conceded by all, that woman should be the equal and friend, not the slave and toy of man.” Lastly, as the writer of the heart-breaking LETTERS TO IMLAY, which, notwithstanding her own views, form, as Lowell has said of her life, “the most powerful argument possible against the doctrine of the ‘Elective Affinities’,”--Mary Wollstonecraft can never be forgotten.

Our mosaic portrait is doubtless far from perfect; yet who shall paint her as she was, without distortion, without idealization? This beautiful woman, with her “Titianesque” coloring, her careless dress, and habits frugal that she might be generous--with her quick temper, sensitiveness, pride, inconsistency, deep personal tenderness; with her melancholy, and her misunderstood religious enthusiasm; this daughter of the Revolution, her strong head crowded with theories--some of them, one would think, to be beaten out of it by all the waves and billows that went over her. But not so; the circumstances of her marriage with Godwin, the tendency of the work done during the brief remainder of her life, show us that we must add tenacity to her characteristics. This creature, now coarse, now fine, now harsh, and now all pity,--who shall explore her strength and weakness, her deeps and shallows? It is natural that in an age better calculated to understand her motives than that in which she lived, a vindicator should have arisen to call up out of the past, by the name of Mary Wollstonecraft, a spirit radiant and purified, like the soul of Ianthe in ‘Queen Mab,’ from every stain of earthliness. But to make the woman herself live before us, as she lived in Paris, in London, in those strange days of the close of the eighteenth century--that would be a task for a pen that has dealt with character under somewhat similar conditions--the pen of Ivan Turgenef.

Like Charlotte Brontë, she at last knew happiness before she died. But thinking of Godwin, “with his great head full of cold brains,” one cannot but wish that the gleam of sunshine at the close of her stormy life had been less “winterly.”

* * * * *

With her very first years Mary Wollstonecraft began a bitter training in the school of experience, which was in no small degree instrumental in developing her character and forming her philosophy. There are few details of her childhood, and no anecdotes indicating a precocious genius. But enough is known of her early life to make us understand what were the principal influences to which she was exposed. Her strength sprang from the very uncongeniality of her home and her successful struggles against the poverty and vice which surrounded her.

[Sidenote: Her parents.]

Her father was a selfish, hot-tempered despot, whose natural bad qualities were aggravated by his dissipated habits. His chief characteristic was his instability. He could persevere in nothing. Apparently brought up to no special profession, he was by turns a gentleman of leisure, a farmer, a man of business. It seems to have been sufficient for him to settle in any one place to almost immediately wish to depart from it. The history of the first fifteen or twenty years of his married life is that of one long series of migrations.

Mrs. Wollstonecraft was her husband’s most abject slave, but was in turn somewhat of a tyrant herself. She approved of stern discipline for the young. She was too indolent to give much attention to the education of her children, and devoted what little energy she possessed to enforcing their unquestioning obedience in trifles, and to making them as afraid of her displeasure as they were of their father’s anger.

[Sidenote: Sad childhood.]

Mary was one of those children whose sad fate it is to weep “in the play-time of the others.” Not even to the David Copperfields and Paul Dombeys of fiction has there fallen a lot so hard to bear and so sad to record, as that of the little Mary Wollstonecraft.... Overflowing with tenderness, she dared not lavish it on the mother who should have been so ready to receive it. Instead of the confidence which should exist between mother and daughter, there was in their case nothing but cold formality. Nor was there for her much compensation in the occasional caresses of her father. Sensitive to a fault, she could not forgive his blows and unkindness so quickly as to be able to enjoy his smiles and favors. Moreover, she had little chance of finding, without, the devotion and gentle care which were denied to her within her own family. Mr. Wollstonecraft remained so short a time in each locality in which he made his home that his wife saw but little of her relations and old acquaintances; while no sooner had his children made new friends, than they were separated from them.

[Sidenote: Friendship with Fanny Blood.]

Mary’s existence up to 1775 had been, save when disturbed by family storms, quiet, lonely, and uneventful. As yet no special incident had occurred in it, nor had she been awakened to intellectual activity. But in Hoxton she contracted a friendship which, though it was with a girl of her own age, was always esteemed by her as the chief and leading event in her existence. This it was which first aroused her love of study and of independence, and opened a channel for the outpouring of her too long suppressed affections. Her love for Fanny Blood was the spark which kindled the latent fire of her genius.... From the moment they met until they were separated by poor Fanny’s untimely death, Mary never wavered in her devotion and its active expression, nor could the vicissitudes and joys of her later life destroy her loving loyalty to the memory of her first and dearest friend. “When a warm heart has strong impressions,” she wrote in a letter long years afterward, “they are not to be effaced. Emotions become sentiments; and the imagination renders even transient sensations permanent, by fondly retracing them. I cannot without a thrill of delight recollect views I have seen, which are not to be forgotten, nor looks I have felt in every nerve, which I shall never more meet. The grave has closed over a dear friend, the friend of my youth; still she is present with me, and I hear her soft voice warbling as I stray over the heath.”

ELIZABETH ROBINS PENNELL: ‘Life of Mary Wollstonecraft.’ (Famous Women Series.) Boston: Roberts Bros., 1884.

* * * * *

[Sidenote: Unfortunate experience.]

It is singularly unfortunate that Mary Wollstonecraft was fated, as it were, to see the unattractive side of almost all the great institutions of society with which she was brought into contact: marriage, education, particularly religious education as administered at Eton, and aristocratic life. Her views on all these subjects were colored by her own personal experiences. She generalized from particulars, and never suspected that such a one-sided view must be partially unfair.