Fanny Burney (Madame D'Arblay)

The match, not the less, was a thoroughly happy one. “Never,” – says Mme. D’Arblay’s niece, – “never was union more blessed and felicitous; though after the first eight years of unmingled happiness, it was assailed by many calamities, chiefly of separation or illness, yet still mentally unbroken.” Pending the arrival of funds for building the cottage in Norbury Park, they went into temporary lodgings in Phenice or Phœnix Farm, and subsequently migrated to what she calls – “a very small house in the suburbs of a very small village called Bookham” – about two miles from Mickleham. Very early in his wedded life M. D’Arblay announced his intention of taking part in the Toulon Expedition; but fortunately for his wife, his services, for reasons which do not appear, were not accepted by the Government. Upon this he settled down quietly to domesticity and gardening – in which he was apparently more energetic than expert. “Abdolonime,”77 writes Mme. D’Arblay to her father after his first visit to the Bookham hermitage, – “ ‘Abdolonime’ [who figures her husband] has no regret but that his garden was not in better order; he was a little piqué, he confesses, that you said it was not very neat– and, to be shor!– but his passion is to do great works: he undertakes with pleasure, pursues with energy, and finishes with spirit, but, then, all is over! He thinks the business once done always done; and to repair, and amend, and weed, and cleanse, – O, these are drudgeries insupportable to him!“ However, he seems to have succeeded in “plantant des choux,” as it is admitted that the Bookham cabbages were remarkable for freshness and flavour; and when La Fayette’s ex-adjutant mowed down the hedge with his sabre, his wife was “the most contente personne in the world” to see that warlike weapon so peaceably employed. Madame herself, after composing a not very persuasive Address to the Ladies of England on behalf of the Emigrant French clergy, was plying her pen upon a new novel and a tragedy. Then, at the close of 1794, – a year which had not been “blemished with one regretful moment,” her activities were interrupted by the birth (Dec. 18) of a son, who was christened Alexandre Charles Louis Piochard, his prénoms being derived from his father, and his godfathers, Dr. Burney junior, and the Count de Narbonne.

The tragedy was the earlier of Mme. D’Arblay’s new works to see the light. She had begun it, she says, at Kew, and she finished it at Windsor (August, 1790), without any specific intention either of production or publication. Having been read by some of her family and friends, it was shown by her brother Charles to John Kemble, who pronounced for its acceptance. A few days before the birth of her son it was suddenly required for Sheridan’s inspection, with the result that, according to the author’s account, it was brought out at Drury Lane without the full revision she intended, and as she subsequently had a seven weeks’ illness, was never in a position, to give it. On the 21st March, 1795, it was played. But not even the Kembles and Mrs. Siddons, aided as they were by Bensley and Palmer, could secure a success for Edwy and Elgiva, nor could the fact that there were no fewer than three Bishops among the dramatis personae, save it from being withdrawn, nominally “for alterations,” after one solitary performance. Mme. D’Arblay quite reasonably attributes some of its ill-fortune to her inability to correct it and superintend the rehearsals; and, in a later letter, which gives an account of its fate, she lays stress upon the very unsatisfactory acting of some of the subordinate performers. But though Edwy and Elgiva was never printed, the ms., which still exists, has been carefully examined by a capable critic, whose report leaves little room for doubt as to the real cause of its faint reception.78 Though at some points there is a certain stir and action, the plot generally lacks incident and movement. But what is said to be fatal is the “incurable poverty of its stilted language, its commonplace sentiments, and its incorrect and inharmonious versification.” The specimens given of the blank verse are certainly of the most unhappy kind. From the fact that the ms. is carefully pencilled with amendments in French and English, it is probable that, just as “Daddy” Crisp had, to the last, believed in Virginia, the author must have continued to believe in Edwy and Elgiva. But though Cumberland – always forgiving to a failure – professed that the players had lent it an ill-name, and offered to risk his life on its success if it were re-cast and submitted to his inspection, it is not likely the audience were radically wrong. What is wonderful is, that Sheridan and Kemble should have accepted it, and that Mrs. Siddons should have consented to play the heroine.

When, a month after the production of Edwy and Elgiva, Warren Hastings, to Mme. D’Arblay’s great delight, was finally acquitted, she was apparently hard at work upon her new novel, with which she makes as rapid progress as is consistent with the absorbing care of the little personage whom she styles the “Bambino,” and to whom she hopes “it may be a little portion.” In June she tells a friend that it has been a long time in hand, and will be published in about a year. But, owing to the expenses of the press, she has now – money being a very definite object – decided to act upon the advice, formerly given to her by Burke, and to print by subscription. “This is in many – many ways,” she writes, “unpleasant and unpalatable to us both; but the chance of real use and benefit to our little darling overcomes all scruples, and, therefore, to work we go.” The Honble. Mrs. Boscawen, Mrs. Crewe and Mrs. Locke consented to keep the subscription books. The result of this contrivance, which Dr. Burney (who was generally unfortunate as an adviser) did not at first approve, was a complete pecuniary success. Camilla; or, a Picture of Youth, was issued in the middle of 1796, in five volumes, 8vo., with a list of subscribers rivalling that of Prior to the poems of 1718. It occupies thirty-eight pages; and the whole is headed by the Duchess of York, and the Duke of Gloucester. The volumes are dedicated, from Bookham, to the Queen, who, when they were presented to her at Windsor by Mme. D’Arblay and her husband in person, repaid the compliment by a purse of one hundred guineas from herself and the King. Many persons took more than one copy. Warren Hastings interested himself specially for his staunch adherent, and engaged to attack the East Indies on her behalf. Burke, a sad and mourning man, who had lost both son and brother, subscribed nevertheless for them, as well as for his wife, sending £20 for a single copy; three of the Miss Thrales took ten copies, Mrs. Piozzi two, and so forth. It would be idle to select further names; but two are of special interest. One is that of “Miss J. Austen, Steventon”; the other that of the sworn adversary of “what you call stuff,” Mrs. Schwellenberg, who with Miss Planta and Miss Goldsworthy rallied round an old colleague. The names of Colonel Digby and his wife are significantly absent.79 The result of all this effort was encouraging. About a month after publication Dr. Burney told Horace Walpole that his daughter had made £2000; and three months after publication only five hundred copies remained out of four thousand. The selling price was one guinea, so that Macaulay’s estimate that the author “cleared more than three thousand guineas” is, – allowing for fancy payments and the Queen’s douceur, and deducting for the cost of publication, – probably below the mark upon this occasion.

Camilla, however, could not be called a literary success, even by its contemporaries, and certainly was not an advance upon the writer’s previous works. Horace Walpole, who had regretted the live-burial of the author’s talents in the Windsor antechambers, was too frank to disguise his disappointment. He had not cared for Cecilia as much as Evelina: he thought the “deplorable Camilla” infinitely worse than Cecilia. “Madame D’Arblay,” – he wrote to Hannah More in August, 1796, – had “reversed experience.” She had known the world and penetrated character before she had stepped over the threshold, “and, now she had seen so much of it, she had little or no insight at all.” This, of course, did not prevent the Monthly Review from politely comparing her to Homer, – both for occasionally nodding and for the peculiar distinctness and propriety of her delineations of character. But though Mme. D’Arblay still deserves the praise which Burke had formerly given to her, and which the Monthly Review repeats, of assigning “to each person a language of his own, and preserving it uniformly through the work,” the maze of misapprehensions which encompass the loves of Camilla Tyrold and Edgar Mandlebert grows sadly tedious, and the book, it must be confessed, is difficult reading. Whether, if it had been written in the style of Evelina, it would have been more attractive, is impossible to say: the style in which it is in great part written, by reason of its absurd roundabout pomposity, is simply unendurable. “Where opinion may humour systematic prepossession, who shall build upon his virtue or wisdom to guard the transparency of his impartiality” – is one of the sentences which even Mr. Griffiths’ review is forced to characterise as “singularly obscure.” Obscure it certainly is; but it is not by any means single, for there are other passages to pattern. For this extraordinary degradation of manner various reasons have been assigned. It has been ascribed to recollections of Johnson, – to imitation of Dr. Burney, – to the influence of a French husband, – to the inflation superinduced upon a court appointment. There is another cause that has not been mentioned, which we suspect had more to do with the matter than any of the things suggested. This is, that Mme. D’Arblay had recently been engaged in the composing of much indifferent blank verse; and like other distinguished authors, she fell insensibly into this laboured style whenever she had anything to say in her own person which she regarded as unusually fine. And it is curious that the manner must have been adopted de parti pris, for, as the “Abdolonime” quotation on an earlier page almost suffices to show, she was, at this very time, writing easy and graphic letters to her friends. But apart from the style, and the fact that the personages reproduce, in many instances, the earlier types, there is still humour and careful character-drawing in the Orkbornes and Dubsters and Clarendels of Camilla. And even the impatient modern may care to remember that in Chapter V. of Northanger Abbey Jane Austen does not scruple to couple it with Cecilia and Miss Edgeworth’s Belinda in terms of enthusiastic praise; and that Charles Lamb himself, in a sonnet to Fanny’s novelist step-sister Sarah Harriet, referring to her elder as —

        “renowned for many a taleOf faithful love perplexed” —

goes on to commend specially the character of Sir Hugh Tyrold —

                  “that good  Old man, who, as Camilla’s guardian, stoodIn obstinate virtue clad like coat of mail.”80

At the close of 1796 Mme. D’Arblay lost her step-mother. By this time she was apparently engaged in converting the gains from Camilla into bricks and mortar. Upon a piece of land in a field at West Humble, leased to her husband by Mr. Locke of Norbury,81 they built a cottage, to which, at Dr. Burney’s suggestion, they gave the name of the novel;82 and the letters at this date are full of the activities of M. D’Arblay, who was his own sole architect and surveyor, in planning his new garden, digging a well, and constructing a sunk fence to prevent the inroads of the domestic (and prospective) cow. As may be anticipated, the cost of building largely exceeded the estimate. “Our new habitation” – she writes in August, 1797 – “will very considerably indeed exceed our first intentions and expectations”; and not much remained when the bills for Camilla Cottage were discharged. The expenses of living in war time, too, were exceptionally heavy, and various expedients were suggested to replenish the pot-au-feu, including the liberal planting of potatoes in every corner of the little property. It was perhaps wise that under this pressure Mme. D’Arblay did not fall in with Mrs. Crewe’s proposal that she should edit an Anti-Jacobin journal to be styled The Breakfast Table. But she again attempted the stage with a comedy called Love and Fashion, which, in 1799, was actually accepted and put into rehearsal by Harris of Covent Carden. Dr. Burney, however, had set his heart upon fiction. It was in vain that his daughter protested that all her life she had been urged to write a comedy, and that to write a comedy was her ambition. Moreover, that the incidents and effects for a drama occurred to her, and the combinations for a long work did not. Her father was seized with a panic of failure, and early in 1800 Love and Fashion was hastily withdrawn. Before this took place, Mme. D’Arblay had the misfortune to lose her sister, Mrs. Phillips, who since 1796 had been resident in Ireland. She died on the 6th January, when on her way to visit her relations. In 1801, the preliminaries for the short-lived Peace of Amiens having been signed, and the difficulties of the domestic situation being urgent, M. D’Arblay decided to return to France, hoping vaguely, first, to recover his lost property, and, secondly, to obtain from Napoleon something in the nature of a recognition of his past military services. Ultimately, having stipulated that he should not be called upon to serve against his wife’s country, and having besides pledged himself to the Alien office, when obtaining his passport, not to return to that country for a year, he found himself in the double predicament of getting nothing, and being obliged to remain in France, whither he accordingly summoned his bonne amie and his son.

Mme. D’Arblay expected to have been able to come back to her father in eighteen months: she stayed in France ten years. During this period she resided with her husband at Passy. Their means, in the absence of remittances from England, which had practically ceased with the renewal of the war, consisted, primarily, of a small military retraite, or retiring allowance, of 1500 francs per annum (£62, 10s.), and later of a modest income earned by M. D’Arblay as a rédacteur and afterwards sous-chef in the Civil Department of les Bâtiments (Ministère de l’Intérieur). The post was no sinecure, and carried him to Paris daily from about half-past eight to half-past five. But he was treated by his chiefs with exemplary good feeling and consideration; and although, for lack of funds, only three rooms of the little home in the Rue Basse were finished and furnished, the husband and wife were perfectly happy. “Our view is extremely pretty from it [Paris on one side; the country on the other], and always cheerful; we rarely go out, yet always are pleased to return. We have our books, our prate, and our boy – how, with all this, can we, or ought we, to suffer ourselves to complain of our narrowed and narrowing income?” This was written in April, 1804. In 1810, they have apparently moved to Paris, for she dates from the Rue D’Anjou; and is rejoicing over the adopted friends she has found in her adopted country. “The society in which I mix, when I can prevail with myself to quit my yet dearer fireside, is all that can be wished, whether for wit, wisdom, intelligence, gaiety or politeness.” M. D’Arblay, says the same letter, is well, and at his office, where he is sadly overworked; and their son, now a youth of fifteen, with mathematical gifts, is preparing, at the same table, an exercise for his master. He is thin, pale and strong – we are told elsewhere; – but terribly sauvage, and singularly “averse to all the forms of society. Where he can have got such a rebel humour we conceive not; but it costs him more to make a bow than to resolve six difficult problems of algebra, or to repeat twelve pages from Euripides; and as to making a civil speech, he would sooner renounce the world.”83

In 1810 M. D’Arblay yielded to his wife’s desire to visit her friends in England. Everything had been done, and M. de Narbonne had procured her passport from the terrible Fouché, when a sudden embargo blocked all departures from the coast, and she was unable to start. In the following year she was operated upon for “a menace of cancer” by Napoleon’s famous surgeon, Baron de Larrey, a trial which, according to her niece, she bore with such fortitude as to earn, in her French circle, the name of L’Ange. In 1812 she made another, and a more successful, attempt to reach England. The necessity was then growing urgent, as her son was seventeen, and liable soon to a conscription which would have forced him to do the very thing his father had endeavoured to avoid, – namely, to fight the English. Mme. D’Arblay and young Alexandre, after waiting six weeks vainly at Dunkirk, at last landed at Deal in August. Many things had happened in her ten years’ absence. The King was now hopelessly mad; the Princess Amelia was dead; Mr. Twining was dead, as was also Mr. Locke of Norbury. She found her father sadly aged and broken, and indeed almost entirely confined to his bed-room. But she had plenty to occupy her during her stay. First, there was the settling of her son at Cambridge, where, having gained the Tancred scholarship, he began residence at Christ’s College in October 1813. Then there was the completion and publication of a new book, of which nearly three volumes out of five had been finished before she quitted France. Already, from Paris, she had been attempting some informal negotiations as to this, for Byron had heard of its existence. “My bookseller, Cawthorne,” – he wrote to Harness in Dec. 1811, – “has just left me, and tells me, with a most important face, that he is in treaty for a novel of Madame D’Arblay’s, for which 1000 guineas are asked! He wants me to read the MS. (if he obtains it), which I shall do with pleasure; but I should be very cautious in venturing an opinion on her whose Cecilia Dr. Johnson superintended.84 If he lends it to me, I shall put it into the hands of Rogers and M[oor]e, who are truly men of taste.” Three days later, he repeats the story to Hodgson; but the amount has grown to 1500 guineas.

The best one can say about The Wanderer; or, Female Difficulties, issued in March 1814, is, that it brought grist to the mill. It was not published by subscription like Camilla;85 but Mme. D’Arblay herself tells us that 3600 copies were “positively sold and paid for” at the “rapacious price” of two guineas each in six months. From a literary point of view the book was an utter failure. It “was apparently never read by anybody,” observes Sir Leslie Stephen; and Macaulay says that “no judicious friend to the author’s memory will attempt to draw it from the oblivion into which it has justly fallen.” Even Mme. D’Arblay’s most faithful editor and admirer, Mrs. Ellis, makes open and heartfelt thanksgiving that it is not her duty to read it again. After these discouraging opinions from critics not unfriendly, it is scarcely surprising to learn that The Wanderer was attacked with unusual severity in the Quarterly for April, 1814; or that Hazlitt should, in the Edinburgh for February, 1815, make it the sorry pretext for that admirable survey of the national fiction which he afterwards converted into No. vi. of his Lectures on the English Comic Writers. Hazlitt earned, as has already been told in chapter i., the disapprobation of honest James Burney for his treatment of Mme. D’Arblay’s final effort. Yet it is notable that the critic blames The Wanderer, not for “decay of talent, but a perversion of it.” It is impossible to say as much now. The book, in truth, is wearisome, and its “difficulties” are unreal. The reason for its first success is, we suspect, to be traced to the cause suggested by Mme. D’Arblay herself, namely, the prevailing expectation that its pages would present a picture of contemporary and revolutionary France, where, it was known, the writer had been residing; and that this led to a number of copies being freely bespoken. When the real nature of its theme – the trivial and improbable adventures, in England, of a female refugee during the reign of Robespierre – was fully appreciated, the sale immediately fell off. Were it not futile, it would be interesting to speculate whether, had The Wanderer taken the place of Evelina in the order of Mme. D’Arblay’s productions, it would have succeeded at all, even in the absence of rivals. But it is a curious instance of the irony of circumstance that a book which nobody could read should have brought more than £7000 to somebody in the year in which Miss Edgeworth published Patronage, and Miss Austen, Mansfield Park. It is also more curious still, that in this very year Constable could not see his way to risk more than £700 on the copyright of an anonymous novel entitled Waverley; or, ’tis Sixty Years Since.

The Preface or Dedication to The Wanderer, from which some quotations have already been made during the progress of this volume, is dated 14 March, 1814. On the 12 April following, Dr. Burney died, being nursed tenderly by his daughter Fanny during his last illness. He had attained his eighty-eighth year, and since 1806 had enjoyed a pension of £300 per annum. One of the last distinctions of his busy career, which he had latterly occupied with a Life of Metastasio and contributions to Rees’ Cyclopædia, was that of Correspondent to the Institute of France, the diploma for which Mme. D’Arblay brought with her from Paris. A tablet was erected to his memory in Westminster Abbey. Not long after his death, his daughter had the honour of being presented, in England, to Louis xviii., who received her effusively, complimenting her, “in very pretty English,” upon her writings, and bidding her farewell at last under the style of “Madame la Comtesse.”86 This was in April, 1814, after the taking of Paris, and the abdication of Buonaparte. A short time subsequently M. D’Arblay arrived from the French capital. He received a commission from the Duc de Luxembourg as Sous-Lieutenant in the Corps de Garde, and was restored to his old rank as Maréchal de Camp. He came to England on leave later in the same year, and took his wife back with him to France. Then followed the return of Buonaparte from Elba; and in March, 1815, Mme. D’Arblay took flight for Brussels. Some time afterwards she wrote from memory a narrative of the Hundred Days (March 20 to June 28), which has interest, but not the interest of a journal, although it is supposed to have supplied Thackeray with hints for the Brussels chapters of Vanity Fair. In July of the same year, General D’Arblay, while attempting, at Trèves, to raise a troop of refugees, received a kick from an unbroken horse. The accident was made worse by unskilled surgery; and having now, like his wife, passed his sixtieth year, he was placed on the retired list, with the title of Lieutenant-General, and received permission to settle in England. Three years later (3 May, 1818), he died at Bath, being buried in Walcot churchyard.87 General D’Arblay is one of the most delightful figures in his wife’s Diary. A true militaire– as Susan Burney called him – he is also a typical specimen of the old pre-revolutionary régime, courteous, cheerful, amiable, and as dignified in ill-fortune as he is patient under poverty.

The remaining occurrences of Mme. D’Arblay’s life may be rapidly related. At Bath, in 1817 she had renewed her acquaintance with Mrs. Piozzi. At Ilfracombe, in the same year, she had a narrow escape from drowning, being surprised by the rising of the tide when she was searching for curiosities. After M. D’Arblay’s death she moved to 11, Bolton Street, Piccadilly, which bears a Society of Arts tablet in testimony of her residence there. It was at Bolton Street that she was visited by Sir Walter Scott, who describes her in his Journal for Nov. 18, 1826. Rogers took him. He found her an elderly lady (she was then seventy-four), “with no remains of personal beauty, but with a gentle manner and a pleasing expression of countenance. She told me she had wished to see two persons – myself, of course, being one; the other, George Canning. This was really a compliment to be pleased with – a nice little handsome pat of butter made up by a neat-handed Phillis of a dairymaid, instead of the grease, fit only for cart-wheels, which one is dosed with by the pound.” She told him the story of Evelina, and the mulberry tree episode.88 “I trust I shall see this lady again,” writes Scott; “she has simple and apparently amiable manners, with quick feelings.”89 He did see her again, two years later, and again with Rogers, when she showed him some notes which she induced him to believe had been recollected and jotted down in compliance with his suggestion on the former occasion. This was in May 1828.90