Whatever view may be taken of the effect of Miss Burney’s life at Court upon her literary prospects, it was allowed by King George that she had sacrificed something. “It is but her due,” said that amiable monarch, referring to the Queen’s intention of granting her late Keeper of Robes a retiring allowance. “She has given up five years of her pen.” A hundred pounds per annum may not, it is true, seem much; but considering the amount of Miss Burney’s salary, and the brief duration of her service, it was not illiberal. And it came out of the Queen’s pocket. “It is solely from me to you,”—Her Majesty told her, adding other friendly expressions of farewell. This pension, or retiring allowance,—as far as we know,—Miss Burney continued to receive for the greater part of her life, which lasted forty-eight years more. That this is also the period comprised in the present chapter, may appear—at first sight—to suggest a certain hurry at the close. But the fault lies with the material, not with the limits of the volume. After Miss Burney’s resignation, and her marriage two years later, the events of her career, as well as the record of them, grow less interesting. She wrote tragedies, one of which was produced, and failed. She wrote a comedy, which was never produced at all. She wrote—mainly for money—two novels, which were commercial successes but added nothing to her reputation. Finally, in extreme old age, she wrote Memoirs of her father, which have been over-abused, but which cannot conscientiously be praised. Such are the leading facts of her literary life from the 7th July, 1791,—the day she quitted St. James’s Palace,—to her death in 1840.

For a week or two she remained at home,—home being now Chelsea College, where her father was domiciled. Then her kind friend, Mrs. Ord, carried her off on a four months’ tour to recruit. “She rambled”—in Macaulay’s picturesque phrases—“by easy journeys from cathedral to cathedral, and from watering-place to watering-place. She crossed the New Forest, and visited Stonehenge and Wilton, the cliffs of Lyme, and the beautiful valley of Sidmouth. Thence she journeyed by Powderham Castle, and by the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey, to Bath, and from Bath, when the winter was approaching, returned well and cheerful to London.”^[70] By this time it was the middle of October. Her father had anxiously awaited her coming, not without hope that she would forthwith resume her literary pursuits. Resume them indeed she did, but fitfully, working chiefly at tragedies, two of which she had roughly sketched at Windsor. To these she now added a third. “I go on with various writings,” she says at the close of 1791, “at different times, and just as the humour strikes. I have promised my dear father a Christmas Box, and a New Year’s gift upon my return from Norbury Park, and therefore he now kindly leaves me to my own devices.” But social functions, as in the post-Cecilian days, began to exercise their old attraction; and, in her Diary, we frequently trace her at places which were not those haunts of study and imagination, the great and little “Grubberies” at Chelsea. She visits poor Sir Joshua, now nearly blind, with bandaged and green-shaded eyes, and fast nearing his end.^[71] “ ‘I am very glad,’ he said, in a meek voice and dejected accent, ‘to see you again, and I wish I could see you better! but I have only one eye now—and hardly that.’ ” She visits Buckingham House periodically, and even looks in upon “Cerbera,” who is unexpectedly cordial, though she has evidently not forgiven her old colleague for declining to die at her post. During the temporary lameness of her successor, Mlle. Jacobi, Miss Burney goes so far as to resume her attendance for two days, only to be amply assured, by that brief experience, of the peril she has escaped. “Indeed,”—she says,—“I was half dead with only two days’ and nights’ exertion.” She goes again to the ever-during Hastings trial,^[72] renewing her relations with Windham; she goes to a public breakfast at Mrs. Montagu’s in Portman Square, and sees the Feather Room, referred to in chapter iv. “It was like a full Ranelagh by daylight,” she writes; and among other guests she meets Sophy Streatfield, no longer the peerless “S.S.” of yore, but faded, and sad, and changed. Another visit she mentions is to Mrs. Crewe at Hampstead. Mrs. Crewe, it will be remembered, was the daughter of Fanny’s godmother, Mrs. Greville. Here she listens to Burke’s praise of her dead friend, Mrs. Delany, whom he affirms to have been “a real fine lady”—“the model of an accomplished woman of former times”; and she reads with her hostess the newly published Pleasures of Memory of Mr. Samuel Rogers.

The close of 1792 was saddened by the sudden death of Miss Burney’s brother-in-law, Mr. Francis of Aylsham,—an event which detained her for some time in Norfolk. It is about this time, too, that we begin to hear of the French refugees whose arrival in this country, previous to the execution of Louis the Sixteenth, was to exercise so important an influence upon Fanny’s fortunes. The letters of Mrs. Phillips from Mickleham are much occupied with these illustrious exiles. There is the Duc de Liancourt, who has escaped to England in a small boat covered with faggots; there is Mme. de Broglie, who has taken a little cottage hard by in the hamlet of West Humble. There is a group who have clubbed to rent Juniper Hall—a delightful and still existent house on the road between Mickleham and Burford Bridge. This group, or syndicate, consists of Count Louis de Narbonne, ex-Minister of War; of the Marquise de la Châtre and her son; of M. de Montmorency, “a ci-devant Duc”; of M. de Jaucourt; and afterwards of Mme. de Staël, and M. Ch. Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, late Bishop of Autun,—not yet the terrible old man of Maclise’s sketch and Rossetti’s scathing description,^[73] but a dignified personage of eight-and-thirty. Finally there was M. de Narbonne’s friend, M. Alexandre D’Arblay, an artillery officer, maréchal de camp and former adjutant-general to La Fayette. On the night of the flight to Varennes he had been on guard at the Tuileries. With all these pathetic figures of exile, the waif and stray of a fallen Constitution, Mrs. Phillips, with her French traditions and education, was delighted; but particularly with the last. “He seems to me”—she writes to Fanny in November—“a true militaire, franc et loyal—open as the day—warmly affectionate to his friends—intelligent, ready, and amusing in conversation, with a great share of gaieté de cœur, and at the same time, of naïveté and bonne foi.” Further, he was announced to be about forty, tall, with a good figure, and a frank and manly countenance. Like his friend, Narbonne, he had lost almost everything, but what Narbonne had left they were to share. “Quoique ce soit, nous le partagerons ensemble,” he said. “Je ne m’en fais pas le moindre scrupule, puisque nous n’avons eu qu’un intérêt commun, et nous nous sommes toujours aimés comme frères.”

Early in January, having duly presented herself at Buckingham House on the Queen’s Birthday, Fanny set out for Norbury Park, arriving just after the news of the execution of Louis the Sixteenth, an event which of course overwhelmed her. With her quick sympathies, she was soon absorbed by the interesting tenants of Junipère, as they called it; and they, on their side, were equally interested in the author of Cecilia.^[74] Mme. de Staël, who was now at the head of the little French colony, was especially amiable to the lady whom she designates “la première femme d’Angleterre”; and Fanny seems to have been delighted from the first with Narbonne and his friend. M. D’Arblay—she tells her father—“is one of the most delightful characters I have ever met, for openness, probity, intellectual knowledge, and unhackneyed manners.” Very soon she is being pressed by Mme. de Staël—who is as ardent as Mrs. Thrale—to come and stay at Juniper. Concurrently, M. D’Arblay, who, in addition to his other good qualities, turns out to be “passionately fond of literature, a most delicate critic in his own language, well versed in both Italian and German, and a very elegant poet,”^[75] undertakes to teach her French in return for lessons in English. Dr. Burney, who received these confidences (per favour of M. de Talleyrand en route to his too expensive lodgings in Woodstock Street), and no doubt recollected the similar relations of Sir Charles Grandison and Clementina, must have foreseen the result—not without misgiving. He did not like Talleyrand; there was gossip afloat about Narbonne and Mme. de Staël; and at length, when “this enchanting M. D’Arblay” (as Fanny calls him to Mrs. Locke) openly expressed what was no doubt a genuine affection for his daughter, he was naturally averse from a match which promised so little, as the gentleman had no prospect of regaining his lost fortune, and Fanny had only her pension and her pen. But romance, and the world, were, as usual, against common sense; and after retreating for a little “maiden meditation” to Chessington, whither she was promptly followed by her lover, Fanny was eventually married to M. D’Arblay at Mickleham Church on the 31st July, 1793, Captain Burney, in the absence of his father, giving her away. Owing to the bridegroom’s being a Roman Catholic, the ceremony was, on the following day, repeated at the chapel of the Sardinian Ambassador in London—the object being that, if by any chance M. D’Arblay came to his own again, his wife might not be debarred from participation. Their means for the present were limited to Fanny’s pension, which, it had been feared, might be withdrawn. This fear, however, must have been removed. Mr. Locke gave them a site for a cottage in Norbury Park, adding cheerfully that after all, £100 per annum was but the income of many curates. But the view of the outsiders is expressed by Miss Maria Josepha Holroyd in a letter to her friend Miss Firth. “I must desire you”—she writes—“to wonder at Miss Burney’s marriage if I have not mentioned it before. She met with Monsieur D’Arblay at Mr. Locke’s, therefore probably Mme. de Staël was in the secret.” . . . “He [M. D’Arblay] is even worse off than many other Emigrants, who have at least a futurity of Order in France to look forward to. But this man is disinherited by his father, for the part he took in politics, having followed LaFayette on his Étât Major. Miss Burney has nothing but the 100l from the Queen. Should you not have formed a better opinion of the author of Cecilia?”^[76]

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—

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

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]

From 1828 to 1832 she busied herself in putting together the Memoirs of Dr. Burney, which appeared in the latter year. They are based, with slight exceptions, on her father’s own mss., drawn up in 1807 and afterwards, and on her own unprinted diaries and personal recollections. She herself was eighty when they were published, and her style had not improved with age. For the present generation, these records have been superseded by the publication of the original diaries and letters upon which in part they were based; but when they were issued in 1832, their memories and anecdotes were new to the public, who were not so impatient of their other defects as are later readers. Southey, indeed, to whom the volumes were sent by the author’s son, was unreserved in his praise. He wrote from Keswick that Evelina had not given him more pleasure when he was a schoolboy than these memoirs had given him now, and that was saying a good deal. “Except Boswell’s”—he went on—“there is no other work in our language which carries us into such society, and makes us fancy that we are acquainted with the people to whom we are there introduced.” But Croker, whom she had declined to assist with material for his edition of Boswell, made the Memoirs the subject of malignant attack in the Quarterly for April, 1833. Mme. D’Arblay—we are given to understand—was seriously pained by the imputation of unveracity contained in this article; and she might well be hurt on other grounds. The duties of reviewers are not always pleasant to perform; and Croker might plead, in defence of his ungallant inquisition into the author’s age, that, like Rousseau, he was simply actuated by the love of truth; but to say of a blameless and inoffensive old lady of eighty, who might certainly claim indulgence for imperfect recollection, that her style could not have been “more feeble, anile, incoherent, or ‘sentant plus l’apoplexie,’ ” is surely to write oneself down both cruel and contemptible.

One of the rare references to Mme. D’Arblay at this date is contained in Disraeli’s letters to his sister. “Contarini,” he writes, “seems universally liked, but moves slowly. The staunchest admirer I have in London, and the most discerning appreciator of Contarini, is old Madame D’Arblay. I have a long letter, which I will show you,—capital!” This was written in July, 1832. In 1837 Mme. D’Arblay had the misfortune to lose her son. Since she had placed him at Cambridge in 1813, he had done well. He had graduated in 1818 as tenth Wrangler; and though handicapped by a French education, became a Fellow of his College (Christ’s). Having taken orders in 1819, he was made, in 1836, minister of Ely Chapel, Holborn. He was preparing to marry, when he succumbed suddenly to influenza in January, 1837. His mother did not long survive him. Two years later, she was attacked by an illness, which was accompanied by spectral illusions; and, on January 6, 1840, being then in her eighty-eighth year, she died, at Lower Grosvenor Street, New Bond Street, and was buried by the side of her husband and son at Walcot. The prettiest story of her last days is told by Rogers. It is à propos of the well-known lines which begin—

and end—

“Sitting with Madame D’Arblay some time before she died, I [Rogers] said to her, ‘Do you remember those lines of Mrs. Barbauld’s Life, which I once repeated to you?’ ‘Remember them,’ she replied; ‘I repeat them to myself every night before I go to sleep.’ ”^[91]

In 1842, two years after Mme. D’Arblay’s death, the first five volumes of her Diary and Letters were issued. These, like the Memoirs of Dr. Burney, were savagely assailed by Croker in the Quarterly in an article which had the good fortune to provoke a masterly retort in the Edinburgh from Lord Macaulay. Modern research has rectified some of the minor details, and modern criticism may dissent from some of the deductions, in this famous counterblast. But though no doubt prompted by antagonism to Mme. D’Arblay’s assailant in the rival review, and though strongly coloured by the writer’s political opinions, it remains, and must remain, a memorable tribute to the author of Evelina and Cecilia.

To Lord Macaulay’s essay, indeed, and to its periodical reproduction in fresh editions of his works, is probably due most of Mme. D’Arblay’s existing reputation as a novelist. And that reputation rests almost exclusively upon her first two productions, Evelina and Cecilia. We doubt if the piety of the enthusiast could ever revive—or rather create—the slightest interest in The Wanderer; or that any but the fanatics of the out-of-date, or the student of manners, could conscientiously struggle through Camilla. Works of genius, it is true, are occasionally born out of due time, and consequently fail of the recognition they deserve from their contemporaries, only to attain it eventually either through the insight of the independent critic, or the better knowledge of after ages. But these were not the circumstances of Camilla and The Wanderer. Both books were circulated freely among an audience not only specially qualified to judge, but also specially well-disposed; and if, with these advantages, they could not succeed in obtaining approbation, it is idle to attempt to revive them now. With Cecilia and Evelina, the case is different. They stand on their merits. And their merits are undeniable. It is true that—as Walpole said—Cecilia is too long; but its crowd of characters is very skilfully varied, and many of them, as Briggs, Albany, Mr. Delville, Mrs. Harrel, Mr. Monckton, are drawn with marked ability. And though the book has less freshness than its predecessor, it has more constructive power and greater certainty of hand. Mme. D’Arblay’s masterpiece, however, is Evelina. This she wrote because she must,—neither preoccupied with her public nor her past;^[92]—and throughout this book penned for amusement in Newton’s old observatory, one never catches, as in Cecilia, the creak of the machinery, or fancies, in the background, the paternal voice pressing for prompt publication. It is perhaps difficult for a modern reader to be impressed by the sentiments of the excellent Mr. Villars, still less to “blubber,” like Dr. Burney, over Sir John Belmont’s heroics; but, in spite of youthful exaggerations and faults of taste, it is still possible to admire the vivacity with which Miss Anville narrates her experiences, embarrassments, and social trepidations. It is also possible to comprehend something of the unparalleled enthusiasm produced by the opportune appearance of Evelina’s history in a dead season of letters—by its freedom from taint of immorality, its unfeigned fun and humour, and its unhackneyed descriptions of humanity. One can easily conceive how welcome these latter characteristics must have been to a public sickened and depressed by the “inflammatory tales” and “sentimental frippery”^[93] of the circulating libraries. Evelina, moreover, marks a definite deviation in the progress of the national fiction. Leaving Fielding’s breezy and bustling highway, leaving the analytic hothouse of Richardson, it carries the novel of manners into domestic life, and prepares the way for Miss Edgeworth and the exquisite parlour-pieces of Miss Austen.

Of the Memoirs of Dr. Burney, it is not necessary to say much more than has already been said. Although, as we have seen, Southey could praise them warmly,—to be sure, he was acknowledging a complimentary copy,—Macaulay declares that they were received with “a cry of disgust,” which a later writer converts into “a scream of derision.” Yet is must nevertheless be admitted that they contain much in the way of letters, documents, and anecdote which the student cannot well neglect; and it should be observed that it is in the connecting passages that the writer’s “peculiar rhetoric” is most manifest. The curious expedients she adopts to avoid using the personal pronoun; and the catenated phrases to which Croker objected, and which he unkindly emphasised by hyphens (e.g. “the yet very handsome though no longer in her bloom, Mrs. Stephen Allen,” “the sudden, at the moment, though from lingering illnesses often previously expected death, of Mrs. Burney”),—are certainly amusing; as is also the nebulous magniloquence of passages like the following, not, it may be added, an exceptional specimen:—“This sharp infliction, however, though it ill recompensed his ethereal flight, by no means checked his literary ambition; and the ardour which was cooled for gazing at the stars, soon seemed doubly re-animated for the music of the spheres.” But what is more extraordinary than these utterances is, that Mme. D’Arblay seems herself to have had no suspicion of their extravagance, since we find her, even after the publication of The Wanderer, gravely enjoining her son to avoid overstrained expression, not to labour to embellish his thoughts, and above all, to “be natural.”^[94]

Happily for her readers, the Diary—to which we now come—is not written in the pernicious style of the Memoirs of Dr. Burney. Even in those parts of it which were composed after Cecilia and Camilla, it is still clear, fluent, and unaffected. Now and then, perhaps,—as in the quotation on Burke’s oratory at p. 160,—there is a sense of effort; but in general, the manner is delightful. Why Macaulay, who praised the Diary so much, did not praise it more,—did not, in fact, place it high above Mme. D’Arblay’s efforts as a novelist,—is hard to comprehend. It has all the graphic picturesqueness, all the dramatic interest, all the objective characterisation, all the happy faculty of “making her descriptions alive” (as “Daddy” Crisp had said),—which constitute the charm of the best passages in Evelina. But it has the further advantage that it is true; and that it deals with real people. King George and Queen Charlotte, Mrs. Schwellenberg and M. de Guiffardière, Johnson and Reynolds, Burke and Garrick, Sheridan, Cumberland, Mrs. Thrale, Mrs. Delany, Omai and Count Orloff—stand before us in their habits as they lived, and we know them more intimately than Mr. Briggs, believe in them more implicitly than in Captain Mirvan, and laugh at them more honestly than at “Madam French.” The Diary of Mme. D’Arblay deserves to rank with the great diaries of literature. It is nothing that it is egotistical, for egotism is of its essence: it is nothing that it is minute, its minuteness enforces the impression. It gives us a gallery of portraits which speak and move; and a picture of society which we recognise as substantially true to life.