The Dangers of Sensibility
“Above all, my dear Emily, said he, do not indulge in the pride of fine feeling, the romantic error of amiable minds. Those who really possess sensibility ought early to be taught that it is a dangerous quality, which is continually extracting the excess of misery or delight from every surrounding circumstance. And since, in our passage through this world, painful circumstances occur more frequently than pleasing ones, and since our sense of evil is, I fear, more acute than our sense of good, we become the victim of our feelings, unless we can in some degree command them. I know you will say—for you are young, my Emily—I know you will say, that you are contented sometimes to suffer, rather than give up your refined sense of happiness at others; but when your mind has been long harassed by vicissitude, you will be content to rest, and you will then recover from your delusion: you will perceive that the phantom of happiness is exchanged for the substance; for happiness arises in a state of peace, not of tumult: it is of a temperate and uniform nature; and can no more exist in a heart that is continually alive to minute circumstances than in one that is dead to feeling. You see, my dear, that, though I would guard you against the dangers of sensibility, I am not an advocate for apathy. At your age, I should have said that is a vice more hateful than all the errors of sensibility, and I say so still. I call it a vice, because it leads to positive evil. In this, however, it does no more than an ill-governed sensibility, which, by such a rule, might also be called a vice; but the evil of the former is of more general consequence....
“I would not teach you to become insensible, if I could—I would only warn you of the evils of susceptibility, and point out how you may avoid them. Beware, my love, I conjure you, of that self-delusion which has been fatal to the peace of many persons—beware of priding yourself on the gracefulness of sensibility: if you yield to this vanity, your happiness is lost for ever. Always remember how much more valuable is the strength of fortitude, than the grace of sensibility. Do not, however, confound fortitude with apathy: apathy cannot know the virtue. Remember, too, that one act of beneficence, one act of real usefulness, is worth all the abstract sentiment in the world. Sentiment is a disgrace, instead of an ornament, unless it lead us to good actions: the miser, who thinks himself respectable merely because he possesses wealth, and thus mistakes the means of doing good for the actual accomplishment of it, is not more blameable than the man of sentiment without active virtue. You may have observed persons, who delight so much in this sort of sensibility to sentiment, that they turn from the distressed, and because their sufferings are painful to be contemplated, do not endeavour to relieve them. How despicable is that humanity which can be contented to pity where it might assuage!”
And we are finally disposed to question whether Miss Burney herself were actually conscious of the subtlety with which she has allowed her heroine to reveal, in every sentence, the scarcely perceptible advance of her unsuspected “partiality.” The reader, of course, recognises Orville at sight for what he proves to be in the final event; but he frequently reminds us of Sir Charles Grandison—and in nothing so much, perhaps, as in his gentlemanly precautions against letting himself go or expressing his emotions. Only a woman of real delicacy, indeed, could have imagined, or appreciated, the self-effacement with which he helps and protects the guileless heroine from her unprincipled admirers; and it required genuine refinement to give him the courage evinced by his tactful inquiries into her circumstances and his most fatherly advice. The whole development of the relations between them must be acknowledged as a triumph of art, and conclusive evidence of “nice” feeling.
It is impossible, I think, to put Cecilia herself on a level with Evelina; though I personally have always felt that the more crowded canvas of the book so entitled, and its greater variety of incident, reveal more mature power. But it is less spontaneous and, in a certain sense, less original. To begin with, Cecilia is always conscious of her superiority. Like her sister heroine, a country “miss,” and suddenly tossed into Society without any proper guidance, she yet assumes the centre of the stage without effort, and queens it over the most experienced, by virtue of beauty and wealth. It may be doubted if she has much “sensibility” for everyday matters: whereas the lavish expenditure of emotional fireworks over the haughty Delviles, and the melodramatic sufferings they entail, are most intolerably protracted, and entirely destroy our interest in the conclusion of the narrative. The occasional scene, or episode, we complained of in Evelina, is here extended to long chapters, or books, of equally strained passion on a more complex issue. Fortunately they all come at the end, and need not disturb our enjoyment of the main story; though, indeed, the whole plot depends far more on melodramatic effect. Mr. Harrell’s abominable recklessness, and his sensational suicide, the criminal passion of Mr. Monckton, and the story of Henrietta Belfield, carry us into depths beyond the reach of Evelina, where Miss Burney herself does not walk with perfect safety. And, in our judgment, such experiences diminish the charm of her heroine.
Yet in the main Cecilia possesses, and exhibits those primarily feminine qualities which now made their first appearance in English fiction, being beyond man’s power to delineate. She, too, is that “Womanly Woman” whom Mr. Bernard Shaw has so eloquently denounced. She has the magnetic power of personal attraction; the charm of mystery; the strength of weakness; the irresistible appeal with which Nature has endowed her for its own purposes: so seldom present in the man-made heroine, certainly not revealed to Samuel Richardson and his great contemporaries.
For the illustration of our main theme, we have so far dwelt upon the revelation of womanhood achieved by Miss Burney. It is time to consider, in more detail, her application of the new “realism,” her method of “drawing from life,” now first recognised as the proper function of the novelist. It is here that her unique education, or experience, has full play. Instead of depending, like Richardson, upon the finished analysis of a few characters, centred about one emotional situation, or of securing variety of interests and character-types, à la Fielding, by use of the “wild-oats” convention, she works up the astonishing “contrasts” in life, which she had herself been privileged to witness, and achieves comedy by the abnormal mixture of Society. Thus she is able to find drama in domesticity. Her most original effects are produced in the drawing-room or the assembly, at a ball or a theatre, in the “long walks” of Vauxhall or Ranelagh: wherever, and whenever, mankind is seen only at surface-value, enjoying the pleasures and perils of everyday existence. How vividly, as Macaulay remarks, did she conjecture “the various scenes, tragic and comic, through which the poor motherless girl, highly connected on one side, meanly connected on the other, might have to pass. A crowd of unreal beings, good and bad, grave and ludicrous, surrounded the pretty, timid young orphan: a coarse sea-captain; an ugly insolent fop, blazing in a superb court-dress; another fop, as ugly and as insolent, but lodged on Snow Hill, and tricked out in second-hand finery for the Hampstead ball; an old woman, all wrinkles and rouge, flirting her fan with the air of a Miss of seventeen, and screaming in a dialect made up of vulgar French and vulgar English; a poet lean and ragged, with a broad Scotch accent. By degrees these shadows acquired stronger and stronger consistence: the impulse which urged Fanny to write became irresistible; and the result was the history of Evelina.”
Of what must seem, to our thinking, the extraordinary licence permitted to persons accounted gentlemen, Miss Burney avails herself to the utmost; and Evelina is scarcely less often embarrassed or distressed by Willoughby’s violence and the insolence of Lord Merton, than by the stupid vulgarity of the Branghtons and “Beau” Smith. We have primarily the sharp contrast between Society and Commerce—each with its own standards of comfort, pleasure, and decorum; and secondarily, a great variety of individual character (and ideal) within both groups. The “contrasts” of Cecilia are, in the main, more specifically individual, lacking the one general sharp class division, and may be more accurately divided into one group of Society “types,” another of Passions exemplified in persons obsessed by a single idea. It is “in truth a grand and various picture-gallery, which presented to the eye a long series of men and women, each marked by some strong peculiar feature. There were avarice and prodigality, the pride of blood and the pride of money, morbid restlessness and morbid apathy, frivolous garrulity, supercilious silence, a Democritus to laugh at everything, and a Heraclitus to lament over everything.... Mr. Delvile never opens his lips without some allusion to his own birth and station; or Mr. Briggs, without some allusion to the hoarding of money; or Mr. Hobson, without betraying the self-indulgence and self-importance of a purse-proud upstart; or Mr. Simkins, without uttering some sneaking remark for the purpose of currying favour with his customers; or Mr. Meadows, without expressing apathy and weariness of life; or Mr. Albany, without declaiming about the vices of the rich and the miseries of the poor; or Mrs. Belfield, without some indelicate eulogy on her son; or Lady Margaret, without indicating jealousy of her husband. Morrice is all skipping, officious impertinence, Mr. Gosport all sarcasm, Lady Honoria all lively prattle, Miss Larolles all silly prattle.”
It is primarily, indeed, a most diverting picture of manners; and if, as we have endeavoured to show, Miss Burney advanced on Richardson by the revelation of womanhood in her heroines, the realism of her minor persons must be applauded rather for its variety in outward seeming than for its subtlety of characterisation. As Ben Jonson hath it:
“When some one peculiar quality
Does so possess a man, that it doth draw
All his effects, his spirits, and his powers,
In their confluxions all to run one way,
This may be truly said to be a humour.”
It is in the exhibition of “humours” that our authoress delights and excels.
Of any particular construction Miss Burney was entirely guiltless; in this respect, of course, lagging far behind Fielding. She has no style, beyond a most attractive spontaneity; writing in “true woman’s English, clear, natural, and lively.” Under the watchful eye of Dr. Johnson, indeed, she made some attempt at the rounded period, the “elegant” antithesis, in Cecilia: but, regretting the obvious effort, we turn here again, with renewed delight, to the flowing simplicity of her dramatic dialogue.
There is no occasion, at this time of day, to dwell upon her sparkling wit, though we may note in passing its obviously feminine inspiration—as opposed to the more scholarly subtleties of Fielding—and its patent superiority to, for example, the kitten-sprightliness of Richardson’s “Lady G.” We cannot claim that Miss Burney made any particular advance in this matter; but, here again, her work stands out as the first permanent expression—at least in English—of that shrewd vivacity and quickness of observation with which so many a woman, who might have founded a salon, has been wont to enliven the conversation of the home and to promote the gaiety of social gatherings. We must recognise, on the other hand, that, if commonly more refined than her generation, Miss Burney has yielded to its prejudice against foreigners in some coarseness towards Madame Duval; as we marvel at her father’s approval of this detail—while actually deploring the vigour of her contempt for Lovel, the fop!
Finally, for all technicalities of her art, Miss Burney remains an amateur in authorship, who, by a lucky combination of genius and experience, was destined to utter the first word for women in the most popular form of literature; and to point the way to her most illustrious successors for the perfection of the domestic novel.
Probably the most important, more or less contemporary, criticism on the early achievements of women, was uttered—incidentally—by Hazlitt in 1818. Dismissing Miss Edgeworth’s Tales as “a kind of pedantic, pragmatical common-sense, tinctured with the pertness and pretensions of the paradoxes to which they are so complacently opposed,” assigning the first place to Mrs. Radcliffe for her power of “describing the indefinable and embodying a phantom,” he says of Miss Burney and of feminine work generally:
“Madame D’Arblay is a mere common observer of manners, and also a very woman. It is this last circumstance which forms the peculiarity of her writings, and distinguishes them from those masterpieces[1] which I have before mentioned. 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 ... her forte is in describing the absurdities and affectations of external behaviour, or the manners of people in company.... The form such characters or people might be supposed to assume for a night at a masquerade....
“Women, in general, have a quicker perception of any oddity or singularity of character than men, and are more alive to any absurdity which arises from a violation of the rules of society, or a deviation from established custom. This partly arises from the restraints on their own behaviour, which turn their attention constantly on the subject, and partly from other causes. The surface of their minds, like that of their bodies, seems of a finer texture than ours; more soft, and susceptible of immediate impulses. They have less muscular strength, less power of continued voluntary attention, of reason, passion, and imagination; but they are more easily impressed with whatever appeals to their senses or habitual prejudices. The intuitive perception of their minds is less disturbed by any abstruse reasonings on causes or consequences. They learn the idiom of character, as they acquire that of language, by rote, without troubling themselves about the principles. Their observation is not the less accurate on that account, as far as it goes, for it has been well said that ‘there is nothing so true as habit.’
“There is little other power in Madame D’Arblay’s novels than that of immediate observation; her characters, whether of refinement or vulgarity, are equally superficial and confined. The whole is a question of form, whether that form is adhered to or infringed. It is this circumstance which takes away dignity and interest from her story and sentiments, and makes the one so teasing and tedious, and the other so insipid. The difficulties in which she involves her heroines are too much ‘Female Difficulties’; they are difficulties created out of nothing. The author appears to have no other idea of refinement than that it is the reverse of vulgarity; but the reverse of vulgarity is fastidiousness and affectation. There is a true and a false delicacy. Because a vulgar country Miss would answer ‘Yes’ to a proposal of marriage in the first page, Madame D’Arblay makes it a proof of an excess of refinement, and an indispensable point of etiquette in her young ladies, to postpone the answer to the end of five volumes, without the smallest reason for their doing so, and with every reason to the contrary.... The whole artifice of her fable consists in coming to no conclusion. Her ladies ‘stand so upon their going,’ that they do not go at all.... They would consider it as quite indecorous to run downstairs though the house were in flames, or to move an inch off the pavement though a scaffolding was falling. She has formed to herself an abstract idea of perfection in common behaviour, which is quite as romantic and impracticable as any other idea of the sort.... Madame D’Arblay has woven a web of difficulties for her heroines, something like the great silken threads in which the shepherdesses entangled the steed of Cervantes’ hero, who swore, in his fine enthusiastic way, that he would sooner cut his passage to another world than disturb the least of these beautiful meshes.”
The critic recognises the essential quality of Miss Burney’s work—its femininity—which he reckons, curiously enough, as a fault. But prejudices die hard and it is evident that he is not ready for the new point of view.
Evelina, 1778.
Cecilia, 1782.
Camilla, 1796.
The Wanderer, 1814.