‘And another glass to the Queen’s philosopher!’
Neither gentleman objected; but Mrs. Schwellenberg, who had sat laughing and happy all this time, now grew alarmed, and said, ‘Your Royal Highness, I am afraid for the ball!’
‘Hold your potato-jaw, my dear,’ cried the Duke, patting her; but recollecting himself, he took her hand and pretty abruptly kissed it, and then, flinging it hastily away, laughed aloud, and called out, ‘There! that will make amends for anything, so now I may say what I will. So here! a glass of Champagne for the Queen’s philosopher and the Queen’s gentleman-usher! Hang me if it will not do them a monstrous deal of good!’
Here news was brought that the equipage was in order. He started up, calling out, ‘Now, then, for my —— tailor.’[433]
Scenes as vivid, though not so uproarious, might be cited in every chapter of the work; to quote them all would be to print half the Diary. The selection here given is sufficient to show why Miss Burney’s writing is invariably referred to as dramatic. The Diary is, in parts, so like a novel as to prompt the query whether it is at all reliable as a record of facts. Did not the author’s imagination play freely over the events? Did she not select, arrange, and colour according to the demands of art rather than of history? Are the conversations not improved? Is not the diarist a novelist still? Questions of this large kind can hardly be answered save in a large, impressionistic way. The Diary is, in general, a truthful document and a reliable account of the life which it records. A mere glance at the book will reveal the fact that Miss Burney had little of Boswell’s passion for literalness, for accurate dates, and for written evidence. But Boswell was unique in his generation, and Boswell was a lawyer. Miss Burney was writing to amuse her sisters, not to inform the public; but there are passages which show that she was endowed with a remarkably accurate memory. She once has occasion[434] to quote a letter from memory; a comparison of it with the original, which happens to be in existence, reveals no evidence of misinterpretation, and shows the copy to be, in fact, very nearly a literal reproduction of the original. We are to remember that Miss Burney had been in the habit of keeping a diary, recording conversations which had interested her, ever since the age of fifteen; and that this had strengthened her memory as well as her powers of observation. It was to a similar practice that Boswell owed his ability to record conversation with accuracy; and he himself asserted that the ability grew with practice. There is no reason for supposing that the results in one case were radically different from those in the other. Certain it is that Miss Burney’s record of Johnson’s conversation is in no way inconsistent with Boswell’s. To say that in describing life at Streatham or at the Court she used her skill in selection and that she employed the judgment of a novelist in beginning and ending a conversation effectively is merely to repeat that the Diary is a work of art. Judgment in the choice of facts to set down need not indicate a misinterpretation of them.
There is but one quality in Miss Burney which shakes the reader’s confidence in her judgment of character. There is a tendency to emotionalism in her which the irreverent will term gush. She was touched with the sentimentality of her times. The tear of sensibility is ever trembling in her eyes. Her affection for Mrs. Thrale, Mrs. Locke, Mrs. Delany, and most other ladies, for ‘dear Daddy Crisp,’ for ‘dear Sir Joshua,’ is so effusive as to make all terms of endearment seem tawdry.
Hardly less distressing than this mawkishness is the lady’s self-consciousness, which she mistook for the virtue of modesty. The flattery which brought the blush of shame to her cheek and kept her on the verge of swooning, the flattery which made her shrink into corners or retire in confusion from the scene, the praise which was too gross for her ears, all this is written down in extenso and with something unpleasantly like gusto. It flows through the Diary like an apocalyptic river of honey. Macaulay reminds us, quite properly, that all this was ‘for the eyes of two or three persons who had loved her from infancy, who had loved her in obscurity, and to whom her fame gave the purest and most exquisite delight.’ This is true, no doubt; but might not father and sisters have achieved delight without this surfeit of sweetness, ‘whereof a little more than a little is by much too much’? It is all very human, of course, and it would be chivalrous to forget it. But all the chivalry in the world cannot hide the fact that it is a serious blot on the art of the Diary, a blot that we cannot but wish away from so splendid a work.