In January, 1837, she lost the last prop of her old age. Alexander d’Arblay, having taken Orders soon after his degree, became minister of Ely Chapel in 1836, and was about to marry, when he was carried off by an attack of influenza. His mother survived him nearly three years: she had a severe illness, attended by spectral illusions, in November, 1839; and died in London on January 6, 1840—a day which she had observed from the beginning of the century in memory of the death of her sister Susanna. She was buried at Walcot, near Bath, by the side of her husband and their only child.
Except for the production of the “Memoirs,” the last quarter of a century in Madame d’Arblay’s life was barren both of incident and employment. The details of her experience during the preceding fifteen years could not fail to interest us, if we had them related as she would have told them in her prime. Especially, we should like to know something more about that long detention in France, when chafing under police restrictions, and fretting for news from home, her heart vibrated to the continual echoes of cannon announcing Napoleon’s victories. But Fanny married, and growing elderly, was quite a different person from the Fanny of St. Martin’s Street and Chesington, of Streatham and Bath, of Windsor and Kew. Her Diary proper came to a final stop with the death of Mrs. Phillips in 1800. She will always be remembered as Frances Burney of the eighteenth century. Deriving her inspiration in part from Richardson, she heads the roll of those female novelists whose works form a considerable part of English literature. The purity of her writings first made the circulating library respectable. “We owe to her,” says Macaulay very justly, “not only ‘Evelina,’ ‘Cecilia,’ and ‘Camilla,’ but ‘Mansfield Park,’ and the ‘Absentee.’ Yet great as was her influence on her successors,[[125]] it was exhausted before the present century began. Indeed, it has been suggested, with some reason, that the excessive sensibility of her heroines is answerable for a reaction in Miss Edgeworth and Miss Austen; for the too great amount of bright and cold good sense of the first; for the over-sobriety of feeling of the second.[[126]] Fanny’s genius for expressing character in dialogue, aided by touches of description, placed her among the first memoir-writers of that journalizing age. A little more power of compression would have made her diaries equal to the best of Boswell’s sketches.
“The author herself,” says Mr. Leslie Stephen, “with her insatiable delight in compliments—certainly such as might well turn her head—her quick observation and lively garrulity, her effusion of sentiment rather lively than deep, but never insincere, her vehement prejudices corrected by flashes of humour, is always amusing.” We may assent to every word of this sentence, and yet feel that it does its subject something less than justice. We trust that our readers have found Fanny amusing; we trust also that they have recognised in her the possession of some higher qualities. If she was vain, her egotism was of the most innocent kind. It was more harmless than Goldsmith’s, for we cannot recall in her utterances a single envious or jealous remark. Of how many self-conscious authors can the like be said? The simple love of praise which led her to entertain her acquaintance with what was said about herself, has assisted to render her interesting to a wider circle. “Vain glory,” says Bacon quaintly, “helpeth to perpetuate a man’s memory: like unto varnish that makes ceilings not only shine, but last.” If she had strong prejudices, they were free from every taint of personal malevolence. Her dislike of the Opposition resembled Johnson’s professed hatred of the Scotch, at which the doctor himself used to laugh. She goes to the trial of Hastings, full of zeal for his cause, and spends her time there chiefly in conversing with his prosecutors. And however prejudiced on some points, she was far from narrow-minded on many matters of controversy. Though brought up a strict Protestant, she married a Roman Catholic. Though to the end of her days an attached daughter of the English Church, she expresses unqualified esteem for the piety of those very pronounced dissenters, Mr. and Mrs. Barbauld. The sympathy between herself and her own family was at all times perfect. There were no rivalries among them. “I am sure,” she wrote modestly in 1800, “my dear father will not think I mean to parallel our works.” She was extremely pleased when Queen Charlotte declared a tale published by her half-sister Sarah to be “very pretty.” Her faithfulness to duty and her friends was celebrated by her royal mistress in the saying that Miss Burney was “true as gold.” When she had cast in her lot with her Chevalier, no isolation, no privation, no anxiety for the future could make her repine. “I never forget,” she wrote in her poverty, “Dr. Johnson’s words. When somebody said that a certain person had no turn for economy, he answered, ‘Sir, you might as well say that he has no turn for honesty.’“ Whatever cavils have been raised by Croker and one or two like-minded detractors, no artifice or indirect dealing can be laid to her charge, even in literary matters, in regard to which such manœuvres are too often deemed excusable. We are not holding her up as a pattern of elevated or extraordinary virtue. She was simply the best representative of a worthy and amiable family who had been trained in the school of Samuel Johnson. That type of character has passed away. The rugged old dictator’s political creed is unintelligible to the present age; his devotion is taken for superstition or formalism; his canons of criticism are obsolete. His disciples felt nothing of what was stirring in the air. They were but little accessible to fresh ideas. The cause of popular freedom, the Evangelical movement in religion, the romantic spirit in poetry appealed to them with the smallest effect. They were zealous for authority; they were not in the least introspective; when they wanted a line or two of verse, they nearly always went to Pope for it. The speculations, the problems of the modern world were all unknown to them. They were far less inclined to embrace new dogmas of faith or agnosticism than to observe old rules of action. Yet when we read the annals of the Burneys—the accomplished, the genial, self-respecting, conscientious, pious Burneys—may we not be pardoned for thinking that there was a good deal, after all, in those antiquated Johnsonian principles?
THE END.
BILLING AND SONS, PRINTERS, GUILDFORD.
[123]. Moore’s ‘Life of Byron,’ Letters 78, 80.
[124]. He had studied mathematics in Paris according to the analytical method instead of the geometrical, which was at that time exclusively taught at Cambridge.
[125]. Miss Austen took the title of ‘Pride and Prejudice’ from some words on the last page of ‘Cecilia.’