“Get it for yourself, sir,” she had said, “and you will quickly acknowledge that my excuse is valid.”
“Of course I did not get it then,” said Sir Joshua. “I find it impossible to keep pace with the useful books that are printed in these days, and I have long ago given up novels. But when, the next day, Mrs. Damer came to sit to me with a woebegone countenance and the traces of tears on her cheeks, so that I could only paint her draping, and that, too, had a woeful droop in its folds—for let me tell you, madam, that a woman’s dress is usually in sympathy with the mood of the wearer—when, I say, the lady entered my painting-room in this guise, I ventured to inquire if she was serious in her wish that I should depict her in the character of Niobe. ‘Oh, sir,’ she cried, ‘’tis all due to that horrid Branghton—he it is that has brought me to this.’ ‘The wretch!’ said I. ‘Have you no friend who will run him through the vitals? Where is he to be found, that I may arrange for his destruction?’ ‘He is the persecutor of my beloved Evelina,’ she replied, ‘and heaven only knows what is to become of the poor girl.’
“Now, madam, when I had thus brought before me the effect that the book had produced upon so natural a lady as Mrs. Damer, what was left for me but to buy it? And now you see the effect that it has had upon me,” continued Sir Joshua, “so you must e’en buy it also.”
“Nay, Sir Joshua,” said Mrs. Burney, “your case has furnished me with the strongest of reasons for not buying it. I would not allow a book into my house that would so turn me aside from my ordinary life and my daily business. What, sir, would you have me stay out of my comfortable bed for hours, in order that I might make myself more uncomfortable still by reading of the imaginary woes of a young woman who is nothing to me but a shadow?”
“Oh, I promise you that you will find Evelina far from being a shadow,” said Sir Joshua. “She is a creature of flesh and blood, with a heart that beats so that you find your own heart keeping time with it, whether it pulsates slowly or fast. In short, Evelina lives. I have no patience with those attenuated figures that dance on the stage of so many of our new novel writers: I can see the stuffing of straw when their constant gyrating has worked a rip in their seamy side; creatures of rag and wire—they never deceive one for a moment—why, their very gyrations are not true to life. But Evelina lives. Some of the characters in the book are distasteful—some of them are vulgar, but the world is made up of distasteful and vulgar people, and a novel should be true to the world in which the characters are placed. Oh, that was where the greatness of poor Dr. Goldsmith was to be found. He would abate nothing of the vulgarity of the vulgar characters in his plays, because he meant them to live. The people hissed his vulgar bailiffs in his Good-Natured Man, and when Colman cut them out he himself restored them when Shuter played the piece for his benefit the following year, and everyone saw that they were true to life. The vulgarity of Tony Lumpkin and the Three Pigeons made Walpole shudder, but there they remain in the best comedy of our time, and there they will remain for ever. Oh, yes; the author of ‘Evelina’ knows what life is, and so his book will live.”
“And who is the author of this surprising book?” asked Mrs. Burney.
“That is a mystery,” replied Reynolds. “I sent to Lowndes, the bookseller, to inquire, and he pretended that he did not know. He could only say that he was a gentleman of note living in Westminster.”
“Ah, that is one of the booksellers’ tricks to make their wares seem more attractive,” said she. “They know that a man in a mask awakens curiosity.”
“That is so; but ‘Evelina’ stands in need of no advertisement of such a nature. It would attract attention even though the name of Mr. Kenrick were attached to it. But everyone is dying to find out the name of the author; Mrs. Damer believes it to have been written by Horace Walpole, but only because ‘The Castle of Otranto’ was published without his name being on the title page.”