“Not a very cogent line of argument, it seems to me,” said Mrs. Burney. “Well, Sir Joshua, I hope you will enjoy a comfortable sleep to-night, now that you have the fortunes of that young lady off your mind.”
“Oh, my dear madam, I do assure you that my mind is not yet free from the effects of reading that book,” cried Reynolds. “I am more faithful to my friends in some books than to forget all about them when I lay them on the shelf. If they live, be assured that I live with them, and the thought of them is to me at times as pleasant as the thought of the best friends I have met in my daily life. I have laid ‘Evelina’ on a shelf in my memory—not one of the back shelves, but one that is near to me, so that I can console myself with her companionship when I am lonely.”
“I have never heard you praise a book so heartily, sir,” said Mrs. Burney. “But I will beg of you not to mention it to any of my family, for if it has so unhinged you, what would it not do to those poor girls?”
He did not catch all she had said, for she spoke in a voice which she did not mean to travel to Fanny or Susy, who were chatting to Miss Theophila Palmer, Sir Joshua’s niece.
“You may depend on my telling them all I find out in regard to the author,” said he in a tone of assent.
“No, no,” she cried, getting nearer to the bell of his trumpet. “No, no; I want you to refrain from mentioning the book to them. I discourage all novel reading, excepting, of course, the works of Mr. Richardson, and perhaps one or two of Fielding, with some of the pages gummed together to prevent them from being read.”
“Nay, to tempt people to read them,” said Reynolds. “What were we saying about the attractions of a mask? Well, my word for it, the attractions of a book without a name are as nothing compared with the attraction of gummed pages. But you will let them read ‘Evelina,’ and you will, moreover, read it yourself—yes, and you will all be the better and not the worse for doing so.”
Mrs. Burney shook her head.
It was no wonder that Mrs. Thrale thought that Miss Burney looked flushed at this time, or that there was an unwonted sparkle in her eyes; for she had heard nearly every word that Sir Joshua had said, and she could scarcely contain herself for delight. For all her primness, she was at heart a merry schoolgirl, ready to break into a dance at good news, and to shout for joy when things had advanced as she had hoped they would. She felt that it was very hard on her that she could not throw her hat up to the ceiling of the room, as she had heard of Dr. Goldsmith’s doing with his wig in the exuberance of his spirits in this same room—when Miss Reynolds was in her bed upstairs. It was very hard on her to be compelled to restrain her feelings; she was unconscious of the sparkle in her eyes, or of the pæony flush of her cheeks that Mrs. Thrale had noticed and was still noticing.
She had never felt so happy in all her life. A short time before she had felt that everything in the world was insignificant in comparison with love; but now she realized that there was another joy worthy of recognition. She was not wise enough to perceive that the two emotions sprang from the same source—that the foundation of love is the impulse to create, and that the foundation of an artist’s joy in fame is the knowledge that what he has created is recognized by the world. She was (fortunately) not wise enough to be able to analyse her feelings—to be wise enough to analyse one’s feelings is to be incapable of feeling. All that she was conscious of at that moment was that all worth having in the world was hers—the instinct to create, which men call Love, the joy of obtaining recognition for the thing created, which men call Fame.