“It would be more real, I trust,” said her stepmother. “He would have us believe that life is a comedy, and that human beings are like the puppets which Mr. Foote put on his stage for the diversion of the town a few years ago.”
Fanny Burney became grave; the longer she was living in the world, the more impressed was she becoming with the idea that life was a puppet-show; only when the puppets began to dance on their wires in a draught of wind from another world the real comedy began. She felt that as an interpreter of life Mr. Garrick had no equal on the stage or off. On the stage he could do no more than interpret other people's notions of life, and these, except in the case of Shakespeare, were, she thought, mostly feeble; but when he was off the stage—well, Sir Joshua Reynolds had told her what that queer person, Dr. Goldsmith, had written about Garrick—the truest criticism Garrick had ever received: “'Twas only that when he was off he was acting.” She knew what she herself owed to Garrick from the time she was nine years old, when he had accustomed her and her sister to look for him at their house almost daily; she knew that whatever sense of comedy she possessed—and she looked on it as a precious possession—was to be attributed to the visits of Garrick. Every time she looked at her carefully locked desk in that room at the top of the house in St. Martin's Street, which had once been Sir Isaac Newton's observatory, she felt that without the tuition in comedy that she had received at the hands of Mr. Garrick, the contents of that desk would have been very different. Her stepmother, however, had no information on this point; she had lived all her life among the good tradespeople of Lynn, and had known nothing of Mr. Garrick until Dr. Burney had married her and brought her to look after his children, which Fanny knew she had done faithfully, according to her lights, in London.
Fanny kept silent on the subject of Mr. Garrick's fooling, while Mrs. Burney bent with great gravity over the cutting out of a pinafore for Fanny's little niece—also a Burney; and every now and again there came from the closed room downstairs the sound of the insisting voice of the visitor. She hoped that Mr. Garrick would re-enact the scene for her; she had confidence that it would lose nothing by its being re-enacted by Mr. Garrick.
CHAPTER III
I SUPPOSE that I must e'en follow in the wake of the womenkind,” said Lieutenant Burney, making an extremely slow move in the direction of the door, when the door had been closed upon his stepmother and his sisters.
“Is there any need?” asked Garrick. “It seems to me that in such a case as this which Mr. Kendal promises to propound to your father, His Majesty's Navy should be represented. In all matters bearing upon a delicate affaire de cour surely a naval man should be present to act as assessor.”
'Mr. Kendal looked puzzled.
“I fail to take your meaning, sir,” said he, after a pause; he was still rubbing his chin with a fore-finger, when Garrick cried: