“Men are always enchanted with something that is both pretty and silly; because they can so easily please and so soon disconcert it; and when they have made the little blooming fools blush and look down, they feel nobly superior, and pride themselves in victory.... A man looks enchanted while his beautiful young bride talks nonsense; it comes so prettily from her ruby lips, and she blushes and dimples with such lovely attraction while she utters it; he casts his eyes around him with conscious elation to see her admirers, and his enviers.”
The wily governess has all the audacity of a born diplomatist. She simply informs Sir Hugh, who always believes everybody, that Edgar is “practically” engaged to her pet pupil. The old man regards the matter as settled, and, in perfect innocence, encourages her machinations to make a fact of her desire—the girl herself being flattered into an indifferent accomplice.
Now Camilla had acquired the habit, quite becoming to girlhood, of looking to Edgar, more or less consciously, for guidance through life, and of actually asking his advice on all delicate, or doubtful, occasions. Miss Margland ingeniously accuses her of trying to catch the heir by these “confidences,” and Sir Hugh, without for one moment acknowledging the possibility of Camilla having a bad motive, advises her to avoid even the appearance of jealousy, and leave Indiana a fair field. Such an appeal to her generosity, from so kind a friend, was sure of eager support; and the unfortunate girl is thus driven to seek friends against whom Edgar had warned her, and to assume the character of capriciousness and instability. This proves her Introduction to the Great World, whither Miss Burney hurries all her heroines. Like the rest, she arrives entirely unprepared, parents of those days apparently not considering either advice or guidance on such matters a part of their duty. Framed for innocent pleasure, her natural gaiety and ardent temperament lead her astray in every direction. She remains entirely unsoiled, but invariably does the wrong thing. She gets into debt, through sheer ignorance and humility; she makes friends of “doubtful” people, through pity and innocence; she even follows the advice of a worldly acquaintance, attempting to move her lover by flirting with other men. Every word and action is designed to please him: all have the contrary effect. His heart remains faithful; his reason must criticise.
At this stage of the work Miss Burney revives somewhat of her first, spontaneous, manner. The descriptions of Society—wherein “Ton, in the scale of connoisseurs in certain circles, is as much above fashion, as fashion is above fortune”—are animated and amusing. We are introduced to many new types, male and female, naïvely exaggerated perhaps in detail, but absolutely alive and cunningly varied. The “prevailing ill-manners of the leaders in the ton” astonish, no less than their brutal cowardice—in face of a girl’s danger—disgusts. Fine gentlemen, it would seem, are neither gallant nor chivalrous. The ladies, indeed, are not much better. A divinity, unequally yoked, “excites every hope by a sposo[2] properly detestable—yet gives birth to despair by a coldness the most shivering.” Less favoured beauties are equally vain, and some of them more indiscreet.
But here, as in Cecilia, our author cannot resist the indulgence of heroics. She is not satisfied with her delightful “Comedy of Manners,” with the ordinary misunderstandings and heart-burnings essential to romance. In her later volumes she plunges Camilla, and the whole Tyrold family, into the wildest distress. They lose all their money; Eugenia’s husband commits suicide; Lionel nearly murders an uncle, from whom he had expectations, by a practical joke; and Camilla acquires, by an over-elaborated series of foolish impulses, the appearance of having injured her parents beyond forgiveness. Immersed in difficulties, and not in the least understanding the circumstances, her father and mother refuse to see her; and the forsaken maiden prays for death. The whole episode is given in Miss Burney’s worst manner, tempting the reader to mere angry impatience with so much false sentiment and senseless emotion. They tremble, they faint, they weep, they see visions; we could almost fancy ourselves in Bedlam.
In the end, of course, Edgar comes back, receives an “explanation” from Camilla—written, as she supposed, on her death-bed; and promptly restores everybody to their senses and, incidentally—having plenty to spare—to prosperity.
“Thus ended the long conflicts, doubts, suspenses, and sufferings of Edgar and Camilla; who, without one inevitable calamity, one unavoidable distress, so nearly fell the sacrifice to the two extremes of Imprudence, and Suspicion, to the natural heedlessness of youth unguided, or to the acquired distrust of experience that had been wounded.”
At first sight, certainly, it would seem that we had little here of the Richardson-realism, and that Miss Burney was challenging comparison, in their own field, with such melodramatic romancists as Mrs. Radcliffe. Yet Camilla, and even Eugenia, are far more like real life than Emily St. Aubert. However extravagantly composed, they are founded on nature, whereas the older novelists worked entirely from imagination. Before Richardson (and here, of course, Mrs. Radcliffe belongs to the earlier age) the models for character were not drawn from experience and observation. There was, it would seem, a preconceived notion, and certain accepted rules, for the “make-up” of heroes, heroines, parents, villains and the rest—which are somewhat akin to the constructed ideal of abstract Beauty favoured by certain art critics. They were prepared, without very much reference to actual humanity, from mysteriously acquired recipes of virtue and vice.
We cannot find any reason to believe that Miss Burney ever worked, in her most “exalted” moments, on such a plan. She idealised from life, not from the imagination. She really believed that the young ladies of her acquaintance all aimed, more or less consciously, at that exquisite delicacy which she delighted to exhibit; and, in all probability, she was justified in her faith. Her rhapsodies are sincere; and they obviously apply to her own sentiments, shared by her contemporaries. They are—in their own very feminine fashion—reflections on reality—not creations of art by any accepted canons.
And the very exaggerated artificiality of Camilla makes it more typical—of herself and her period—than Evelina or Cecilia: and therefore more representative of Woman, when she began to write fiction for herself. The genius of her earlier work carried it some way in advance of its time; although the progress of her immediate successors is most remarkable. Camilla is the very essence of eighteenth-century girlhood; ill-mated, as they were no doubt, to “our present race of young men,” whose “frivolous fickleness nauseates whatever they can reach”; who—when they are not heroes—“have a weak shame of asserting, or even listening to what is right, and a shallow pride in professing and performing what is wrong.”