It is instructive, indeed, to observe with what apparent crudity Miss Burney has chosen to illustrate the greater purity and refinement, the superior moral standard, of women to those of men: a problem which seems to have almost vanished with Jane Austen (though we may detect it at work under the surface), and which has reappeared so prominently, after quite a new fashion, in modern literature. By the men novelists this was practically assumed without comment; but our knowledge of facts would seem to warrant the emphasis awarded the question by women in their opening campaign of the pen. Here, as elsewhere, Miss Burney was almost the first to teach us what women actually thought and felt: in marked contrast to what it had been hitherto considered becoming for them to express. She was, always, and everywhere, the mouthpiece of her sex.
And, finally, because she was not an “instructed” or professional writer, and had not studied good literature, we must recognise the real, great drawback of Camilla: its grandiloquent style. Dr. Johnson did much for English prose: his ultimate influence was towards vigour, simplicity, clearness, and common sense. But he was personally pompous, a whale in the dictionary; and those who copied him without discretion only made themselves ridiculous. It would be easy enough to find parallels in Rasselas, and elsewhere, for all the clumsy inversions and stilted antitheses of Camilla. But here we can only regret the blindness of ignorant hero-worship, and the natural, if foolish, desire to please or flatter by imitation. Miss Burney wrote Johnsonese fluently, and thereby ruined her natural powers. We cannot estimate, by her foolishness, the influence of the Dictator.
Imitation has not been, fortunately, the besetting sin of women novelists, and we may pass over this one “terrible example” without further comment.
FOOTNOTES:
[2] The “caro sposo” of Mrs. Elton.
“CECILIA” TO “SENSE AND SENSIBILITY”
(1782-1811)
In considering the women writers immediately following Miss Burney, we are confronted at the outset with a deliberate return to the methods of composition in vogue before Richardson. If Mrs. Radcliffe (1764-1823) employs, as she does, Defoe-like minuteness of detail in description, she entitles all her works “Romances,” and is fully justified in that nomenclature. “It was the cry at the period,” says her biographer, “and has sometimes been repeated since, that the romances of Mrs. Radcliffe, and the applause with which they were received, were evil signs of the times, and argued a great and increasing degradation of the public taste, which, instead of banqueting as heretofore upon scenes of passion, like those of Richardson, or of life and manners, as in the pages of Smollett and Fielding, was now coming back to the fare of the nursery, and gorged upon the wild and improbable fictions of an over-heated imagination.”
Yet the anonymous author of the Pursuits of Literature writes of some sister-novelists: “Though all of them are ingenious ladies, yet they are too frequently whining and frisking in novels, till our girls’ heads turn wild with impossible adventures. Not so the mighty magician of The Mysteries of Udolpho, bred and nourished by the Florentine muses in their sacred solitary caverns, amid the paler shrines of Gothic superstition, and in all the dreariness of enchantment: a poetess whom Ariosto would with rapture have acknowledged, as
‘... La nudrita
Damigella Trivulzia al sacro speco.’”—O.F. c. xlvi.
We fear to-day it would be difficult to find men “too mercurial to be delighted” by Richardson, “too dull to comprehend” Le Sage, “too saturnine to relish” Fielding, who would yet “with difficulty be divorced from The Romance of the Forest”: since every one of us now