“Madame D’Arblay is a mere common observer of manners, and also a very woman. It is this last circumstance which forms the peculiarity of her writings, and distinguishes them from those masterpieces[1] which I have before mentioned. She is a quick, lively, and accurate observer of persons and things; but she always looks at them with a consciousness of her sex, and in that point of view in which it is the particular business and interest of women to observe them ... her forte is in describing the absurdities and affectations of external behaviour, or the manners of people in company.... The form such characters or people might be supposed to assume for a night at a masquerade....

“Women, in general, have a quicker perception of any oddity or singularity of character than men, and are more alive to any absurdity which arises from a violation of the rules of society, or a deviation from established custom. This partly arises from the restraints on their own behaviour, which turn their attention constantly on the subject, and partly from other causes. The surface of their minds, like that of their bodies, seems of a finer texture than ours; more soft, and susceptible of immediate impulses. They have less muscular strength, less power of continued voluntary attention, of reason, passion, and imagination; but they are more easily impressed with whatever appeals to their senses or habitual prejudices. The intuitive perception of their minds is less disturbed by any abstruse reasonings on causes or consequences. They learn the idiom of character, as they acquire that of language, by rote, without troubling themselves about the principles. Their observation is not the less accurate on that account, as far as it goes, for it has been well said that ‘there is nothing so true as habit.’

“There is little other power in Madame D’Arblay’s novels than that of immediate observation; her characters, whether of refinement or vulgarity, are equally superficial and confined. The whole is a question of form, whether that form is adhered to or infringed. It is this circumstance which takes away dignity and interest from her story and sentiments, and makes the one so teasing and tedious, and the other so insipid. The difficulties in which she involves her heroines are too much ‘Female Difficulties’; they are difficulties created out of nothing. The author appears to have no other idea of refinement than that it is the reverse of vulgarity; but the reverse of vulgarity is fastidiousness and affectation. There is a true and a false delicacy. Because a vulgar country Miss would answer ‘Yes’ to a proposal of marriage in the first page, Madame D’Arblay makes it a proof of an excess of refinement, and an indispensable point of etiquette in her young ladies, to postpone the answer to the end of five volumes, without the smallest reason for their doing so, and with every reason to the contrary.... The whole artifice of her fable consists in coming to no conclusion. Her ladies ‘stand so upon their going,’ that they do not go at all.... They would consider it as quite indecorous to run downstairs though the house were in flames, or to move an inch off the pavement though a scaffolding was falling. She has formed to herself an abstract idea of perfection in common behaviour, which is quite as romantic and impracticable as any other idea of the sort.... Madame D’Arblay has woven a web of difficulties for her heroines, something like the great silken threads in which the shepherdesses entangled the steed of Cervantes’ hero, who swore, in his fine enthusiastic way, that he would sooner cut his passage to another world than disturb the least of these beautiful meshes.”

The critic recognises the essential quality of Miss Burney’s work—its femininity—which he reckons, curiously enough, as a fault. But prejudices die hard and it is evident that he is not ready for the new point of view.

Evelina, 1778.
Cecilia, 1782.
Camilla, 1796.
The Wanderer, 1814.

FOOTNOTES:

[1] Of Richardson, Fielding, etc.

A PICTURE OF YOUTH

It is natural, if not inevitable, that the later works of Miss Burney should have been suffered to remain unread and unremembered. Critics have told us that they only face them unwillingly, from a sense of duty; and none has ventured a second time. To-day, no doubt, readers would hesitate before the five, or more, volumes of extenuated sensibility.

And yet, though we should not ask for any reversal of this verdict, there are points of interest—at any rate in Camilla—which will repay attention. The fact is, that in this work Miss Burney has given full rein to her ideal of women, her conception of home life, and her notions about marriage: all eminently characteristic of the age, and full of suggestion as to the work of women.