The Facts of Fiction (11 page)

In
The Traveller
and
The Deserted Village
, on the other hand, Goldsmith still believed in Human Folly and Human Frailty and Human Despair and Human Regret and Human Pride: and wrote about them in the manner of a yearning and pessimistic preacher. In
She Stoops to Conquer
and
The Good Natured Man
the moralist has given place to the Epicurean; and the soft, serious things of life are all deliciously played upon by the comic spirit.

Not that Goldsmith's was a consistent and chronological pilgrimage from pessimism to comedy. On the contrary, it was a hesitating jay-flight between one mood and the next. And it so happens that
The Vicar of Wakefield
, which is that part of Goldsmith that concerns us, was written in
a moment when Life outside was a forbidding grey, and everything within was a delicate shell pink.

“With that sweet story of
The Vicar of Wakefield'”
wrote Thackeray, “he has found entry into every castle and every hamlet in Europe. Not one of us, however busy or hard, but once or twice in our lives has passed an evening with him and undergone the charm of his delightful music.”

Such an utterance illuminates more of the kindly soul of Thackeray than of his subject. At the least provocation Thackeray's heart was ready to overflow; and his pictures of every king and peasant from Novaya Zemlya to Gibraltar all greedily poring over Goldsmith, and of Scrooges indulging themselves with their solitary feast of pathos, are the product of a mind that carries more than a fair handicap of sentimental lead.

Scott said: “We read
The Vicar of Wakefield
in youth and in age—we return to it again and again, and bless the memory of an author who contrives so well to reconcile us to human nature.” And that is very fairly put. Scott had fewer of that sort of books to which a man may return again and again than Thackeray had. And there was intelligence as well as affection in naming youth and age as the best times for reading about the Vicar.

The subject of
The Vicar of Wakefield
rather obviously is Marriage: the characters in the story are a wife, sons and daughters and the spectre of poverty. Now, though Goldsmith was extremely well equipped to describe the latter, he had as a bachelor no qualifications at all for writing about the former. And his novel in consequence is very much what a well disposed hermit might imagine marriage to be like. It is a mixture of nonsense and realism; an Arcady in which a writ of impeachment could still be served.

Its chief merit is that it is constantly interesting; and its popular appeal is due to the fact that it is made up of small, separate scenes, sufficiently short to be appreciated as a whole by a simple mind.

It is, indeed, the product of a mind working as a dramatist's mind works, in moments and divisions of activity. And such a passage as:

“Where, where are my children? ” cried I, rushing through the flames and bursting the door of the chamber in which they were confined: “Where are my little ones? ”—“Here, dear papa, here we are,” cried they together, while the flames were just catching the bed where they lay. I caught them both in my arms, and conveyed them through the fire as fast as possible, while just as I was going out the roof sunk in …

is a classic example of the sort of melodrama which was to get out of hand a century later, but which was still a respectable literary device in the eighteenth century.

Fanny Burney is the first recorded specimen of a now familiar English bird often shot on these shores, the woman novelist, who could write a really admirable novel, yet remain a foolish young thing all her life.

She was favoured as few have been in the moment of her coming: 1778 was the end of one of the most alarming literary droughts in English history. But it would be ungenerous to attribute one of the conspicuous successes of talent merely to an accident of time. For Fanny Burney could write. Indeed, she could not help writing. Like
Richardson's, her soul expanded and expended itself on paper. And it is probable that at any moment her mind was comparatively well emptied; she certainly behaved at the Thrales' as though it was. When Sheridan, very politely making conversation, asked Fanny, “What, then, are you about now? ” she replied with the fatuity of a coy nursemaid, “Why, twirling my fan, I think.”

By the age of sixteen she had written enough to make a bonfire of her writings, which included a complete novel. The reason for the conflagration is said to have been that her stepmother had admonished her to guard her mind against such gaudy toys of invention. That may have been the reason: for Fanny in the flesh had the spirit of a fly. But—so far as I know, there is no tangible evidence to support the theory—it seems far more likely that the second Mrs. Burney's disparagements had sent Fanny back to reading her own
juvenilia
. And the rosy prose fiction of thirteen and fourteen doubtless had a strangely flaccid look in the white light of the eyes of sixteen.

At any rate, Fanny burned her romances, put authorship resolutely behind her, and began to keep a diary. Probably something of the kind was absolutely necessary. Fanny would simply have disappeared out of existence if she had not been living a robust life on paper as well as a bashful life on earth. And soon she was secretly at work on
Evelina
, writing as industriously and cautiously as Pamela. “The fear of discovery or of suspicion in the house,” she tells us, “made the copying extremely laborious to me; for in the daytime, I could only take odd moments, so that I was obliged to sit up the greater part of many nights, in order to get it ready.”

She preserved an elaborate anonymity, which was probably more fascinating than necessary: it was as though a little peninsula of romantic fiction had at last managed
to obtrude its nose into the world of fact. She offered the first two volumes of her book to the fashionable Dodsley, in Pall Mall, under no signature, and asked that the reply should be addressed to Mr. Grafton at the Orange Coffee House in Pall Mall. Mr. Dodsley's reply restored the geographies of fact. He answered (as any self-respecting publisher was bound to answer) that he would not stir a finger without knowing the author's name. Fanny, therefore, made one more effort to impose romantic fancy on unromantic, manuscript-rejecting Life. And she beat Life at its own game. She dressed up her brother Charles in a disguise and sent him off, bearing the manuscript, to Mr. Lowndes in Fleet Street. Thereafter the impatient Mr. Grafton called for his letters at the Orange Coffee House, with almost feminine nervousness and frequency. And he finally received the reply that as soon as the book was finished there was a publisher waiting to receive it.

Probably the original plan of
Evelina
seemed unnecessarily long to Fanny about that date. Certainly she wrote: “I had hardly time to write half a page in a day; and neither my health nor inclination would allow me to continue my
nocturnal
scribbling, for so long a time, as to write first, and then copy, a whole volume.” But the question whether to write only two parts or persevere with a concluding one usually ends with the completion of the third, and a year later, in 1778, Mr. Lowndes had paid her
£20
for the entire work, a sum which caused Fanny “boundless surprise at its magnificence.”

Fanny was soon enjoying the highly practical pleasure of hard cash and that purely æsthetic pleasure (to an artistic mind such as hers) of watching everyone wondering who the author of
Evelina
really was. And the romantic little soul of Fanny is again revealed when she and her stepmother, who, like a sensible woman, disapproved not
of authorship but only of unsuccessful authorship, visited Mr. Dodsley to inquire about the indentity of the author of
Evelina
, and the poor bewildered bookseller replied that he knew nothing except that “it was a page torn from life.”

The extraordinary thing is that everyone should have thought the novel was by a man. One has only to compare the sweet vaporous morality of
The Vicar of Wakefield
with the acidulated comment of
Evelina
to detect the difference in the sex of the two authors.

From the publication of
Evelina
onwards Fanny's career was so remarkably successful that it was quite impossible for her ever again to write anything so good. She appears to have kept respectable people awake almost as outrageously as the air-raids did later. Indeed, her very reputation hangs on the fact that she made half fashionable London insomniomaniacs when
Evelina
was first out. Joshua Reynolds, for instance, who started it and was “too much engaged to go on with it,” was “so caught that he could think of nothing else, and was quite absent all the day, not knowing a word that was said to him; and, when he took it up again, found himself so much interested in it, that he sat up all night to finish it.” While this tribute is revealing, as much of Sir Joshua's memorably excitable mind, as of Fanny Burney's genius, it is well to remember that for the past ten years or so there had been nothing published that could keep even a wakeful man from sleep. But Fanny was always hearing of her successes, and was the recipient of as many bouquets during her lifetime as Congreve. Like Congreve she got to know everyone. But unlike Congreve, whose magnificence commanded praise even from Dryden, she was a pet whose helplessness educed flattery even from Johnson. Everyone in the presence of an author has said harmless, happy,
helpful things that he would not repeat on paper for the price of his soul. The fact is that no one would expect him to. Thus when Johnson declared that he was too proud to eat earthly food when sitting next to Fanny Burney, we know that it is Johnson, the ponderously agreeable luncheon guest, and not Johnson, the mentally alert critic, who has spoken. The flatteries that were paid Fanny, indeed, are so numerous as to make one wonder just what her contemporaries really thought of her. A deep respect for the intelligence of anyone simply freezes words of flattery in the throat. Yet Johnson and Sheridan and Burke and Sir Joshua Reynolds and Mrs. Thrale were all raiding the flowershops of the imagination for bouquets to throw to her; until on one occasion Fanny felt so overpowered that she would like to have been able to “poke herself under the table.”

Evelina
itself is startlingly intelligent, so intelligent, indeed, that it should have educated Cadell, the publisher, who eleven years later, was so snubbing to the shy soul of Jane Austen. It should have warned him that alone among the arts the novel was the one which suited the feminine genius perfectly, and that more would be heard of it presently. For a novel does not require rhetoric or the exercise of reason; two things at which men are conspicuously better than women. But it does require acquaintance with life and interest in other people; which is exactly what most women possess more abundantly than men. It would be possible for instance to comb and recomb
Evelina
for stretches of fine writing, or rich purple thoughts, or passages pregnant with penetration or observation (other than that which accompanies the formula of a rather ungracious female wit) and find none of them.

Yet it would be hard to know exactly how to improve it in any particular. Had Fanny Burney lived thirty years
later she would have displaced several reputations. As it is, she remains trapped in the notoriety of the century, a century of rakes and wenches and elegant postchaises and dinner at four o'clock and a dirty navy. Another generation and she would have been ageless. As things were planned, however, she is merely the most wide-eyed, pert, nervous, provocative reporter who strayed unsoiled through the refined raffishness of the eighteenth century.

True, she did drift on, a woman with a splendid past always before her, into nearly the middle of the nineteenth century. The Queen adopted her and gave her full use of the royal backstairs. M. d'Arblay married her and set her up in a house of true French fussiness after Fanny came down the royal backstairs for the last time. Henceforward she was as industrious as she was unsuccessful. She died finally in Lower Grosvenor Street, her disordered mind surrounding her with phantoms peopling the reign of Queen Victoria with the spirits of Dr. Johnson's circle.

It would seem impossible to overpraise the singular genius of Jane Austen. But with alarming accumulation of hyperbole it has been done.

Though well intentioned, it probably began unintentionally. Lord Macaulay started the trouble with his slightly silly remark that “while Shakespeare has left us a greater number of striking portraits than other dramatists put together, he has hardly left us a single caricature,” and that though “Shakespeare has had neither equal nor second ” (here the silliness begins), “among the writers who, in that point in which we have noticed, have approached nearest to the manner of the great master, we have no hesitation in placing Jane Austen.”

This remark would be perfectly true if it were not that in just such miraculous characters as Mr. Collins, Mrs. Bennet, Sir John Middleton, General Tilney, Mr. Woodhouse, Admiral Croft, and so forth, the supremacy of Jane Austen is most conspicuous. And a caricature does not cease to be a caricature because it has been done skilfully.

Macaulay (now speaking absolute common sense) added, to his previous unfortunate remark, the comment that Jane Austen “has given us a multitude of characters, all, in a certain sense, commonplace, all such as we meet every day. Yet they are all perfectly discriminated from each other as if they were the most eccentric of human beings.… And almost all this is done by touches so delicate that they elude analysis, that they defy the
powers of description, and that we know them to exist only by the general effect to which they have contributed.”

Macaulay certainly knew his Jane; he very nearly knew her by heart. For she herself said as much when she spoke of her books as “little bits (two inches wide) of ivory on which I work with so fine a brush as produces little effect after much labour.” And if only people would remember that the miniature is no more than one of the charming younger sisters of art, some of the worst excesses of rabid Janeism would be avoided.