Such vanities and emotions on the part of the reader are perpetually forcing the novelist to gratify them. And the result, though it may give the novel a short life of extreme vigour, is, as we know even while we are enjoying the tears and laughs and excitement of that life, fatal to its endurance. For the accuracy of representation, the looseness and simplicity of its method, its denial of artifice and convention, its immense power to imitate the surface reality – all the qualities that make a novel the most popular form of literature – also make it, even as we read it, turn stale and perish on our hands. Already some of the ‘great novels’ of the past, like Robert Elsmere or Uncle Tom’s Cabin,fn60 are perished except in patches because they were originally bolstered up with so much that had virtue and vividness only for those who lived at the moment that the books were written. Directly manners change, or the contemporary idiom alters, page after page, chapter after chapter, become obsolete and lifeless.

  But the novelist is aware of this too and while he uses the power of exciting human sympathy which belongs to him he also attempts to control it. Indeed the first sign that we are reading a writer of merit is that we feel this control at work on us. The barrier between us and the book is raised higher. We do not slip so instinctively and so easily into a world that we know already. We feel that we are being compelled to accept an order and to arrange the elements of the novel – man, nature, God – in certain relations at the novelist’s bidding. In looking back at the few novels that we have glanced at here we can see how astonishingly we lend ourselves to first one vision and then to another which is its opposite. We obliterate a whole universe at the command of Defoe; we see every blade of grass and snail shell at the command of Proust. From the first page we feel our minds trained upon a point which becomes more and more perceptible as the book proceeds and the writer brings his conception out of darkness. At last the whole is exposed to view. And then, when the book is finished, we seem to see (it is strange how visual the impression is) something girding it about like the firm road of Defoe’s story telling; or we see it shaped and symmetrical with dome and column complete, like Pride and Prejudice and Emma.fn61 A power which is not the power of accuracy or of humour or of pathos is also used by the great novelists to shape their work. As the pages are turned, something is built up which is not the story itself. And this power, if it accentuates and concentrates and gives the fluidity of the novel endurance and strength, so that no novel can survive even a few years without it, is also a danger. For the most characteristic qualities of the novel – that it registers the slow growth and development of feeling, that it follows many lives and traces their unions and fortunes over a long stretch of time – are the very qualities that are most incompatible with design and order. It is the gift of style, arrangement, construction, to put us at a distance from the special life and to obliterate its features; while it is the gift of the novel to bring us into close touch with life. The two powers fight if they are brought into combination. The most complete novelist must be the novelist who can balance the two powers so that the one enhances the other.

  This would seem to prove that the novel is by its nature doomed to compromise, wedded to mediocrity. Its province, one may conclude, is to deal with the commoner but weaker emotions; to express the bulk and not the essence of life. But any such verdict must be based upon the supposition that ‘the novel’ has a certain character which is now fixed and cannot be altered, that ‘life’ has a certain limit which can be defined. And it is precisely this conclusion that the novels we have been reading tend to upset.

  The process of discovery goes on perpetually. Always more of life is being reclaimed and recognised. Therefore, to fix the character of the novel, which is the youngest and most vigorous of the arts, at this moment would be like fixing the character of poetry in the Eighteenth Century and saying that because Gray’s Elegy was ‘poetry’ Don Juan was impossible.fn62 An art practised by hosts of people, sheltering diverse minds, is also bound to be simmering, volatile, unstable. And for some reason not here to be examined, fiction is the most hospitable of hosts; fiction today draws to itself writers who would even yesterday have been poets, dramatists, pamphleteers, historians. Thus ‘the novel’, as we still call it with such parsimony of language, is clearly splitting apart into books which have nothing in common but this one inadequate title. Already the novelists are so far apart that they scarcely communicate, and to one novelist the work of another is quite genuinely unintelligible or quite genuinely negligible.

  The most significant proof of this fertility, however, is provided by our sense of feeling something that has not yet been said; of some desire still unsatisfied. A very general, a very elementary, view of this desire would seem to show that it points in two directions. Life – it is a commonplace – is growing more complex. Our self-consciousness is becoming far more alert and better trained. We are aware of relations and subtleties which have not yet been explored. Of this school Proust is the pioneer, and undoubtedly there are still to be born writers who will carry the analysis of Henry James still further, who will reveal and relate finer threads of feeling, stranger and more obscure imaginations.

  But also we desire synthesis. The novel, it is agreed, can follow life; it can amass details. But can it also select? Can it symbolise? Can it give us an epitome as well as an inventory? It was some such function as this that poetry discharged in the past. But, whether for the moment or for some longer time, poetry with her rhythms, her poetic diction, her strong flavour of tradition, is too far from us today to do for us what she did for our parents. Prose perhaps is the instrument best fitted to the complexity and difficulty of modern life. And prose – we have to repeat it – is still so youthful that we scarcely know what powers it may not hold concealed within it. Thus it is possible that the novel will come to differ as widely from the novel of Tolstoy and Jane Austen as the poetry of Browning and Byron differs from the poetry of Lydgate and Spenser.fn63 In time to come – but time to come lies far beyond our province.

  Dr Burney’s Evening Partyfn1

  Part I

  The party was given either in 1777 or in 1778, on which day or month of the year is not known, but the night was cold. Fanny Burney, from whom we get much of our information, was accordingly either twenty-five or twenty-six, as we choose.fn2 But in order to enjoy the party to the full it is necessary to go back some years and to scrape acquaintance with the guests.

  Fanny, from the earliest days, had always been fond of writing. There was a cabin at the end of her stepmother’s garden, at Kings Lynn, where she used to sit and write of an afternoon till the oaths of the seamen sailing up and down the river drove her in. But it was only in the afternoon, and in remote places, that her half suppressed, uneasy passion for writing had its way. Writing was held to be slightly ridiculous in a girl; rather unseemly in a woman. Besides, one never knew, if a girl kept a diary, whether she might not say something indiscreet – so Miss Dolly Young warned her,fn3 and Miss Dolly Young, though exceedingly plain, was esteemed a woman of the highest character in Kings Lynn. Fanny’s stepmother also disapproved of writing. Yet so keen was the joy – ‘I cannot express the pleasure I have in writing down my thoughts at the very moment and my opinion of people when I first see them,’fn4 she wrote – that scribble she must. Loose sheets of paper fell from her pocket and were picked up and read by her father to her agony and shame. Once she was forced to make a bonfire of all her papers in the back garden. At last some kind of compromise seems to have been arrived at. The morning was sacred to more serious tasks like sewing; it was only in the afternoon that she allowed herself to scribble letters, diaries, stories, verses, in the look-out place which overhung the river till the oaths of the sailors drove her in.

  There was something strange in that, perhaps, for the eighteenth century was the age of oaths. Fanny’s early diary is larded with them. ‘God help me,’ ‘Split me,’ ‘Stap my vitals,’ together with damneds and devilishes dropped daily and hourly from the lips of her adored father and her venerated Daddy Crisp.fn5 Perhaps Fanny’s attitude to language was altogether a little abnormal. She was immensely susceptible to the power of words, but not nervously, or acutely, as Jane Austen was. She adored fluency and the sound of language pouring warmly and copiously over the page. Directly she read Rasselas enlarged and swollen sentences formed on the end of her childish pen in the manner of Dr Johnson. Quite early in life she would go out of her way to avoid the plain name of Tomkins.fn6 Thus, whatever she heard from her cabin at the end of the garden was sure to affect her more than most girls, and it is also clear that while her ears were sensitive to sound her soul was sensitive to meaning. There was something a little prudish in her nature. Just as she avoided the name of Tomkins, so she avoided the roughness, the asperity, the plainness of life. The chief fault that mars the extreme vivacity and vividness of the early diary is that the words tend in their smooth downpour to soften the edges, to smooth out the outlines. And thus, when she heard the sailors swearing, though Mary Allen, her half-sister would, one believes, have liked to stay and perhaps toss a kiss over the water – her future history allows us to take the liberty of thinking so – Fanny went indoors.

  Fanny went indoors but not to solitary meditation. The house, whether it was in Lynn or in London – and by far the greater part of the year was spent in Poland Street – hummed with activity. There was the sound of the harpsichord, the sound of singing; there was the sound – for such concentration seems to pervade a whole house with its murmur – of Dr Burney writing furiously, surrounded by notebooks, in his study; and there were great bursts of chatter and laughter when, returning from their various occupations, the Burney children got together. Nobody enjoyed family life more than Fanny did. For there her shyness only served to fasten the nickname of ‘Old Lady’ upon her;fn7 there she had a familiar audience for her humour; there she need not bother about her dress; there – perhaps the fact that their mother had died when they were all young was partly the cause of it – was that intimacy which expresses itself in jokes and legends and a private language (‘The wig is wet,’fn8 they would say, winking at each other); there were endless confabulations, confidences and criticisms between sisters and brothers and brothers and sisters. Nor could there be any doubt that the Burneys – Susan and James and Charles and Fanny and Hetty and Charlotte – were a gifted race. Charles was a scholar; James was a humorist; Fanny was a writer; Susan was musical – each had some special gift or characteristic to add to the common stock. And besides their natural gifts they were happy in the fact that their father was a very popular man – a man, too, so admirably situated by his talents, which were social, and his birth, which was gentle, that they could mix without difficulty either with lords or with bookbinders, and had, in fact, as free a run of life as could be wished.

  As for Dr Burney himself, there were some points about which, at this distance of time, one may feel dubious. It is difficult to be sure what, had one met him now, one would have felt for him. One thing is certain, one would have met him everywhere. Hostesses would be competing to catch him. Notes would wait for him. Telephone bells would interrupt him. For he was the most sought after, the most occupied of men. He was always dashing in and dashing off. Some times he dined off a box of sandwiches in his carriage; some times he went out at 7 and was not back from his round of music lessons till 11 at night. When he was not teaching he was writing. The ‘habitual softness of his manners,’fn9 his great social charm, his haphazard, untidy ways – everything, notes, money, manuscripts, was tossed into a drawer, and once he was robbed of his savings, but his friends were delighted to make it up for him; his odd adventures – did he not fall asleep after a bad crossing at Dover, and so return to France, and so have to cross the Channel again?fn10 – endeared him to everybody. It is perhaps his diffuseness that makes him a trifle nebulous. He seems to be for ever writing, and then rewriting, and requiring his daughters to write for him endless books and articles, while over him, unchecked, unfiled, unread, pour down notes, letters, invitations to dinner which he cannot destroy and means some day to annotate and collect, until he melts away at lastfn11 in a cloud of words. When he died at the age of ninety-onefn12 there was nothing to be done by the most devoted of daughters but to burn the whole accumulation. Even Fanny’s love of language was suffocated. But if we fumble a little as to our feeling for Dr Burney, Fanny certainly did not. She adored her father. She never minded how many times she had to lay aside her own writing in order to copy his, and he returned her affection. Though his ambition for her success at court was foolish, perhaps, and almost cost her her life, she had only to cry, when a distasteful suitor was pressed on her, ‘Oh, sir, I wish for nothing! Only let me live with you!’ for the emotional doctor to reply, ‘My life! Thou shalt live with me for ever if thou wilt. Thou canst not think I meant to get rid of thee?’fn13 And not only were his eyes full of tears, but, what was more remarkable, he never mentioned Mr Barlow again. Indeed, the Burneys were a happy family – a mixed, composite, oddly assorted family, for there were the Allens, too, and little half-brothers and half-sisters being born and growing up.

  So time passed and the passage of the years made it impossible for the family to continue in Poland Street any longer. First they moved to Queens Square and then in 1774 to the house where Newton had lived in St Martins Street, Leicester Fields,fn14 where his observatory still stood and his room with the painted panels was still to be seen. Here in a mean street, but in the centre of the town, the Burneys set up their establishment. Here Fanny went on scribbling (the observatory was her favourite sitting place as the Cabin had been at Lynn) for she exclaimed ‘I cannot any longer resist what I find to be irresistible, the pleasure of popping down my thoughts from time to time upon paper.’fn15 Here come so many famous people either to be closeted with the doctor, or, like Garrick, to sit with him while his fine head of natural hair was brushed,fn16 or to join the lively family dinner, or, more formally to gather together in a musical party where all the Burney children played and their father ‘dashed away’fn17 on the harpsichord and perhaps some foreign musician of distinction performed a solo – so many people came for one reason or another to the house in St Martins Street that it is only the eccentrics, the grotesques that catch the eye. One remembers for instance the Agujari, the astonishing soprano, because she had been ‘mauled as an infant by a pig, in consequence of which she is reported to have a silver side.’fn18 One remembers Bruce the traveller because he had a ‘most extraordinary complaint … When he attempted to speak, his whole stomach suddenly seemed to heave like an organ bellows. He did not wish to make any secret about it, but spoke of it as having originated in Abyssinia. However, one evening, when he appeared rather agitated, it lasted much longer than usual, and was so violent that it alarmed the company.’fn19 One seems to remember, for she paints herself while she paints the others, Fanny herself slipping eagerly and shyly in and out of all this company, with her rather prominent gnat-like eyes, her quick observant mind, that noted every gesture, remembered every word, so that as soon as the company had gone she stole to the observatory and wrote it all down in letters twelve pages long for her beloved Daddy Crisp at Chessington. For that old hermit – he had retired to a house in a field in dudgeon with society – though professing to be better pleased with a bottle of wine in his cellar and a horse in his stable, and a game of backgammon at night than with all the fine company in the world, was always agog for news.

  Mr Crisp wanted to know in particular ‘about Mr Greville and his notions.’fn20 For, indeed, Mr Greville was a perpetual source of curiosity. It is a thousand pities that time with her poppy dust has covered Mr Greville, who was once so eminent, so that only his most prominent features – that is to say, his birth, his person and his pride – emerge. Mr Greville was the descendant – he must, one fancies, have emphasised the fact from the way in which it is repeated – of the friend of Sir Philip Sidneyfn21 – a coronet indeed ‘hung almost suspended over his head.’ In person he was tall and well proportioned. ‘His face[,] features and complexion were striking for masculine beauty.’ ‘His air and carriage were noble with conscious dignity’; his bearing was ‘lofty yet graceful.’fn22 But all these gifts and qualities to which one must add that he rode and fenced and danced and played tennis to admiration were marred by prodigious faults. He was supercilious in the extreme, he was selfish, he was fickle. He was a man of violent temper. His introduction to Dr Burney, in the first place, was due to his doubt whether a musician could be fit company for a gentleman. When he found that young Burney not only played the harpsichord to perfection, but curved his finger and rounded his hand as he played; that he answered plain ‘Yes, sir,’ or ‘No, sir,’ being more interested in the music than in his patron;fn23 that it was only, indeed, when Greville himself thrummed pertinaciously from memory that he could stand it no longer and broke into vivacious conversation – it was only when he found that young Burney was well bred and gifted that, being himself a very clever man, he no longer stood upon his dignity. Burney became his friend and equal. Burney, indeed, almost became his victim. For if there was one thing that the descendant of the friend of Sir Philip Sidney detested it was what he called ‘fogrum.’ By that expressive word he seems to have meant the middle-class virtues of discretion and respectability as opposed to the aristocratic virtues of what he called ‘ton.’fn24 Life must be lived dashingly, daringly, with perpetual display, even if the display was extremely expensive and, as seemed possible to those who trailed dismally round his grounds, as boring to the man who had made the improvements as to the unfortunate guests whose admiration he insisted upon extorting. But Greville could not endure fogrum in himself or in his friends. He threw the obscure young musician into the fast life of Whitesfn25 and Newmarket and watched with amusement to see if he sank or swam.fn26 Burney, most adroit of men, swam as if born to the water, and the descendant of the friend of Sir Philip Sidney was pleased. From being his protégé Burney became his confidante. Indeed, the splendid gentleman, for all his high carriage, was in need of one, and in Burney, perhaps, he found a link between the world of ton and the world of fogrum. He was a man of the world who could dice and bet with the bloods; he was also a musician who could talk intellectual things and ask clever people to his house.

 

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