Complete Works of Frances Burney

by Frances Burney

  Such, in their early effervescence, was the vent which this man of affliction found to his sorrows, in the sympathy of his affectionate friends.

  At other times, they were beguiled from their deadly heaviness by the expansion of fond description in melancholy verse. To this he was less led by poetical enthusiasm — for all of fire, fancy, and imagery, that light up the poet’s flame, was now extinct, or smothered — than by a gentle request of his Esther, uttered in her last days, that he would address to her some poetry; a request intended, there can be no doubt, as a stimulus to some endearing occupation that might tear him from his first despondence, by an idea that he had still a wish of hers to execute.

  Not as poetry, in an era fastidious as the present in metrical criticism, does the editor presume to offer the verses now about to be selected and copied from a vast mass of elegiac laments found amongst the posthumous papers of Dr. Burney: it is biographically alone, like those that have preceded them, that they are brought forward. They are testimonies of the purity of his love, as well as of the acuteness of his bereavement; and, as such, they certainly belong to his memoirs. The reader, therefore, is again entreated to remember that they were not designed for the press, though they were committed, unshackled, to the discretion of the editor. If that be in fault, the motive will probably prove a palliative that will make the heart, not the head, of the reader, the seat of his judgment.

  “She’s gone! — the all-pervading soul is fled

  T’ explore the unknown mansions of the dead,

  Where, free from earthly clay, the immortal mind

  Casts many a pitying glance on those behind;

  Sees us deplore the wife — the mother — friend —

  Sees fell despair our wretched bosoms rend!

  Oh death! — thy dire inexorable dart

  Of every blessing has bereft my heart!

  Better to have died like her, in hope of rest,

  Than live forlorn, and life and light detest. —

  In hope of rest? ah no! her fervent pray’r

  Was that her soul, when once dissolv’d in air

  Might, conscious of its pre-existent state,

  On those she lov’d alive, benignly wait, —

  Our genius, and our guardian angel be

  Till fate unite us in eternity!

  But — the bless’d shade to me no hope bequeaths

  Till death his faulchion in my bosom sheaths!

  Sorrowing, I close my eyes in restless sleep;

  Sorrowing, I wake the live-long day to weep.

  No future comfort can this world bestow,

  ’Tis blank and cold, as overwhelm’d with snow.

  * * * * *

  When dying in my arms, she softly said:

  “Write me some verses!” — and shall be obey’d.

  The sacred mandate vibrates in my ears,

  And fills my eyes with reverential tears.

  For ever on her virtues let me dwell,

  A Patriarch’s life too short her worth to tell.

  Such manly sense to female softness join’d,

  Her person grac’d, and dignified her mind,

  That she in beauty, while she trod life’s stage,

  A Venus seem’d — in intellect, a sage.

  Before I her beheld, the untutor’d mind

  Still vacant lay, to mental beauty blind:

  But when her angel form my sight had bless’d

  The flame of passion instant fill’d my breast;

  Through every vein the fire electric stole,

  And took dominion of my inmost soul.

  By her.... possess’d of every pow’r to please,

  Each toilsome task was exercis’d with ease.

  * * * * *

  For me, comprising every charm of life,

  Friend — Mistress — Counsellor — Companion — Wife —

  Wife! — wife ! — oh honour’d name! for ever dear,

  Alike enchanting to the eye and ear!

  Let the corrupt, licentious, and profane

  Rail, scoff, and murmur at the sacred chain:

  It suits not them. Few but the wise and good

  It’s blessings e’er have priz’d or understood.

  Matur’d in virtue first the heart must glow,

  Ere happiness can vegetate and grow.

  From her I learnt to feel the holy flame,

  And found that she and virtue were the same.

  From dissipation, though I might receive —

  Ere yet I knew I had a heart to give —

  An evanescent joy, untouch’d the mind

  Still torpid lay, to mental beauty blind;

  Till by example more than precept taught

  From her, to act aright, the flame I caught.

  How chang’d the face of nature now is grown!

  * * * * *

  Illusive hope no more her charms displays;

  Her flattering schemes no more my spirits raise;

  Each airy vision which her pencil drew

  Inexorable death has banish’d from my view.

  Each gentle solace is withheld by fate

  Till death conduct me through his awful gate.

  Come then, Oh Death! let kindred souls be join’d!

  Oh thou, so often cruel — once be kind!”

  A total chasm ensues of all account of events belonging to the period of this irreparable earthly blast. Not a personal memorandum of the unhappy survivor is left; not a single document in his handwriting, except of verses to her idea, or to her memory; or of imitations, adapted to his loss, and to her excellences, from some selected sonnets of Petrarch, whom he considered to have loved, entombed, and bewailed another Esther in his Laura.

  When this similitude, which soothed his spirit and flattered his feelings, had been studied and paralleled in every possible line of comparison, he had recourse to the works of Dante, which, ere long, beguiled from him some attention; because, through the difficulty of idiom, he had not, as of nearly all other favourite authors, lost all zest of the beauties of Dante in solitude, from having tasted the sweetness of his numbers with a pleasure exalted by participation: for, during the last two years that his Esther was spared to him, her increased maternal claims from a new baby; and augmented domestic cares from a new residence, had checked the daily mutuality of their progress in the pursuit of improvement; and to Esther this great poet was scarcely known.

  To Dante, therefore, he first delivered over what he could yet summon from his grief-worn faculties; and to initiate himself into the works, and nearly obsolete style, of that hardest, but most sublime of Italian poets, became the occupation to which, with the least repugnance, he was capable of recurring.

  A sedulous, yet energetic, though prose translation of the Inferno, remains amongst his posthumous relics, to demonstrate the sincere struggles with which, even amidst this overwhelming calamity, he strove to combat that most dangerously consuming of all canker-worms upon life and virtue, utter inertness.

  Of his children, James, his eldest son, had already, at ten years of age, been sent to sea, a nominal midshipman, in the ship of Admiral Montagu.

  The second son, Charles, who was placed, several years later, in the Charterhouse, by Mr. Burney’s first and constant patron, the Earl of Holdernesse, was then but a child.

  The eldest daughter was still a little girl; and the last born of her three sisters could scarcely walk alone. But all, save the seaman, who was then aboard his ship, were now called back to the paternal roof of the unhappy father.

  None of them, however, were of an age to be companionable; his fondness for them, therefore, full of care and trouble, procured no mitigation to his grief by the pleasure of society: and the heavy march of time, where no solace is accepted from abroad, or attainable at home, gave a species of stagnation to his existence, that made him take, in the words of Young,

  “No note of time,

  Save by its loss!”

  His tenderness, however, as a father; his situa
tion as a man; and his duties as a Christian, drew, tore him, at length, from this retreat of lonely woe; and, in the manuscript already quoted from, which was written many years after the period of which it speaks, he says: “I was forced, ere long, to plunge into business; and then found, that having my time occupied by my affairs was a useful dissipation of my sorrows, as it compelled me to a temporary inattention to myself, and to the irreparable loss I had sustained.”

  Still, however, all mitigation to his grief that was not imposed upon him by necessity, he avoided even with aversion; and even the sight of those who most had loved and esteemed the departed, was the sight most painful to him in sharpening his regrets, “which, therefore, no meeting whatsoever,” he says, “could blunt; since to love and admire her, had been universally the consequence of seeing and knowing her.”

  From this mournful monotony of life, he was especially, however, called, by reflecting that his eldest daughter was fast advancing to that age when education is most requisite to improvement; and that, at such a period, the loss of her mother and instructress might be permanently hurtful to her, if no measure should be taken to avert the possible consequences of neglect.

  Yet the idea of a governess, who, to him, unless his children were wholly confined to the nursery, must indispensably be a species of companion, was not, in his present desolate state of mind, even tolerable. Nevertheless masters without superintendence, and lessons without practice, he well knew to be nugatory. Projects how to remedy this evil, as fruitless as they were numberless, crossed his mind; till a plan occurred to him, that, by combining economy with novelty, and change of scene for himself, with various modes of advantage to his daughters, ripened into an exertion that brought him, about a month after its formation, to the gates of Paris.

  The design of Mr. Burney was to place two of his daughters in some convent, or boarding-house, where their education might be forwarded by his own directions.

  Sundry reasons decided him to make his third daughter, Susanna, take place, in this expedition, of his second, Frances; but, amongst them, the principal and most serious motive, was a fearful tendency to a consumptive habit in that most delicate of his young plants, that seemed to require the balsamic qualities of a warmer and clearer atmosphere.

  Another reason, which he acknowledged, in after times, to have had great weight with him for this arrangement, was the tender veneration with which Frances was impressed for her maternal grandmother; whose angelic piety, and captivating softness, had won her young heart with such reverential affection, that he apprehended there might be danger of her being led to follow, even enthusiastically, the religion of so pure a votary, if she should fall so early, within the influence of any zealot in the work of conversion. He determined, therefore, as he could part with two of them only at a time, that Fanny and Charlotte should follow their sisters in succession, at a later period.

  PARIS.

  Immediately upon his arrival at Paris, Mr. Burney, by singular good fortune, had the honour to be introduced to Lady Clifford, a Roman Catholic dowager, of a character the most benevolent, who resided entirely in France, for the pious purpose of enjoying with facility the rites of her religion, which could not, at that period, be followed in England without peril of persecution.

  This lady took the children of Mr. Burney into her kindest favour, and invited their father to consult with her unreservedly upon his projects and wishes; and, through such honourable auspices, scarcely ten days elapsed, ere Esther and Susan were placed under the care of Madame St. Mart, a woman of perfect goodness of heart, and of a disposition the most affectionate.

  Madame St. Mart was accustomed to the charge of — des jeunes Anglaises, two daughters of Sir Willoughby Aston, Selina and Belinda, being then under her roof.

  Highly satisfied with this arrangement, Mr. Burney now visited the delightful capital of France; made himself acquainted with its antiquities, curiosities, public buildings, public places, general laws, and peculiar customs; its politics, its resources, its festivities, its arts and its artists; as well as with the arbitrary tyrannies, and degrading oppressions towards the lower classes, which, at that epoch, were, to an English looker-on, incomprehensibly combined, not with murmurs nor discontent, but with the most lively animal spirits, and the freshest glee of national gaiety.

  But his chosen haunts were the Public Libraries, to which an easiness of access, at that time deplorably unknown in England, encouraged, nay, excited, the intelligent visitor, who might be mentally inclined to any literary project, to hit upon some subject congenial to his taste; by rousing in him that spirit of emulation, which ultimately animates the humbly instructed, to soar to the heights that distinguish the luminous instructor.

  Collections of books, even the most multitudinous and the most rare, may hold, to the common runner through life, but an ordinary niche in places of general resort; nevertheless, the Public Libraries, those Patrons of the Mind, must always be entered with a glow of grateful pleasure, by those who, instinctively, meditate upon the vast mass of thought that they contain.

  To wander amidst those stores, that commit talents to posterity as indubitably as the Herald’s Register transmits names and titles; to develop as accurately the systems of nations, the conditions of communities, the progress of knowledge, and the turn of men’s minds, two or three thousand years ago, as in this our living minute; to visit, in fact, the Brains of our fellow creatures, — not alone with the harrowing knife to dissect physical conformation, but, with the piercing eye of penetration to dive into the recesses of human intelligence, the sources of imagination, and the springs of genius; and there, in those sacred receptacles of mental remains, to survey, in clear, indestructible evidence, all of the soul that man is able to bequeath to man ——

  Views such as these of the powers of his gifted, though gone fellow-creatures, seen thus abstractedly through their intellectual attributes; purified equally from the frailties and selfishness of active life, and the sickly humours and baleful infirmities of age; seen through the medium of learned, useful, or fanciful productions; and beheld in so insulated a moment of vacuity of any positive plan of life, instinctively roused the dormant faculties of the subject of these memoirs, by setting before him a comprehensive chart of human capabilities, which involuntarily incited a conscious inquiry: what, peradventure, might be his own share, if sought for, in such heavenly gifts?

  And it was now that, vaguely, yet powerfully, he first fell into that stream of ideas, or visions, that seemed to hail him to that class indefinable and indescribable, from its mingled elevation and abjectness, which, by joining the publicity of the press to the secret intercourse of the mind with the pen, insensibly allures its adventurous votaries to make the world at large the judge of their abilities, or their deficiences — namely, the class of authors.

  For this was the real, though not yet the ostensible epoch, whence may be traced the opening of his passion for literary pursuits.

  And from this period, to the very close of his long mortal career, this late, though newly chosen occupation, became all that was most consoling to his sorrows, most diversifying to his ideas, and most animating to his faculties.

  Some new stimulus had been eminently wanting to draw a man of his natively ardent and aspiring character from the torpid blight of availless misery; which, in despoiling him of all bosom felicity, had left only to an attempt at some untried project and purpose, any chance for the restoration of his energies.

  He did not immediately fix on a subject for any work, though he had the wisdom, at once, and the modesty, to resolve, since so tardily he entered such lists, to adopt no plan that might wean him from his profession — for his profession was his whole estate I but rather to seek one that might amalgamate his rising desire of fame in literature, with his original labours to be distinguished as a follower of Orpheus.

  He took notes innumerable in the public libraries, which he meant to revisit on returning to Paris for his daughters, of the books, subjects, p
assages, and authors which invited re-perusal; and which, hereafter, might happily conduct to some curious investigation, or elucidating commentary.

  He made himself master of a beautiful collection of what then was esteemed to be most select of the French classics.

  He completed, by adding to what already he possessed, all that recently had been published of that noblest work that had yet appeared in the republic of letters, the original Encyclopedia.

  He opened an account with the reigning bookseller of the day, whose reputation in his mind-enlightening business still sustains its renown, M. Guy, whom he commissioned to send over to England the principal works then suspending over the heights of the French Parnassus; where resplendently were grouped all that was most attractive in Wit, Poetry, Eloquence, Science, Pathos, and Entertainment; from Rousseau, Voltaire, D’Alembert, Marmontel, Destouches, Marivaux, Gilbert, Diderot, Fontenelle, de Jaucourt; and many others.

  It will easily be conceived how wistfully Mr. Burney must have coveted to make acquaintance with this brilliant set; his high veneration for genius having always led him to consider the first sight of an eminent author to form a data in his life.

  But he had neither leisure, nor recommendatory letters; nor, perhaps, courage for such an attempt; the diffidence of his nature by no means anticipating the honourable place he himself was destined to hold in similar circles.

  Not small, however, was his solace, while missing every ray of living light from this foreign constellation, when he found himself shone upon by a fixed star of the first magnitude belonging to his own system; for at the house of the English ambassador, the Earl of Hertford, he became acquainted with the celebrated secretary of his lordship, the justly admired, and justly censured DAVID HUME; who, with the skilful discernment that waited neither name nor fame for its stimulus, took Mr. Burney immediately and warmly into his favour.

  Had this powerful and popular author, in his erudite, spirited, and intellectual researches and reflections, given to mankind his luminous talents, and his moral philosophy, for fair, open, and useful purposes, suited to the high character which he bore, not alone for genius, but for worth and benevolence; intead of bending, blending, involving them with missive weapons of baneful sarcasm, insidiously at work to undermine our form of faith; he would have been hailed universally, not applauded partially, as, in every point, one of the first of British writers.