This was indeed a great promise made to future time, as Dr. Burney was born while George the First was not firm upon his throne, and lived until close on eighty-eight. What might he not have told us had he been able to fulfil his plan, unchecked by engagements with pupils, and societies, musical, literary, and benevolent; by innumerable friends, and multitudinous invitations; by an old pledge to complete his “History of Music,” and by an agreement made when he was seventy-five years old to furnish the musical articles for a new edition of the Cyclopaedia of Chambers— “the shortest calculation for the termination of this work being” (as he wrote in 1801) “still ten years.”
To fulfil this contract, he gave up writing for the “Monthly Review,” and laid aside his autobiography. The fragment which we have quoted was written in 1782, and stood, without a page to follow it, until 1807, when Dr. Burney began to write his own life in earnest, at the age of eighty-one.
At little less than the same age, his daughter Frances published that compilation from his twelve volumes of manuscript memoirs, his “countless, fathomless” mass of papers, and her own journals and letters, which is known as the “Memoirs of Dr. Burney.” In it she has indicated her reasons for suppressing his own narrative. They are more fully given in “quite a pamphlet” of a letter to her sister Esther, which was written in November, 1820.
It would fatigue the reader’s fancy to follow her details of toil and disappointment. Of the twelve volumes, some were mere repetitions of others. “The dear, indefatigable author wrote frequently the whole of every cahier three times over himself,” in small writing, with many abbreviations; and Frances (nervous in her turn) read some of the manuscript volumes in even four different copies lest her collation should be imperfect. She found the Memoirs to be the work, not of the father who wrote the “Tours,” or the “History of Music,” not even of the father whose spirits afterwards rallied so that he wrote “occasional essays” of better texture than the Memoirs, and very entertaining letters, some of which she has printed in his “Memoirs,” but of a man dejected by the loss of his wife, of his “gentle Susan,” and of many of his oldest friends; by the experience of one paralytic stroke, and the apprehension of another. Beginning with the thought that she “had nothing to do but to revise, and somewhat abridge,” his narrative, her ultimate decision was to suppress all that he had written which would not maintain his literary “credit and fair fame.”
She shrank “from a storm of disapprobation, if not invective, upon the editor who, for a fortnight’s quick profit from his former celebrity, had exhibited her faded father’s faded talents.” In the full conviction that he would have been his own expurgator had he not written in ill-health and seclusion, she at once destroyed all his manuscripts and papers which “could not have been spread, even in a general family review, without causing pain or mischief.” From the remainder, she chose such portions as resembled his manner of writing “when his memory was full and gay;... when he lived in the world.” These amount to very few pages in the “Memoirs of Dr. Burney.” After this long winnowing of his “voluminous piles of papers” and pocket-books, the rest of the book appears to have been chiefly constructed from her own diaries, letters, and memory. She felt herself to be the guardian of her father’s fame, and no more tender guardian could have been found, or fancied.
According to the bent of her readers, her decision to suppress, if not destroy, her father’s autobiography, will be received with satisfied submission, or questioned, disapproved, nay, deplored. “Invective” she did not escape at the time. Croker was lying in wait, and among his points of attack was that she had not suffered her father to tell his own tale, but had published her autobiography under the title of his Memoirs.
Her labour to prepare the book, none but herself could know. At the end of 1820 she had not even finished reading the correspondence of Dr. Burney, nor does she appear to have begun that looking through all her own diaries and letters which took place within the next ten years. In November, 1820, her anticipation was that “about three years’ hard reading for myself will finally produce about three quarters of an hour’s reading for my Lecturers.” Justification of the suppression of the mass of her father’s papers she has left in abundance in that letter to her sister of sixteen quarto pages; at less length, but with even more strength, in her “Memoirs of Dr. Burney,” she has pleaded justification. “All the juvenile voluminous MSS. (she writes to Esther) are filled with literal nurses’ tales, — such as narrated by himself were truly amusing, but on paper, and read, not recited, they are trivial to poverty, and dull to sleepiness.” When he described his early life in London, she found him “giving his whole paper... to enormous long paragraphs, and endless folio pages, upon the city electioneering for organs, and concerts, and Stanley’s rivalry, and Frasi, and local interests of the day.” In “the various cahiers upon Norfolk and Lynn” there was “some more agreeable style of writing, but still upon people not generally known.”
“At last comes London; and then the great names begin to occur.”... [Those of his correspondents, (most of whom were his friends), “Garrick, Diderot, Rousseau, Dr. Warton, Dr. JOHNSON, Mr. Mason, Horace Walpole, Lord Mornington, Mr. Crisp, Mr. Greville, Lady Crewe, Mr. Bewley, Mr. Griffith, Mr. Cutler, Mrs. Le Noir, Lord Macartney, Lord Lonsdale, Duke of Portland, Mr. Canning, Mr. Windham, Mr. Wesley, Mr. La Trobe, Mr. Walker, Mr. Burke, Mr. Malone, Sir J. Reynolds, Mr. Seward, Kit Smart, Mrs. Piozzi.”]—” Here I had the full expectation of detail, anecdote, description, and conversation, such as to manifest these characters in the brilliant light of their own fame, and to show our dear father the caressed, sought, honoured and admired friend of such a constellation; for such he was, and as much loved and esteemed as if he had been the universal patron of them all.” Again she felt sore disappointment. For many years Dr. Burney had been too busy to do more than register in his pocket-books the first day of meeting each particular star of this constellation. He had trusted the rest (all besides the where, and the when) to a future time of leisure, which came only when his memory was impaired.
For his kind intentions towards them, antiquaries, at least, will give Dr. Burney their gratitude. We believe that, in the end, Madame D’Arblay put it out of the power of any one to affirm, contest, or revise her judgement. Without blaming her, we incline to regret it. Even with the piteous picture before us of an aged Frances bending over boxes after boxes, and bags after bags, of papers, “wading, painfully, laboriously wading,” through every note of appointment, or invitation, which her father had ever received, every pocket-book in which he had made entries, and the twelve folio volumes of his autobiography, our provoked fancy teases us, by repeating that the aspect of the second fifty years of this century towards such records as lay before her is far from being that of the first fifty. Those “nursery-tales” might now be called Folk-lore; those accounts of obscure people in Lynn and Norfolk, materials for a narrative of the manners and customs of a town and county which, not long ago, had strongly marked ways of their own; and the trivial, or tedious, details of Dr. Burney’s early days in the City of London, facts precious to those for whom he meant them, — that is, to lovers of anecdote, antiquaries, and even historians. The Memoirs of Dr. Burney are now rather consulted than read; but as the book is in the London Library, as well as in all permanent subscription-libraries and in many private libraries of its time, we need not draw much from it. Rather we would add to it a little by quoting a few anecdotes from his own writings which his daughter overlooked, or did not copy because it could never have occurred to her how little his works would be read now, as compared with her own.
The Burney family waits for a genealogist and bibliographer. One ought to appear within it. Meantime, a family tradition brings it, with James I., from Scotland, in 1600. This might easily be the case with Dr. Burney’s great-great grandfather, as his grandfather, James Macburney, was born about 1653. He had an estate in Great Hanwood, in Shropshire, and a house in Whitehall. He married a daughter
of his Shropshire rector, Mr. Evance [Evans]. His eldest son, James (born at Hanwood in 1678), was a pupil of Dr. Busby at Westminster School, and of Dahl in painting. When nineteen he married Rebecca Ellis, a girl of sixteen, who is said to have acted at Goodman’s Fields Theatre. Thereupon his father disinherited him, and himself married his own cook, whose son, Joseph, ran through the property.
James is said by Mme. D’Arblay to have possessed “negligent facility and dissipated ease.” Her words bore a softer meaning in the last century than in this. James Macburney might now be called “clever all round,” that is, he was agreeable, witty, an admirable dancer, and as good a player on the violin as a painter, but with much of that want of perseverance, and concentration of mind, that being “everything by turns, and nothing long,” about him, which was the older meaning of the word “dissipation.” We know not when his wife died, leaving several children. Next he married Ann Cooper, a Shropshire young lady, not without money. Having nine children living out of fifteen (of the two marriages), he was at last forced to stick to some one way of earning money, and chose portrait-painting. He settled at Chester, leaving his last-born child, Charles (who was twin with a girl, Susannah), at nurse in the village of Condover, four miles from Shrewsbury. There, the boy was left for twelve or thirteen years. This was by no means an injury to him, his foster-mother, Dame Ball, being a simple, kind creature, who loved him, and whom he quitted “in an agony of grief.” It was, perhaps, to his (apparent) abandonment in a village that he owed the vigorous health which enabled him afterwards to give lessons in music from eight in the morning until eleven at night, then write until four in the morning, and rise at seven, — yet live to be eighty-eight. Such a brain as his could scarcely have been idle anywhere, or at any age, and such a rector as that of Condover, during the whole time of Burney’s stay in it, was the very man to quicken its activity.
The Reverend George Lluellyn, who had in his youth been a page to Charles II, was “a lively Welshman, active in all his pursuits, a man of wit, and taste in the fine arts, fond of music, who had fitted his house with great taste, and had many good pictures, but spent more time in gardening than he did in anything else.” Mr. Lluellyn liked “the Dutch manner of laying out gardens,” with yew-trees cut into shapes; he liked not William of Orange, but was hand-in-glove with the Shropshire Jacobite leader (Kynaston Corbett, M.P.), and in 1715 sheltered rebels in his rectory. “The Whigs called him a Jacobitical, musical, mad Welsh parson.”
He had known Henry Purcell well enough to be able to supply Dr. Blow with more than thirty of Purcell’s settings of music to words, when Blow brought out the “Orpheus Britannicus,” so that between him and the eldest half brother of little Charles (James Burney, organist then, and for many a year afterwards, of St. Margaret’s, Shrewsbury), the child was little likely to lack music. We assume that some one must have minded his learning, as he got on very quickly at Chester Grammar School, and cannot have been there more than from three to four years, which, of course, was not long enough for scholarship, but was long enough to give him some clue to it. At Chester School, he was only once punished: it was for prompting a friend. When about fourteen, the Cathedral organist, who was a pupil of Dr. Blow, had a fit of the gout. In a few days, he taught the musical school-boy, Burney, to play chants enough “to keep the organ going.”
The following extract shows young Burney on his first approach to Handel: “When Handel went through Chester, on his way to Ireland, this year, 1741, I was at the Public-School in that city, and very well remember seeing him smoke a pipe, over a dish of coffee, at the Exchange Coffeehouse, for being extremely curious to see so extraordinary a man, I watched him narrowly so long as he remained in Chester; which, on account of the wind being unfavourable for his embarking at Parkgate, was several days. During this time, he applied to Mr. Baker, the organist, my first music-master, to know whether there were any choirmen in the Cathedral who could sing at sights as he wished to prove some books that had been hastily transcribed, by trying the choruses which he intended to perform in Ireland. Mr. Baker mentioned some of the most likely singers then in Chester, and among the rest, a printer of the name of Janson, who had a good base voice, and was one of the best musicians in the choir. At this time, Harry Alcock, a good player, was the first violin at Chester, which was then a very musical place; for besides public performances, Mr. Prebendary Prescott had a weekly concert, at which he was able to muster eighteen or twenty performers, gentlemen and professors. A time was fixed for this private rehearsal at the Golden Falcon, where Handel was quartered; but, alas! on trial of the chorus in the Messiah, ‘And with his stripes we are healed? — poor Janson, after repeated attempts, failed so egregiously, that Handel let loose his great bear upon him; and after swearing in four or five languages, cried out in broken English: ‘You shcauntrel! tit not you dell me dat you could sing at soite?” Yes, sir,’ says the printer, ‘and so I. can; but not at first sight.’”
Soon afterwards Charles Burney is found at Shrewsbury as a pupil in music of his half-brother, the organist; learning French, and to play upon the violin, from “little Matteis,” who (in Burney’s mature opinion) played Corelli’s solos better than any one whom he ever heard afterwards. At sixteen, Charles was the future Doctor in little; learning every thing that any one would teach him, and “helping himself” to what he was not taught. He wrote, taught, tuned instruments, and copied “a prodigious quantity of music” for his brother. He says that he tried to “keep up the little Latin he had learned,” to improve his handwriting, and to compose. He does not tell us what he composed, but it seems to have been prose, verse, and music. He read much; and though angling with fervour, it was with a book in his pocket.
He heard Mr. Felton and Dr. William Hayes play on his brother’s organ. He admired them, and they encouraged him. “Thenceforward, he went to work with an ambition and fury that would hardly allow him to eat or sleep.”
In the autumn of 1744, Arne, who is still a well-known English composer of music, was, after a stay of two years in Ireland, on his way to London to take his post at Drury Lane, as conductor of the orchestra and composer of music for that Royal theatre. He met young Burney, who was again at Chester, was pleased with him, and took him to London as his apprentice in music.
If Charles Burney had suffered from what Madame D’Arblay calls “the parsimonious authority and exactions” of his half-brother, James, he was left far too much to himself by Arne, who cared not what was his conduct, and taught him very little: exacting only that he should copy a great quantity of music and make himself useful. His elder own brother, Richard, was then living in London. His seems to have been the only guidance given to Charles. It is described by Madame D’Arblay as “lordly tyranny.” She wrote with the warmth of a daughter, whose imagination kindled at inattention, rigour, or show of superiority to such a father as hers, who, although the youngest born, was the ornament of his family and its chief; but Dr. Burney seems to have taken some neglect, some harshness, and much hard work in his early days very little to heart; and wrote gaily of what moved his daughter to pity, akin to indignation, long after all had passed into “honour, obedience, love, and troops of friends.”
The Burneys of the generation before her own had been able enough, but with the exception of her father and his sister Rebecca, Mme. D’Arblay describes them as having been much less amiable and united by affection than his children and their cousins. But then there were so many of them, that life was a struggle to live. There could not have been much amiss in his early life, as the enthusiasm of Dr. Burney for “old Shrewsbury” was a subject of pleasantry among those who knew him, and to dwell on Condover, and sing the songs of his dear old nurse, with an imitation of her tones, and the expression of her face, his delight even to his old age.
In 1819 Mrs. Piozzi writes to Sir James Fellowes, that Sir Baldwin Leighton is “a true Salopian, who, though well acquainted with both hemispheres, delights in talking only of Shrewsbury. He will now end his life
where he began, a mile from his favourite spot; — a pretty spot enough, but its power over a soldier of fortune like General Leighton, or a full-minded man like my friend, the first Dr. Burney, is really to its credit. When the last-named friend had occasion to kiss his majesty’s hand two or three times within two or three years, I remember the wags saying, ‘Why, Burney takes the King’s hand, sure, for Shrewsbury-brawn; he puts it so often to his lips.’” The jest sounds like one of Mrs. Thrale’s own, but Dr. Burney does really seem to have translated an Italian word, “mostacdolo,” as “simnel,” in order to have the pleasure of bringing Shrewsbury into a note in his “Life of Metastasio.” This note explains that “mostacciolo is a cake made at Naples, of flour, sugar, eggs, and sweet wine,.... which is very different from a Shrewsbury simnel, which is a rich plum-cake, inclosed in an impenetrable case, or crust, made of flour and water, and coloured with saffron, which preserves it from injury and decay in the longest voyages to the most remote parts of the globe.”
He did not see Shrewsbury again for fifty-three years. In 1797, Mrs. Crewe, to raise his spirits after the death of Burke, insisted upon his accompanying her to Crewe Hall, in Cheshire, and went forty miles out of her way to show him Shrewsbury. Then he wrote to Fanny, “I ran away from Mrs. Crewe, who was too tired to walk about, and played the Cicerone myself to Miss Crewe,.... and M. de Frontiville, to whom I undertook to show off old Shrewsbury, of which I knew all the streets, lanes, and parishes, as well as I did sixty years ago.”.... “The next morning.... I walked in that most beautiful of all public walks, as I still believe, in the world, called the Quarry; formed in verdant, and flower-enamelled fields, by the Severn side, with the boldest and most lovely opposite shore imaginable.”....” In a most violent rain, nearly a storm, we left my dear old Shrewsbury; and without being able, in such weather, to get to my dearer old Condover.”
Complete Works of Frances Burney Page 444