Three English Writers

OF the three biographical studies ¹ upon which we are to venture some brief comment, Mr. Dobson’s Fanny Burney is, on all counts, the most important. For one thing, his subject lies toward the hither boundary of the period of which he has so curious a knowledge, and which he has been able to invest with charm for many persons who might, lacking his offices, have remained perfectly indifferent to it. Nobody is more punctilious in erudition, or more genially human in interpretation, than Mr. Dobson. One comes to have a weakness for his footnotes, and more than toleration for his amiable foible for dates. Indeed, his dates, like Milton’s proper names, take on a sort of talismanic value ; in the end, one is not able to see how the text could get on properly without them : “On the 6th of July, 1786, the Public Advertiser announced that — ‘ Miss Burney, daughter of Dr. Burney, is appointed Dresser to the Queen, in the room of Mrs. Hoggadore, gone to Germany.’ The last three words were premature, for further notifications, with much pleasing and ingenious variation of Mrs. Haggerdorn’s name, made it clear that the lady in question only took leave of the Queen on the 13th, and retired to her native Mecklenburg on the 17th.” The date of Mrs. Haggerdorn’s departure cannot be said to be in itself of very great importance to the narrative ; but somehow the little pedantry, if such it be, is rather engaging than otherwise.

Mr. Dobson’s manner as a biographer is a model of literary breeding. He never allows himself to be merely clever or witty, though wit and cleverness are, as we have abundant reason for knowing, very much at his disposal. He takes it for granted that his readers are interested in his subject, and not in himself. The calm audacity of Mr. Birrell and the brilliant effrontery of Mr. Chesterton are equally remote from his method. He chooses to throw a steady beam upon his subject rather than a series of flashes. Yet the good rule holds : by losing himself he comes to his own. It is his personality, after all, which gives his work its effectiveness.

To write a new life of Fanny Burney was a task of delicacy and importance. Most persons who remember her at all probably remember her by way of Macaulay, if not directly from him. That spirited but not altogether reliable Edinburgh essay stands a little between us and a direct view of the object. We see the young Fanny the least trifle more charming and ingenuous than she was, and watch with dismay her metamorphosis into the prim and Johnsonian Madame D’Arblay. We harbor, perhaps, an unwarrantably violent grudge against the well-meaning queen and her stupid Haggerdorn. We feel some resentment toward the altogether admirable M. D’Arblay, and can hardly forgive his wife for having been merely happy with him for a quarter of a century. There is no denying that Miss Burney’s work was done before she reached middle life. So was Miss Austen’s ; yet who can forbear the wish that she, too, might have had twentyfive years more of life to throw away upon some man as good as M. D’Arblay ?

Mr. Dobson employs frequent quotations from the Diary in the course of his narrative. What he has to say about it specifically is very brief ; is to be found, indeed, in his final paragraph. His main contention is indisputable: that Miss Burney’s fame must rest upon the Diary rather than upon the two novels which made her a great figure in her own day. “ It has all the graphic picturesqueness, all the dramatic interest, all the objective characterization, all the happy faculty of ‘ making her descriptions alive,’ — which constitute the charm of the best passages in Evelina. But it has the further advantage that it is true; and that it deals with real people.” The short of the matter is that your true diarist has a very different method from that of the novelist; he makes use of actual events and persons as material for his kind of creative writing. There is no doubt that Miss Burney found her proper literary strength in the intimate letter and the still more intimate journal; while Miss Austen, whose letters serve mainly to endear her to us as a woman, found it in fiction.

Mr. Ainger’s Crabbe, in the same series, is another admirable example of condensed critical biography. Crabbe’s life was of the quietest, and there have been no new data of importance for the present biographer to unearth. His facts, almost without exception, have been derived from the life written by FitzGerald’s friend, the younger Crabbe, and prefixed to the first collected edition of the poet’s work, which was published shortly after his death. That was a biography both filial and judicial; it contained, perhaps, a single conscious suppression, — the word misrepresentation could not be used. This is of so interesting a nature that Mr. Ainger is justified in discussing it somewhat at length. Crabbe wrote three or four poems which, though powerful, are altogether unlike the work which gave him his audience. Mr. Ainger gives good reasons for his surmise that their source was like that of the Dream-Fugue and Kubla Khan. The younger Crabbe admits that for many years his father used opium, “ and to a constant but slightly increasing dose of it,” he says, “ may be attributed his long and generally healthy life.” A marginal note against this passage in FitzGerald’s copy suggests that the opium “ probably influenced his dreams, for better or worse,” and adds, “ See also the World of Dreams and Sir Eustace Grey.” Mr. Ainger draws an interesting parallel between the imagery of Sir Eustace Grey and that of certain passages in the De Quincey Confessions. He might also have called attention to the striking resemblance to that other famous opium-eater in the sound and savor of such passages as this : —

Of course this is a matter of inferior moment. The substance of Crabbe’s work, his most characteristic poetry, was in a vein altogether different from that of any of his contemporaries ; though in its inequality of workmanship it bore a certain analogy to the poetry of Byron and Wordsworth.

There are curious points of contrast in Crabbe’s life and work which would have been fair game for Macaulay if the Edinburgh commission had fallen to him instead of Jeffrey. (Macaulay admired Crabbe, but mentions him only once in the essays, and then merely by way of throwing the villainous literary figure of a luckless Mr. Robert Montgomery into blacker relief.) There never was a better chance for paradox. His verse is monotonous and slipshod, his knowledge of human types is varied and exact. He judges women like an Ecclesiastes, and describes them like a Tom Moore. He is a sentimental pessimist ; an opium-eating realist; a stern critic of clerical shortcomings, and an absentee pluralist: and so on. The really important fact is that with much of provinciality in the substance of his work, and much of imperfection in its form, he did somehow succeed in producing poetry of permanent value. The Parish Register is a record not only of local events, but of universal experience ; the Borough and the Tales make up a picture of universal society. Sir Leslie Stephen’s remark may fairly be taken as the world’s verdict thus far: “ With all its shortand long-comings, Crabbe’s better work leaves its mark on the reader’s mind and memory as only the work of genius can.”

Of Mr. Whibley’s Thackeray one must speak with a good deal of qualification. It is not without vigor, it is not without discernment, but it seems by this or by that to lack roundness and soundness. The critical biographer is probably more open to error than others of the critical trade ; for it is harder to be impartial in interpreting a man than in interpreting a work of art. One has no quarrel with Mr. Whibley for having decided opinions about Thackeray, and for stating them frankly. A critic will not escape the charge of folly by being too fearful in treading his ground. He must, quite as much as a “ creative ” artist, give himself away ; he must offer his strength and his weakness for inspection. If he is strong enough to command the serious attention of his audience, whether it agrees with him or not, he will have exposed himself not altogether vainly ; but the best criticism is not only frank, it is true. Mr. Whibley does not quite convince us that truth is ready to his call.

His method is not simple enough; he is too clever by half. He says a good many brilliant things, and not a few witty ones. He has a pretty turn for epigram. He “ illuminates ” his subject with a capable arrangement of artificial lights. The method has its value in reaching toward a just estimate of some writer so recent that the question of his greatness or mere prominence can be determined only by time. We have had half a century for making up our minds about Thackeray; and we have come to a pretty general understanding of his limitations. But the trial is not finished for Mr. Whibley : he here undertakes to sum up the case against Thackeray, and to recommend a verdict of guilty with extenuating circumstances. Here are some of the counts in the indictment: (1) Thackeray is “a gentlemanly Philistine, who esteems ton higher than truth; ” (2) he is a sentimentalist, “ who unto the end of his career delighted somewhat naïvely in the obvious emotions ; ” (3) “he is too often a man and a brother; he forgets the impartiality of the artist, and goes about babbling with his own puppets ; ” (4) “his style lacks distinction, though it gives a general impression of gentlemanly ease.” There is nothing really novel in the substance of these charges ; but they have hardly been given heretofore such a hard glittering surface. Every century contributes a few great personalities to the world’s cherished store. Thackeray was one of these ; and the breath of him is not to be found in the ingenious manikin which Mr. Whibley has constructed, and which he neatly anatomizes for us. The disjecta membra look much like those of a Christian or an ordinary man. Thackeray himself, — the big, worldly, warm-hearted gentleman whom FitzGerald and Tennyson and Carlyle loved,— the great artist in the intimate style, — does not appear.