FANNY BURNEY

I LIKE better to begin with this English maiden name, with its pleasant familiarity, than to adopt the stately Madame D'Arblay which stands at the head of Mr. Austin Dobson's superb edition of the Diary and Letters. For however much the form of this minute self-revelation may remind us of the famous French diaries, in substance it is singularly English, and on that quality not a little of its interest depends, as well as its very grave defects. There is, too, something incongruous in the very sound of a name which did not belong to the writer until she was fortyone. By a kind of unconscious selection the memory of our great friends and mentors of the

'Diary and Letters of Madame D'Arblay (1778-1840). As edited by her niece, Charlotte Barrett. With Preface and Notes by Austin Dobson. In six volumes. New York: The Macmillan Co., 1904-05.-This is properly a continuation of The Early D ary of Frances Burney (1768-78), with a Selection from her Correspondence, and from the Journals of her Sisters, Susan and Charlotte Burney. Edited by Annie Raine Ellis. Two volumes. London, 1889. The eight volumes together thus extend over a period of seventy-three years.

past fixes itself at a certain age, and it is only with an effort that we can picture them to ourselves as younger or older than this arbitrary image. Of Miss Burney's contemporaries, Johnson we always see as grave and wearing the years of authority; can any one honestly say the legend of the young poet and hack writer strolling through Grub Street with a hungry friend has any meaning to him? Walpole remains in the middle years of life with the cynicism on his face that comes when youth has passed and the powers of manhood still remain. But Fanny is a girl to the end. At the close of her Journal we read of her as an old woman, alone in her London house, bending over the mass of papers left by her father and sorting them out with tired fingers, but the story leaves us incredulous. The stiffness of language which has gradually benumbed her style, we take as the pedantry of untried youth, and the face of the writer persists in wearing the mobile features so familiar in the portrait made by her artist cousin.' The brow keeps its breadth and smoothness; the eyes still look out with the same mixture of large, quizzical humour and near-sighted abstraction-they were "greenishgrey," she says, like those of a dove; and the bow of the mouth is not unstrung, but arched as

This portrait, known so well from engravings, may not be of Miss Burney after all. Though painted in 1782, when she was thirty years old, it has a marked appearance of youth.

if holding back the sly, swift satire.

She was a

small, frail body, we know, and not handsome; yet men felt a singular attraction in her, and women did not withhold their love, and we who ¡ead her life cannot think of her as anything but winsome and unhandseled by time.

It was, perhaps, under this impression of her inherent youth that Mr. Dobson has prefixed to his volumes the quaint preface which Fanny wrote down at the age of fifteen, when she had made a solemn holocaust of her childish attempts at literature, and was beginning, instead, the record of her own life:

To have some account of my thoughts, manners, acquaintance, and actions, when the hour arrives at which time is more nimble than memory, is the reason which induces me to keep a Journal-a Journal in which, I must confess, my every thought must open my whole heart.

But a thing of the kind ought to be addressed to somebody-I must imagine myself to be talking-talking to the most intimate of friends-to one in whom I should take delight in confiding, and feel remorse in concealment; but who must this friend be? To make choice of one in whom I can but half rely, would be to frustrate entirely the intention of my plan. The only one I could wholly, totally confide in, lives in the same house with me, and not only never has, but never will, leave me one secret to tell her. [Her "heart's beloved sister, Susanna," we may suppose.] To whom then must I dedicate my wonderful, surprising, and interesting adventures?-to whom dare I reveal my private opinion of my nearest relations? my secret thoughts of my dearest