Fanny Burney (Madame D'Arblay). Dobson Austin
them, I am sure, was as big as a nut-meg at least. When we were all satisfied it was returned, and the Prince most graciously made a bow to, and received a curtsie from, everyone who looked at it.”20
In the remainder of Fanny’s letters to Mr. Crisp, she gives an account of a further concert arising out of the famous duet. This time the principal guest was the Count (afterwards the Duke) de Guines, the French Ambassador, who was not only a virtuoso of the first order, but an accomplished flute-player, who had the reputation of having dared to beard that other distinguished performer on the same instrument, Frederick the Great. His Majesty had said to him impatiently and impertinently – “Je vous prie, qu’est-ce que fait votre maître quand il ne peut pas chasser De Guisnes?” The Count – a typical aristocrat of the pre-Revolution days – shrugged his shoulders, and made answer, “Il est vrai, Sire, que mon maître n’a pas le bonheur de savoir jouer de la flûte,”21 a retort more dexterous than deserved, since Frederick, whom Dr. Burney had listened to at Potsdam, was not by any means a mere amateur. Lady Edgecumbe had talked so much to M. de Guines about the duet, that he expressed a great desire to hear it, and a second concert had to be arranged. The company convened on this occasion included Lord Ashburnham, “Groom of the Stole, and First Lord of the Bedchamber,” the Baron and Baroness Deiden, Lord Barrington, Lord Sandwich (“Jemmy Twitcher,” to wit), and Signor Venanzio Rauzzini, the “pius Æneas” to the Dido of Gabrielli. Rauzzini was vainly implored to indulge the company with a Rondeau de sa façon—i. e. from his own Piramo e Tisbe; but he pleaded the professional cold. Fanny is enchanted with the young Roman’s appearance. “He looked like an angel,” she writes. “Nothing can be more beautiful than this youth. He has the complection of our Dick, – the very finest white and red I ever saw: his eyes are the sweetest in the world, at once soft and spirited: all his features are animated and charming.” “ ‘Avez vous une Assemblée chez vous tous les Dimanches,’22 cried he, to my father. ‘Je viendrai une autre fois quand je pourrai chanter!’ Only think how we were let down! ‘Une autre fois!’ cried Hetty; ‘Une autre fois!’ echoed Susette; ‘Une autre fois!’ still more pathetically echoed your humble servant.” But he contributed his quota to the gossip about the Gabrielli; and when the oft-told story was repeated as to the extraordinary ceremonial parade she observed in quitting the Opera House on Saturdays, with first a running footman to clear the way, then her sister, then herself, then a page for her train, then another footman, and then a man out of livery to carry her lap-dog in her muff, – Rauzzini interjected, “Et puis, une autre pour un singe, et un autre pour un perroquet!” As to “Mrs. Gabrielle” (for so she styled herself on her Golden Square doorplate), it is manifest that her reputation for whim had created considerable prejudice against her. But in the History of Music Dr. Burney, who knew her intimately, is much milder in his expressions than the more excitable members of his family. He says that despite her low origin (she was the daughter of a Cardinal’s cook at Rome), she had extraordinary grace and dignity of gesture. She was, moreover he declared, the most intelligent and best bred virtuosa with whom he ever conversed, speaking like a well-educated woman, who had seen the world, not only on music, but on other subjects. “In youth,” he writes, “her beauty and caprice had occasioned an universal delirium among her young countrymen, and there were still remains of both sufficiently powerful, while she was in England, to render credible their former influence.”
That Fanny’s detailed despatches delighted her correspondent at Chessington, is only to be expected. “You have produc’d such an illustrious assembly of Princes, and generals, and lords, and ladies, and wits, and pictures, and diamonds, and shoulder-knots, that I feel myself shrink into nothing at the idea of them, – nay, you yourself that made one among them, seem to be a little dazzled at their glare.” And then Mr. Crisp rallies her upon her evident admiration of the “beautiful Rauzzini.” In another letter there is a significant sentence. “You have learned from that R[ogue] your father (by so long serving as amanuensis, I suppose) to make your descriptions alive” – an utterance which, while it throws some light on the vexed question of Miss Burney’s style, also recalls us to the progress of that History of Music, in which she bore so laborious a part. In March 1775 it had come to a “dead stop” owing to Dr. Burney’s rheumatism, which prevented him from writing; and in April it was scarcely moving. “My father’s History goes on very slowly indeed at present… He teaches from nine to nine almost every day, and has scarce time to write a page a week.” Still, it gradually progresses, and in October, Fanny is able to report that the first volume is ready. “The History has been this very day, for the first time since its long cessation, put into the press[?]. It is now rough written to the end of the first volume, Preface and Dedication inclusive. When it is actually published, we intend to keep the Carnival.” A few days before, the Dedication to the Queen had been read by Dr. Burney to an admiring friend; and in 1776 the first volume was issued, when, we may conclude, the Carnival was duly kept.
But of this, unhappily, no record has been preserved; and it was some years before a second volume gave the busy Doctor opportunity for a further jubilation.23 Beyond the fact that the Burneys, and Fanny in particular, made friends (through the Stranges) with the Miss Paynes, daughters of the famous old bookseller in Castle Street, “next the Upper Mews-Gate,” whose L-shaped shop was so well known to Eighteenth Century bibliomaniacs,24– little remains of interest from the records of 1775. For 1776 there is no journal at all, what had been written having been “destroyed in totality,” as consisting wholly of family matters or anecdotes; and save for a very graphic picture of the slatternly Duchess of Devonshire in St. James’s Park, no very attractive correspondence, although Mr. Crisp refers to a “conversation piece” which Fanny drew of the fine company at the house of Sir James Lake, the great portrait collector, which should have been good to read. “If specimens of this kind had been preserved of the different Tons that have succeeded one another for twenty centuries last past,” he writes, “how interesting would they have been! infinitely more so, than antique statues, bas-reliefs, and intaglios.” In a fragment dated 2 December there is a vignette of Nollekens the sculptor, “a jolly, fat, lisping, laughing, underbred, good-humoured man as lives: his merit seems pretty much confined to his profession, and his language is as vulgar as his works are elegant.” Mrs. Nollekens (the very handsome daughter of Fielding’s friend Justice Welch), his wife, is also mentioned: “a civil, obliging, gentle sort of woman; rather too complaisant.” Then there is a costume-piece of “Miss B – something, a sister-in-law of Mr. Hayes of the Pantheon,” and not entirely unsuggestive of Lady Louisa Larpent in Evelina; “a young lady quite à-la-mode, – every part of her dress, the very pink and extreme of the fashion; – her [head] erect and stiff as any statue; – her voice low, and delicate, and mincing; – her hair higher than twelve wigs stuck one on the other; – her waist taper, and pinched evidently; – her eyes cast languishingly from one object to another, and her conversation very much the thing.” Decidedly “Daddy” Crisp was right in saying: “To do you justice, Fanny, you paint well!”
For the next year, 1777, there is only one letter to Mr. Crisp; but it is an important one, since it gives Miss Burney’s account of her first meeting with Dr. Johnson, to which accident, indeed, it owes its preservation. Dr. Burney had for some time known Johnson slightly, – he had written to him from Lynn with regard to the Dictionary; he had also met him at intervals; and, as we have seen, Johnson, notwithstanding his insensibility to music, had read and appreciated the Musical Tours. Writing Dr. Burney’s Memoirs in extreme old age, his daughter seems to have thought that Johnson had already accompanied her father to Winchester to put his youngest son, Richard, under the care of the then Head Master of that day, Joseph Warton; and that he had also, before this date, interested himself to procure Dr. Burney access to the libraries at Oxford. But her memory must have led her astray, for both these things, as is plain from Boswell, belong to 1778, while Miss Burney’s “first sight” of the great man demonstrably took place on the 20th March, 1777,25 and
Dr. Burney evidently had mild qualms about these Sunday concerts. When after the first occasion here referred to, Dr. King and Dr. Ogle supped at St. Martin’s Street, he said that he hoped for
The second volume appeared in 1782, and the third and fourth volumes, completing the work, in 1789.
In September, 1785, Miss Sally Payne married Captain James Burney, Fanny’s brother.