not enjoyed but consumed

Apprehension such as these frightened her into forbearance: but in teaching her prudence they did not endow her with contentment. Her hours lingered in depression and uncertainty; her time was not enjoyed but consumed; her faculties were not enjoyed but wasted.

(Frances Burney, The Wanderer, 1814)



I sing Lely
Who burnt no tower
But brought the sea-bed
Into flower.

(Raymond Garlick, Note on the Iliad, from Anglo-Welsh Poetry 1480 – 1980, ed. Raymond Garlick and Roland Mathias)

he had, much against his Will, appeared

Mr Hervey, not yet recovered from his Surprize, stood some Moments considering the strange Scene he had been Witness to; and in which he had, much against his Will, appeared the principal Character.

(Ann Lennox, The Female Quixote, 1752)



Privacy is a sort of 'self-ownership' that society inherently and to a greater or lesser degree threatens.

(Jennifer A Wager, Privacy and Anonymity in Evelina, from Modern Critical Interpretations: Evelina, 1988, ed. Harold Bloom)

weigh’d

Reading the sentence, “How a middle-aged business man came so thoroughly to understand a little servant girl is the usual mystery of creation,” in Eaves and Kimpel’s Samuel Richardson: a Biography, 1971, p. 105, re Pamela, 1740, I made the following notes:

Richardson believed that he was shy; now say that shyness is a form of captivity.

See for evidence, his letter to Samuel Lobb, Jan 31st, 1754, sampled like this: “When I was young, I was very sheepish; (so I am indeed now that I am old: I have not had Confidence enough to try to overcome a Defect so natural to me, tho’ I have been a great Loser by it),” going on through the strategies he invented so that he could raise his voice in public: “this was my Rule to get Courage … : I let them all speak round before I open’d my Lips, after the first Introductions: Then I weigh’d, whether I had been to speak on the same Occasions, that each Person spoke upon, I should have been able to deliver myself as well as they had done ...” etc.

His women are under the wills of others, even in their homes, this is the form of his world.

Sir Charles Grandison, who is the best possible man in Richardson’s mind, is not shy.

Richardson doesn’t heroise inactive men (compare Burney).

Grandison lectures his inactive uncle. The uncle becomes subordinate.

An inactive, speechless woman in Richardson has a vocabulary of goodness around her: she is humble, modest, obedient, kind, and respectful; lots of praiseworthy things can be read into her silence; especially young women.

Kind, self-sufficient men are active in R.

Kind, self-sufficient women do not have to be active.

His “Rule” was to wait until the rest had spoken before he decided to join or stay silent: all depended on them. “I let them all speak round before I open’d my Lips … Then I weigh’d … And if I found I should have rather chosen to be silent, than to say some things they said, I preserv'd my Silence and was pleased. And if I could have spoken as well as others, I was the less scrupulous: While those who were above my Match, I admir'd, endeavour'd to cultivate their Acquaintance, by making myself agreeable to them by my Modesty, if I could not by my Merit; and to imitate them, as nearly as my Abilities and Situation would permit ...”

suppose you never were there

The discussion around the excerpt that Scott G.F. Bailey posted on his blog from the rough manuscript known as The Bottom of the Earth included the suggestion that northern hemisphere people used to think of the southern hemisphere as “the bottom of the earth,” or another phrase that was something like that, and so (looking for more knowledge in that area) I read Weitemeyer’s book out of curiosity to see if he used those words or any other while he was planning (euphemism) his move to Australia, but Weitemeyer did not use any phrase at all: he used a series of scenes that suggested a difficulty in obtaining accurate information; difficulty was his description of distance. “Travellers who come from this distant continent, bring us very conflicting statements,” he remembers his school textbook telling him before it segued into a paragraph about kangaroos, wool, and the “vast lake of salt water” that it saw in the centre of the island – imagination – didn’t exist. “It was really an ignorant and disgraceful morsel of information for one of the best schools in Copenhagen to offer to its pupils,” he writes, “but it was all the knowledge I had or could get.” He spoke to a man in Hamburg who was being paid to encourage European citizens to migrate to Queensland.

"Do you yourself know anything much about Queensland?" I ventured to ask; "I suppose you never were there?" "I, no, I never was there-- [says the man] I wish I had been, I should not have to stand here to-day. But we have every information. They have found gold-diggings again. Here are the statistics of exports; I will read them for you:--

Weitemeyer buys his ticket, trusts that he knows nothing; imagines that bushranging will be his recourse if all else fails. “To be the captain of a gang of warriors, half robbers, half gold-miners, roaming over the continent of Australia, seemed a delightful prospect.” On the ship he “stood aloof looking round me in silent wonder as to what the end would be.” Distance is underinformednation and so is wonder. Proust, corresponding about stock investments with his cousin Lionel Hauser, once mentioned that he was interested in Australian gold mines. “With Marcel his investments reflected not incompetence but aspects of his character,” writes Jean-Yves Tadié. “When he dreamed about these names, stock exchange quotations came to resemble railway timetables.” Marcel Proust: a Life, 1996, tr. Euan Cameron. The dying man who whispers the murderer’s identity to his son in The Boscombe Valley Mystery, Doyle, 1892, would not have been able to name his killer if Sherlock Holmes had not been capable of covering the mental distance between the “allusion to a rat” that the son heard and the presence of a large goldfield town west of Melbourne. “He mumbled a few words,” says the son, “but I could only catch some allusion to a rat.” The Coroner asks him how he interpreted the rat. “It conveyed no meaning to me,” says the son. “I thought that he was delirious.” Not until Holmes has wired to Bristol for a map of Victoria with place names marked on it is he in a position to show Watson that “a rat” is not a rat but the end of a word, “-arat.” The abstract proceeds to materialism. “We have come now out of mere vagueness to the definite conception of an Australian from Ballarat with a grey cloak,” Holmes says. The son who, on the day of his father’s death, heard his father calling, “Cooee,” thought that he was being summoned, but the father was shouting to someone else and he did not expect to see the son crossing a distance towards him. “He appeared to be much surprised at seeing me and asked me rather roughly what I was doing there.” Here, at first, is the sound -- in the son’s imagination -- of the father absolutely desiring the presence of his son, and now secondly the father is nonplussed, he appears to have cried out ambiguously and confusingly, both desiring and not-desiring his son – but then thirdly and finally, thanks to Holmes, we all know that he did not think he was calling his son at all, in spite of the fact that “Cooee” was understood by the young man to be “a usual signal between my father and myself.”

Now this specific cry of “Cooee” identifies the father as a man who could utter that word without regarding it, as the son does, as a privately-owned set of consonants and vowels. Why is the father in this position of wisdom? Because he has emigrated from Australia. He is trying to communicate with a different man, one who has lived in Ballarat, a diabetic who is about to hit him on the head with a rock: someone who is still remembered on the Victorian goldfields by the name he called himself while he was living out Weitemeyer’s dream of bushranging. “'Cooee' is a distinctly Australian cry, and one which is used between Australians,” Holmes explains to Watson. The word that the son thinks of as his own is shared by thousands of people he has never met, inhabiting a continent that he has never visited, all so far away that the news of ownership has never reached him. When Captain James Cook wrote about his Voyage Towards the South Pole and Round the World, 1777, he gave you some idea of the distance between the hemispheres partly by describing the volume of supplies he would have to order before he left, and if I am wrong about this (I haven’t read the book in a while) then I am focussed on it because the phrase, “inspissated juice of wort” has stuck with me. What’s this word, “inspissated”? I wondered, when I read it. In my recollection I crossed the distance between myself and “inspissated” immediately by looking it up. Cook meant that the juice of wort was thickened by a process of dehydration. If I had not been impatient I would have discovered after a few more lines or paragraphs (I forget which) that he wanted to explain inspissation to me himself. Today I know the definition but I am still not comforted and calmed and undisturbed by the words “inspissated juice of wort” and I expect to go on being uneasy until I have found some and drunk it. Fanny Burney’s brother sailed with Cook, by the way: he must have known what it tasted like. A small bat-shaped island near the Australian coast has been named after him. See Henry Stuart Russell’s The Genesis of Queensland, 1888.

to shop with her

“To explain is never more than to describe a way of making: it is merely to remake in thought. The why and the how, which are only ways of expressing the implications of this idea, inject themselves into every statement, demanding satisfaction at all costs.” Paul Valéry, Sea Shells, 1936, tr. Ralph Manheim. I’ve been thinking of Camilla’s Mrs Mittin, the character in Burney who (aside from Briggs) most successfully evades the “why” that the author gives her, which is this, “simple egotism.”

She would work, read, go on errands, or cook a dinner; be a parasite, a spy, an attendant, a drudge; keep a secret, or spread a report; incite a quarrel, or coax contending parties into peace; invent any expedient, and execute any scheme ... all with the pretext to oblige others, but all, in fact, for simple egotism; as prevalent in her mind as in that of the more highly ambitious, though meaner and less dangerous. [vol V., bk II, ch XII, ellipsis in text]

She advertises her willingness to oblige you, but (we discover) she can only oblige you in the way she has decided you want to be obliged – by telling you to go to shows she likes and finding bargain hats for you – by shopping and gossiping -- Burney using the word “gossiping” in association with her fairly often, and never “shopping,” though it had been in the English lexicon since she was a child, both born at roughly the same time according to the OED, which says somewhere between 1755 – 1765 for “shopping” while Burney appeared in 1752 -- and the description of shopping (not called by that name though “shop” as a verb is used, “to shop with her,” vol. V, ch. VI), is that it is an activity of shame, in which Mittin pulls Camilla down the street by the arm and the heroine is humiliated as she imagines people sneering at the spectacle of two women going from place to place and looking without buying. If you do not want to pay for the cheap cape that Mittin has brought back to your room then she will become “evasive” when you ask her to return it to the shopkeeper. Does she secretly hate you? You will never know. The author herself does not know. Vulgarity per se is enough of an essential negative in Burney’s eyes. You do not have to be kind or cruel on top of it, although her vulgar characters are also kind and cruel. ("Mrs Mittin [...] a character so forward, vulgar, and encroaching." Bk VIII, ch I.)

“To please was her incessant desire, and her rage for popularity included every rank and class of society. The more eminent, of course, were her first objects, but the same aim descended to the lowest.” Mittin is flexible but stiff: she will contort anywhere but only inside the boundaries that she recognises. The motivating factor that Burney identifies as “egotism” is invisible or harmless to the other characters* until they bump against it, when, as with Camilla, Mittin becomes a haunting presence who sabotages the heroines’s desire to guard her tiny money by insisting that Camilla congratulate her effort and buy the hat or cape. Or not insisting maybe, but refusing to recognise her No. To “remake” Mittin, ‘in thought,” you would need to inhabit, not an external history (as with Mrs Ireton in The Wanderer, whose backstory is a lesson against indulgence), but the unexplained internal core of Mittin-egotism itself, keeping in mind that the core flexibly remakes everything that comes to it, attempting to draw it in and reform it, until Camilla, in a false sense, is a young woman who would like that cape. News outlets reform the world like that for their audience: the protester gassed at the rally was violent.

Camilla falls into debt, runs away, and suffers death visions whose Gothic intensity owes something to the popularity of Ann Radcliff. But Mittin is blithe: the brother who keeps borrowing money from his sister is also blithe: they are both smiling. The brother breaks down eventually. He is tortured, tortured. Mittin is impenetrable. “She's the good-naturedest creature I ever knew,” says Miss Dennell to her father in bk. VI, ch. VI. In bk. X, ch XIV, “The notable Mrs. Mittin contrived soon to so usefully ingratiate herself in the favour of Mr. Dennel, that, in the full persuasion she would save him half his annual expences, he married her.”



*or actively useful. “Mrs. Berlinton, tired of remonstrances she could not controvert, and would not observe, was extremely relieved by finding a person [Mrs Mittin] who would sit with her aunt, comply with her humours, hear her lamentations, subscribe to her opinions, and beguile her of her rigid fretfulness by the amusement of gossiping anecdotes.”


Mudpuddle's comment below is prompting me to add this .pdf link to a good Mittin-essay by Li-ching Chen. "But I Do My Own Way": Mrs. Mittin's Autonomy and Quest for Respectability in Frances Burney’s Camilla.

examined and tossed about

Juliet in The Wanderer, 1814, goes to work at a milliner’s shop. This is the most amazing thing in Burney since the man in Cecilia shot himself. Millinery tires her, not the work itself, but the fact that she is always on display, she is in a room with other workers; she is depressed by conversation that she dislikes; the war between the customers and sellers is oppressive to her.

The ladies whose practice it was to frequent the shop, thought the time and trouble of its mistress, and her assistants, amply paid by the honour of their presence; and though they tried on hats and caps, till they put them out of shape; examined and tossed about the choicest goods, till they were so injured that they could be sold only at half price; ordered sundry articles, which, when finished, they returned, because they had changed their minds; or discovered that they did not want them; still their consciences were at ease, their honour was self-acquitted, and their generosity was self-applauded, if, after two or three hours of lounging, rummaging, fault-finding and chaffering, they purchased a yard or two of ribbon, or a few skanes of netting silk.

But “Upon further observation, nevertheless, her compassion for the milliner and the work-women somewhat diminished; for she found that their notions of probity were as lax as those of their customers were of justice; and saw that their own rudeness to those who had neither rank nor fortune, kept pace with the haughtiness which they were forced to support, from those by whom both were possessed.”

Eventually “In viewing conflicts such as these, between selfish vanity and cringing cunning, it soon became difficult to decide, which was least congenial to the upright mind and pure morality of Juliet, the insolent, vain, unfeeling buyer, or the subtle, plausible, over-reaching seller.” The two sides have four faults each in that sentence: they are equal for a moment, but the ladies are condemned more insidiously by Burney because they have more power, as Mr Giles says in vol. IV, ch. LXV, when he is speaking to Mrs Ireton: “I don't know why you ladies who are so rich and gay should not try to make yourselves pleasant to those who are poor and sad,” and the Admiral in vol. V, ch. XCII, "For who the devil's the better for her birth and breeding, if they only serve to make her fancy she has a right to be impudent?"

The protagonist wants to settle on her morals and she can't. “I know no longer what is kind or what is cruel, nor have I known for some time past right from wrong, nor good from evil!" said Cecilia in Cecilia after she had lived for months with a guardian who guilted her into giving him money for his debts. It is economics that introduces these problems to Burney’s world, the inequalities of money, which create a level of misunderstanding that is different from the interpersonal kind (which the author still pursues), it is a misunderstanding that confounds direct thought, and it is less optimistic than the interpersonal, since there is no Other to understand; there is no hope that (as at the end of Camilla) the problem will be fixed with some statement of truth. “[E]very doubt was wholly, and even miraculously removed, by learning thus the true feelings of her heart.” With economics it is the opposite: every revelation makes it worse.

of man; that amazing assemblage

Camilla starts by saying that it wants to explore “the Heart of man; that amazing assemblage of all possible contraries,” but the work is difficult -- “The historian of human life finds less of difficulty and of intricacy to develop, in its accidents and adventures, than the investigator of the human heart in its feelings and its changes” – this is her hwaet – and her investigatory method is a romance-story idea, the delayed marriage, distant forebear to Christina Stead’s 1952 book, The People With The Dogs – I’m mentioning Dogs because I think it carries out Burney’s ambition where Burney doesn’t –; and in that book (Dogs) there are many characters who demonstrate some series of possible contraries, for instance, “a woman in a scarlet dress” who, during a rehearsal in a theatre, responds to one of the protagonist’s lines with a catchphrase, “I’ll be a mistress but never a wife,” then “withdrew her soft plump bosom from the comradely hands of a rakish young actor and moved back and up in one single voluptuous motion, as if startled. She laughed, took a step back. Suddenly her face clouded, became proud and she went and stood against the back curtain, arms akimbo. No one took any notice.”

In Dogs it is enough for a character to come in once only and do that action and leave, detaching herself from plot; first making a public persona with the catchphrase, then reacting to a private stimulus by withdrawing her bosom, and you can offer some sort of structure there, some kind of equation, a desired addition of verbal attention justifying a desired subtraction of physical attention, but the implied engine of those actions remains locked within the woman and in her associations with the rest of the room. The larger engine is the book. But the book is a book of privacies and relational missteps, and by this is related to that little gesture. In Camilla, too, privacies and missteps, but there the different aspects have been separated, they are not introduced in that casual way, and the engine is externalised, explained, the machinery bared, the changed emotions are clear and they are preceded by clear triggers. Edgar, seeing Sir Sedley kissing Camilla’s hand in the garden, decides wrongly that she is flirting, so his mood is transformed. “Within these last twenty-four hours I have been the most wretched ... the happiest ... and again the most agonized of human beings!” The moods are large: they articulate themselves. They are often tied to statements of judgment and temperance,* which speak back to the book’s last line, “What, at last, so diversified as man? what so little to be judged by his fellow?” Indecisive behaviour is reserved for people who are at the apex of distress.

She now heard a hand upon the lock of the door. 'O that I could die! that I could die!' she cried, madly advancing to the window, and throwing up the sash, yet with quick instinctive repentance pulling it down, shuddering and exclaiming: 'Is there no death for me but murder—no murder but suicide?'

Stead’s method is the one that enters Cecilia briefly when the protagonist sits on a chair. Camilla tries a similar strategy when Edgar is about to leave the house and Camilla, who can't talk to him, stands in the parlour staring through the window at his horse. If the chair seems effective then why does this version of the same idea feel so ludicrous?



*eg, “The goodness of her heart, the evenness of her temper, and her natural turn to contemplation, had established her character alike for sanctity and for philosophy throughout the family.” “The inconsiderate facility with which she had wandered about with a person so little known to her, so underbred, and so forward, appeared now to herself inexcusable; and she determined, if but spared this dreadful punishment, to pass the whole of her future life in unremitting caution.” That's an interesting "inconsiderate."

he could not bear to have the pleasing reflections revolving in his mind

Going from Evelina, 1778, to Cecilia, 1782, and to Camilla, 1796, you notice that the sentences have become longer, more leisurely, and more packed: short stories closed inside them –

Charmed with the youthful nurse, and seeing in her unaffected attitudes, a thousand graces he had never before remarked, and reading in her fondness for children the genuine sweetness of her character, he could not bear to have the pleasing reflections revolving in his mind interrupted by the spleen of Miss Margland, and, slipping away, posted himself behind the baby's father, where he could look on undisturbed, certain it was a vicinity to which Miss Margland would not follow him.

-that from a page picked at random – her style getting farther away from the one that Samuel Crisp asked her to use in her letters to him when she was young, in a note to her during the winter of 1773, “Dash away, whatever comes uppermost – the sudden sallies of imagination clap’d down on paper, just as they arise, are worth Folios”—that is the character Evelina’s mode of letter-writing, though she never knew Crisp and he never wrote to her – but by Camilla the sallies are Folios: pages 291 – 293 of my 1972 Oxford edition are filled with the information that Edgar loves Camilla, which we have already heard more than once. How many more times are we going to hear it? I am up to page 367* and the story ends on 913. The author has become a scanning eye across a multitude: the secondaries can wander off and hold conversations of their own, she’ll follow them, going from one character to another and stopping and rounding them up for a head-count.

Miss Margland screamed, and hid her face with her hands. Indiana, taught by her lessons to nourish every fear as becoming, shriekt still louder, and ran swiftly away, deaf to all that Edgar, who attended her, could urge. Eugenia, to whom Bellamy instantly hastened, seeing the beast furiously make towards the gate, almost unconsciously accepted his assistance, to accelerate her flight from its vicinity; while Dr. Orkborne, intent upon his annotations, calmly wrote on, sensible there was some disturbance, but determining to evade inquiring whence it arose, till he had secured what he meant to transmit to posterity from the treachery of his memory. Camilla, the least frightened, because the most enured to such sounds, from the habits and the instruction of her rural life and education, adhered firmly to Sir Hugh, who began blessing himself with some alarm; but whom Dr. Marchmont re-assured, by saying the gate was secured, and too high for the bull to leap, even supposing it a vicious animal.

Burney wants you to have your eyes on them all – why? for a reason? what reason? – to make them familiar? too familiar? -- “the latent springs,” she says, “the multifarious and contradictory sources of human actions and propensities” (what is the ending of Cecilia if it isn’t a Middlemarch that doesn’t know what it is?)-- what are they doing? how are they positioned in space? how are they acting? what do they think about other people’s friends?

Mr. Tyrold, according to the system of recreation which he had settled with his wife, saw with satisfaction the pleasure with which Camilla began this new acquaintance, in the hope it would help to support her spirits during the interval of suspense with regard to the purposes of Mandlebert. Mrs. Arlbery [the new acquaintance] was unknown to him, except by general fame; which told him she was a woman of reputation as well as fashion, and that though her manners were lively, her heart was friendly, and her hand ever open to charity.

The reader has heard similar news about Mrs Arlbery before. I am reading a reprint of the first edition, which was written under pressure: words were left out of sentences when the book went to the printers, and serious revisions waited for the second and third editions. “Fanny finished the book – which is about 350, 000 words long – in a period of two years that also included the birth of her child and her subsequent illness.” Fanny Burney: a Biography, 2000, Claire Harmon. The repetition, then, those long expositions, they were physically written to Crisp’s instructions, “clap’d down on paper,” “whatever comes uppermost” – not spiritually written like that though, and when I say spirit of course I mean style.



* It changes.

taking possession of it

Mary Poovey’s Fathers and Daughters: the Trauma of Growing Up Female, 1981, is the only essay in the 1988 collection of Evelina criticisms, Modern Critical Interpretations: Fanny Burney’s Evelina, ed. Harold Bloom, that mentions the last, weird letter to the protagonist from her guardian, Mr Villers, who tells her that she has his consent to get married. “Villers, until this point apparently healthy, suddenly depicts himself as nearing the grave,” says Poovey. Myself I was so startled by his unprecedented barrage of phrases about death -- “the weak and aged frame of thy almost idolizing parent, nearly worn out by time, past afflictions, and infirmities,” “the remnant of my days,” “breathing my last faint sighs,” “the fleeting fabric of life would give way,” “pouring forth my dying words,” “a shadow insensible to her touch,” “Grieve not at the inevitable moment! but may thy own end be equally propitious” – that I re-read ten pages to see if anyone had told us Villers was sick, or had fallen off a horse, or … eh, he’s fine, and Evelina’s three-sentence response (the last letter in this epistolary book) doesn’t react to his death-language at all, or not overtly, although I wondered if Burney’s mind was still hanging on annihilation when she began it with: “All is over, my dearest Sir; and the fate of your Evelina is decided!” – the mentality of the Villers letter seeping across into another character, and both of them foreshadowing the little death that Burney will suffer in a moment: she is about to stop being the person who is writing Evelina. The plot is culminating in a triumphant wedding, but the language is staging a rebellion against happiness with a sort of implied murder.

In the Poovey context this Villers letter is proof of a Freudian conflict that the essayist has been working out, with the father figure needing to go through a textual elimination so that the new father-husband, can take his place: and in the essay it fits neatly but in the book it fits nothing, it does not appear to be part of a pattern, it comes and is denied or ignored, and this burst of strangeness from outside the story – the author’s mind encountering something that is not plot and allowing it to stay there, not erasing it, a sudden mystery -- appears to me like the cousin of a phrase in Cecilia, when the protagonist has a “secret idea” that she is “doing something right” as she sits deliberately on the chair that her beloved has just vacated: he leaves, he dramatically “tore himself away” exclaiming “this bitter hour!” and everything at the moment is fraught, Cecilia is distracted: she “went to the chair upon which he had been seated, and taking possession of it, sat with her arms crossed, silent, quiet, and erect, almost vacant of all thought, yet with a secret idea she was doing something right.” Soon another character will show “concern at the strangeness of her look and attitude.” One of the other essayists, Jennifer A. Wagner, has decided that Evelina is a novel about privacy. “Privacy is a sort of ‘self-ownership’ that society inherently and to a greater or lesser degree threatens.” Privacy and Anonymity in Evelina, 1988.

'twas for himself

Margaret Anne Doody wrote this about the character Briggs in her introduction to the 1988 Oxford edition of Burney’s second book, Cecilia, 1782: “It is one of the novel’s inventive triumphs that Briggs, far from being the stereotyped wretched miser, is one of the most vivacious characters. He lives in perpetual complete enjoyment of himself and what he is worth: he his self-love needs no supplement from the comforts or pleasures that lesser men enjoy.” See: Briggs: possessing every supplement naturally by making everything conform to his stratagem: to evaluate -- dressing himself for a masquerade ball in clothes that have been borrowed from a sweep and “pointing with a sneer” at the fake pearls on Sir Robert Floyer’s Turkish turban because they are not real, they are valueless, they are “nothing but French beads.” By the logic of the masquerade it doesn’t matter that the pearls are not real but Briggs’s understanding does not change when he leaves his house, it doesn't change according to anyone else’s wishes: it is never modified, it gets more violent, and his miserliness gives him an arsenal of rudeness, which he loves. His costume does not contribute to “the general air of gaiety diffused throughout the company,” it stinks (“an offensive smell of soot, making everybody look around the room”), it repels (“the company, with general disgust, retreated wherever he advanced“), but he is proud of it because it was cheap, and, in fact, he is glad – “All the better” -- when it is unique and annoying.

"How could this blackguard get in?" cried the Turk, "I believe he's a mere common chimneysweeper out of the streets, for he's all over dirt and filth. I never saw such a dress at a masquerade before in my life."

"All the better," returned the other; "would not change. What do think it cost?"

"Cost? Why, not a crown."

"A crown? ha! ha! -- a pot o' beer! Little Tom borrowed it; had it of our own sweep. Said 'twas for himself. I bid him a pint; rascal would not take less."

The sweep outfit is genuine, and it has a genuine effect, people run away from the smell of soot, while they do not react to Sir Robert’s costume as if the man inside is genuine Turk, nor do they treat a man in a black devil costume as if he is really an evil supernatural monster, and the book notices – Cecilia notices as well – that most people do not try to be genuine, it is not important to them; they do not try to stay in character at the ball. “[A] Minerva, not stately nor austere, not marching in warlike majesty, but gay and airy … ran up.”

"To own the truth," said Cecilia, "the almost universal neglect of the characters assumed by these masquers has been the chief source of my entertainment this evening: for at a place of this sort, the next best thing to a character well supported is a character ridiculously burlesqued."

The book calls a woman ignorant because she is dressed as a haymaker but doesn’t have any idea how haymakers live. “And pleased with her own readiness at repartee, without feeling the ignorance it betrayed, she tript lightly on.” Cecilia values genuineness, the book goes along with her tastes and supports them; Briggs loves genuineness though his is a different species of genuineness, but money-valuing makes him say things that have the same conclusion as her variety of genuineness – when he sums up Sir Robert’s outfit further: “never mind gold trappings; none of his own; all a take-in; hired for eighteenpence; not worth a groat." Robert Floyer’s self is not worth anything either; he looks good but he’s piggish. Cecilia knows it: she won’t marry him.

I think she deserves to feel the strange disgusted attraction towards Briggs that David Copperfield feels for Uriah Heep, but the book, as of page four hundred and eighteen, where I am, has made her react to his unpropriety with mannerly, clear distancing – and yet the example of his self-confidence standing in front of her fear deserves to be weirdly alluring (she is not as retreatful as Evelina, but still, she likes corners, she silences herself, ‘to avoid any hazard of altercation, she discreetly forbore making further complaints”) – she can’t get the black devil man away from her, she is at a loss, but Briggs, being a sweep, has a shovel, and he shovels him. “The fiend then began a yell so horrid, that it disturbed the whole company; but the chimney-sweeper, only saying, "Aye, aye, blacky, growl away, blacky, -- makes no odds," sturdily continued his work, and, as the fiend had no chance of resisting so coarse an antagonist without a serious struggle, he was presently compelled to change his ground.”

And then, patting her cheek with his dirty hand, and nodding at her with much kindness, "Pretty dove," he added, "be of good heart! shan't be meddled with; come to see after you.”

martyrdom for the pleasure

Fanny Burney’s Evelina wishes that the people she doesn’t like would leave her alone and that is the dominant tone in the novel, more than anything else, the subject of its most constant inventions. The introductory essay that comes with my edition (Edward A. Bloom, 1968) talks about an educational development that she undergoes, Bloom writing, “Like any education, hers is cumulative, with virtue and self-awareness directed to social fulfilment,” but I reckon I am not convinced, the word education is wrong in this context, she is not Austen’s Emma of 1815, or even Betsy Thoughtless of 1751, she has not been confronted with a body of wisdom that transfers her by increments from a child into an adult, the city-knowledge that she obtains is patchy and functional – don’t go down that dark walkway in Marybone Gardens – but the longing to go there did not need to be conquered and chastised – she never had a desire to go – Betsy Thoughtless had to learn not to but Evelina Annville would always rather not – I would rather not is her self-awareness and it is in place from the beginning to the end – not taught, no, fundamental, consistently reiterated (eg, at her first London ball, Vol. 1, letter XI; in her reluctance to accompany Madame Duval, Vol. 1, letter XXI; in the fact that she "wished extremely to shew" Mr Macartney that she was not part of the group, Vol. II, letter XIV; in her avoidance of Tom, Vol. II, letter XXIV; she is impressed when Lord Orville refuses to participate, Vol. III, letter III; her discussion of the Orville note, Vol. III, letter XVI, etc), and the people around her ignore it. “Can you then,” they say, “refuse me the smallest gratification, though, but yesterday, I almost suffered martyrdom for the pleasure of seeing you?” and so, sabotaged, she puts up with their wheedling, periodically trying to make them stop – "I entreat you never again to to address me in a language so flighty, and so unwelcome," she says, and rises to go, but Clement Willoughby "flung himself at my feet to prevent me" – scenes like that are repeated: the wheedling person is Sir Clement, or it is Polly, or Mr Smith or Mr Braughton "demand[ing]" "Why so?" when she ("looking alarmed") tells him that a thing "is utterly impossible," and then Madame Duval chimes in at her, "Ma foi child, you don't know no more about the world than if you was a baby" – so the group does that vulgar thing anyway, and she has to be involved, "I would rather have submitted to the severest punishment  – but all resistance was in vain" – it is not Evelina that the author wishes she could train to virtue, it is everybody else – cos they are hopeless – “I find all endeavours vain to escape any thing which these people desire I should not ...”

abetted by the stage lighting

Now for the wonder of wonders, – when Mrs. Thrale, in a coaxing voice, suited to a Nurse soothing a Baby, had run on for some Time, – while all the rest of us, in Laughter, joined in the request, – two Crystal Tears came into the soft Eyes of the S. S., – and rolled gently down her Cheeks! – such a sight I never saw before, nor could I have believed; – she offered not to conceal or dissipate them, – on the contrary, she really contrived to have them seen by every body. She looked, indeed, uncommonly handsome, for her pretty Face was not, like Chloes, blubbered; it was smooth and elegant, and neither her Features nor complexion were at all ruffled; – nay, indeed, she was smiling all the Time.

"Look, look!" cried Mrs. Thrale; "see if the Tears are not come already!"

Journals and Letters, 2001, by Frances Burney, ed. Lars E. Troide: from a letter to her sister Susanna, dated 12 October 1779. 'S.S.' is Sophia Streatfeild, "a noted beauty," according to Troide's footnote, "called 'the Fair Grecian,' because of her knowledge of Greek. Able to cry at will." 'Chloe' is a reference to Matthew Prior's (1664–1721) poem A Better Answer, which starts with, "Dear Chloe, how blubbered is that pretty face!"



Official Communist critics, however, immediately branded Chekhov's interpretation as decadent and reactionary. Evidently, they could not endure the "suffering and deathly horror in his eyes" as he moved "with nervous, wavering steps to meet his doom." Although he emphasized his duty of revenge, "he appeared so crushed with grief and despair for himself and mankind that his consciousness seemed to disintegrate." After an outburst of activity in the last scene, culminating in the killing of Claudius, Hamlet accepted his own death peacefully, with a lucid mind, "as if laying carefully his body by." "The more impotent Hamlet's body became, the brighter and more all-consuming became his inner life, which was abetted by the stage lighting."

Shakespeare and Eastern Europe, 2000, by Zdeněk Stříbrný. 'Chekhov' is the actor Michael Chekhov (1891 - 1955).