She also makes fine distinctions between people. Sir Clement Willoughby, the West End snob, and Mr. Smith, the East End beau, are drawn with discrimination. With what wit Miss Burney describes the scene at the ridotto between Evelina and Sir Clement. He had asked her to dance with him. Unwilling to do so, because she wished to dance with another gentleman, if he should ask her, she told Sir Clement she was engaged for that dance. He did not leave her, however, but remained by her side and speculated as to who the beast was so hostile to his own interests as to forget to come to her; pitied the humiliation a lady must feel in having to wait for a gentleman, and pointed to each old and lame man in the room asking if he were the miscreant; he offered to find him for her and asked what kind of a coat he had on. When Evelina did not know, he became angry with the wretch who dared to address a lady in so insignificant a coat that it was unworthy of her notice. To save herself from further annoyance she danced with him, for she now knew that Sir Clement had seen through her artifice from the beginning.
But the portrait of Mr. Smith, the East End snob, is even better than that of Sir Clement Willoughby. Evelina is visiting her relatives at Snow Hill, when Mr. Smith enters, self-confident and vulgar. His aim in life, as he tells us, is to please the ladies. When Tom Branghton is disputing with his sister about the place where they shall go for amusement, he reprimands Tom for his lack of good breeding.
"O fie, Tom,—dispute with a lady!" cried Mr. Smith. "Now, as for me, I'm for where you will, providing this young lady [meaning Evelina] is of the party; one place is the same as another to me, so that it be but agreeable to the ladies. I would go anywhere with you, Ma'm, unless, indeed, it were to church;—ha, ha, ha, you'll excuse me, Ma'm, but, really, I never could conquer my fear of a parson;—ha, ha, ha,—really, ladies, I beg your pardon, for being so rude, but I can't help laughing for my life."
Mr. Smith endeavoured to make himself particularly pleasing to Evelina, and for that purpose bought tickets for her and her relatives to attend the Hampstead Assembly. When he observed that Evelina was a little out of sorts, he attributed her low spirits to doubts of his intentions towards her. "To be sure," he told her, "marriage is all in all with the ladies; but with us gentlemen it's quite another thing." He advised her not to be discouraged, saying with a patronising air, "You may very well be proud, for I assure you there is nobody so likely to catch me at last as yourself."
Both Sir Clement Willoughby and Mr. Smith are selfish and conceited; but the former had lived among the gentlemen of Mayfair, the latter among the tradespeople of Snow Hill, and this difference of environment is shown in every speech they utter.
It is the contrast between these two distinct classes of society that saves the book from becoming monotonous. Evelina visits the Pantheon with her West End friends. When Captain Mirvan wonders what people find in such a place, Mr. Lovel, a fashionable fop, quickly rejoins: "What the ladies may come hither for, Sir, it would ill become us to determine; but as to we men, doubtless we can have no other view, than to admire them." At another time Evelina visits the opera with the vulgar Branghtons, who all rejoiced when the curtain dropped, and Mr. Branghton vowed he would never be caught again. The Branghtons at the opera is hardly inferior to Partridge at the play. Tom Branghton is a good representative of his class. He describes with glee the last night at Vauxhall: "There's such squealing and squalling!—and then all the lamps are broke,—and the women skimper scamper;—I declare I would not take five guineas to miss the last night!"
All the characters, even the heroine, take delight, in boisterous mirth. Much of the humour of the book consists rather in ludicrous situations than in any real delicacy of wit. Too often the laugh is at another's discomfiture, and so fails to please the present age with its kindlier feeling towards others. Such are the practical jokes which Captain Mirvan plays upon Madame Duval. In one instance, disguised as a robber, he waylays the lady's coach, and leaves her in a ditch with her feet tied to a tree. The many tricks which the doughty Salt plays upon this lady so much resemble some of the humorous scenes in Joseph Andrews, and Tom Jones that we may infer the readers of that century found them laughable. The Captain and the French woman are two puppets which serve to introduce much of this horse-play. They are not even caricatures; they are entirely unlike anything in human life. With the exception of these two characters, all the men and women who provoked the mirth of the heroine are well portrayed.
Miss Burney is less felicitous in her descriptions of serious characters. Lord Orville, the same type of man as Sir Charles Grandison, is true only in the sense that Miss Burney announces the truth of the entire book. "I have not pretended to show the world what it actually is, but what it appears to a girl of seventeen," she wrote in the preface to Evelina. Lord Orville, all dignity, nobility, charm, and perfection, is but the ideal of a young girl.
Evelina was a new woman in literature, a revelation to the men of the time of George the Third. The sincerity of the book could not be doubted. "But," they asked, "did Evelina represent the woman's point of view of life? Surely no man ever held like views." The Lovelaces and Tom Joneses are not so attractive as when seen through the eyes of their own sex, and the heroines are not so soft and yielding as a man would create them. Evelina, like all Miss Burney's heroines, is independent, fearless, and witty, with scarcely a trace of the traditional heroine of fiction. Saints and Magdalenes have always appealed to the masculine imagination. La donna dolorosa has occupied a prominent place in the art and literature of man's creation. Here he has revealed his sex egoism in all its nudity: the woman weeping for man, either lover, husband, or son; man the centre of her thoughts, her hopes and fears. This new heroine with a new regard towards man was a revelation to them. Evelina was the first woman to break the spell, to show them woman as woman, in lieu of woman as parasite and adjunct to man. Evelina is not always pleasing; she hasn't always good manners; she sometimes laughs in the faces of the dashing beaux who are addressing her. But she is a woman of real flesh and blood; such women have existed in all time, and, liked many women we meet every day and whom men in all ages have known, Evelina insists on being the centre of every scene.
In July, 1782, Miss Burney's second book, Cecilia, or Memoirs of an Heiress, was published. This novel met with as enthusiastic a reception as Evelina. Gibbon read the whole five volumes in a day; Burke declared they had cost him three days, though he did not part with the story from the time he first opened it, and had sat up a whole night to finish it; and Sir Joshua Reynolds had been fed while reading it, because he refused to quit it at the table.
The book shows more care and effort than Evelina. That was an outburst of youthful vivacity and spirits, but in Cecilia the author is striving to do her best. This is particularly revealed in the style, which shows the influence of Doctor Johnson, for it has lost the simplicity of Evelina. The diction is more ambitious, and the sentences are longer, many of them balanced. Even some of the inferior characters from their speech, appear to have received a lesson in English composition from Dr. Johnson.
But the novel owes its place among English classics to the varieties of characters portrayed and the vivid pictures of English life. Here again the gaieties of Vauxhall, Ranelagh, Marylebone and the Pantheon have become immortal, drawn with colours as vivid and enduring as Hogarth used in painting the sadder sides of London life. No other writer has brought these places before our eyes as clearly and as fully as Fanny Burney.
The plot of Cecilia, like that of Evelina, is so arranged as to present different classes of society. Cecilia has three guardians, with one of whom she must live during her minority. First she visits Mr. Harrel, a gay, fashionable man, a spendthrift and a gambler, who lives in a fashionable house in Portman Square, where Cecilia, during a constant round of festivities, meets the fashionable people of London. Next she visits Mr. Briggs in the City, "a short thick, sturdy man, with very small keen black eyes, a square face, a dark complexion, and a snub nose." He was so miserly that when Cecilia asked for pen, ink, and a sheet of paper, he gave her a slate and pencil, as he supposed she had nothing of consequence to say. He was as sparing of his words as of his money, and used the same elliptical sentences in his speech as Dickens afterwards put into the mouth of Alfred Jingle, the famous character in Pickwick Papers. He thus advises Cecilia in regard to her lovers: "Take care of sharpers; don't trust shoe-buckles, nothing