Cecilia: “if he will play Romeo, you, I dare say, will play Juliet”

 1/ When I picked up Cecilia, I wanted to promote Frances Burney—why is she not better known and widely read? 

Look at her achievements. As Frances Burney focuses on manners and codes of conduct and types of people, that makes her novels rather different from other 18th century novels I have read by Daniel Defoe, Henry Fielding, Jonathan Swift, and Charlotte Lennox (and beyond English fiction: Voltaire and Choderlos de Laclos), but rather close to the plays of William Congreve and Richard Brinsley Sheridan. In other words, she’s going in another direction, pioneering the novel of manners*, which is later adopted (and developed) by Jane Austen. She also starts using free indirect discourse, which is later used extensively (and perfected) by Austen.  

*: Did anyone do it before her? No, I’m asking. I actually don’t know. 

The first half of the novel is about Cecilia living in the house of the Harrels and exploring fashionable society in London. She has seven suitors: Mortimer Delvile (I don’t know what Frances Burney was thinking, giving such a name to the love interest), Mr Monckton (who’s married), Mr Arnott, Mr Belfield, Sir Robert Floyer, Mr Marriot, and Lord Derford. No wonder Jane Austen’s more popular: it’s easier to relate to broke girls trying to find a normal and stable husband, than to an heiress pursued by seven men. 

After the final disaster of the Harrels, Cecilia moves into the house of Mr Delvile, another guardian. Then they go to Delvile Castle in the country, and get a visit from Lady Honoria Pemberton, a relative of the Delviles. 

She’s hilarious. 

“… cried she; “he has not the least spirit, and I dare say he would not fight to save the whole nation from destruction; but I’ll make him believe that it’s necessary, in order to give him something to think of, for really his poor head is so vacant, that I am sure if one might but play upon it with sticks, it would sound just like a drum.”” (B.6, ch.6) 

I know she’s volatile and airy and unthinking; I know she teases our heroine mercilessly and turns everything into a laugh; I know we’re supposed to disapprove of her; but Lady Honoria cracks me up. It’s especially funny when she teases the proud, stiff, self-important Mr Delvile. 

““For heaven’s sake, Lady Honoria,” said Cecilia, “could you find no better entertainment for Mr Delvile than ridiculing his own house?”

“O,” cried she, laughing, “did you never hear us quarrel before? why when I was here last summer, I used to affront him ten times a day.”

[…] “And do you call it so small a matter to wish a man’s whole habitation annihilated?”

“Lord, I don’t wish anything about it! I only say so to provoke him.”” (B.6, ch.9) 

That proud and insufferable Mr Delvile deserves some mockery and derision and he’s not going to get any from our amiable Cecilia, so I’m glad he gets it from the “unladylike” Lady Honoria. 

(Some of you may have noticed that Frances Burney seems to like female names that end in an a: Evelina, Cecilia, Camilla, Augusta Delvile, Priscilla Harrel, Henrietta Belfield, Lady Honoria…). 

There is, I should say, an important difference between many conversations in the fashionable society of London and her talks: many conversations in the earlier part of the novel don’t contribute much to the plot and their function is to depict the various types of people in high society, which can get exhausting (I don’t watch reality TV because I don’t want to listen to vapid people); the chatter of Lady Honoria is not all empty chatter, because she either reveals something about the Delvile family, including Mortimer, or she teases Cecilia and betrays her discomfort to Mrs Delvile. 

“And then, with the hope of appearing unconcerned, [Cecilia] raised her head; but meeting the eyes of Mrs Delvile fixed upon her face with a look of penetrating observation, abashed and guilty, she again dropt it, and resumed her work.” (B.6, ch.7) 

In these chapters, Frances Burney also gives us some pointed conversations between Cecilia and Mrs Delvile, and a few moments when they leave things unsaid, which Henry James would have enjoyed. 

“The state of her mind seemed read by Mrs Delvile, who examined her with eyes of such penetrating keenness, that they rather made discoveries than enquiries.” (B.6, ch.8) 

That whole scene is very, very good.

2/ The novel is around 940 pages. Cecilia falls in love with Mortimer Delvile (what a dreadful name) around page 250, so you can tell that they have to go through lots of soap opera stuff before they can get their happily ever after. 

In the first half of the novel, Frances Burney however focuses on society, the other suitors, and the baseness of Mr Harrel; it’s around page 450 or so that the marriage plot begins. 

I know I wrote that I wanted to praise and promote Frances Burney, but honestly one of the problems here is that Cecilia is extremely irritating: her gullibility; her weakness and irresoluteness about the Harrels; her “modest” behaviour towards Mortimer Delvile. In an earlier blog post, I complained that there’s a misunderstanding and every time an opportunity came up to clear it, they got interrupted, and the misunderstanding got dragged out for about 170 pages. When they’re at Delvile Castle, there’s another confusion, and every time Mortimer tries to speak to Cecilia, she refuses to listen. When he becomes ill, she feels guilty, thinking that her refusal to listen is partly to blame. But what does she do when he later stumbles into her and asks for three minutes? 

““No, sir,” cried she, indignantly, “not for an instant!” and leaving him utterly astonished, she hastened to her own apartment.

She was then sorry she had been so precipitate; nothing had been clearly proved against him; no authority was so likely to be fallacious as that of Lady Honoria; neither was he under any engagement to herself that could give her any right to manifest such displeasure. These reflections, however, came too late, and the quick feelings of her agitated mind were too rapid to wait the dictates of cool reason.” (B.6, ch.7) 

See what I mean? Frances Burney has no compassion for my poor nerves.  

3/ There are some affecting passages, when Cecilia sees that Mortimer has left her, knowing that his proud family would never accept such a marriage: 

“… having now no part to act, and no dignity to support, no observation to fear, and no inference to guard against, she gave vent to her long smothered emotions, by weeping without caution or restraint.

She had met with an object whose character answered all her wishes for him with whom she should entrust her fortune, and whose turn of mind, so similar to her own, promised her the highest domestic felicity; to this object her affections had involuntarily bent, they were seconded by esteem, and unchecked by any suspicion of impropriety in her choice; she had found too, in return, that his heart was all her own; her birth, indeed, was inferior, but it was not disgraceful; her disposition, education and temper seemed equal to his fondest wishes; yet, at the very time when their union appeared most likely, when they mixed with the same society, and dwelt under the same roof, when the father to one, was the guardian to the other, and interest seemed to invite their alliance even more than affection, the young man himself, without counsel or command, could tear himself from her presence by an effort all his own, forbear to seek her heart, and almost charge her not to grant it, and determining upon voluntary exile, quit his country and his connections with no view, and for no reason, but merely that he might avoid the sight of her he loved!” (B.6, ch.10)

This is moving and you can feel her pain, because Frances Burney has taken the time to depict the other suitors: Mr Belfield is irresponsible and doesn’t dare to pursue her once he removed the façade of wealth; Sir Robert Floyer and Mr Marriot are despicable, especially the former; Lord Derford is a simpleton, courting her only because his father wants her money; Mr Arnott is the only good man who loves her tenderly (I like that Burney doesn’t paint all the suitors as unlikeable), but Cecilia cannot return his feelings. Mortimer has everything she wants and they love each other, but he gives her up because the will dictates that she can only keep the inheritance if the man she marries takes her last name.  

When Mortimer discovers that she too loves him, he can no longer give her up. He proposes a secret marriage (like Romeo and Juliet). She doubts. She hesitates. She agrees. She struggles. She considers breaking the engagement. She freaks out after a conversation with the (villainous) Mr Monckton (that she stupidly trusts). She tries to break the engagement. Am I harsh on the 21-year-old Cecilia? Perhaps I am, but: 

“Cecilia returned to Mrs Charlton to acquaint her with what had passed; and notwithstanding the sorrow she felt in apparently injuring the man whom, in the whole world she most wished to oblige, she yet found a satisfaction in the sacrifice she had made, that recompensed her for much of her sufferings, and soothed her into something like tranquility; the true power of virtue she had scarce experienced before, for she found it a resource against the cruellest dejection, and a supporter in the bitterest disappointment.” (B.7, ch.7) 

Is that not irritating? Frances Burney does test my patience. 

But she doesn’t stop there. Cecilia writes to break the engagement but the letter doesn’t reach Mortimer (like Romeo), so she and Mrs Charlton have to hurry to London to find him, but they get interrupted on the way—Frances Burney just throws one thing after another at the characters—when I saw that the chapter had more than 15 pages left of Cecilia being held captive by those chatty, frivolous people of fashionable society, I had no patience left and closed the book mid-chapter. 

Am I going to continue? I do not know. I was near page 600. But the book, brilliant at times, is drawn-out and exasperating. Most of my reading this year, as it turns out, has been educational—I want to read something I really enjoy. 

The headline quotes Lady Honoria, B.6, ch.9. 

Cecilia: “the VOLUBLE […] are flirting, communicative, restless, and familiar, and attack without the smallest ceremony”

1/ Evelina, Frances Burney’s first book, is an epistolary novel, but because it’s mainly composed of Evelina’s letters narrating her experiences in London, it very quickly stops looking like letters, and looks more like a first-person narrative—with scenes, dialogue, characters, etc. Cecilia has a third-person narrator, though Frances Burney mainly focuses on the perspective of Cecilia Beverley. 

“… This, added to the behaviour of young Delvile, made her suspect that some engagement was in agitation on his own part, and that while she thought him so sedulous only to avoid her, he was simply occupied in seeking another. This painful suggestion, which every thing seemed to confirm, again overset all her schemes, and destroyed all her visionary happiness. Yet how to reconcile it with what had passed at their last meeting she knew not; she had then every reason to believe that his heart was in her power, and that courage, or an opportunity more seasonable, was all he wanted to make known his devotion to her; why, then, shun if he loved her? why, if he loved her not, seem so perturbed at the explanation of her independence?” (B.4, ch.10)

That’s an example of free indirect discourse, though Frances Burney doesn’t use it extensively in the novel. 

“Her pity, however, for Miss Belfield was almost wholly unallayed by jealousy; she harboured not any suspicion that she was loved by young Delvile, whose aspiring spirit led her infinitely more to fear some higher rival, than to believe he bestowed even a thought upon the poor Henrietta; but still she wished with the utmost ardour to know the length of their acquaintance, how often they had met, when they had conversed, what notice he had taken of her, and how so dangerous a preference had invaded her heart.

[…] Would she obtain them? no; the most romantic generosity would revolt from such a demand, for however precarious was her own chance with young Delvile, Miss Belfield she was sure could not have any; neither her birth nor education fitted her for his rank in life, and even were both unexceptionable, the smallness of her fortune, as Mr Monckton had instructed her, would be an obstacle insurmountable.

Would it not be a kind of treachery to gather from her every thing, yet aid her in nothing? to take advantage of her unsuspicious openness in order to learn all that related to one whom she yet hoped would belong ultimately to herself, and gratify an interested curiosity at the expence of a candour not more simple than amiable? “No,” cried Cecilia, “arts that I could never forgive, I never will practice; this sweet, but unhappy girl shall tell me nothing; betrayed already by the tenderness of her own heart, she shall at least suffer no further from any duplicity in mine. If, indeed, Mr Delvile, as I suspect, is engaged elsewhere, I will make this gentle Henrietta the object of my future solicitude; the sympathy of our situations will not then divide but unite us, and I will take her to my bosom, hear all her sorrows, and calm her troubled spirit by participating in her sensibility. But if, on the contrary, this mystery ends more happily for myself, if Mr Delvile has now no other engagement, and hereafter clears his conduct to my satisfaction, I will not be accessory to loading her future recollection with the shame of a confidence she then cannot but repent, nor with an injury to her delicacy that may wound it for ever.”” (B.5, ch.9) 

Frances Burney narrates Cecilia’s feelings; then uses free indirect discourse, blending the narrator’s voice with the thoughts of Cecilia; and then switches to direct speech (why does Cecilia make such a long speech to herself though?). 

2/ When I read Vanity Fair (1848) a couple of years ago and came across the passage “I wonder how many families are driven to roguery and to ruin by great practitioners in Crawley’s way?—how many great noblemen rob their petty tradesmen, condescend to swindle their poor retainers out of wretched little sums and cheat for a few shillings?...” (ch.37, it’s a long passage), I wrote: 

“… personally I find it interesting because I often read 19th century novels and don’t think other writers directly address, as Thackeray does, the impact on the tradesmen and employees when a person of higher class lives beyond their means and cheats them, or goes bankrupt and cannot repay debts.” 

We don’t see this in, say, Madame Bovary or The Custom of the Country. But look at Cecilia: not only had Frances Burney done it in 1782 but she also went further, letting us meet the workmen and the creditors. 

3/ Except for the heroine, the characters in Cecilia are largely characterised through dialogue, which would make it easy should anyone intend to adapt it for the screen (hint hint). Cecilia would work best as a TV series, but a lot would still have to be cut: lots of scenes could be shortened or cut altogether; Mr Gosport could easily be removed; Mr Morrice could go; etc.

Unfortunately I think a lot of these things should have been cut from the novel itself. I have always defended the length of Moby-Dick and War and Peace (and read both from cover to cover twice), but Cecilia should be significantly shorter: there is too much dialogue; most scenes are too long; many conflicts and misunderstandings are too drawn out… 

Take for example the development of the Harrels. Cecilia has three guardians after her uncle’s death: Mr Harrel, Mr Briggs, and Mr Delvile. She moves into Mr Harrel’s house because his wife Priscilla was her childhood friend, and at first she has a nice time as the Harrels are merry people and she gets introduced to high society and all sorts of amusements in London. Gradually Cecilia realises that the Harrels live a life of extravagance and dissipation: not only do they live beyond their means, paying no heed to the poor workers and tradesmen, but Mr Harrel is also a gambler. Mr Harrel is one of the most well-delineated, well-developed characters I’ve come across in fiction—Frances Burney doesn’t hold back—she depicts the recklessness and duplicity and treachery of Mr Harrel as he becomes more and more desperate. The development of Mr Harrel, as Burney gradually removes the layers and exposes his base character, is excellent. Mrs Harrel is also very well-written—she is shallow and callous and selfish, living as though actions have no consequences. I can’t help wondering, was Thackeray influenced by Frances Burney? Was George Eliot? Was Edith Wharton? Were Emily and Anne Bronte?

Frances Burney’s depiction of Cecilia’s naïveté and gullibility (though extremely irritating) is also excellent, especially when Cecilia struggles with herself: 

“… Startled by this consideration, she most severely reproached herself for a compliance of which she had so lightly weighed the consequences, and thought with the utmost dismay, that while she had flattered herself she was merely indulging the dictates of humanity, she might perhaps be accused by the world as an abettor of guile and injustice.” (B.5, ch.9) 

At the same time, parts of the novel are too long. Do we need pages and pages of vapid conversations? Do we need Mr Gosport’s analysis of various types of people in high society? Do we need so many scenes—and such long scenes—of Cecilia getting manipulated by the Harrels? Do we need such a long elaborate scene at Vauxhall, with all the empty talks thoroughly and meticulously written down, before the fatal act? I don’t think we do. It gets exhausting and I think a lot of the dialogue could be cut. Frances Burney has great talent for giving each character an individual voice, but she doesn’t know when to stop—very often I find myself thinking, all right Fanny, you have delighted us long enough.

The quote in the headline comes from B.1, ch.5. 

If This Be Magic and Shakespeare in translation: some further thoughts

 1/ When asked whether we know a writer if we only read them in translation, I suppose most people would say either yes or no. I think it depends: I think some but not too much is lost if we’re talking about Jane Austen, Trollope, Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, Fielding, Balzac, Zola, Molière…; but Nguyễn Du in translation is no longer Nguyễn Du and I’d say the same about Shakespeare, Melville, or Wodehouse; and I can’t help feeling that I don’t really know Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, or Ovid. 

There’s a reason that non-Russians name Tolstoy, Dostoyevsky, or Chekhov as the greatest Russian writer, whereas Russians say Pushkin. 

That doesn’t mean we reject everything in translation. We look at different translations; we do what we can. Am I going to learn ancient Greek? No, I have no gift for languages. To read as widely as I aim to do, I need translators, for whom I’m forever grateful. I’m just saying that sometimes we do lose a lot: Wodehouse’s comic genius is in the phrasing, so what do we have when his sentences are now rephrased by someone else? It’s something to keep in mind. 

2/ In my previous blog post about Daniel Hahn’s If This Be Magic: The Unlikely Art of Shakespeare in Translation, I wrote: 

“When people read or watch Shakespeare in translation, his poetry is lost but his other qualities—his metaphors, his range, his characterisation and psychological insight, his examination of power and politics, his understanding of human nature, his sense of pacing and understanding of drama, and so on—are still there. When I read Racine, I suspected that much of his greatness was in the French alexandrine verse that got lost in translation.” 

Glad to later find Hahn making the same point in his book: 

“… Jean-Michel cited this distinction to explain why we see so few plays by Racine staged in English—he’s a writer for whom language is everything. A play like Bérénice has very little plot— ‘it’s all music, it’s all language.’ It’s a beautiful literary play, but Racine never wrote anything as generously, theatrically user-friendly as A Midsummer Night’s Dream.” (ch.32) 

The plays of Racine are all talk talk talk. 

If we leave aside the ancient Greek plays (different tradition of drama, with lots of singing), I have noticed that sometimes a long speech in someone else’s play is just the author writing poetry, whereas long speeches in Shakespeare are usually either rhetoric (a character trying to persuade another, which moves the plot forward), or a soliloquy (which depicts a character’s stream of thoughts). Spanish Golden Age playwrights, except for Lope de Vega, very often write those long speeches which neither move the plot forward nor do anything for characterisation (I’m looking at you, Tirso de Molina—what’s the point of that four-page speech about Lisbon?). The closet plays of Seneca, or Goethe’s Faust, have many passages and scenes that I know wouldn’t work well onstage. 

Shakespeare and Molière are performed widely around the world—in translation—because they understand theatre so well, having such a great sense of pacing and tension and pitch and dramatic effects (I once saw a bad production of Othello which still managed to make me tear up at the end).  

I’ve also noted that some of the playwrights who do well onstage in translation wrote in prose: Chekhov, Ibsen (except for some early plays)… Different beast, then. 

3/ Daniel Hahn’s book makes me have immense respect for translators of Shakespeare into other languages, and I do think many of the examples—the choices, the solutions to the problems inherent in translating Shakespeare—are brilliant. But at the same time, the book reinforces my view that Shakespeare is best appreciated in English, that I’m glad to read and watch his works in the original, and that it’s silly to call for a translation of his plays into today’s English. 

(Yep, over the years I’ve encountered lots of philistines who think readers of Shakespeare in translation have an advantage over us). 

When a translator finds a clever solution for a joke or a pun in Shakespeare, it might be funny (and the translator deserves an applause), but that joke or that pun is not Shakespeare’s. Hahn also explores many other problems and not everything gets a neat solution. What do you do when Shakespeare plays with the coexistence of Latinate/ Romance and Germanic words in the English language? Or when he marks an accent or regional dialect? Or when he includes words from another language? Or when he includes words from the target language itself (i.e. what does a French translator do with the French passages in the plays)? And if you make a choice between domestication and foreignisation, how far do you go and where do you draw the line? 

The translator is thus the second author. 

Hahn raises a million questions—sometimes there’s a brilliant answer, sometimes there’s no neat solution—and the book gets one to think more deeply about Shakespeare and about the art of translation. One aspect I’ve never considered, for example, is that a translator of Shakespeare tries to think about beats, rhythm, and rhyme, which is challenging enough if some languages (such as Italian or Greek) have longer words than English does, but things could be even further complicated by accents: a play translated by a Brazilian might end up losing some effects in the mouth of a Portuguese actor, as they pronounce syllables differently.

4/ This is interesting: 

“Just as everyday English carries idioms drawn from our own greatest canonical translation, the 1611 King James Bible (and its more quietly influential predecessors), so translated Shakespeare looms large in other languages, phrases from his work inflecting people’s speech.” (ch.37) 

I like that. 

(Does this happen in Vietnamese? I have no idea). 

“We readers can become attached to [translations] in just the same way, and it’s hard to imagine the validity of alternative interchangeable versions. Just recall the stories that mattered most to you as a kid, when some of the strongest bonds were formed. For me, those books included classics that were definitely not called ‘Gretel and Hansel’ or ‘Cindergirl’, Lindgren’s Pippi Longsocks, Hans Christian Andersen’s ‘Small Mermaid’.” 

In Vietnam, some titles of classics—Giấc mộng đêm hè (A Midsummer Night’s Dream), Bắt trẻ đồng xanh (The Catcher in the Rye), Đỉnh gió hú (Wuthering Heights), Cuốn theo chiều gió (Gone with the Wind), Tội ác và trừng phạt (Crime and Punishment), and so on—have become so iconic that retranslated titles would flop, or new translators don’t bother. It’s like Dostoyevsky’s Братья Карамазовы: since Constance Garnett, everyone has called it The Brothers Karamazov even though some later translators (such as Ignat Avsey) translated it as The Karamazov Brothers. 

We become attached to translations: I love Constance Garnett’s translations of Chekhov (still going through the 13 volumes); Aylmer and Louise Maude’s versions of Tolstoy are dear friends, including their War and Peace (revised by Amy Mandelker), though now the Anna Karenina copy I keep is by Rosamund Bartlett; I suspect I’m also attached to Robert Fitzgerald’s translations of Homer, which is why I (unreasonably) stick to Akhilleus when everyone else says Achilles, and so on. 

If This Be Magic is a very good book—a celebration of Shakespeare and a celebration of translators—and it’s certainly one of the books I’ve enjoyed most this year.