14 



Indiana University Studies 



III. Dialogue 



The keeping of a diary was a salutary influence in the develop- 

 ment of Madame D'Arblay's style. The naivete and freshness with 

 which she set down the events of her daily life and the conversation 

 of those around her appear in the more vivid passages of Evelina and 

 Cecilia. These lines from the Diary ring true to life and seem re- 

 markably of the present day: 



Our confab was interrupted by the entrance of Mr. King. 

 The joke is, the people speak as if they were afraid of me, instead of my 

 being afraid of them. 47 



Professor Burton says, ''No one who has been admitted to the privilege 

 of Miss Burney's Diary can fail to feel that a woman who commands 

 such idiom is easily an adept in the realistic dialogue of the novel." 

 Mr. Elton makes a similar statement: "Her fictitious dialogues have 

 the same air of veracity, of line-by-line reproduction, as her record of 

 her talks with royalty or with the unspeakable old court dame 

 S chwellenberg . "^^ 



These judgments are but partially true. They apply only to 

 certain parts of Evelina, to fewer of Cecilia, and to almost none of 

 Camilla and The Wanderer. As far as the speech of her characters 

 is concerned, Madame D'Arblay cannot be compared with so con- 

 summate an artist as William De Morgan; but she is significant in 

 the history of the novel on account of the attention she paid to dialogue, 

 for before her there had been practically no differentiation of charac- 

 ters by their speech. For this she deserves praise ; but, just as in the 

 differentiation of her characters she has produced humors, so in their 

 speech she has introduced a good deal of caricature. Each of them 

 talks in the same way all the time. Those of the upper-class, as a rule, 

 ponverse in a stilted, affected way that lessens very much the illusion 

 of reality.^^ But the second-class characters are always more natural, 

 and in reporting their speech, Madame D'Arblay shows great skill. 

 The Branghtons and Mr. Smith, of the first novel, talk more like 

 human beings than anybody else in the author's works. She displays 

 her power nowhere better than in the altercation at the box-office when 

 the Branghtons take Evelina to the opera: 



" Cf. Richard Burton, Masters of the English Novel, 99. 

 Oliver Elton, A Survey of English Literature, I, 177. 



« It must be conceded that some of this unnaturalness is undoubtedly due to the 

 way such people talked in the last half of the eighteenth century. And yet, when all 

 allowance has been made for the artificial state of society at that time and the changes 

 that have occurred in speech since then, it still seems that these novels go beyond what 

 was the usage even then. 



