His Fortune.
It is many years since Richardson fell into desuetude; it is many years
since he became the novelist not of the world at large but of that
inconsiderable section of the world which is interested in literature.
His methods are those of a bygone epoch; his ideals, with one or two
exceptions, are old-fashioned enough to seem fantastic; his sentiment
belongs to ancient history; to a generation bred upon Ouida's romances
and the plays of Mr. W. S. Gilbert his morality appears not merely
questionable but coarse and improper and repulsive. While he lived he
was adored: he moved and spoke and dwelt in an eternal mist of 'good,
thick, strong, stupefying incense smoke'; he was the idol of female
England, a master of virtue, a king of art, the wisest and best of
mankind. Johnson revered him--Johnson and Colley Gibber; Diderot ranked
him with Moses and Homer; to Balzac and Musset and George Sand he was the
greatest novelist of all time; Rousseau imitated him; Macaulay wrote and
talked of him with an enthusiasm that would have sat becomingly on Lady
Bradshaigh herself. But all that is over. Not even the emasculation to
which the late Mr. Dallas was pleased to subject his _Clarissa_ could
make that _Clarissa_ at all popular; not all the allusions of all the
leader-writers of a leader-writing age have been able to persuade the
public to renew its interest in the works and ways of Grandison the
august and the lovely and high-souled Harriet Byron. Richardson has to
be not skimmed but studied; not sucked like an orange, nor swallowed like
a lollipop, but attacked _secundum artem_ like a dinner of many courses
and wines. Once inside the vast and solid labyrinth of his intrigue, you
must hold fast to the clue which you have caught up on entering, or the
adventure proves impossible, and you emerge from his precincts defeated
and disgraced. And by us children of Mudie, to whom a novel must be
either a solemn brandy-and-soda or as it were a garrulous and vapid
afternoon tea, adventures of that moment are not often attempted.
Pamela.
Again, when all is said in Richardson's favour it has to be admitted
against him that in _Pamela_ he produced an essay in vulgarity--of
sentiment and morality alike--which has never been surpassed. In these
days it is hardly less difficult to understand the popularity of this
masterpiece of specious immodesty than to speak or think of it with
patience. That it was once thought moral is as wonderful as that it was
once found readable. What is more easily apprehended is the contempt of
Henry Fielding--is the justice of that ridicule he was moved to visit it
withal. To him, a scholar and a gentleman and a man of the world,
_Pamela_ was a new-fangled blend of sentimental priggishness and prurient
unreality. To him the pretensions to virtue and consideration of the
vulgar little hussy whom Richardson selected for his heroine were
certainly not less preposterous than the titles to life and actuality of
the wooden libertine whom Richardson put forth as his hero. He was
artist enough to know that the book was ignoble as literature and
absolutely false as fact; he was moralist enough to see that its
teachings were the reverse of elevating and improving; and he uttered his
conclusions _more suo_ in one of the best and healthiest books in English
literature. This, indeed, is the only merit of which the history of Miss
Andrews can well be accused: that it set Fielding thinking and provoked
him to the composition of the first of his three great novels. Pamela is
only remembered nowadays as Joseph's sister: the egregious Mr. B--- has
hardly any existence save as Lady Booby's brother. 'Tis an ill wind that
blows good to nobody. There are few more tedious or more unpleasant
experiences than _Pamela_; _or_, _Virtue Rewarded_. But you have but to
remember that without it the race might never have heard of Fanny and
Joseph, of the fair Slipslop and the ingenuous Didapper, of Parson
Trulliber and immortal Abraham Adams, to be reconciled to its existence
and the fact of its old-world fame. Nay, more, to remember its ingenious
author with something of gratitude and esteem.
Grandison.
Nor is this the only charge that can be made and sustained against our
poet. It is also to be noted in his disparagement that he is the author
of _Sir Charles Grandison_, and that _Sir Charles Grandison_, epic of the
polite virtues, is deadly dull. 'My dear,' says somebody in one of Mr.
Thackeray's books, 'your eternal blue velvet quite tires me.' That is
the worst of _Sir Charles Grandison_: his eternal blue velvet--his
virtue, that is, his honour, his propriety, his good fortune, his absurd
command over the affections of the other sex, his swordsmanship, his
manliness, his patriotic sentiment, his noble piety--quite tires you. He
is an ideal, but so very, very tame that it is hard to justify his
existence. He is too perfect to be of the slightest moral use to
anybody. He has everything he wants, so that he has no temptation to be
wicked; he is incapable of immorality, so that he is easily quit of all
inducements to be vicious; he has no passions, so that he is superior to
every sort of spiritual contest; he is monstrous clever, so that he has
made up his mind about everything knowable and unknowable; he is
excessively virtuous so that he has made it up in the right direction. He
is, as Mr. Leslie Stephen remarks, a tedious commentary on the truth of
Mrs. Rawdon Crawley's acute reflection upon the moral effect of five
thousand a year. He is only a pattern creature, because he has neither
need nor opportunity, neither longing nor capacity, to be anything else.
In real life such faultless monsters are impossible: one does not like to
think what would happen if they were not. In fiction they are possible
enough, and--what is more to the purpose--they are of necessity
extravagantly dull. This is what is the matter with Sir Charles. He is
dull, and he effuses dulness. By dint of being uninteresting himself he
makes his surroundings uninteresting. In the record of his adventures
and experiences there is enough of wit and character and invention to
make the fortune of a score or more of such novels as the public of these
degenerate days would hail with enthusiasm. But his function is to
vitiate them all. He is a bore of the first magnitude, and of his
eminence in that capacity his history is at once the monument and the
proof.
Clarissa.
But if _Grandison_ be dull and _Pamela_ contemptible _Clarissa_ remains;
and _Clarissa_ is what Musset called it, 'le premier roman du monde.' Of
course _Clarissa_ has its faults. Miss Harlowe, for instance, is not
always herself--is not always the complete creation she affects to be:
there are touches of moral pedantry--anticipations of George Eliot--in
her; the scenes in which she is brought to shame are scarcely real,
living, moving, all the rest of it. But on the other hand is there
anything better than Lovelace in the whole range of fiction? Take
Lovelace in all or any of his moods--suppliant, intriguing, repentant,
triumphant, above all triumphant--and find his parallel if you can.
Where, you ask, did the little printer of Salisbury Court--who suggests
to Mr. Stephen 'a plump white mouse in a wig'--where did Richardson
discover so much gallantry and humanity, so much romance and so much
fact, such an abundance of the heroic qualities and the baser veracities
of mortal nature? Lovelace is, if you except Don Quixote, the completest
hero in fiction. He has wit, humour, grace, brilliance, charm; he is a
scoundrel and a ruffian, and he is a gentleman and a man; of his kind and
in his degree he has the right Shakespearean quality. Almost as perfect
in her way is the enchanting Miss Howe--an incarnation of womanliness and
wit and fun, after Lovelace the most brilliant of Richardson's creations.
Or take the Harlowe family: the severe and stupid father, the angry and
selfish uncles, the cub James, the vixen Arabella, a very fiend of envy
and hatred and malice--what a gallery of portraits is here! And Solmes
and Tomlinson, Belford and Brand and Hickman; and the infinite complexity
of the intrigue; the wit, the pathos, the invention; the knowledge of
human nature; the faculty of dialogue--where save in _Clarissa_ shall we
find all these? As for Miss Harlowe herself, all incomplete as she is
she remains the Eve of fiction, the prototype of the modern heroine, the
common mother of all the self-contained, self-suffering, self-satisfied
young persons whose delicacies and repugnances, whose independence of
mind and body, whose airs and ideas and imaginings, are the stuff of the
modern novel. With her begins a new ideal of womanhood; from her
proceeds a type unknown in fact and fiction until she came. When after
outrage she declines to marry her destroyer, and prefers death to the
condonation of her dishonour, she strikes a note and assumes a position
till then not merely unrecognised but absolutely undiscovered. It has
been said of her half in jest and half in earnest that she is 'the
aboriginal Woman's Rights person'; and it is a fact that she and Helena
and Desdemona and Ophelia are practically a thousand years apart. And
this is perhaps her finest virtue as it is certainly her greatest charm:
that, until she set the example, woman in literature as a self-suffering
individuality, as an existence endowed with equal rights to
independence--of choice, volition, action--with man, had not begun to be.
That of itself would suffice to make _Clarissa_ memorable; and that is
the least of its merits. Consider it from which point you will, the book
remains a masterpiece, unique of its kind. It has been imitated but it
has never been equalled. It is Richardson's only title to fame; but it
is enough. Not the Great Pyramid itself is more solidly built nor more
incapable of ruin.