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RES JUDICATÆ
_IN UNIFORM BINDING_
=ANDREW LANG=
Letters to Dead Authors $1 00
=AUGUSTINE BIRRELL=
Obiter Dicta--First Series 1 00
Obiter Dicta--Second Series 1 00
Res Judicatæ 1 00
=W. E. HENLEY=
Views and Reviews--Literature 1 00
RES JUDICATÆ
_PAPERS AND ESSAYS_
BY
AUGUSTINE BIRRELL AUTHOR OF 'OBITER DICTA,' ETC.
'It need hardly be added that such sentences do not any more
than the records of the superior courts conclude as to matters
which may or may not have been controverted.'--_See_ BLACKHAM'S
_Case I. Salkeld 290_
NEW YORK CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS 1892
COPYRIGHT, 1892, BY
CHARLES SCRIBNER'S SONS.
PREFACE
The first two essays in this volume were composed as lectures, and are
now printed for the first time; the others have endured that indignity
before. The papers on 'The Letters of Charles Lamb' and 'Authors in
Court' originally appeared in _Macmillan's Magazine_; and the short
essays entitled 'William Cowper' and 'George Borrow' in the _Reflector_,
a lively sheet which owed its existence to and derived its inspiration
from the energy and genius of the late Mr. J. K. Stephen, whose too
early death has not only eclipsed the gaiety of many gatherings, but has
robbed the country of the service of a noble and truth-loving man.
The other papers appeared either in _Scribner's Magazine_ or in the
columns of the _Speaker_ newspaper.
Although, by the kindness of my present publishers, I have always been
practically a 'protected article' in the States, I cannot help
expressing my pleasure in finding myself in the enjoyment of the same
modest rights as an author in the new home of my people as in the old.
A. B.
LINCOLN'S INN, LONDON.
CONTENTS
PAGE
I. SAMUEL RICHARDSON 1
II. EDWARD GIBBON 39
III. WILLIAM COWPER 84
IV. GEORGE BORROW 115
V. CARDINAL NEWMAN 140
VI. MATTHEW ARNOLD 181
VII. WILLIAM HAZLITT 224
VIII. THE LETTERS OF CHARLES LAMB 232
IX. AUTHORS IN COURT 253
X. NATIONALITY 274
XI. THE REFORMATION 284
XII. SAINTE-BEUVE 298
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
A LECTURE
It is difficult to describe mankind either in a book or in a breath, and
none but the most determined of philosophers or the most desperate of
cynics have attempted to do so, either in one way or the other. Neither
the philosophers nor the cynics can be said to have succeeded. The
descriptions of the former are not recognisable and therefore as
descriptions at all events, whatever may be their other merits, must be
pronounced failures; whilst those of the cynics describe something which
bears to ordinary human nature only the same sort of resemblance that
chemically polluted waters bear to the stream as it flows higher up than
the source of contamination, which in this case is the cynic himself.
But though it is hard to describe mankind, it is easy to distinguish
between people. You may do this in a great many different ways: for
example, and to approach my subject, there are those who can read
Richardson's novels, and those who cannot. The inevitable third-class
passenger, no doubt, presents himself and clamours for a ticket: I mean
the man or woman who has never tried. But even a lecturer should have
courage, and I say boldly that I provide no accommodation for that
person tonight. If he feels aggrieved, let him seek his
remedy--elsewhere.
* * * * *
Mr. Samuel Richardson, of Salisbury Court, Fleet Street, printer, was,
if you have only an eye for the outside, a humdrum person enough.
Witlings, writing about him in the magazines, have often, out of
consideration for their pretty little styles, and in order to avoid the
too frequent repetition of his highly respectable if unromantic name,
found it convenient to dub him the 'little printer.'
He undoubtedly was short of stature, and in later life, obese in figure,
but had he stood seven feet high in his stockings, these people would
never have called him the 'big printer.' Richardson has always been
exposed to a strong under-current of ridicule. I have known people to
smile at the mention of his name, as if he were a sort of
man-milliner--or, did the thing exist, as some day it may do, a male
nursery-governess. It is at first difficult to account for this strange
colouring of the bubble reputation. Richardson's life, admirable as is
Mrs. Barbauld's sketch, cannot be said to have been written--his
letters, those I mean, he wrote in his own name, not the nineteen
volumes he made his characters write, have not been reprinted for more
than eighty years. He of all men might be suffered to live only in his
works, and when we turn to those works, what do we find? _Pamela_ and
_Clarissa_ are both terribly realistic; they contain passages of horror,
and are in parts profoundly pathetic, whilst _Clarissa_ is desperately
courageous. Fielding, with all his swagger and bounce, gold lace and
strong language, has no more of the boldness than he has of the
sublimity of the historian of Clarissa Harlowe. But these qualities
avail poor Richardson nothing. The taint of afternoon tea still clings
to him. The facts--the harmless, nay, I will say the attractive,
facts--that he preferred the society of ladies to that of his own sex,
and liked to be surrounded by these, surely not strange creatures, in
his gardens and grottos, first at North End, Hammersmith, and afterwards
at Parsons Green, are still remembered against him. Life is indeed full
of pitfalls, if estimates of a man's genius are to be formed by the
garden-parties he gave, and the tea he consumed a century and a quarter
ago. The real truth I believe to be this: we are annoyed with Richardson
because he violates a tradition. The proper place for an
eighteenth-century novelist was either the pot or the sponging house. He
ought to be either disguised in liquor or confined for debt. Richardson
was never the one or the other. Let us see how this works: take Dr.
Johnson; we all know how to describe him. He is our great moralist, the
sturdy, the severe, the pious, the man who, as Carlyle puts it in his
striking way, worshipped at St. Clement Danes in the era of Voltaire,
or, as he again puts it, was our real primate, the true spiritual
edifier and soul's teacher of all England? Well, here is one of his
reminiscences: 'I remember writing to Richardson from a sponging-house
and was so sure of my deliverance through his kindness and liberality,
that before his reply was brought I knew I could afford to joke with the
rascal who had me in custody, and did so over a pint of adulterated wine
for which at that moment I had no money to pay.'
Now, there we have the true, warm-hearted, literary tradition of the
eighteenth century. It is very amusing, it is full of good feeling and
fellowship, but the morality of the transaction from the great
moralist's point of view is surely, like his linen, a trifle dingy. The
soul's teacher of all England, laid by the heels in a sponging-house,
and cracking jokes with a sheriff's officer over a pint of wine on the
chance of another man paying for it, is a situation which calls for
explanation. It is not my place to give it. It could, I think, easily be
given. Dr. Johnson was, in my judgment, all Carlyle declared him to be,
and to have been called upon to set him free was to be proudly
privileged, and, after all, why make such a fuss about trifles? The
debt and costs together only amounted to £5 18s., so that the six
guineas Richardson promptly sent more than sufficed to get our 'real
primate' out of prison, and to pay for the pint. All I feel concerned to
say here is, that the praise of this anecdote belongs to the little
printer, and not to the great lexicographer. The hero of the parable of
the Good Samaritan is the Good Samaritan himself, and not the
unfortunate, and therefore probably foolish, traveller who must need
fall amongst thieves.
But if you violate traditions, and disturb people's notions as to what
it is becoming for you to be, to do, or to suffer, you have to pay for
it. An eighteenth-century novelist who made a fortune first by honest
labour and the practice of frugality, and wrote his novels afterwards;
who was fond of the society of ladies, and a vegetarian in later life;
who divided his time between his shop and his villa, and became in due
course master of a city company, is not what we have a right to expect,
and makes a figure which strongly contrasts with that of Richardson's
great contemporary, the entirely manly Henry Fielding, whose very name
rings in the true tradition; whilst as for his books, to take up _Tom
Jones_ is like re-entering in middle life your old college rooms, where,
so at least Mr. Lowell assures us,
'You feel o'er you stealing
The old, familiar, warm, champagny, brandy-punchy feeling.'
It may safely be said of Richardson that, after attaining to
independence, he did more good every week of his life--for he was a wise
and most charitable man--than Fielding was ever able to do throughout
the whole of his; but this cannot alter the case or excuse a violated
tradition.
The position, therefore, of Richardson in our literature is that of a
great Nonconformist. He was not manufactured according to any
established process. If I may employ a metaphor borrowed from his own
most honourable craft, he was set up in a new kind of type. He was born
in 1689 in a Derbyshire village, the name of which, for some
undiscovered reason, he would never tell. The son of poor parents--his
father was a joiner--he had never any but a village school education,
nor did he in later life worry much about learning, or seek, as so many
printers have done, to acquire foreign tongues. At fourteen years of age
he was bound apprentice to a printer in Aldersgate Street, and for seven
years toiled after a fashion which would certainly nowadays be forbidden
by Act of Parliament, were there the least likelihood of anybody either
demanding or performing drudgery so severe. When out of his
apprenticeship, he worked for eight years as a compositor, reader, and
overseer, and then, marrying his late master's daughter, set up for
himself, and slowly but steadily grew prosperous and respected. His
first wife dying, he married again, the daughter of a bookseller of
Bath. At the age of fifty he published his first novel, _Pamela_. John
Bunyan's life was not more unlike an Archbishop of Canterbury's than was
Richardson's unlike the life of an ordinary English novelist of his
period.
This simile to Nonconformity also holds good a little when we seek to
ascertain the ambit of Richardson's popularity. To do this we must take
wide views. We must not confine our attention to what may be called the
high and dry school of literary orthodoxy. There, no doubt, Richardson
has his admirers, just as Spurgeon's sermons have been seen peeping out
from under a heap of archidiaconal, and even episcopal Charges, although
the seat of Spurgeon's popularity is not in bishops' palaces, but in
shop parlours. I do not mean by this that Richardson is now a popular
novelist, for the fact, I suppose, is otherwise; but I mean that to take
the measure of his popularity, you must look over the wide world and not
merely at the clans and the cliques, the noble army of writers, and the
ever lessening body of readers who together constitute what are called
literary circles. Of Richardson's great fame on the Continent, it will
be time enough to speak in a few minutes; for the moment I will stop at
home. Mr. Leslie Stephen, who has been called to be editor of our first
really great Dictionary of National Biography, and has in that capacity
to sit like a coroner's jury upon every dead author, and to decide
whether his exploits are to be squeezed into one miserable paragraph,
or may be allowed proudly to expand over a page--he, I say, pronounces
_Pamela_ to be neither moral nor amusing. Poor Pamela, who through two
mortal volumes thinks of nothing but her virtue, and how to get married
according to law! to be thus dismissed by her most recent, most
distinguished editor! But, I repeat, we must take wide views. We must
not be content with the verdict of the university; we must seek that of
the kitchen: nor is the distance ever great between these institutions.
Two months ago a cook in a family of my acquaintance, one Saturday
evening, when like old Caspar 'her work was done,' suddenly bethought
herself of _Pamela_, a book she had not read since girlhood. Rest was
impossible--get it forthwith she must. The housemaid proffered her _The
Heir of Redclyffe_, and the kitchen-maid, a somewhat oppressed damsel,
timidly produced _Gates Ajar_. The cook was not to be trifled with after
any such feeble fashion. The spell of _Pamela_ was upon her, and out she
sallied, arrayed in her majesty, to gratify her soul's desire. Had she
been a victim of what is called 'Higher Education of Women,' and
therefore in the habit of frequenting orthodox bookshops, she would
doubtless have found the quest at so late an hour as hopeless as that of
the _Holy Grail_; but she was not that sort of person, and the shop she
had in her mind, and whither she straightway bent her steps, was a small
stationer's where are vended _Family Heralds_ and _Ballads_ and
_Pamelas_; for the latter, in cheap sixpenny guise--and I hope complete,
but for this I cannot vouch--is a book which is constantly reprinted for
sale amongst the poor. The cook, having secured her prize, returned to
her home in triumph, where a dinner worthy of the name was not to be had
until Pamela's virtue was rewarded, which, as you doubtless remember, it
only was when her master brings her a license and presses for a day. She
desires it may be on a Thursday, and gives her reasons. He rallies her
agreeably on that head. The Thursday following is fixed upon. She
reflects seriously on the near prospect of her important change of
condition, and is diffident of her own worthiness, and prays for
humility that her new condition may not be a snare to her, and makes up
her mind how to behave herself to the servants, she herself having been
one.
There are well-authenticated instances of the extraordinary power
_Pamela_ possesses of affecting those who are not much in the habit of
reading. There is a story of its being read aloud by a blacksmith round
his anvil night after night, to a band of eager rustics, all dreadfully
anxious good Mr. Richardson would only move on a little faster, and yet
unwilling to miss a single one of poor Pamela's misadventures; and of
their greeting by hearty rounds of British cheers, the happy issue out
of her afflictions that awaits her, namely, her marriage with the cause
of every one of them.
There are living writers who have written some admirable novels, and I
have known people to be glad when they were finished, but never to the
pitch of three times three.
I am not, of course, recommending anyone to read _Pamela_; to do so
would be an impertinence. You have all done so, or tried to do so. 'I do
not remember,' says Charles Lamb, 'a more whimsical surprise than
having been once detected by a familiar damsel, reclining at my ease
upon the grass on Primrose Hill, reading _Pamela_. There was nothing in
the book to make a man seriously ashamed at the exposure; but as she
seated herself down by me, and seemed determined to read in company, I
could have wished it had been--any other book. We read on very socially
for a few pages; and not finding the author much to her taste, she got
up and went away. Gentle casuist, I leave it to thee to conjecture
whether the blush (for there was one between us) was the property of the
nymph or the swain in the dilemma. From me you shall never learn the
secret.'[1]
Miss Pamela Andrews was, to tell the truth, a vulgar young person. There
is nothing heroic or romantic about her; she has not a touch or a trace
of the moral sublimity of Jeannie Deans, who though of the same rank of
life, belonged to another country and had had an entirely different
up-bringing. What a reply was that of Jeannie's to the Rev. Mr.
Staunton, George Robertson's father, when he, entirely misapprehending
the purport of her famous journey, lets her perceive that he fancies she
is plotting for her own marriage with his son. Says the father to the
son: 'Perhaps you intend to fill up the cup of disobedience and
profligacy by forming a low and disgraceful marriage; but let me bid you
beware.' 'If you were feared for sic a thing happening with me, sir,'
said Jeannie, 'I can only say that not for all the land that lies
between the twa ends of the rainbow, wad I be the woman that should wed
your son.' 'There is something very singular in all this,' said the
elder Staunton; and so Pamela would have thought. She, honest girl that
she was, was always ready to marry anybody's son, only she must have the
marriage lines to keep in her desk and show to her dear parents.
The book's origin ought not to be overlooked. Some London booksellers,
knowing Mr. Richardson to be a grave man of decorous life, and with a
talent for moralising, desired him to write a series of familiar letters
on the behaviour of young women going out to service for the first
time; they never intended a novel: they wanted a manual of conduct--that
conduct which, according to a precise Arithmetician is three-fourths, or
some other fraction, of human life. It was in this spirit that
Richardson sat down to write _Pamela_ and make himself famous. He had a
facile pen, and the book, as it grew under his hand, outstripped its
design, but never lost sight of it. It was intended for Pamelas, and is
_bourgeois_ to the very last degree. The language is simple, but its
simplicity is not the noble, soul-stirring simplicity of Bunyan, nor is
it the manly simplicity of Cobbett or Hugh Miller: it is the ignoble,
and at times almost the odious, simplicity of a merely uncultured life.
It abounds in vulgar phrases and vulgar thoughts; still, it reflects
powerfully the scenes it portrays, and you feel as you read a fine
affinity between the communicating medium, the language, and the thing
communicated, the story. When people said, in the flush of their first
enthusiasm, as they did say, that there were but two good books in the
world, the _Bible_, and _Pamela_, this is what, perhaps unconsciously
they were thinking of; otherwise they were talking nonsense. Pamela
spoke a language still understood of many, and if she was not romantic
or high-flown, there are others like her. We are always well pleased,
and it is perhaps lucky for the majority of novelists that it should be
so, to read about people who do not in the least resemble us; still,
anyone who describes us as we are, 'strikes the electric chain wherewith
we are darkly bound,' and makes humanity quiver right down the
centuries. Pamela was a vulgar little thing, and saucy withal: her
notions of honour and dishonour were neither lofty nor profound; but she
had them and stuck to them in perilous paths along which the defenceless
of her sex are too often called to tread; and when finally her virtue is
rewarded, and she is driven off in a chariot drawn by the four
long-tailed mares upon whom she had been cruelly twitted for setting her
affections, I for one am quite prepared to join with the rustics round
the blacksmith's anvil in loud cheers for Pamela.
Ten years after _Pamela_ came _Clarissa_. It is not too much to say that
not only Great Britain and Ireland, (the latter country not yet
deprived of her liberties by the Act of Union, and therefore in a
position to pirate popular authors, after the agreeable fashion of our
American cousins,[2]) but also France, Germany, and Holland, simply
gulped _Clarissa_ down; and she was in seven volumes. It was a kind of
gospel, something good and something new. Its author was a stout
tradesman of sixty, but he was not in the very least degree what is now
called--perhaps to the point of nausea--a Philistine. By a Philistine I
suppose we must understand someone who lives and moves and has his being
in the realm of ordinary stock conventional ideas--a man who is as blind
to the future as he is deaf to the past. For example, that Dr. Drummond,
Archbishop of York, who just about this very time told the Rev. Mr.
Conyers, one of his clergy, 'that he would be better employed preaching
the morality of Socrates than canting about the New Birth,' was a
Philistine--I doubt not a very amiable one, but, being a Philistine, he
had no chance of recognising what this nascent methodism was, and as
for dreaming what it might become--had he been capable of this--he would
not have been a Philistine or, probably, Archbishop of York!
Richardson on the other hand had his quiver full of new ideas; he had
his face to the east; he was no mere inheritor, he was a progenitor. He
is, in short, as has been often said, our Rousseau; his characters were
not stock characters. Think of Fielding's characters, his Tom Joneses
and Booths, his Amelias and Sophias. They are stage properties as old as
the Plantagenets. They are quite unidea'd, if I may use a word which, as
applied to girls, has the authority of Dr. Johnson. Fielding's men are
either good fellows with large appetites, which they gratify openly, or
sneaks with equally large appetites, which they gratify on the sly;
whilst the characters of his women are made to hinge solely upon their
willingness or unwillingness to turn a blind eye. If they are ready to
do this, they are angels; Sophia comes upon the stage in a chapter
headed 'A short hint of what we can do in the sublime, and a description
of Miss Sophia Western.' Poor neglected Amelia, whenever she is
forgiving her husband, is described as 'all one blaze of beauty;' but if
they are not willing to play this _rôle_, why then they are unsexed and
held up to the ridicule and reprobation of all good fellows and pretty
women. This sort of thing was abhorrent to the soul of the little
printer; he hated Fielding's boisterous drunkards with an entire hatred.
I believe he would have hated them almost as much if Fielding had not
been a rival of his fame. He said he was not able to read any more than
the first volume of _Amelia_, and as for _Tom Jones_, in the year 1750,
he was audacious enough to say that its run was over. Regarded merely as
writers, there can, I suppose, be no real rivalry between Fielding and
Richardson. The superiority of Fielding is apparent on every page. Wit,
good-humour, a superb lusty style which carries you along like a pair of
horses over a level moorland road, incidents, adventures, inns, and all
the glory of motion, high spirits, huge appetites, pretty women--what a
catalogue it makes of things no doubt smacking of this world and the
kingdom thereof, but none the less delightful on that account! No
wonder _Tom Jones_ is still running; where, I should like to know, is
the man bold enough to stop him. But for all this, Richardson was the
more remarkable and really interesting man of the two; and for the
reason that he was the evangel of the new sentimentalism, that word
which so puzzled one of his most charming correspondents that she wrote
to ask him what it meant--this new word sentimental which was just
beginning to be in everybody's mouth. We have heard a good deal of it
since.
_Clarissa Harlowe_ has a place not merely amongst English novels, but
amongst English women.
It was a new thing for a woman to be described as being not only in
herself but by herself commendable and altogether lovely, as triumphing
in her own right over the cruelest dishonour, and rejecting, with a
noble scorn new to literature, the hand in marriage of the villain who
had done her wrong. The book opened the flood-gates of human tears. The
waters covered the earth. We cannot weep as they used to do in 'the
brave days of old.'
Listen to the wife of a Lancashire baronet: 'I verily believe I have
shed a pint of tears, my heart is still bursting though they cease not
to flow at this moment, nor will I fear for some time.... Had you seen
me I surely should have moved your pity. When alone in agonies would I
lay down the book, take it up again, walk about the room, let fall a
flood of tears, wipe my eyes, read again, perhaps not three lines, throw
away the book, crying out: "Excuse me, good Mr. Richardson, I cannot go
on, it is your fault, you have done more than I can bear;" threw myself
upon my couch to compose; again I read, again I acted the same part,
sometimes agreeably interrupted by my dear man, who was at that time
labouring through the sixth volume with a heart capable of impressions
equal to my own--tho' the effects shown in a more justifiable
manner--which I believe may be compared to what Mr. Belfort felt when he
found the beauteous sufferer in her prison-room. Something rose in my
throat, I knew not what, which made me guggle as it were for speech.'
Nor did the men escape; a most grave and learned man writes:
'That _Pamela_ and _Clarissa_ have again "obtained the _honour_ of my
perusal," do you say, my dear Mr. Richardson. I assure you I think it an
_honour_ to be able to say I have read, and as long as I have eyes will
read, all your three most excellent _pieces_ at least once a year, that
I am capable of doing it with increasing pleasure which is perpetually
doubled by the reflection, that this good man, this charming author, is
_my friend_. I have been this day weeping over the seventh volume of
_Clarissa_ as if I had attended her dying bed and assisted at her
funeral procession. Oh may my latter end be like hers!'
It is no wonder the author of _Clarissa_ had soon a great correspondence
with ladies, married and single, young and old, virtuous and the
reverse. Had he not written seven volumes, all about a girl? had he not
made her beautiful, wise and witty and learned withal? had he not
depicted with extraordinary skill the character of the fascinating--the
hitherto resistless Lovelace, who, though accomplishing Clarissa's ruin
does thereby but establish her triumph and confound himself? It is no
doubt unhappily the case that far too many of Richardson's fair
correspondents lacked the splendid courage of their master, and to his
infinite annoyance fell in love with his arch-scamp, and prayed his
creator that Lovelace might first be led to see the error of his ways,
and then to the altar with the divine Clarissa. But the heroic printer
was adamant to their cries, and he was right if ever man was. As well
might _King Lear_ end happily as _Clarissa Harlowe_.
The seven volumes caused immense talk and discussion, and it was all
Clarissa, Clarissa, Clarissa. Sophia Western was, as we have seen, a
comely girl enough, but she was as much like Clarissa as a ship in dock
is like a ship at sea and on fire. What can you find to say of her or to
her?[3] When you have dug Tom Jones in the ribs, and called him a lucky
dog, and wished her happy, you turn away with a yawn; but Clarissa is
immense. Do you remember Thackeray's account in the _Roundabout Papers_
of Macaulay's rhapsody in the Athenæum Club? 'I spoke to him once about
_Clarissa_. "Not read _Clarissa_?" he cried out. "If you have once
thoroughly entered on _Clarissa_ and are infected by it, you can't leave
off. When I was in India I passed one hot season at the hills, and there
were the governor-general, the secretary of government, the
commander-in-chief and their wives. I had _Clarissa_ with me, and as
soon as they began to read the whole station was in a passion of
excitement about Miss Harlowe and her misfortunes, and her scoundrelly
Lovelace. The governor's wife seized the book, and the secretary waited
for it, and the chief justice could not read it for tears." He acted the
whole scene, he paced up and down the Athenæum Library. I dare say he
could have spoken pages of the book, of that book, and of what countless
piles of others.'
I must be permitted to observe that lawyers have been great
Richardsonians. The Rev. Mr. Loftus, writing to our author from Ireland,
says: 'I will tell you a story about your sweet girl Pamela. Our late
lord chancellor,[4] who was a man more remarkable for the goodness of
his heart than even for the abilities of his head, which were of the
most exalted kind, was so struck with her history that he sat up reading
it the whole night, although it was then the middle of term, and
declared to his family he could not find it in his heart to quit his
book, nor imagined it to be so late by many hours.'
The eminent Sergeant Hill, though averse to literature, used to set
Clarissa's will before his pupils, and bid them determine how many of
its uses and trusts could be supported in court. I am sorry to have to
add that in the learned sergeant's opinion, poor Clarissa, in addition
to all her other misfortunes, died intestate.
All this commotion and excitement and Clarissa-worship meant that
something was brewing, and that good Mr. Richardson, with his fat,
round face flushed with the fire, had his ladle in the pan and was busy
stirring it about. What is called the correspondence of Samuel
Richardson, which was edited by that admirable woman, Mrs. Barbauld, and
published in six volumes in 1804, is mostly made up, not of letters
from, but to, the author of _Clarissa_. All the more effectually on that
account does it let us into the manufactory of his mind. The letters a
man receives are perhaps more significant of his real character than
those he writes. People did not write to Mr. Richardson about themselves
or about their business, or about literature, unless it were to say they
did not like _Tom Jones_, or about politics, or other sports, but they
wrote to him about himself and his ideas, his good woman, Clarissa, his
good man, Sir Charles, and the true relation between the sexes. They are
immense fun, these letters, but they ought also to be taken seriously;
Mr. Richardson took them as seriously as he always took himself. There
was, perhaps, only one subject Richardson regarded as of equal
importance with himself, and that was the position of woman. This is
why he hated Fielding, the triumphant, orthodox Fielding, to whom man
was a rollicking sinner, and woman a loving slave. He pondered on this
subject, until the anger within him imparts to his style a virility and
piquancy not usually belonging to it. The satire in the following
extract from a letter he wrote to the good lady who shed a pint of tears
over _Clarissa_, is pungent: 'Man is an animal that must bustle in the
world, go abroad, converse, fight battles, encounter other dangers of
seas, winds, and I know not what, in order to protect, provide for,
maintain in ease and plenty, women. Bravery, anger, fierceness are made
familiar to them. They buffet and are buffeted by the world; are
impatient and uncontrollable; they talk of honour, run their heads
against stone walls to make good their pretensions to it, and often
quarrel with one another and fight duels upon any other silly thing that
happens to raise their choler--their shadows if you please; while women
are meek, passive, good creatures, who used to stay at home, set their
maids at work, and formerly themselves, get their houses in order to
receive, comfort, oblige, give joy to their fierce, fighting, bustling,
active protectors, providers, maintainers, divert him with pretty pug's
tricks, tell him soft tales of love, and of who and who's together, what
has been done in his absence, bring to him little master, so like his
own dear papa, and little pretty miss, a soft, sweet, smiling soul, with
her sampler in her hand, so like what her meek mamma was at her years.'
You cannot, indeed, lay hold of many specific things which Richardson
advocated. Ignorant of the classics himself, he was by no means disposed
to advocate the teaching of them to women. Clarissa, indeed, knew Latin,
but Harriet Byron did not. The second Mrs. Richardson was just a little
bit too much for her husband, and he was consequently led to hold what
may be called 'high doctrine' as to the duty of wives obeying their
husbands. Though never was man less of a revolutionary than Richardson,
still he was on the side of the revolution. He had an ethical system
different from that which stood beside him. This did not escape the
notice of a keen-witted contemporary, the great Smollett, whose own
Roderick Randoms and Peregrine Pickles are such unmitigated,
high-coloured ruffians as to induce Sir Walter Scott to call him the
Rubens of fiction, but who none the less had an eye for the future; he
in his history speaks in terms of high admiration of the sublime code of
ethics of the author of _Clarissa_. Richardson was fierce against
duelling, and also against corporal punishment. He had the courage to
deplore the evil effects produced by the works of Homer, 'that fierce,
fighting _Iliad_,' as he called it. We may be sure his children were
never allowed to play with tin soldiers, at least, not with their
father's consent.
Having written _Clarissa_ it became inevitable that Richardson should
proceed further and write _Grandison_. In reading his correspondence we
hail Sir Charles afar off. Richardson had deeply grieved to see how many
of his ladies had fallen in love with the scoundrelly Lovelace. It
wounded him to the quick, for he could not but feel that he was not in
the least like Lovelace himself. He turns almost savagely upon some of
his fair correspondents and upbraids them, telling them indeed plainly
that he feared they were no better than they should be. They had but one
answer: 'Ah, dear Mr. Richardson, in _Clarissa_ you have shown us the
good woman we all would be. Now show us the good man we all should
love.' And he set about doing so seriously, aye and humbly, too. He
writes with a sad sincerity a hundred years cannot hide:
'How shall a man obscurely situated, never in his life delighting in
public entertainments, nor in his youth able to frequent them from
narrowness of fortune; one of the most attentive of men to the calls of
business--his situation for many years producing little but prospects of
a numerous family--a business that seldom called him abroad when he
might in the course of it see and know a little of the world, as some
employments give opportunities to do--naturally shy and sheepish, and
wanting more encouragement by smiles to draw him out than anybody
thought it worth their while to give him--and blest (in this he will
say blest) with a mind that set him above dependence, and making an
absolute reliance on Providence and his own endeavours--how I say, shall
such a man pretend to describe and enter into characters in upper life?'
However, he set about it, and in 1754 produced _Sir Charles Grandison_,
or as he had originally intended to call it, the _Good Man_, in six
octavo volumes.
I am not going to say he entirely succeeded with his good man, who I
know has been called an odious prig. I have read _Sir Charles Grandison_
once--I cannot promise ever to read it again, and yet who knows what may
happen? Sir Walter Scott, in his delightful, good-humoured fashion,
tells a tale of a venerable lady of his acquaintance, who, when she
became subject to drowsy fits, chose to have _Sir Charles_ read to her
as she sat in her elbow chair in preference to any other work; because,
said she, 'should I drop asleep in the course of the reading, I am sure
when I awake I shall have lost none of the story, but shall find the
party where I left them, conversing in the cedar-parlour.'
After _Sir Charles_, Richardson wrote no more. Indeed, there was nothing
to write about, unless he had taken the advice of a morose clerical
friend who wrote to him: 'I hope you intend to give us a bad
woman--expensive, imperious, lewd, and, at last, a drammer. This is a
fruitful and necessary subject which will strike and entertain to a
miracle.' Mr. Richardson replied jocosely that if the Rev. Mr. Skelton
would only sketch the she-devil for him, he would find room for her
somewhere, and the subject dropped. The wife of the celebrated German
poet, Klopstock, wrote to him in her broken English: 'Having finished
your _Clarissa_ (oh, the heavenly book!) I would prayed you to write the
history of a manly _Clarissa_, but I had not courage enough at that
time. I should have it no more to-day, as this is only my first English
letter; but I am now Klopstock's wife, and then I was only the single
young girl. You have since written the manly _Clarissa_ without my
prayer. Oh, you have done it to the great joy and thanks of all your
happy readers! Now you can write no more. You must write the history of
an Angel.'
The poor lady died the following year under melancholy circumstances,
but her prophecy proved true. Richardson wrote no more. He died in 1761,
seventy-two years of age. His will, after directing numerous
mourning-rings to be given to certain friends, proceeds as follows: 'Had
I given rings to all the ladies who have honoured me with their
correspondence, and whom I sincerely venerate for their amiable
qualities, it would even in this last solemn act appear like
ostentation.'
It now only remains to say two or three words about Richardson's great
popularity abroad. Until quite recently, he and Sterne may be said to
have been the only popular English authors abroad; perhaps Goldsmith
should be added to the party. Foreigners never felt any difficulty about
him or about the tradition he violated. The celebrated author of _Manon
Lescaut_ translated _Clarissa_ into French, though it was subsequently
better done by a less famous hand. She was also turned into German and
Dutch. Foreigners, of course, could not be expected to appreciate the
hopeless absurdity of a man who lived at Parson's Green attempting to
describe the upper classes. Horace Walpole when in Paris did his best to
make this plain, but he failed. Say what he might, _Clarissa_ lay on the
toilet tables of the French Princesses, and everybody was raving about
her. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu was also very angry. 'Richardson,' says
she, writing to the Countess of Bute, 'has no idea of the manners of
high life. Such liberties as pass between Mr. Lovelace and his cousins
are not to be excused by the relation. I should have been much
astonished if Lord Denbigh should have offered to kiss me; and, I dare
swear Lord Trentham never attempted such impertinence to you.' To the
English reader these criticisms of Lady Mary's have immense value; but
the French sentimentalist, with his continental insolence, did not care
a sou what impertinences Lord Denbigh and Lord Trentham might or might
not have attempted towards their female cousins. He simply read his
_Clarissa_ and lifted up his voice and wept: and so, to do her justice,
did Lady Mary herself. 'This Richardson,' she writes, 'is a strange
fellow. I heartily despise him and eagerly read him, nay, sob over his
works in a most scandalous manner.'
The effect produced upon Rousseau by Richardson is historical. Without
_Clarissa_ there would have been no _Nouvelle Heloïse_, and had there
been no _Nouvelle Heloïse_ everyone of us would have been somewhat
different from what we are.
The elaborate eulogy of Diderot is well-known, and though extravagant in
parts is full of true criticism. One sentence only I will quote: 'I have
observed,' he says, 'that in a company where the works of Richardson
were reading either privately or aloud the conversation at once became
more interesting and animating.' This, surely, is a legitimate test to
which to submit a novel. You sometimes hear people say of a book, 'Oh,
it is not worth talking about! I was only reading it.'
The great Napoleon was a true Richardsonian. Only once did he ever seem
to take any interest in an Englishman. It was whilst he was first
consul and when he was introduced to an officer called Lovelace, 'Why,'
he exclaimed with emotion, 'that is the name of the man in _Clarissa_!'
When our own great critic, Hazlitt, heard of this incident he fell in
love with Napoleon on the spot, and subsequently wrote his life in
numerous volumes.
In Germany _Clarissa_ had a great sale, and those of you who are
acquainted with German sentiment, will have no difficulty in tracing a
good deal of it to its original fountain in Fleet Street.
As a man, Richardson had perhaps only two faults. He was very nervous on
the subject of his health and he was very vain. His first fault gave a
great deal of trouble to his wives and families, his second afforded
nobody anything but pleasure. The vanity of a distinguished man, if at
the same time he happens to be a good man, is a quality so agreeable in
its manifestations that to look for it and not to find it would be to
miss a pleasure. When the French poet Boileau was invited to Versailles
by Louis Quatorze, he was much annoyed by the vanity of that monarch.
'Whenever,' said he, 'the conversation left the king's doings'--and, let
us guess, just approached the poet's verses--'his majesty always had a
yawning-fit, or suggested a walk on the terrace.' The fact is, it is not
vanity, but contending vanities, that give pain.
As for those of you who cannot read Richardson's nineteen volumes, it
can only be said you are a large and intelligent class of persons. You
number amongst you poets like Byron--for I presume Byron is still among
the poets--and philosophers like d'Alembert, who, when asked whether
Richardson was not right in imitating Nature, replied, 'Yes, but not to
the point of ennui.' We must not bear you malice or blacken your private
characters. On the other hand, you must not sneer at us or call us
milksops. There is nothing to be proud of, I can assure you, in not
being able to read _Clarissa Harlowe_, or to appreciate the genius which
created Lovelace.
A French critic, M. Scherer, has had the audacity to doubt whether
_Tristram Shandy_ is much read in England, and it is commonly asserted
in France that _Clarissa_ is too good for us. Tristram may be left to
his sworn admirers who could at any moment take the field with all the
pomp and circumstance of war, but with Clarissa it is different. Her
bodyguard is small and often in need of recruits. This indeed is my
apology for the trouble I have put you to.
EDWARD GIBBON
A LECTURE
'It was at Rome, on the 15th of October, 1764, as I sat musing amidst
the ruins of the Capitol, while the bare-footed fryars were singing
vespers in the Temple of Jupiter that the idea of writing the Decline
and Fall of the City first started to my mind.
'It was on the day, or rather night, of the 27th of June, 1787, between
the hours of eleven and twelve, that I wrote the last lines of the last
page, in a summer-house in my garden. After laying down my pen I took
several turns in a _berceau_, or covered walk of acacias, which commands
a prospect of the country, the lake and the mountains. The air was
temperate, the sky was serene, the silver orb of the moon was reflected
from the waters and all nature was silent. I will not dissemble the
first emotions of joy on recovery of my freedom and perhaps of the
establishment of my fame. But my pride was soon humbled and a sober
melancholy was spread over my mind by the idea that I had taken an
everlasting leave of an old and agreeable companion, and that whatever
might be the future date of my history, the life of the historian must
be short and precarious.'
Between these two passages lies the romance of Gibbon's life--a romance
which must be looked for, not, indeed, in the volumes, whether the
original quartos or the subsequent octavos, of his history--but in the
elements which went to make that history what it is: the noble
conception, the shaping intellect, the mastered learning, the stately
diction and the daily toil.
Mr. Bagehot has declared that the way to reverence Gibbon is not to read
him at all, but to look at him, from outside, in the bookcase, and think
how much there is within; what a course of events, what a muster-roll of
names, what a steady solemn sound. All Mr. Bagehot's jokes have a kernel
inside them. The supreme merit of Gibbon's history is not to be found in
deep thoughts, or in wide views, or in profound knowledge of human
nature, or prophetic vision. Seldom was there an historian less
well-equipped with these fine things than he. Its glory is its
architecture, its structure, its organism. There it is, it is worth
looking at, for it is invulnerable, indispensable, immortal. The
metaphors which have been showered upon it, prove how fond people have
been of looking at it from outside. It has been called a Bridge, less
obviously an Aqueduct, more prosaically a Road. We applaud the design
and marvel at the execution.
There is something mournful in this chorus of approbation in which it is
not difficult to detect the notes of surprise. It tells a tale of
infirmity both of life and purpose. A complete thing staggers us. We are
accustomed to failure.
'What act proves all its thought had been?'
The will is weak, opportunities are barren, temper uncertain and life
short.
'I thought all labour, yet no less,
Bear up beneath their unsuccess;
Look at the end of work: contrast
The petty done--the undone vast.'
It is Gibbon's triumph that he made his thoughts acts. He is not exactly
what you call a pious writer, but he is provocative of at least one
pious feeling. A sabbatical calm results from the contemplation of his
labours. Succeeding scholars have read his history and pronounced it
good. It is likewise finished. Hence this feeling of surprise.