women gives a remarkable power to his works. Nothing is more rare than
to find a great novelist who can satisfactorily describe the opposite
sex. Women's heroes are women in disguise, or mere lay-figures, walking
gentlemen who parade tolerably through their parts, but have no real
vitality. On the other hand, the heroines of male writers are for the
most part unnaturally strained or quite colourless; male hands are too
heavy for the delicate work required. Milton could draw a majestic
Satan, but his Eve is no better than a good-managing housekeeper who
knows her place. It is, therefore, remarkable that Richardson's greatest
triumph should be in describing a woman, and that most of his feminine
characters are more life-like and more delicately discriminated than his
men. Unluckily, his conspicuous faults result from the same cause. His
moral prosings savour of the endless gossip over a dish of chocolate in
which his heroines delight; we can imagine the applause with which his
admiring feminine circle would receive his demonstration of the fact,
that adversity is harder to bear than prosperity, or the sentiment that
'a man of principle, whose love is founded in reason, and whose object
is mind rather than person, must make a worthy woman happy.' These are
admirable sentiments, but they savour of the serious tea-party. If 'Tom
Jones' has about it an occasional suspicion of beer and pipes at the
bar, 'Sir Charles Grandison' recalls an indefinite consumption of tea
and small-talk. In short, the feminine part of Richardson's character
has a little too much affinity to Mrs. Gamp--not that he would ever be
guilty of putting gin in his cup, but that he would have the same
capacity for spinning out indefinite twaddle of a superior kind. And, of
course, he fell into the faults which beset the members of mutual
admiration societies in general, but especially those which consist
chiefly of women. Men who meet for purposes of mutual flattery become
unnaturally solemn and priggish; they never free themselves from the
suspicion that the older members of the coterie may be laughing at them
behind their backs. But the flattery of women is so much more delicate,
and so much more sincere, that it is far more dangerous. It is a
poultice which in time softens the hardest outside. Richardson yielded
as entirely as any curate exposed to a shower of slippers. He evidently
wrote under the impression that he was not merely an imaginative writer
of the highest order, but also a great moralist. He was reforming the
world, putting down vice, sending duelling out of fashion, and
inculcating the lessons of the pulpit in a far more attractive form. A
modern novelist is half-ashamed of his art; he disclaims earnestly any
serious purpose; his highest aim is to amuse his readers, and his
greatest boast that he amuses them by honourable or at least by harmless
means. There are, indeed, novelists who write to inculcate High-Church
or Low-Church principles, or to prove that society at large is out of
joint; but a direct intention to prove that men ought not to steal or
get drunk, or commit any other atrocities, is generally considered to be
beside the novelist's function, and its introduction to be a fault of
art. Indeed, there is much to be said against it. In our youth we used
to read a poem about a cruel little boy who went out to fish and was
punished by somehow becoming suspended by his chin from a hook in the
larder. It never produced much effect upon us, because we felt that the
accident was, to say the least, rather exceptional; at most, we fished
on, and were careful about the larder. The same principle applies to the
poetic justice distributed by most novelists. When Richardson kills off
his villains by violent deaths, we know too well that many villains live
to a good old age, leave handsome fortunes, and are buried under the
handsomest of tombstones, with the most elegant of epitaphs. This very
rough device for inculcating morality is of course ineffectual, and
produces some artistic blemishes. The direct exhortations to his
readers to be good are still more annoying; no human being can long
endure a mixture of preaching and story-telling. For Heaven's sake, we
exclaim, tell us what happens to Clarissa, and don't stop to prove that
honesty is the best policy! In a wider sense, however, the seriousness
of Richardson's purpose is of high value. He is so keenly in earnest, so
profoundly interested about his characters, so determined to make us
enter into their motives, that we cannot help being carried away; if he
never spares an opportunity of giving us a lecture, at least his zeal in
setting forth an example never flags for an instant. The effort to give
us an ideally perfect character seems to stimulate his imagination, and
leads to a certain intensity of realisation which we are apt to miss in
the purposeless school of novelists. He is always, as it were, writing
at high-pressure and under a sense of responsibility.
The method which he adopts lends itself very conveniently to heighten
this effect. Richardson's feminine delight in letter-writing was, as we
have seen, the immediate cause of his plunge into authorship.
Richardson's novels, indeed, are not so much novels put for convenience
under the form of letters, as letters expanded till they become novels.
A genuine novelist who should put his work into the unnatural shape of a
correspondence would probably find it a very awkward expedient; but
Richardson gradually worked up to the novel from the conception of a
collection of letters; and his method, therefore, came spontaneously to
him. He started from the plan of writing letters to illustrate a certain
point of morality, and to make them more effective attributed them to a
fictitious character. The result was the gigantic tract called
'Pamela'--distinctly the worst of his works--of which it is enough to
say at present that it succeeds neither in being moral nor in amusing.
It shows, however, a truly amazing fertility in a specially feminine
art. We have all suffered from the propensity of some female minds (the
causes of which we will not attempt to analyse) for pouring forth
indefinite floods of correspondence. We know the heartless fashion in
which some ladies, even in these days of penny postage, will fill a
sheet of note-paper and proceed to cross their writing till the page
becomes a chequer-work of unintelligible hieroglyphics. But we may feel
gratitude in looking back to the days when time hung heavier, and
letter-writing was a more serious business. The letters of those times
may recall the fearful and wonderful labours of tapestry in which ladies
employed their needles by way of killing time. The monuments of both
kinds are a fearful indication of the _ennui_ from which the
perpetrators must have suffered. We pity those who endured the toil as
we pity the prisoners whose patient ingenuity has carved a passage
through a stone wall with a rusty nail. Richardson's heroines, and his
heroes too, for that matter, would have been portents at any time. We
will take an example at hazard. Miss Byron, on March 22, writes a letter
of fourteen pages (in the old collective edition). The same day she
follows it up by two of six and of twelve pages respectively. On the
23rd she leads off with a letter of eighteen pages, and another of ten.
On the 24th she gives us two, filling together thirty pages, at the end
of which she remarks that she is _forced_ to lay down her pen, and then
adds a postscript of six more; on the 25th she confines herself to two
pages; but after a Sunday's rest she makes another start of equal
vigour. In three days, therefore, she covers ninety-six pages. Two of
the pages are about equal to three in this volume. Consequently, in
three days' correspondence, referring to the events of the day, she
would fill something like a hundred and forty-four of these pages--a
task the magnitude of which may be appreciated by anyone who will try
the experiment. We should say that she must have written for nearly
eight hours a day, and are not surprised at her remark, that she has on
one occasion only managed two hours' sleep.
It would, of course, be the height of pedantry to dwell upon this, as
though a fictitious personage were to be in all respects bounded by the
narrow limits of human capacity. It is not the object of a really good
novelist, nor does it come within the legitimate means of high art in
any department, to produce an actual illusion. Showmen in some foreign
palaces call upon us to admire paintings which we cannot distinguish
from bas-reliefs; the deception is, of course, a mere trick, and the
paintings are simply childish. On the stage we do not require to believe
that the scenery is really what it imitates, and the attempt to
introduce scraps of real life is a clear proof of a low artistic aim.
Similarly a novelist is not only justified in writing so as to prove
that his work is fictitious, but he almost necessarily hampers himself,
to the prejudice of his work, if he imposes upon himself the condition
that his book shall be capable of being mistaken for a genuine
narrative. Every good novelist lets us into secrets about the private
thoughts of his characters which it would be impossible to obtain in
real life. We do not, therefore, blame Richardson because his characters
have a power of writing which no mortal could ever attain. His fault,
indeed, is exactly the contrary. He very erroneously fancies that he is
bound to convince us of the possibility of all his machinery, and often
produces the very shock to our belief which he seeks to avoid. He is
constantly trying to account by elaborate devices for the fertile
correspondence of his characters, when it is perfectly plain that they
are simply writing a novel. We should never have asked a question as to
the authenticity of the letters, if he did not force the question upon
us; and no art can induce us for a moment to accept the proffered
illusion. For example, Miss Byron gives us a long account of
conversations between persons whom she did not know, which took place
ten years before. It is much better that the impossibility should be
frankly accepted, on the clear ground that authors of novels, and
consequently their creatures, have the prerogative of omniscience. At
least, the slightest account of the way in which she came by the
knowledge would be enough to satisfy us for all purposes of fiction.
Richardson is not content with this, and elaborately demonstrates that
she might have known a number of minute details which it is perfectly
plain that a real Miss Byron could never have known, and thus dashes
into our faces an improbability which we should have been quite content
to pass unnoticed.
The method, however, of telling the story by the correspondence of the
actors produces more important effects. The hundred and forty-four pages
in question are all devoted to the proceedings of three days. They are
filled, for the most part, with interminable conversations. The story
advances by a very few steps; but we know all that every one of the
persons concerned has to say about the matter. We discover what was Sir
Charles Grandison's relation at a particular time to a certain Italian
lady, Clementina. We are told exactly what view he took of his own
position; what view Clementina took of it; what Miss Byron had to say to
Sir Charles on the subject, and what advice her relations bestowed upon
Miss Byron. Then we have all the sentiments of Sir Charles Grandison's
sisters, and of his brothers-in-law, and of his reverend old tutor; and
the sentiments of all the Lady Clementina's family, and the incidental
remarks of a number of subordinate actors. In short, we see the
characters all round in all their relations to each other, in every
possible variation and permutation; we are present at all the
discussions which take place before every step, and watch the gradual
variation of all the phases of the positions. We get the same sort of
elaborate familiarity with every aspect of affairs that we should
receive from reading a blue-book full of some prolix diplomatic
correspondence; indeed, Sir Charles Grandison closely resembles such a
blue-book, for the plot is carried on mainly by elaborate negotiations
between three different families, with proposals, and counter-proposals,
and amended proposals, and a final settlement of the very complicated
business by a deliberate signing of two different sets of articles. One
of them, we need hardly say, is a marriage settlement; the other is a
definite treaty between the lady who is not married and her family, the
discussion of which occupies many pages. The extent to which we are
drawn into the minutest details may be inferred from the fact that
nearly a volume is given to marrying Sir Charles Grandison to Miss
Byron, after all difficulties have been surmounted. We have at full
length all the discussions by which the day is fixed, and all the
remarks of the unfortunate lovers of both parties, and all the
criticisms of both families, and finally an elaborate account of the
ceremony, with the names of the persons who went in the separate
coaches, the dresses of the bride and bridesmaids, and the sums which
Sir Charles gave away to the village girls who strewed flowers on the
pathway. Surely the feminine element in Richardson's character was a
little in excess.
The result of all this is a sort of Dutch painting of extraordinary
minuteness. The art reminds us of the patient labour of a line-engraver,
who works for days at making out one little bit of minute stippling and
cross-hatching. The characters are displayed to us step by step and line
by line. We are gradually forced into familiarity with them by a process
resembling that by which we learn to know people in real life. We are
treated to few set analyses or summary descriptions, but by constantly
reading their letters and listening to their talk we gradually form an
opinion of the actors. We see them, too, all round; instead of, as is
usual in modern novels, regarding them steadily from one point of view;
we know what each person thinks of everyone else, and what everyone else
thinks of him; they are brought into a stereoscopic distinctness by
combining the different aspects of their character. Of course, a method
of this kind involves much labour on the part both of writer and reader.
It is evident that Richardson did not think of amusing a stray half-hour
in a railway-carriage or in a club smoking-room; he counted upon readers
who would apply themselves seriously to a task, in the hope of improving
their morals as much as of gaining some harmless amusement. This theory
is explicitly set forth in Warburton's preface to 'Clarissa.' But it
must also be said that, considering the cumbrous nature of the process,
the spirit with which it is applied is wonderful. Richardson's own
interest in his actors never flags. The distinct style of every
correspondent is faithfully preserved with singular vivacity. When we
have read a few letters we are never at a loss to tell, from the style
alone of any short passage, who is the imaginary author. Consequently,
readers who can bear to have their amusement diluted, who are content
with an imperceptibly slow development of plot, and can watch without
impatience the approach of a foreseen incident through a couple of
volumes, may find the prolixity less intolerable than might be expected.
If they will be content to skip when they are bored, even less patient
students may be entertained with a series of pictures of character and
manners skilfully contrasted and brilliantly coloured, though with a
limited allowance of incident. Within his own sphere, no writer exceeds
him in clearness and delicacy of conception.
In another way, the machinery of a fictitious correspondence is rather
troublesome. As the author never appears in his own person, he is often
obliged to trust his characters with trumpeting their own virtues. Sir
Charles Grandison has to tell us himself of his own virtuous deeds; how
he disarms ruffians who attack him in overwhelming numbers, and converts
evil-doers by impressive advice; and, still more awkwardly, he has to
repeat the amazing compliments which everybody is always paying him.
Richardson does his best to evade the necessity; he couples all his
virtuous heroes with friendly confidants, who relieve the virtuous
heroes of the tiresome task of self-adulation; he supplies the heroes
themselves with elaborate reasons for overcoming their modesty, and
makes them apologise profusely for the unwelcome task. Still, ingenious
as his expedients may be, and willing as we are to make allowance for
the necessities of his task, we cannot quite free ourselves from an
unpleasant suspicion as to the simplicity of his characters. 'Clarissa'
is comparatively free from this fault, though Clarissa takes a
questionable pleasure in uttering the finest sentiments and posing
herself as a model of virtue. But in 'Sir Charles Grandison' the
fulsome interchange of flattery becomes offensive even in fiction. The
virtuous characters give and receive an amount of eulogy enough to turn
the strongest stomachs. How amiable is A! says B; how virtuous is C, and
how marvellously witty is D! And then A, C, and D go through the same
performance, adding a proper compliment to B in place of the exclamation
appropriate to themselves. The only parallel in modern times is to be
found at some of the public dinners, where every man proposes his
neighbour's health with a tacit understanding that he is himself to
furnish the text for a similar oration. But then at dinners people have
the excuse of a state of modified sobriety.
This fault is, as we have said, aggravated by the epistolary method.
That method makes it necessary that each person should display his or
her own virtues, as in an exhibition of gymnastics the performers walk
round and show their muscles. But the fault lies a good deal deeper.
Every writer, consciously or unconsciously, puts himself into his
novels, and exhibits his own character even more distinctly than that of
his heroes. And Richardson, the head of a little circle of conscientious
admirers of each other's virtues, could not but reproduce on a different
scale the tone of his own society. The Grandisons, and the families of
Miss Byron and Clementina, merely repeat a practice with which he was
tolerably familiar at home; whilst his characters represent to some
extent the idealised Richardson himself;--and this leads us to the most
essential characteristic of his novels. The greatest woman in France,
according to Napoleon's brutal remark, was the woman who had the most
children. In a different sense, the saying may pass for truth. The
greatest writer is the one who has produced the largest family of
immortal children. Those of whom it can be said that they have really
added a new type to the fictitious world are indeed few in number.
Cervantes is in the front rank of all imaginative creators, because he
has given birth to Don Quixote and Sancho Panza. Richardson's literary
representatives are far indeed below these; but Richardson too may boast
that, in his narrower sphere of thought, he has invented two characters
that have still a strong vitality. They show all the weaknesses
inseparable from the age and country of their origin. They are far
inferior to the highest ideals of the great poets of the world; they are
cramped and deformed by the conventionalities of their century and the
narrow society in which they move and live. But for all that they stir
the emotions of a distant generation with power enough to show that
their author must have pierced below the surface into the deeper and
more perennial springs of human passion. These two characters are, of
course, Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison; and I may endeavour shortly
to analyse the sources of their enduring interest.
Sir Charles Grandison has passed into a proverb. When Carlyle calls
Lafayette a Grandison-Cromwell, he hits off one of those admirable
nicknames which paint a character for us at once. Sir Charles Grandison
is the model fine gentleman of the eighteenth century--the master of
correct deportment, the unimpeachable representative of the old school.
Richardson tells us with a certain _naïveté_ that he has been accused of
describing an impossible character; that Sir Charles is a man absolutely
without a fault, or at least with faults visible only on a most
microscopic observation. In fact, the only fault to which Sir Charles
himself pleads guilty, in seven volumes, is that he once rather loses
his temper. Two ruffians try to bully him in his own house, and even
draw their swords upon him. Sir Charles so far forgets himself as to
draw his own sword, disarm both of his opponents and turn them out of
doors. He cannot forgive himself, he says, that he has been 'provoked by
two such men to violate the sanctity of his own house.' His only excuse
is, 'that there were two of them; and that tho' I drew, yet I had the
command of myself so far as only to defend myself, when I might have
done with them what I pleased.' According to Richardson, this venial
offence is the worst blot on Sir Charles's character. We certainly do
not blame him for the attempt to draw an ideally perfect hero. It is a
perfectly legitimate aim in fiction, and the only question can be
whether he has succeeded: for Richardson's own commendation cannot be
taken as quite sufficient, neither can we quite accept the ingenious
artifice by which all the secondary characters perform as decoy-birds to
attract our admiration. They do their very best to induce us to join in
their hymns of praise. 'Grandison,' says a Roman Catholic bishop, 'were
he one of us, might expect canonisation.' 'How,' exclaims his uncle,
after a conversation with his paragon of a nephew, 'how shall I bear my
own littleness?' A party of reprobates about town have a long dispute
with him, endeavouring to force him into a duel. At the end of it one of
them exclaims admiringly, 'Curse me, if I believe there is such another
man in the world!' 'I never saw a hero till now,' says another. 'I had
rather have Sir C. Grandison for my friend than the greatest prince on
earth,' says a third. 'I had rather,' replies his friend, 'be Sir C.
Grandison for this one past hour than the Great Mogul all my life.' And
the general conclusion is, 'What poor toads are we!' 'This man shows
us,' as a lady declares, 'that goodness and greatness are synonymous
words;' and when his sister marries, she complains that her brother 'has
long made all other men indifferent to her. Such an infinite
difference!' In the evening, according to custom, she dances a minuet
with her bridegroom, but whispers a friend that she would have performed
better had she danced with her brother.
The structure, however, of the story itself is the best illustration of
Sir Charles's admirable qualities. The plot is very simple. He rescues
Miss Byron from an attempt at a forcible abduction. Miss Byron,
according to her friends, is the queen of her sex, and is amongst women
what Sir Charles is amongst men. Of course, they straightway fall in
love. Sir Charles, however, shows symptoms of a singular reserve, which
is at last explained by the fact that he is already half-engaged to a
noble Italian lady, Clementina. He has promised, in fact, to marry her
if certain objections on the score of his country and religion can be
surmounted. The interest lies chiefly in the varying inclinations of the
balance, at one moment favourable to Miss Byron, and at another to the
'saint and angel' Clementina. When Miss Byron thinks that Sir Charles
will be bound in honour to marry Clementina, she begins to pine; 'she
visibly falls away; and her fine complexion fades;' her friends 'watch
in silent love every turn of her mild and patient eye, every change of
her charming countenance; for they know too well to what to impute the
malady which has approached the best of hearts; they know that the cure
cannot be within the art of the physician.' When Clementina fears that
the scruples of her relatives will separate her from Sir Charles, she
takes the still more decided step of going mad; and some of her madness
would be very touching, if it were not a trifle too much after the
conventional pattern of the mad women in Sheridan's 'Critic.' Whilst
these two ladies are breaking their hearts about Sir Charles they do
justice to each other's merits. Harriet will never be happy unless she
knows that the admirable Clementina has reconciled herself to the loss
of her adored; when Clementina finds herself finally separated from her
lover, she sincerely implores Sir Charles to marry her more fortunate
rival. Never was there such a display of fine feeling and utter absence
of jealousy. Meanwhile a lovely ward of Sir Charles finds it necessary
to her peace of mind to be separated from her guardian; and another
beautiful, but rather less admirable, Italian actually follows him to
England to persuade him to accept her hand. Four ladies--all of them
patterns of physical, moral, and intellectual excellence--are breaking
their hearts; and though they are so excellent that they overcome their
natural jealousy, they can scarcely look upon any other man after having
known this model of all his sex. Indeed, every woman who approaches him
falls desperately in love with him, unless she is his sister or old
enough to be his grandmother. The plot of the novel depends upon an
attraction for the fair sex which is apparently irresistible; and the
men, if they are virtuous, rejoice to sit admiringly at his feet, and if
they are vicious retire abashed from his presence, to entreat his good
advice when they are upon their deathbeds.