conceived as Clarissa herself, and the other characters should be
equally worthy of their position. Here there are certain drawbacks. The
plot, it might easily be shown, is utterly incredible. Richardson has
the greatest difficulty in preventing his heroine from escaping, and at
times we must not look too closely for fear of detecting the flimsy
nature of her imaginary chains. There is, indeed, no reason for looking
closely; so long as the situations bring out the desired sentiment, we
may accept them for the nonce, without asking whether they could
possibly have occurred. It is of more importance to judge of the
consistency of the chief agent in the persecution. Lovelace is by far
the most ambitious character that Richardson has attempted. To heap
together a mass of virtues, and christen the result Clarissa Harlowe or
Charles Grandison, is comparatively easy; but it is a harder task to
compose a villain, who shall be by nature a devil, and yet capable of
imposing upon an angel. Some of Richardson's judicious critics declared
that he must have been himself a man of vicious life or he could never
have described a libertine so vividly. This is one of the smart sayings
which are obviously the proper thing to say, but which, notwithstanding,
are little better than silly. Lovelace is evidently a fancy
character--if we may use the expression. He bears not a single mark of
being painted from life, and is formed by the simple process of putting
together the most brilliant qualities which his creator could devise to
meet the occasion. We do not say that the result is psychologically
impossible; for it would be very rash to dogmatise on any such question.
No one can say what strange amalgams of virtue and vice may have
sufficient stability to hold together during a journey through this
world. But it is plain that Lovelace is not a result of observation, but
an almost fantastic mixture of qualities intended to fit him for the
difficult part he has to play. To exalt Clarissa, for example,
Lovelace's family are represented as all along earnestly desirous of a
marriage between them; and Lovelace has every conceivable motive,
including the desire to avoid hanging, for agreeing to the match. His
refusal is unintelligible, and Richardson has to supply him with a
reason so absurd and so diabolical that we cannot believe in it; it
reminds us of Hamlet's objecting to killing his uncle whilst at prayers,
on the ground that it would be sending him straight to heaven. But we
may, if we please, consider Hamlet's conceit as a mere pretext invented
to excuse his irresolution to himself; whereas Lovelace speculates so
long and so seriously upon the marriage, that we are bound to consider
his far-fetched arguments as sincere. And the supposition makes his
wickedness gratuitous, if we believe in his sanity. Lovelace suffers,
again, from the same necessity which injures Sir Charles Grandison; as
the virtuous hero has to be always expatiating on his own virtues, the
vicious hero has to boast of his own vices; it is true that this is, in
an artistic sense, the least repulsive habit of the two; for it gives
reason for hating not a hero but a villain; unluckily it is also a
reason for refusing to believe in his existence. The improbability of a
thoroughpaced scoundrel writing daily elaborate confessions of his
criminality to a friend, even when the friend condemns him, expatiating
upon atrocities that deserved hanging, and justifying his vices on
principle, is rather too glaring to be admissible. And by another odd
inconsistency, Lovelace is described as being all the time a steady
believer in eternal punishment and a rebuker of sceptics--Richardson
being apparently of opinion that infidelity would be too bad to be
introduced upon the stage, though a vice might be described in detail. A
man who has broken through all moral laws might be allowed a little
free-thinking. We might add that Lovelace, in spite of the cleverness
attributed to him, is really a most imbecile schemer. The first
principle of a villain should be to tell as few lies as will serve his
purpose; but Lovelace invents such elaborate and complicated plots,
presenting so many chances of detection and introducing so many persons
into his secrets, that it is evident that in real life he would have
broken down in a week.
Granting the high improbability of Lovelace as a real living human
being, it must be admitted that he has every merit but that of
existence. The letters which he writes are the most animated in the
voluminous correspondence. The respectable domestic old printer, who
boasted of the perfect purity of his own life, seems to have thrown
himself with special gusto into the character of a heartless reprobate.
He must have felt a certain piquancy in writing down the most atrocious
sentiments in his own respectable parlour. He would show that the quiet
humdrum old tradesman could be on paper as sprightly and audacious as
the most profligate man about town. As quiet people are apt to do, he
probably exaggerated the enormities which such men would openly avow; he
fancied that the world beyond his little circle was a wilderness of wild
beasts who could gnash their teeth and show their claws after a terribly
ostentatious fashion in their own dens; they doubtless gloated upon all
the innocent sheep whom they had devoured without any shadow of
reticence. And he had a fancy that, in their way, they were amusing
monsters too; Lovelace is a lady's villain, as Grandison is a lady's
hero; he is designed by a person inexperienced even in the observation
of vice. Indeed, he would exaggerate the charm a good deal more than the
atrocity. We must also admit that when the old printer was put upon his
mettle he could be very lively indeed. Lovelace, like everybody else, is
at times unmercifully prolix; he never leaves us to guess any detail for
ourselves; but he is spirited, eloquent, and a thoroughly fine gentleman
after the Chesterfield type. 'The devil take such fine gentlemen!'
exclaims somebody; and if he does not, I see little use (to quote the
proverbial old lady) in keeping a devil. But, as Johnson observed, a man
may be very wicked and 'very genteel.' Richardson lectures us very
seriously on the evil results which are sure to follow bad courses; but
he evidently holds in his heart that, till the Nemesis descends, the
libertines are far the most amusing part of the world. In Sir Charles
Grandison's company, we should be treated to an intolerable deal of
sermonising, with an occasional descent into the regions of humour--but
the humour is always admitted under protest. With Lovelace we might hear
some very questionable morality, but there would be a never-ceasing flow
of sparkling witticisms. The devil's advocate has the laugh distinctly
on his side, whatever may be said of the argument. Finally, we may say
that Lovelace, if too obviously constructed to work the plot, certainly
works it well. When we coolly dissect him and ask whether he could ever
have existed, we may be forced to reply in the negative. But whilst we
read we forget to criticise; he seems to possess more vitality than
most living men; he is so full of eloquent brag, and audacious
sophistry, and unblushing impudence, that he fascinates us as he is
supposed to have bewildered Clarissa. The dragon who is to devour the
maiden comes with all the flash and glitter and overpowering whirl of
wings that can be desired. He seems to be irresistible--we admire him
and hate him, and some time elapses before we begin to suspect that he
is merely a stage dragon, and not one of those who really walk this
earth.
Richardson's defects are, of course, obvious enough. He cares nothing,
for example, for what we call the beauties of nature. There is scarcely
throughout his books one description showing the power of appealing to
emotions through scenery claimed by every modern scribbler. In passing
the Alps, the only remark which one of his characters has to make,
beyond describing the horrible dangers of the Mont Cenis, is that 'every
object which here presents itself is excessively miserable.' His ideal
scenery is a 'large and convenient country-house, situated in a spacious
park,' with plenty of 'fine prospects,' which you are expected to view
from a 'neat but plain villa, built in the rustic taste.' And his views
of morality are as contracted as his taste in landscapes. The most
distinctive article of his creed is that children should have a
reverence for their parents which would be exaggerated in the slave of
an Eastern despot. We can pardon Clarissa for refusing to die happy
until her stupid and ill-tempered old father has revoked a curse which
he bestowed upon her. But we cannot quite excuse Sir Charles Grandison
for writing in this fashion to his disreputable old parent, who has
asked his consent to a certain family arrangement in which he had a
legal right to be consulted:--
'As for myself,' he says, 'I cannot have one objection; but what am I in
this case? My sister is wholly my father's; I also am his. The
consideration he gives me in this instance confounds me. It binds me to
him in double duty. It would look like taking advantage of it, were I so
much as to offer my humble opinion, unless he were pleased to command it
from me.'
Even one of Richardson's abject lady-correspondents was revolted by this
exaggerated servility. But narrow as his vision might be in some
directions, his genius is not the less real. He is a curious example of
the power which a real artistic insight may exhibit under the most
disadvantageous forms. To realise his characteristic power, we should
take one of the great French novelists whom we admire for the exquisite
proportions of his story, the unity of the interest and the skill--so
unlike our common English clumsiness--with which all details are duly
subordinated. He should have, too, the comparative weakness of French
novelists, a defective perception of character, a certain unwillingness
in art as in politics to allow individual peculiarities to interfere
with the main flow of events; for, admitting the great excellence of his
minor performers, Richardson's most elaborately designed characters are
so artificial that they derive their interest from the events in which
they play their parts, rather than give interest to them--little as he
may have intended it. Then we must cause our imaginary Frenchman to
transmigrate into the body of a small, plump, weakly printer of the
eighteenth century. We may leave him a fair share of his vivacity,
though considerably narrowing his views of life and morality; but we
must surround him with a court of silly women whose incessant flatteries
must generate in him an unnatural propensity to twaddle. It is curious,
indeed, that he describes himself as writing without a plan. He compares
himself to a poor woman lying down upon the hearth to blow up a wretched
little fire of green sticks. He had to live from hand to mouth. But the
absence of an elaborate scheme is not fatal to the unity of design. He
watches, rather than designs, the development of his plot. He has so
lively a faith in his characters that, instead of laying down their
course of action, he simply watches them to see how they will act. This
makes him deliberate a little too much; they move less by impulse than
from careful reflection upon all the circumstances. Yet it also implies
an evolution of the story from the necessity of the characters in a
given situation, and gives an air of necessary deduction to the whole
scheme of his stories. All the gossiping propensities of his nature will
grow to unhealthy luxuriance, and the fine edge of his wit will be
somewhat dulled in the process. He will thus become capable of being a
bore--a thing which is impossible to any unsophisticated Frenchman. In
this way we might obtain a literary product so anomalous in appearance
as 'Clarissa'--a story in which a most affecting situation is drawn with
extreme power, and yet so overlaid with twaddle, so unmercifully
protracted and spun out as to be almost unreadable to the present
generation. But to complete Richardson, we must inoculate him with the
propensities of another school: we must give him a liberal share of the
feminine sensitiveness and closeness of observation of which Miss Austen
is the great example. And perhaps, to fill in the last details, he
ought, in addition, to have a dash of the more unctuous and offensive
variety of the dissenting preacher--for we know not where else to look
for the astonishing and often ungrammatical fluency by which he is
possessed, and which makes his best passages remind us of the marvellous
malleability of some precious metals.
Anyone who will take the trouble to work himself fairly into the story
will end by admitting Richardson's power. Sir George Trevelyan records
and corroborates a well-known anecdote told by Thackeray from Macaulay's
lips. A whole station was infected by the historian's zeal for
'Clarissa.' It worked itself up into a 'passion of excitement,' and all
the great men and their wives fought for the book, and could hardly read
it for tears. The critic must observe that Macaulay had a singular taste
for reading even the trashiest novels; and, that probably an Indian
station at that period was in respect of such reading like a thirsty
land after a long drought. For that reason it reproduced pretty
accurately the state of society in which 'Clarissa' was first read, when
there were as yet no circulating libraries, and the winter evenings were
long in the country and the back parlours of tradesmen's shops.
Probably, a person eager to enjoy Richardson's novels now would do well
to take them as his only recreation for a long holiday in a remote place
and pray for steady rain. On those conditions, he may enter into the old
spirit. And the remark may suggest one moral, for one ought not to
conclude an article upon Richardson without a moral. It is that a
purpose may be a very dangerous thing for a novelist in so far as it
leads him to try means of persuasion not appropriate to his art; but
when, as with Richardson, it implies a keen interest in an imaginary
world, a desire to set forth in the most forcible way what are the great
springs of action of human beings by showing them under appropriate
situations, then it may be a source of such power of fascination as is
exercised by the greatest writers alone.
_POPE AS A MORALIST_
The vitality of Pope's writings, or at least of certain fragments of
them, is remarkable. Few reputations have been exposed to such perils at
the hands of open enemies or of imprudent friends. In his lifetime 'the
wasp of Twickenham' could sting through a sevenfold covering of pride or
stupidity. Lady Mary and Lord Hervey writhed and retaliated with little
more success than the poor denizens of Grub Street. But it is more
remarkable that Pope seems to be stinging well into the second century
after his death. His writings resemble those fireworks which, after they
have fallen to the ground and been apparently quenched, suddenly break
out again into sputtering explosions. The waters of a literary
revolution have passed over him without putting him out. Though much of
his poetry has ceased to interest us, so many of his brilliant couplets
still survive that probably no dead writer, with the solitary exception
of Shakespeare, is more frequently quoted at the present day. It is in
vain that he is abused, ridiculed, and often declared to be no poet at
all. The school of Wordsworth regarded him as the embodiment of the
corrupting influence in English poetry; and it is only of late that we
are beginning to aim at a more catholic spirit in literary criticism. It
is not our business simply to revile or to extol the ideals of our
ancestors, but to try to understand them. The passionate partisanship
of militant schools is pardonable in the apostles of a new creed, but
when the struggle is over we must aim at saner judgments. Byron was
impelled by motives other than the purely judicial when he declared Pope
to be the 'great moral poet of all times, of all climes, of all
feelings, and of all stages of existence;' and it is not less
characteristic that Byron was at the same time helping to dethrone the
idol before which he prostrated himself. A critic whose judgments,
however wayward, are always keen and original, has more recently spoken
of Pope in terms which recall Byron's enthusiasm. 'Pope,' says Mr.
Ruskin, in one of his Oxford lectures, 'is the most perfect
representative we have since Chaucer of the true English mind;' and he
adds that his hearers will find, as they study Pope, that he has
expressed for them, 'in the strictest language, and within the briefest
limits, every law of art, of criticism, of economy, of policy, and
finally of a benevolence, humble, rational, and resigned, contented with
its allotted share of life, and trusting the problem of its salvation to
Him in whose hand lies that of the universe.' These remarks are added by
way of illustrating the relation of art to morals, and enforcing the
great principle that a noble style can only proceed from a sincere
heart. 'You can only learn to speak as these men spake by learning what
these men were.' When we ask impartially what Pope was, we may possibly
be inclined to doubt the complete soundness of the eulogy upon his
teaching. Meanwhile, however, Byron and Mr. Ruskin agree in holding up
Pope as an instance, almost as the typical instance, of that kind of
poetry which is directly intended to enforce a lofty morality. Though we
can never take either Byron or Mr. Ruskin as the representative of sweet
reasonableness, their admiration is some proof that Pope possessed great
merits as a poetical interpreter of morals. Without venturing into the
wider ocean of poetical criticism, I will endeavour to consider what was
the specific element in Pope's poetry which explains, if it does not
justify, this enthusiastic praise.
I shall venture to assume, indeed, that Pope was a genuine poet.
Perhaps, as M. Taine thinks, it is a proof of our British grossness that
we still admire the 'Rape of the Lock,' yet I must agree with most
critics that it is admirable after its kind. Pope's sylphs, as Mr. Elwin
says, are legitimate descendants from Shakespeare's fairies. True, they
have entered into rather humiliating bondage. Shakespeare's Ariel has to
fetch the midnight dew from the still-vexed Bermoothes; he delights to
fly--
To swim, to dive into the fire, to ride
On the curl'd clouds--
whereas the 'humbler province' of Pope's Ariel is 'to tend the fair'--
To steal from rainbows, ere they drop in showers,
A brighter wash; to curl their waving hairs,
Assist their blushes, and inspire their airs.
Nay, oft in dreams invention we bestow
To change a flounce or add a furbelow.
Prospero, threatening Ariel for murmuring, says 'I will
rend an oak
And peg thee in his knotty entrails, until
Thou hast howled away twelve winters.'
The fate threatened to a disobedient sprite in the later poem is that he
shall
Be stuff'd in vials, or transfixed with pins,
Or plunged in lakes of bitter washes lie,
Or wedged whole ages in a bodkin's eye.
Pope's muse--one may use the old-fashioned word in such a
connection--had left the free forest for Will's Coffee-house, and
haunted ladies' boudoirs instead of the brakes of the enchanted island.
Her wings were clogged with 'gums and pomatums,' and her 'thin essence'
had shrunk 'like a rivel'd flower.' But a delicate fancy is a delicate
fancy still, even when employed about the paraphernalia of modern life;
a truth which Byron maintained, though not in an unimpeachable form, in
his controversy with Bowles. We sometimes talk as if our ancestors were
nothing but hoops and wigs; and forget that they had a fair allowance of
human passions. And consequently we are very apt to make a false
estimate of the precise nature of that change which fairly entitles us
to call Pope's age prosaic. In showering down our epithets of
artificial, sceptical, and utilitarian, we not seldom forget what kind
of figure we are ourselves likely to make in the eyes of our own
descendants.
Whatever be the position rightly to be assigned to Pope in the British
Walhalla, his own theory has been unmistakably expressed. He boasts
That not in fancy's maze he wandered long,
But stooped to truth and moralised his song.
His theory is compressed into one of the innumerable aphorisms which
have to some degree lost their original sharpness of definition, because
they have passed, as current coinage, through so many hands.
The proper study of mankind is man.
The saying is in form nearly identical with Goethe's remark that man is
properly the only object which interests man. The two poets, indeed,
understood the doctrine in a very different way. Pope's interpretation
strikes the present generation as narrow and mechanical. He would place
such limitations upon the sphere of human interest as to exclude,
perhaps, the greatest part of what we generally mean by poetry. How
much, for example, would have to be suppressed if we sympathised with
Pope's condemnation of the works in which
Pure description holds the place of sense.
Nearly all the works of such poets as Thomson and Cowper would
disappear, Wordsworth's pages would show fearful gaps, and Keats would
be in risk of summary suppression. We may doubt whether much would be
left of Spenser, from whom both Keats and Pope, like so many other of
our poets, drew inspiration in their youth. Fairyland would be deserted,
and the poet condemned to working upon ordinary commonplaces in broad
daylight. The principle which Pope proclaimed is susceptible of the
inverse application. Poetry, as it proves, may rightly concern itself
with inanimate nature, with pure description, or with the presentation
of lovely symbols not definitely identified with any cut-and-dried saws
of moral wisdom; because there is no part of the visible universe to
which we have not some relation, and the most ethereal dreams that ever
visited a youthful poet 'on summer eve by haunted stream' are in some
sense reflections of the passions and interests that surround our daily
life. Pope, however, as the man more fitted than any other fully to
interpret the mind of his own age, inevitably gives a different
construction to a very sound maxim. He rightly assumes that man is his
proper study; but then by man he means not the genus, but a narrow
species of the human being. 'Man' means Bolingbroke, and Walpole, and
Swift, and Curll, and Theobald; it does not mean man as the product of a
long series of generations and part of the great universe of
inextricably involved forces. He cannot understand the man of distant
ages; Homer is to him not the spontaneous voice of the heroic age, but a
clever artist whose gods and heroes are consciously-constructed parts of
an artificial 'machinery.' Nature has, for him, ceased to be inhabited
by sylphs and fairies, except to amuse the fancies of fine ladies and
gentlemen, and has not yet received a new interest from the fairy tales
of science. The old ideal of chivalry merely suggests the sneers of
Cervantes, or even the buffoonery of Butler's wit, and has not undergone
restoration at the hands of modern romanticists. Politics are not
associated in his mind with any great social upheaval, but with a series
of petty squabbles for places and pensions, in which bribery is the
great moving force. What he means by religion is generally not so much
the existence of a divine element in the world as a series of bare
metaphysical demonstrations too frigid to produce enthusiasm or to
stimulate the imagination. And, therefore, he inevitably interests
himself chiefly in what is certainly a perennial source of interest--the
passions and thoughts of the men and women immediately related to
himself; and it may be remarked, in passing, that if this narrows the
range of Pope's poetry, the error is not so vital as a modern delusion
of the opposite kind. Because poetry should not be brought into too
close a contact with the prose of daily life, we sometimes seem to think
that it must have no relation to daily life at all, and consequently
convert it into a mere luxurious dreaming, where the beautiful very
speedily degenerates into the pretty or the picturesque. Because poetry
need not be always a point-blank fire of moral platitudes, we
occasionally declare that there is no connection at all between poetry
and morality, and that all art is good which is for the moment
agreeable. Such theories must end in reducing all poetry and art to be
at best more or less elegant trifling for the amusement of the indolent;
and to those who uphold them Pope's example may be of some use. If he
went too far in the direction of identifying poetry with preaching, he
was not wrong in assuming that poetry should involve preaching, though
by an indirect method. Morality and art are not independent, though not
identical. Both, as Mr. Ruskin urges in the passage just quoted, are
only admirable when the expression of healthful and noble natures. But,
without discussing that thorny problem and certainly without committing
myself to an approval of Mr. Ruskin's solution, I am content to look at
it for the time from Pope's stand-point.
Taking Pope's view of his poetical office, there remain considerable
difficulties in estimating the value of the lesson which he taught with
so much energy. The difficulties result both from that element which was
common to his contemporaries and from that which was supplied by Pope's
own idiosyncrasies. The commonplaces in which Pope takes such infinite
delight have become very stale for us. Assuming their perfect sincerity,
we cannot understand how anybody should have thought of enforcing them
with such amazing emphasis. We constantly feel a shock like that which
surprises the reader of Young's 'Night Thoughts' when he finds it
asserted, in all the pomp of blank verse, that
Procrastination is the thief of time.
The maxim has rightly been consigned to copy-books. And a great deal of
Pope's moralising is of the same order. We do not want denunciations of
misers. Nobody at the present day keeps gold in an old stocking. When
we read the observation,
'Tis strange the miser should his cares employ
To gain the riches he can ne'er enjoy,
we can only reply that we have heard something like it before. In fact,
we cannot place ourselves in the position of men at the time when modern
society was first definitely emerging from the feudal state, and
everybody was sufficiently employed in gossiping about his neighbours.
We are perplexed by the extreme interest with which they dwell upon the
little series of obvious remarks which have been worked to death by
later writers. Pope, for example, is still wondering over the first
appearance of one of the most familiar of modern inventions. He
exclaims,
Blest paper credit! last and best supply!
That lends corruption lighter wings to fly!
He points out, with an odd superfluity of illustration, that bank-notes
enable a man to be bribed much more easily than of old. There is no
danger, he says, that a patriot will be exposed by a guinea dropping out
of his pocket at the end of an interview with the minister; and he shows
how awkward it would be if a statesman had to take his bribes in kind,
and his servants should proclaim,
Sir, Spain has sent a thousand jars of oil;
Huge bales of British cloth blockade the door;
A hundred oxen at your levees roar.