MR. BELFORD, TO ROBERT LOVELACE, ESQ.
THURSDAY, AUG. 17.
I am sincerely rejoiced to hear that thou art already so much amended, as
thy servant tells me thou art. Thy letter looks as if thy morals were
mending with thy health. This was a letter I could show, as I did, to
the lady.
She is very ill: (cursed letters received from her implacable family!) so
I could not have much conversation with her, in thy favour, upon it.--But
what passed will make thee more and more adore her.
She was very attentive to me, as I read it; and, when I had done, Poor
man! said she; what a letter is this! He had timely instances that my
temper was not ungenerous, if generosity could have obliged him! But his
remorse, and that for his own sake, is all the punishment I wish him.--
Yet I must be more reserved, if you write to him every thing I say!
I extolled her unbounded goodness--how could I help it, though to her
face!
No goodness in it! she said--it was a frame of mind she had endeavoured
after for her own sake. She suffered too much in want of mercy, not to
wish it to a penitent heart. He seems to be penitent, said she; and it
is not for me to judge beyond appearances.--If he be not, he deceives
himself more than any body else.
She was so ill that this was all that passed on the occasion.
What a fine subject for tragedy, would the injuries of this lady, and her
behaviour under them, both with regard to her implacable friends, and to
her persecutor, make! With a grand objection as to the moral,
nevertheless;* for here virtue is punished! Except indeed we look
forward to the rewards of HEREAFTER, which, morally, she must be sure of,
or who can? Yet, after all, I know not, so sad a fellow art thou, and so
vile an husband mightest thou have made, whether her virtue is not
rewarded in missing thee: for things the most grievous to human nature,
when they happen, as this charming creature once observed, are often the
happiest for us in the event.
* Mr. Belford's objections, That virtue ought not to suffer in a tragedy,
is not well considered: Monimia in the Orphean, Belvidera in Venice
Preserved, Athenais in Theodosius, Cordelia in Shakespeare's King Lear,
Desdemona in Othello, Hamlet, (to name no more,) are instances that a
tragedy could hardly be justly called a tragedy, if virtue did not
temporarily suffer, and vice for a while triumph. But he recovers
himself in the same paragraph; and leads us to look up to the FUTURE for
the reward of virtue, and for the punishment of guilt: and observes not
amiss, when he says, He knows not but that the virtue of such a woman as
Clarissa is rewarded in missing such a man as Lovelace.
I have frequently thought, in my attendance on this lady, that if
Belton's admired author, Nic. Rowe, had had such a character before him,
he would have drawn another sort of penitent than he has done, or given
his play, which he calls The Fair Penitent, a fitter title. Miss Harlowe
is a penitent indeed! I think, if I am not guilty of a contradiction in
terms; a penitent without a fault; her parents' conduct towards her from
the first considered.
The whole story of the other is a pack of d----d stuff. Lothario, 'tis
true, seems such another wicked ungenerous varlet as thou knowest who:
the author knew how to draw a rake; but not to paint a penitent. Calista
is a desiring luscious wench, and her penitence is nothing else but rage,
insolence, and scorn. Her passions are all storm and tumult; nothing of
the finer passions of the sex, which, if naturally drawn, will
distinguish themselves from the masculine passions, by a softness that
will even shine through rage and despair. Her character is made up of
deceit and disguise. She has no virtue; is all pride; and her devil is
as much within her, as without her.
How then can the fall of such a one create a proper distress, when all
the circumstances of it are considered? For does she not brazen out her
crime, even after detection? Knowing her own guilt, she calls for
Altamont's vengeance on his best friend, as if he had traduced her;
yields to marry Altamont, though criminal with another; and actually beds
that whining puppy, when she had given up herself, body and soul, to
Lothario; who, nevertheless, refused to marry her.
Her penitence, when begun, she justly styles the phrensy of her soul;
and, as I said, after having, as long as she could, most audaciously
brazened out her crime, and done all the mischief she could do,
(occasioning the death of Lothario, of her father, and others,) she stabs
herself.
And can this be the act of penitence?
But, indeed, our poets hardly know how to create a distress without
horror, murder, and suicide; and must shock your soul, to bring tears
from your eyes.
Altamont indeed, who is an amorous blockhead, a credulous cuckold, and,
(though painted as a brave fellow, and a soldier,) a mere Tom. Essence,
and a quarreler with his best friend, dies like a fool, (as we are led to
suppose at the conclusion of the play,) without either sword or pop-gun,
of mere grief and nonsense for one of the vilest of her sex: but the Fair
Penitent, as she is called, perishes by her own hand; and, having no
title by her past crimes to laudable pity, forfeits all claim to true
penitence, and, in all probability, to future mercy.
But here is Miss CLARISSA HARLOWE, a virtuous, noble, wise, and pious
young lady; who being ill used by her friends, and unhappily ensnared by
a vile libertine, whom she believes to be a man of honour, is in a manner
forced to throw herself upon his protection. And he, in order to obtain
her confidence, never scruples the deepest and most solemn protestations
of honour.
After a series of plots and contrivances, all baffled by her virtue and
vigilance, he basely has recourse to the vilest of arts, and, to rob her
of her honour, is forced first to rob her of her senses.
Unable to bring her, notwithstanding, to his ungenerous views of
cohabitation, she over-awes him in the very entrance of a fresh act of
premeditated guilt, in presence of the most abandoned of women assembled
to assist his devilish purpose; triumphs over them all, by virtue only of
her innocence; and escapes from the vile hands he had put her into.
She nobly, not franticly, resents: refuses to see or to marry the wretch;
who, repenting his usage of so divine a creature, would fain move her to
forgive his baseness, and make him her husband: and this, though
persecuted by all her friends, and abandoned to the deepest distress,
being obliged, from ample fortunes, to make away with her apparel for
subsistence; surrounded also by strangers, and forced (in want of others)
to make a friend of the friend of her seducer.
Though longing for death, and making all proper preparations for it,
convinced that grief and ill usage have broken her noble heart, she
abhors the impious thought of shortening her allotted period; and, as
much a stranger to revenge as despair, is able to forgive the author of
her ruin; wishes his repentance, and that she may be the last victim to
his barbarous perfidy: and is solicitous for nothing so much in this
life, as to prevent vindictive mischief to and from the man who used her
so basely.
This is penitence! This is piety! And hence distress naturally arises,
that must worthily effect every heart.
Whatever the ill usage of this excellent woman is from her relations, she
breaks not out into excesses: she strives, on the contrary, to find
reason to justify them at her own expense; and seems more concerned for
their cruelty to her for their sakes hereafter, when she shall be no
more, than for her own: for, as to herself, she is sure, she says, God
will forgive her, though no one on earth will.
On every extraordinary provocation she has recourse to the Scriptures,
and endeavours to regulate her vehemence by sacred precedents. 'Better
people, she says, have been more afflicted than she, grievous as she
sometimes thinks her afflictions: and shall she not bear what less faulty
persons have borne?' On the very occasion I have mentioned, (some new
instances of implacableness from her friends,) the enclosed meditation
will show how mildly, and yet how forcibly, she complains. See if thou,
in the wicked levity of thy heart, canst apply it to thy cause, as thou
didst the other. If thou canst not, give way to thy conscience, and that
will make the properest application.