ingeniously described as "the most natural and the least probable way of
telling a story," namely, in consecutive letters. The famous heroine of
his first book is a young girl, Pamela Andrews, who describes in letters
to her father and mother what goes on in the house of a lady with whom
she had lived as maid, and who is just dead when the story opens. The
son of Pamela's late mistress, a Mr. B.--it was Fielding who wickedly
enlarged the name to Booby--becomes enamoured of her charms, and takes
every mean advantage of her defenceless position; but, fortunately,
Pamela is not more virtuous than astute, and after various agonies,
which culminate in her thinking of drowning herself in a pond, she
brings her admirer to terms, and is discovered to us at last as the
rapturous though still humble Mrs. B. There are all sorts of faults to
be found with this crude book. The hero is a rascal, who comes to a good
end, not because he has deserved to do so, but because his clever wife
has angled for him with her beauty, and has landed him at last, like an
exhausted salmon.
So long as Pamela is merely innocent and frightened, she is charming,
but her character ceases to be sympathetic as she grows conscious of the
value of her charms, and even the lax morality of the day was shocked at
the craft of her latest manoeuvres. But all the world went mad with
pleasure over the book. What we now regard as tedious and prolix was
looked upon as so much linked sweetness long drawn out. The fat printer
had invented a new thing, and inaugurated a fresh order of genius. For
the first time the public was invited, by a master of the movements of
the heart, to be present at the dissection of that fascinating organ,
and the operator could not be leisurely enough, could not be minute
enough, for his breathless and enraptured audience.
In France, for some ten years past there had been writers--Crébillon,
Marivaux, Prévost--who had essayed this delicate analysis of emotion,
but these men were the first to admit the superiority of their rough
English rival. In _Marianne_, where the heroine tells her own story,
which somewhat resembles that of Pamela, the French novelist produced a
very refined study of emotion, which will probably be one day more
largely read than it now is, and which should be looked through by every
student of the English novel. This book is prolix and languid in form,
and undoubtedly bears a curious resemblance to Richardson's novel. The
English printer, however, could not read French,[29] and there is
sufficient evidence to show that he was independent of any influences
save those which he took from real life. None the less, of course,
Marivaux, who has a name for affectation which his writings scarcely
deserve, has an interest for us as a harbinger of the modern novel.
_Pamela_ was published in two volumes in 1740. The author was
sufficiently ill-advised to add two more in 1741. In this latter
instalment Mrs. B. was represented as a dignified matron, stately and
sweet under a burden of marital infidelity. But this continuation is
hardly worthy to be counted among the works of Richardson.
The novelist showed great wisdom in not attempting to repeat too quickly
the success of his first work. He allowed the romances of Henry and
Sarah Fielding, the latter as grateful to him as the former were
repugnant, to produce their effect upon the public, and it was to an
audience more able to criticise fiction that Richardson addressed his
next budget from the mail-bag. _Clarissa; or, The History of a Young
Lady_, appeared, in instalments, but in seven volumes in all, in 1748,
with critical prefaces prefixed to the first and fourth volumes. In this
book the novelist put his original crude essay completely into the
shade, and added one to the masterpieces of the world. Released from the
accident which induced him in the pages of _Pamela_ to make his heroine
a servant-girl, in _Clarissa_, Richardson depicted a lady, yet not of so
lofty a rank as to be beyond the range of his own observation. The story
is again told entirely in letters; it is the history of the abduction
and violation of a young lady by a finished scoundrel, and ends in the
death of both characters. To enable the novelist to proceed, each
personage has a confidant. The beautiful and unhappy Clarissa Harlowe
corresponds with the vivacious Miss Howe; Robert Lovelace addresses his
friend and quondam fellow-reveller, John Belford. The character of
Clarissa is summed up in these terms by her creator: "A young Lady of
great Delicacy, Mistress of all the Accomplishments, natural and
acquired, that adorn the Sex, having the strictest Notions of filial
Duty." Her piety and purity, in fact, are the two loadstars of her moral
nature, and the pursuit of each leads her life to shipwreck.
By the universal acknowledgment of novel-readers, Clarissa is one of the
most sympathetic, as she is one of the most lifelike, of all the women
in literature, and Richardson has conducted her story with so much art
and tact that her very faults canonize her, and her weakness crowns the
triumph of her chastity. In depicting the character of Lovelace, the
novelist had a difficult task, for to have made him a mere ruffian would
have been to ruin the whole purpose of the piece. He is represented as
witty, versatile, and adroit, the very type of the unscrupulous
gentleman of fashion of the period. He expiates his crimes, at the close
of a capital duel, by the hands of Colonel Morden, a relative of the
Harlowe family, who has seen Clarissa die. The success of _Clarissa_,
both here and in France, was extraordinary. As the successive volumes
appeared, and readers were held in suspense as to the fate of the
exquisite heroine, Richardson was deluged with letters entreating him to
have mercy. The women of England knelt sobbing round his knees, and
addressed him as though he possessed the power of life and death.
The slow and cumbrous form of _Clarissa_ has tended to lessen the number
of its students, but there is probably no one who reads at all widely
who has not at one time or another come under the spell of this
extraordinary book. In France its reputation has always stood very high.
Diderot said that it placed Richardson with Homer and Euripides,
Rousseau openly imitated it, and Alfred de Musset has styled it the best
novel in the world. To those who love to see the passions taught to move
at the command of sentiment, and who are not wearied by the excessively
minute scale, as of a moral miniature-painter, on which the author
designs his work, there can scarcely be recommended a more thrilling and
affecting book. The author is entirely inexorable, and the reader must
not hope to escape until he is thoroughly purged with terror and pity.
After the further development of Fielding's genius, and after the advent
of a new luminary in Smollett, Richardson once more presented to the
public an elaborate and ceremonious novel of extreme prolixity. The
_History of Sir Charles Grandison_, in seven (and six) volumes, appeared
in the spring of 1754, after having been pirated in Dublin during the
preceding winter. Richardson's object in this new adventure was, having
already painted the portraits of two virtuous young women--the one
fortunate, the other a martyr--to produce this time a virtuous hero, and
to depict "the character and actions of a man of true honor," as before,
in a series of familiar letters. There is more movement, more plot, in
this novel than in the previous ones; the hero is now in Italy, now in
England, and there is much more attempt than either in _Pamela_ or
_Clarissa_ to give the impression of a sphere in which a man of the
world may move. Grandison is, however, a slightly ludicrous hero. His
perfections are those of a prig and an egoist, and he passes like the
sun itself over his parterre of adoring worshippers. The ladies who are
devoted to Sir Charles Grandison are, indeed, very numerous, but the
reader's interest centres in three of them--the mild and estimable
Harriet Byron, the impassioned Italian Clementina della Porretta, and
the ingenuous ward Emily Jervois. The excuse for all this is that this
paragon of manly virtue has "the most delicate of human minds," and
that women are irresistibly attracted to him by his splendid perfections
of character. But posterity has admitted that the portrait is
insufferably overdrawn, and that Grandison is absurd. The finest scenes
in this interesting but defective novel are those in which the madness
of Clementina is dwelt upon in that long-drawn patient manner of which
Richardson was a master. The book is much too long.
Happy in the fame which "the three daughters" of his pen had brought
him, and enjoying prosperous circumstances, Richardson's life closed in
a sort of perpetual tea-party, in which he, the only male, sat
surrounded by bevies of adoring ladies. He died in London, of apoplexy,
on July 4, 1761. His manners were marked by the same ceremonious
stiffness which gives his writing an air of belonging to a far earlier
period than that of Fielding or Smollett; but his gravity and
sentimental earnestness only helped to endear him to the women. Of the
style of Richardson there is little to be said; the reader never thinks
of it. If he forces himself to regard it, he sees that it is apt to be
slipshod, although so trim and systematic. Richardson was a man of
unquestionable genius, dowered with extraordinary insight into female
character, and possessing the power to express it; but he had little
humor, no rapidity of mind, and his speech was so ductile and so
elaborate that he can scarcely compete with later and sharper talents.
FOOTNOTES:
[29] It is, however, now certain that there existed an English version
of _Marianne_.
FREDERICK THE GREAT SEIZES SILESIA
MARIA THERESA APPEALS TO THE HUNGARIANS
A.D. 1740
WILLIAM SMYTH
Maria Theresa, the "Empress Queen," stands out among the most heroic
and romantic figures of the eighteenth century. She was the daughter
of Charles VI, last of the real Hapsburg emperors of Germany and
rulers of Austria. With him ended the male line of the mighty
family, but the descendants of his daughter and her husband, the
Duke of Lorraine, were known as the house of Hapsburg-Lorraine, and
gradually the second name disappeared from common usage, leaving
only the more famous half.
Having no male heirs Charles was determined that his daughter,
Maria, should succeed to all the vast Hapsburg estates, and he
entered into treaties upon the subject with the various chief powers
of Europe, yielding them substantial advantages in return for their
gossamer promise to support her in her inheritance. The moment
Charles died (1740) these treaties were thrown to the winds. Each
state planned to snatch what territory it could from the young and
apparently helpless Maria Theresa.
Frederick II of Prussia, afterward called the Great, was the first
of the robbers to move. He also had just come into power in the new
kingdom, which his father, Frederick I, had created. Part of his
inheritance was a splendid standing army, the best-drilled and most
powerful in Europe. With this he promptly overran Silesia, a
borderland composed of many little duchies and accounted one of the
most valuable provinces of the Austrian crown. Frederick openly and
cynically announced the maxim which seems in secret to have guided
many monarchs, that personal honesty had no part in the business of
being a king. His rash and conscienceless seizure of Silesia was
successful, but it proved the prelude to a quarter-century of
repeated wars which involved almost the whole of Europe and brought
his own country to the verge of ruin.
In 1740 Maria Theresa ascends the throne of her ancestors--possessed, it
seems, of a commanding figure, great beauty, animation and sweetness of
countenance, a pleasing tone of voice, fascinating manners, and uniting
feminine grace with a strength of understanding and an intrepidity above
her sex. But her treasury contained only one hundred thousand florins,
and these claimed by the Empress Dowager; her army, exclusive of the
troops in Italy and the Low Countries, did not amount to thirty thousand
effective men; a scarcity of provisions and great discontent existed in
the capital; rumors were circulated that the government was dissolved,
that the Elector of Brunswick was hourly expected to take possession of
the Austrian territories; apprehensions were entertained of the distant
provinces--that the Hungarians, supported by the Turks, might revive the
elective monarchy; different claimants on the Austrian succession were
expected to arise; besides, the Elector of Bavaria, the Elector of
Cologne, and the Elector Palatine were evidently hostile; the ministers
themselves, while the Queen was herself without experience or knowledge
of business, were timorous, desponding, irresolute, or worn out with
age. To these ministers, says Mr. Robinson, in his despatches to the
English court, "the Turks seemed already in Hungary, the Hungarians
themselves in arms, the Saxons in Bohemia, the Bavarians at the gates of
Vienna, and France the soul of the whole." The Elector of Bavaria,
indeed, did not conceal his claims to the kingdom of Bohemia and the
Austrian dominions; and, finally, while the Queen had scarcely taken
possession of her throne, a new claimant appeared in the person of
Frederick of Prussia, who acted with "such consummate address and
secrecy"--as it is called by the historian--that is, with such
unprincipled hypocrisy and cunning, that his designs were scarcely even
suspected when his troops entered the Austrian dominions.
Silesia was the province which he resolved, in the present helpless
situation of the young Queen, to wrest from the house of Austria. He
revived some antiquated claims on parts of that duchy. The ancestors of
Maria Theresa had not behaved handsomely to the ancestors of Frederick,
and the young Queen was now to become a lesson to all princes and states
of the real wisdom that always belongs to the honorable and scrupulous
performance of all public engagements. Little or nothing, however, can
be urged in favor of Frederick. Prescription must be allowed at length
to justify possession in cases not very flagrant. The world cannot be
perpetually disturbed by the squabbles and collisions of its rulers; and
the justice of his cause was, indeed, as is evident from all the
circumstances of the case, and his own writings, the last and the least
of all the many futile reasons which he alleged for the invasion of the
possessions of Maria Theresa, the heiress of the Austrian dominions,
young, beautiful, and unoffending, but inexperienced and unprotected.
The common robber has sometimes the excuse of want; banditti, in a
disorderly country, may pillage, and, when resisted, murder; but the
crimes of men, even atrocious as these, are confined at least to a
contracted space, and their consequences extend not beyond a limited
period. It was not so with Frederick. The outrages of his ambition were
to be followed up by an immediate war. He could never suppose that, even
if he succeeded in getting possession of Silesia, the house of Austria
could ever forget the insult and the injury that had thus been received;
he could never suppose, though Maria Theresa might have no protection
from his cruelty and injustice, that this illustrious house would never
again have the power, in some way or other, to avenge their wrongs. One
war, therefore, even if successful, was not to be the only consequence;
succeeding wars were to be expected; long and inveterate jealousy and
hatred were to follow; and he and his subjects were, for a long
succession of years, to be put to the necessity of defending, by
unnatural exertions, what had been acquired--if acquired--by his own
unprincipled ferocity. Such were the consequences that were fairly to be
expected. What, in fact, took place?
The seizure of this province of Silesia was first supported by a war,
then by a revival of it, then by the dreadful Seven Years' War. Near a
million of men perished on the one side and on the other. Every measure
and movement of the King's administration flowed as a direct consequence
from this original aggression: his military system, the necessity of
rendering his kingdom one of the first-rate powers of Europe, and, in
short, all the long train of his faults, his tyrannies, and his crimes.
We will cast a momentary glance on the opening scenes of this contest
between the two houses.
As a preparatory step to his invasion of Silesia, the King sent a
message to the Austrian court. "I am come," said the Prussian envoy to
the husband of Maria Theresa, "with safety for the house of Austria in
one hand, and the imperial crown for your royal highness in the other.
The troops and money of my master are at the service of the Queen, and
cannot fail of being acceptable at a time when she is in want of both,
and can only depend on so considerable a prince as the King of Prussia
and his allies, the maritime powers, and Russia. As the King, my master,
from the situation of his dominions, will be exposed to great danger
from this alliance, it is hoped that, as an indemnification, the Queen
of Hungary will not offer him less than the whole duchy of Silesia."
"Nobody," he added, "is more firm in his resolutions than the King of
Prussia: he must and will enter Silesia; once entered, he must and will
proceed; and if not secured by the immediate cession of that province,
his troops and money will be offered to the electors of Saxony and
Bavaria." Such were the King's notifications to Maria Theresa. Soon
after, in a letter to the same Duke of Lorraine, the husband of Maria
Theresa, "My heart," says Frederick--for he wrote as if he conceived he
had one--"My heart," says Frederick, "has no share in the mischief which
my hand is doing to your court."
The feelings of the young Queen may be easily imagined, powerful in the
qualities of her understanding, with all the high sensibilities which
are often united to a commanding mind, and educated in all the lofty
notions which have so uniformly characterized her illustrious house. She
resisted; but her arms proved in the event unsuccessful. She was not
prepared; and even if she had been, the combination was too wide and
powerful against her. According to the plan of her enemies, more
particularly of France (her greatest enemy), Bohemia and Upper Austria,
spite of all her efforts, were likely to be assigned to the Elector of
Bavaria; Moravia and Upper Silesia to the Elector of Saxony; Lower
Silesia and the country of Glatz to the King of Prussia; Austria and
Lombardy to Spain; and some compensation to be allotted to the King of
Sardinia.
It was therefore, at last, necessary to detach the King of Prussia from
the general combination by some important sacrifice. The sufferings, the
agonies, of the poor Queen were extreme. Lord Hyndford, on the part of
England as a mediating power, prevailed on the helpless Maria Theresa to
abate something of her lofty spirit, and make some offers to the King.
"At the beginning of the war," said Frederick, "I might have been
contented with this proposal, but not now. Shall I again give the
Austrians battle, and drive them out of Silesia? You will then see that
I shall receive other proposals. At present I must have _four_ duchies,
and not _one_. Do not, my lord," said the King, "talk to me of
magnanimity; a prince ought first to consult his own interests. I am not
averse to peace; but I expect to have four duchies, and will have them."
At a subsequent period the same scene was to be renewed, and Mr.
Robinson, the English ambassador, who was very naturally captivated with
the attractions and spirit of Maria Theresa, endeavored to rouse her to
a sense of her danger. "Not only for political reasons," replied the
Queen, "but from conscience and honor, I will not consent to part with
much in Silesia. No sooner is one enemy satisfied than another starts
up; another, and then another, must be contented, and all at my
expense." "You must yield to the hard necessity of the times," said Mr.
Robinson. "What would I not give, except in Silesia?" replied the
impatient Queen. "Let him take all we have in Gelderland; and if he is
not to be gained by that sacrifice, others may. Let the King, your
master, only speak to the Elector of Bavaria! Oh, the King, your
master--let him only march! let him march only!"
But England could not be prevailed upon to declare war. The dangers of
Maria Theresa became more and more imminent, and a consent to further
offers was extorted from her. "I am afraid," said Mr. Robinson, "some of
these proposals will be rejected by the King." "I wish he may reject
them," said the Queen. "Save Limburg, if possible, were it only for the
quiet of my conscience. God knows how I shall answer for the cession,
having sworn to the states of Brabant never to alienate any part of
their country."
Mr. Robinson, who was an enthusiast in the cause of the Queen, is
understood to have made some idle experiment of his own eloquence on the
King of Prussia; to have pleaded her cause in their next interview; to
have spoken, not as if he was addressing a cold-hearted, bad man, but as
if speaking in the House of Commons of his own country, in the assembly
of a free people, with generosity in their feelings and uprightness and
honor in their hearts. The King, in all the malignant security of
triumphant power, in all the composed consciousness of great
intellectual talents, affected to return him eloquence for eloquence;
said his ancestors would rise out of their tombs to reproach him if he
abandoned the rights that had been transmitted to him; that he could not
live with reputation if he lightly abandoned an enterprise which had
been the first act of his reign; that he would sooner be crushed with
his whole army, etc. And then, descending from his oratorical elevation,
declared that he would _now_ "not only have the four duchies, but all
Lower Silesia, with the town of Breslau. If the Queen does not satisfy
me in six weeks, I will have four duchies more. They who want peace will
give me what I want. I am sick of ultimatums; I will hear no more of
them. My part is taken; I again repeat my demand of all Lower Silesia.
This is my final answer, and I will give no other." He then abruptly
broke off the conference, and left Mr. Robinson to his own reflections.
The situation of the young Queen now became truly deplorable. The King
of Prussia was making himself the entire master of Silesia; two French
armies poured over the countries of Germany; the Elector of Bavaria,
joined by one of them, had pushed a body of troops within eight miles of
Vienna, and the capital had been summoned to surrender. The King of
Sardinia threatened hostilities; so did the Spanish army. The Electors
of Saxony, Cologne, and Palatine joined the grand confederacy; and
abandoned by all her allies but Great Britain, without treasure, without
an army, and without ministers, she appealed, or rather fled for refuge
and compassion, to her subjects in Hungary.
These subjects she had at her accession conciliated by taking the oath
which had been abolished by her ancestor Leopold, the confirmation of
their just rights, privileges, and approved customs. She had taken this
oath at her accession, and she was now to reap the benefit of that sense
of justice and real magnanimity which she had displayed, and which, it
may fairly be pronounced, sovereigns and governments will always find it
their interest, as well as their duty, to display, while the human heart
is constituted, as it has always been, proud and eager to acknowledge
with gratitude and affection the slightest condescensions of kings and
princes, the slightest marks of attention and benevolence in those who
are illustrious by their birth or elevated by their situation.
When Maria Theresa had first proposed to repair to these subjects, a
suitor for their protection, the gray-headed politicians of her court
had, it seems, assured her that she could not possibly succeed; that the
Hungarians, when the Pragmatic Sanction had been proposed to them by her
father, had declared that they were accustomed to be governed only by
men; and that they would seize the opportunity of withdrawing from her
rule, and from their allegiance to the house of Austria.