EIGHTEENTH CENTURY BEGINNINGS: RICHARDSON
There is some significance in the fact that Samuel Richardson,
founder of the modern novel, was so squarely a middle-class
citizen of London town. Since the form, he founded was, as we
have seen, democratic in its original motive and subsequent
development, it was fitting that the first shaper of the form
should have sympathies not too exclusively aristocratic: should
have been willing to draw upon the backstairs history of the
servants' hall for his first heroine.
To be sure, Mr. Richardson had the not uncommon failing of the
humble-born: he desired above all, and attempted too much, to
depict the manners of the great; he had naive aristocratical
leanings which account for his uncertain tread when he would
move with ease among the boudoirs of Mayfair. Nevertheless, in
the honest heart of him, as his earliest novel forever proves,
he felt for the woes of those social underlings who, as we have
long since learned, have their microcosm faithfully reflecting
the greater world they serve, and he did his best work in that
intimate portrayal of the feminine heart, which is not of a
class but typically human; he knew Clarissa Harlowe quite as
well as he did Pamela; both were of interest because they were
women. That acute contemporary, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu,
severely reprimands Richardson for his vulgar lapses in painting
polite society and the high life he so imperfectly knew; yet in
the very breath that she condemns "Clarissa Harlowe" as "most
miserable stuff," confesses that "she was such an old fool as to
weep over" it "like any milkmaid of sixteen over the ballad of
the Lady's Fall"--the handsomest kind of a compliment under the
circumstances. And with the same charming inconsistency, she
declares on the appearance of "Sir Charles Grandison" that she
heartily despises Richardson, yet eagerly reads him--"nay, sobs
over his works in the most scandalous manner."
Richardson was the son of a carpenter and himself a respected
printer, who by cannily marrying the daughter of the man to whom
he was apprenticed, and by diligence in his vocation, rose to
prosperity, so that by 1754 he became Master of The Stationers'
Company and King's Printer, doing besides an excellent printing
business.
As a boy he had relieved the dumb anguish of serving maids by
the penning of their love letters; he seemed to have a knack at
this vicarious manner of love-making and when in the full
maturity of fifty years, certain London publishers requested him
to write for them a narrative which might stand as a model
letter writer from which country readers should know the right
tone, his early practice stood him in good stead. Using the
epistolary form into which he was to throw all his fiction, he
produced "Pamela," the first novel of analysis, in contrast with
the tale of adventure, of the English tongue. It is worth
remarking that Richardson wrote this story at an age when many
novelists have well-nigh completed their work; even as Defoe
published his masterpiece, "Robinson Crusoe," at fifty-eight.
But such forms as drama and fiction are the very ones where ripe
maturity, a long and varied experience with the world and a
trained hand in the technique of the craft, go for their full
value. A study of the chronology of novel-making will show that
more acknowledged masterpieces were written after forty than
before. Beside the eighteenth century examples one places George
Eliot, who wrote no fiction until she had nearly reached the
alleged dead-line of mental activity: Browning with his greatest
poem, "The Ring and the Book," published in his forty-eighth
year; Du Maurier turning to fiction at sixty, and De Morgan
still later. Fame came to Richardson then late in life, and
never man enjoyed it more. Ladies with literary leanings (and
the kind is independent of periods) used to drop into his place
beyond Temple Bar--for he was a bookseller as well as printer,
and printed and sold his own wares--to finger his volumes and
have a chat about poor Pamela or the naughty Lovelace or
impeccable Grandison. For how, in sooth, could they keep away or
avoid talking shop when they were bursting with the books just
read?
And much, too, did Richardson enjoy the prosperity his stories,
as well as other ventures, brought him, so that he might move
out Hammersmith way where William Mortis and Cobden Sanderson
have lived in our day, and have a fine house wherein to receive
those same lady callers, who came in increasing flocks to his
impromptu court where sat the prim, cherub-faced, elderly little
printer. It is all very quaint, like a Watteau painting or a bit
of Dresden china, as we look back upon it through the time-mists
of a century and a half.
In spite of its slow movement, the monotony of the letter form
and the terribly utilitarian nature of its morals, "Pamela" has
the essentials of interesting fiction; its heroine is placed in
a plausible situation, she is herself life-like and her
struggles are narrated with a sympathetic insight into the human
heart--or better, the female heart. The gist of a plot so simple
can be stated in few words: Mr. B., the son of a lady who has
benefited Pamela Andrews, a serving maid, tries to conquer her
virtue while she resists all his attempts--including an
abduction, Richardson's favorite device--and as a reward of her
chastity, he condescends to marry her, to her very great
gratitude and delight. The English Novel started out with a
flourish of trumpets as to its moral purpose; latter-day
criticism may take sides for or against the novel-with-a-purpose,
but that Richardson justified his fiction writing upon
moral grounds and upon those alone is shown in the descriptive
title-page of the tale, too prolix to be often recalled and a
good sample in its long-windedness of the past compared with the
terse brevity of the present in this matter: "Published in order
to cultivate the principles of virtue and religion in the mind
of youth of both sexes"; the author of "Sanford and Merton" has
here his literary progenitor. The sub-title, "or Virtue
Rewarded," also indicates the homiletic nature of the book. And
since the one valid criticism against all didactic aims in
story-telling is that it is dull, Richardson, it will be
appreciated, ran a mighty risk. But this he was able to escape
because of the genuine human interest of his tales and the skill
he displayed with psychologic analysis rather than the march of
events. The close-knit, organic development of the best of our
modern fiction is lacking; leisurely and lax seems the movement.
Modern editions of "Pamela" and "Clarissa Harlowe" are in the
way of vigorous cutting for purposes of condensation. Scott
seems swift and brief when set beside Richardson Yet the slow
convolutions and involutions serve to acquaint us intimately
with the characters; dwelling with them longer, we come to know
them better.
It is a fault in the construction of the story that instead of
making Pamela's successful marriage the natural climax and close
of the work, the author effects it long before the novel is
finished and then tries to hold the interest by telling of the
honeymoon trip in Italy, her cool reception by her husband's
family, involving various subterfuges and difficulties, and the
gradual moral reform she was able to bring about in her spouse.
It must be conceded to him that some capital scenes are the
result of this post-hymeneal treatment; that, to illustrate,
where the haughty sister of Pamela's husband calls on the woman
she believes to be her husband's mistress. Yet there is an
effect of anti-climax; the main excitement--getting Pamela
honestly wedded--is over. But we must not forget the moral
purpose: Mr. B.'s spiritual regeneration has to be portrayed
before our very eyes, he must be changed from a rake into a
model husband; and with Richardson, that means plenty of elbow-room.
There is, too, something prophetic in this giving of ample
space to post-marital life; it paves the way for much latter-day
probing of the marriage misery.
The picture of Mr. B. and Pamela's attitude towards him is full
of irony for the modern reader; here is a man who does all in
his power to ruin her and, finding her adamant, at last decides
to do the next best thing--secure her by marriage. And instead
of valuing him accordingly, Pamela, with a kind of spaniel-like
fawning, accepts his august hand. It must be confessed that with
Pamela (that is, with Richardson), virtue is a market commodity
for sale to the highest bidder, and this scene of barter and
sale is an all-unconscious revelation of the low standard of sex
ethics which obtained at the time. The suggestion by Sidney
Lanier that the sub-title should be: "or Vice Rewarded," "since
the rascal Mr. B. it is who gets the prize rather than Pamela,"
has its pertinency from our later and more enlightened view. But
such was the eighteenth century. The exposure of an earlier time
is one of the benefits of literature, always a sort of ethical
barometer of an age--all the more trustworthy in reporting
spiritual ideals because it has no intention of doing so.
That Richardson succeeds in making Mr. B. tolerable, not to say
likable, is a proof of his power; that the reader really grows
fond of his heroine--especially perhaps in her daughterly
devotion to her humble family--speaks volumes for his grasp of
human nature and helps us to understand the effect of the story
upon contemporaneous readers. That effect was indeed remarkable.
Lady Mary, to quote her again, testifies that the book "met with
very extraordinary (and I think undeserved) success. It has been
translated into French and Italian; it was all the fashion at
Paris and Versailles and is still the joy of the chambermaids of
all nations." Again she writes, "it has been translated into
more languages than any modern performances I ever heard of." A
French dramatic version of it under the same title appeared
three years after the publication of the novel and a little
later Voltaire in his "Nanine" used the same motif. Lady Mary's
reference to chambermaids is significant; it points to the new
sympathy on the part of the novelist and the consequent new
audience which the modern Novel was to command; literally, all
classes and conditions of mankind were to become its patrons;
and as one result, the author, gaining his hundreds of thousands
of readers, was to free himself forever of the aristocratic
Patron, at whose door once on a time, he very humbly and
hungrily knelt for favor. To-day, the Patron is hydra-headed;
demos rules in literature as in life.
The sentimentality of this pioneer novel which now seems
old-fashioned and even absurd, expressed Queen Anne's day.
"Sensibility," as it was called, was a favorite idea in letters,
much affected, and later a kind of cult. A generation after
Pamela, in Mackenzie's "Man of Feeling," weeping is unrestrained
in English fiction; the hero of that lachrymose tale incurred
all the dangers of influenza because of his inveterate tendency
toward damp emotional effects; he was perpetually dissolving in
"showers of tears." In fact, our novelists down to the memory of
living man gave way to their feelings with far more abandon than
is true of the present repressive period. One who reads Dickens'
"Nicholas Nickleby" with this in mind, will perhaps be surprised
to find how often the hero frankly indulges his grief; he cries
with a freedom that suggests a trait inherited from his mother
of moist memory. No doubt, there was abuse of this "sensibility"
in earlier fiction: but Richardson was comparatively innocuous
in his practice, and Coleridge, having the whole sentimental
tendency in view, seems rather too severe when he declared that
"all the evil achieved by Hobbes and the whole school of
materialists will appear inconsiderable if it be compared with
the mischief effected and occasioned by the sentimental
philosophy of Sterne and his numerous imitators." The same
tendency had its vogue on both the English and French stage--the
Comedie larmoyante of the latter being vastly affected in London
and receiving in the next generation the good-natured satiric
shafts of Goldsmith. It may be possible that at the present
time, when the stoicism of the Red Indian in inhibiting
expression seems to be an Anglo-Saxon ideal, we have reacted too
far from the gush and the fervor of our forefathers. In any
case, to Richardson belongs whatever of merit there may be in
first sounding the new sentimental note.
Pope declared that "Pamela," was as good as twenty sermons--an
innocently malignant remark, to be sure, which cuts both ways!
And plump, placid Mr. Richardson established warm epistolary
relations with many excellent if too emotional ladies, who
opened a correspondence with him concerning the conductment of
this and the following novels and strove to deflect the course
thereof to soothe their lacerated feelings. What novelist to-day
would not appreciate an audience that would take him _au grand
serieux_ in this fashion! What higher compliment than for your
correspondent--and a lady at that--to state that in the way of
ministering to her personal comfort, Pamela must marry and
Clarissa must not die! Richardson carried on a voluminous
letter-writing in life even as in literature, and the curled
darlings of latter-day letters may well look to their laurels in
recalling him, A certain Mme. Belfair, for example, desires to
look upon the author of those wonderful tales, yet modestly
shrinks from being seen herself. She therefore implores that he
will walk at an hour named in St. James Park--and this is the
novelist's reply:
I go through the Park once or twice a week to my little
retirement; but I will for a week together be in it, every day
three or four hours, till you tell me you have seen a person who
answers to this description, namely, short--rather plump--fair
wig, lightish cloth coat, all black besides; one hand generally
in his bosom, the other a cane in it, which he leans upon under
the skirts of his coat; ... looking directly fore-right as
passers-by would imagine, but observing all that stirs on either
hand of him; hardly ever turning back; of a light brown
complexion, smoothish faced and ruddy cheeked, looking about
sixty-five; a regular, even pace, a gray eye, sometimes lively--very
lively if he have hope of seeing a lady whom he loves and
honors!
Such innocent philandering is delicious; there is a flavor to it
that presages the "Personals" in a New York newspaper. "Was ever
lady in such humor wooed?" or shall we say it is the novelist,
not the lady, who is besieged!
"Pamela" ran through five editions within a year of its
appearance, which was a conspicuous success in the days of an
audience so limited when compared with the vast reading public
of later times. The smug little bookseller must have been
greatly pleased by the good fortune attending his first venture
into a new field, especially since he essayed it so late in life
and almost by accident. His motive had been in a sense
practical; for his publishers had requested him to write a book
"on the useful concerns of life"--and that he had done so, he
might have learned any Sunday in church, for divines did not
hesitate to say a kind word from the pulpit about so
unexceptionable a work.
One of the things Richardson had triumphantly demonstrated by
his first story was that a very slight texture of plot can
suffice for a long, not to say too long, piece of fiction, if
only a free hand be given the story-teller in the way of
depicting the intuitions and emotions of human beings; dealing
with their mind states rather than, or quite as much as, their
actions. This was the modern note, and very speedily was the
lesson learned; the time was apt for it. From 1742, the date of
"Pamela," to 1765 is but a quarter century; yet within those
narrow time-limits the English Novel, through the labors of
Richardson and Fielding, Smollett, Sterne and Goldsmith, can be
said to have had its birth and growth to a lusty manhood and to
have defined once and for all the mold of this new and potent
form of prose art. By 1773 a critic speaks of the "novel-writing
age"; and a dozen years later, in 1785, novels are so common
that we hear of the press "groaning beneath their weight,"--which
sounds like the twentieth century. And it was all started
by the little printer; to him the praise. He received it in full
measure; here and there, of course, a dissident voice was heard,
one, that of Fielding, to be very vocal later; but mostly they
were drowned in the chorus of adulation. Richardson had done a
new thing and reaped an immediate reward; and--as seldom
happens, with quick recognition--it was to be a permanent reward
as well, for he changed the history of English literature.
One would have expected him to produce another novel post-haste,
following up his maiden victory before it could be forgotten,
after the modern manner. But those were leisured days and it was
half a dozen years before "Clarissa Harlowe" was given to the
public. Richardson had begun by taking a heroine out of low
life; he now drew one from genteel middle class life; as he was
in "Sir Charles Grandison," the third and last of his fictions,
to depict a hero in the upper class life of England. In Clarissa
again, plot was secondary, analysis, sentiment, the exhibition
of the female heart under stress of sorrow, this was everything.
Clarissa's hand is sought by an unattractive suitor; she rebels--a
social crime in the eighteenth century; whereat, her whole
family turn against her--father, mother, sister, brothers,
uncles and aunts--and, wooed by Lovelace, a dashing rake who is
in love with her according to his lights, but by no means
intends honorable matrimony, she flies with him in a chariot and
four, to find herself in a most anomalous position, and so dies
broken-hearted; to be followed in her fate by Lovelace, who is
represented as a man whose loose principles are in conflict with
a nature which is far from being utterly bad. The narrative is
mainly developed through letters exchanged between Clarissa and
her friend, Miss Howe. There can hardly be a more striking
testimony to the leisure enjoyed by the eighteenth-century than
that society was not bored by a story the length of which seems
almost interminable to the reader to-day. The slow movement is
sufficient to preclude its present prosperity. It is safe to say
that Richardson is but little read now; read much less than his
great contemporary, Fielding. And apparently it is his bulk
rather than his want of human interest or his antiquated manner
that explains the fact. The instinct to-day is against fiction
that is slow and tortuous in its onward course; at least so it
seemed until Mr. De Morgan returned in his delightful volumes to
the method of the past. Those are pertinent words of the
distinguished Spanish novelist, Valdes: "An author who wishes to
be read not only in his life, but after his death (and the
author who does not wish this should lay aside his pen), cannot
shut his eyes, when unblinded by vanity, to the fact that not
only is it necessary to be interesting to save himself from
oblivion, but the story must not be a very long one. The world
contains so many great and beautiful works that it requires a
long life to read them all. To ask the public, always anxious
for novelty, to read a production of inordinate length, when so
many others are demanding attention, seems to me useless and
ridiculous, ... The most noteworthy instance of what I say is
seen in the celebrated English novelist, Richardson, who, in
spite of his admirable genius and exquisite sensibility and
perspicuity, added to the fact of his being the father of the
modern Novel, is scarcely read nowadays, at least in Latin
countries. Given the indisputable beauties of his works, this
can only be due to their extreme length. And the proof of this,
that in France and Spain, to encourage the taste for them, the
most interesting parts have been extracted and published in
editions and compendiums."
This is suggestive, coming from one who speaks by the book. Who,
in truth, reads epics now--save in the enforced study of school
and college? Will not Browning's larger works--like "The Ring
and the Book"--suffer disastrously with the passing of time
because of a lack of continence, of a failure to realize that
since life is short, art should not be too long? It may be, too,
that Richardson, newly handling the sentiment which during the
following generation was to become such a marked trait of
imaginative letters, revelled in it to an extent unpalatable to
our taste; "rubbing our noses," as Leslie Stephen puts it, "in
all her (Clarissa's) agony,"--the tendency to overdo a new
thing, not to be resisted in his case. But with all concessions
to length and sentimentality, criticism from that day to this
has been at one in agreeing that here is not only Richardson's
best book but a truly great Novel. Certainly one who patiently
submits to a ruminant reading of the story, will find that when
at last the long-deferred climax is reached and the awed and
penitent Lovelace describes the death-bed moments of the girl he
has ruined, the scene has a great moving power. Allowing for
differences of taste and time, the vogue of the Novel in
Richardson's day can easily be understood, and through all the
stiffness, the stilted effect of manner and speech, and the
stifling conventions of the entourage, a sweet and charming
young woman in very piteous distress emerges to live in
affectionate memory. After all, no poor ideal of womanhood is
pictured in Clarissa. She is one of the heroines who are
unforgettable, dear. Mr. Howells, with his stern insistence on
truth in characterization, declares that she is "as freshly
modern as any girl of yesterday or to-morrow. 'Clarissa
Harlowe,' in spite of her eighteenth century costume and
keeping, remains a masterpiece in the portraiture of that
ever-womanly which is of all times and places."
Lovelace, too, whose name has become a synonym for the fine
gentleman betrayer, is drawn in a way to make him sympathetic
and creditable; he is far from being a stock figure of villainy.
And the minor figures are often enjoyable; the friendship of
Clarissa with Miss Howe, a young woman of excellent good sense
and seemingly quite devoid of the ultra-sentiment of her time,
preludes that between Diana and her "Tony" in Meredith's great
novel. As a general picture of the society of the period, the
book is full of illuminations and sidelights; of course, the
whole action is set on a stage that bespeaks Richardson's
narrow, middle class morality, his worship of rank, his belief
that worldly goods are the reward of well-doing.
As for the contemporaneous public, it wept and praised and went
with fevered blood because of this fiction. We have heard how
women of sentiment in London town welcomed the book and the
opportunity it offered for unrestrained tears. But it was the
same abroad; as Ike Marvel has it, Rousseau and Diderot over in
France, philosophers as they professed to be, "blubbered their
admiring thanks for 'Clarissa Harlowe."' Similarly, at a later
day we find caustic critics like Jeffrey and Macaulay writing to
Dickens to tell how they had cried over the death of Little
Nell--a scene the critical to-day are likely to stigmatize as
one of the few examples of pathos overdone to be found in the
works of that master. It is scarcely too much to say that the
outcome of no novel in the English tongue was watched with such
bated breath as was that of "Clarissa Harlowe" while the eight
successive books were being issued.
Richardson chose to bask for another half dozen years in the
fame of his second novel, before turning in 1754 to his final
attempt, "Sir Charles Grandison," wherein it was his purpose to
depict the perfect pattern of a gentleman, "armed at all points"
of social and moral behavior. We must bear in mind that when
"Clarissa" was published he was sixty years of age and to be
pardoned if he did not emulate so many novel-makers of these
brisker mercantile times and turn off a story or so a year.
By common confession, this is the poorest of his three fictions.
In the first place, we are asked to move more steadily in the
aristocratic atmosphere where the novelist did not breathe to
best advantage. Again, Richardson was an adept in drawing women
rather than men and hence was self-doomed in electing a
masculine protagonist. He is also off his proper ground in
laying part of the action in Italy.
His beau ideal, Grandison, turns out the most impossible prig in
English literature. He is as insufferable as that later prig,
Meredith's Sir Willoughby in "The Egotist," with the difference
that the author does not know it, and that you do not believe in
him for a moment; whereas Meredith's creation is appallingly
true, a sort of simulacrum of us all. The best of the story is
in its portrayal of womankind; in particular, Sir Charles' two
loves, the English Harriet Byron and the Italian Clementina, the
last of whom is enamored of him, but separated by religious
differences. Both are alive and though suffering in the reader's
estimation because of their devotion to such a stick as
Grandison, nevertheless touch our interest to the quick. The
scene in which Grandison returns to Italy to see Clementina,
whose reason, it is feared, is threatened because of her grief
over his loss, is genuinely effective and affecting.
The mellifluous sentimentality, too, of the novelist seems to
come to a climax in this book; justifying Taine's satiric remark
that "these phrases should be accompanied by a mandolin." The
moral tag is infallibly supplied, as in all Richardson's tales--though
perhaps here with an effect of crescendo. We are still
long years from that conception of art which holds that a
beautiful thing may be allowed to speak for itself and need not
be moraled down our throats like a physician's prescription. Yet
Fielding had already, as we shall see, struck a wholesome note
of satiric fun. The plot is slight and centers in an abduction
which, by the time it is used in the third novel, begins to pall
as a device and to suggest paucity of invention. The novel has
the prime merit of brevity; it is much shorter than "Clarissa
Harlowe," but long enough, in all conscience, Harriet being
blessed with the gift of gab, like all Richardson's heroines.
"She follows the maxim of Clarissa," says Lady Mary with telling
humor, "of declaring all she thinks to all the people she sees
without reflecting that in this mortal state of imperfection,
fig-leaves are as necessary for our minds as our bodies." It is
significant that this brilliant contemporary is very hard on
Richardson's characterization of women in this volume (which she
says "sinks horribly"), whereas never a word has she to say in
condemnation of the hero, who to the present critical eye seems
the biggest blot on the performance. How can we join the chorus
of praise led by Harriet, now her ladyship and his loving
spouse, when it chants: "But could he be otherwise than the best
of husbands who was the most dutiful of sons, who is the most
affectionate of brothers, the most faithful of friends, who is
good upon principle in every relation in life?" Lady Mary is
also extremely severe on the novelist's attempt to paint Italy;
when he talks of it, says she, "it is plain he is no better
acquainted with it than he is with the Kingdom of Mancomingo."
It is probable tat Richardson could not say more for his Italian
knowledge than did old Roger Ascham of Archery fame, when he
declared: "I was once in Italy, but I thank God my stay there
was only nine days." "Sir Charles Grandison" has also the
substantial advantage of ending well: that is, if to marry Sir
Charles can be so regarded, and certainly Harriet deemed it
desirable.
It is pleasant to think of Richardson, now well into the
sixties, amiable, plump and prosperous, surrounded for the
remainder of his days--he was to die seven years later at the
ripe age of seventy-five--by a bevy of admiring women, who,
whether literary or merely human, gave this particular author
that warm and convincing proof of popularity which, to most, is
worth a good deal of chilly posthumous fame which a man is not
there to enjoy. Looking at his work retrospectively, one sees
that it must always have authority, even if it fall deadly dull
upon our ears to-day; for nothing can take away from him the
distinction of originating that kind of fiction which, now well
along towards its second century of existence, is still popular
and powerful. Richardson had no model; he shaped a form for
himself. Fielding, a greater genius, threw his fiction into a
mold cast by earlier writers; moreover, he received his direct
impulse away from the drama and towards the novel from
Richardson himself.
The author of "Pamela" demonstrated once and for all the
interest that lies in a sympathetic and truthful representation
of character in contrast with that interest in incident for its
own sake which means the subordination of character, so that the
persons become mere subsidiary counters in the game. And he
exhibited such a knowledge of the subtler phases of the nooks
and crannies of woman's heart, as to be hailed as past-master
down to the present day by a whole school of analysts and
psychologues; for may it not be said that it is the popular
distinction of the nineteenth century fiction to place woman in
the pivotal position in that social complex which it is the
business of the Novel to represent? Do not our fiction and drama
to-day--the drama a belated ally of the Novel in this and other
regards--find in the delineation of the eternal feminine under
new conditions of our time, its chief, its most significant
motif? If so, a special gratitude is due the placid little Mr.
Richardson with his Pamelas, Clarissas and Harriets. He found
fiction unwritten so far as the chronicles of contemporary
society were concerned, and left it in such shape that it was
recognized as the natural quarry of all who would paint manners;
a field to be worked by Jane Austen, Dickens and Thackeray,
Trollope and George Eliot, and a modern army of latter and
lesser students of life. His faults were in part merely a
reflection of his time; its low-pitched morality, its etiquette
which often seems so absurd. Partly it was his own, too; for he
utterly lacked humor (save where unconscious) and never grasped
the great truth, that in literary art the half is often more
than the whole; The Terentian ne quid nimis had evidently not
been taken to heart by Samuel Richardson, Esquire, of
Hammersmith, author of "Clarissa Harlowe" in eight volumes, and
Printer to the Queen. Again and again one of Clarissa's bursts
of emotion under the tantalizing treatment of her seducer loses
its effect because another burst succeeds before we (and she)
have recovered from the first one. He strives to give us the
broken rhythm of life (therein showing his affinity with the
latter day realists) instead of that higher and harder thing--the
more perfect rhythm of art; not so much the truth (which
cannot be literally given) as that seeming-true which is the aim
and object of the artistic representation. Hence the necessity
of what Brunetiere calls in an admirable phrase, the true
function of the novel--"to be an abridged representation of
life." Construction in the modern sense Richardson had not
studied, naturally enough, and was innocent of the fineness of
method and the sure-handed touches of later technique. And there
is a kind of drawing-room atmosphere in his books, a lack of
ozone which makes Fielding with all his open-air coarseness a
relief. But judged in the setting of his time, this writer did a
wonderful thing not only as the Father of the Modern Novel but
one of the few authors in the whole range of fiction who holds
his conspicuous place amid shifting literary modes and fashions,
because he built upon the surest of all foundations--the social
instinct, and the human heart.
If the use of the realistic method alone denoted the Novel,
Defoe, not Richardson, might be called its begetter. "Robinson
Crusoe," more than twenty years before "Pamela," would occupy
the primate position, to say nothing of Swift's "Gulliver's
Travels," antedating Richardson's first story by some fifteen
years. Certainly the observational method, the love of detail,
the grave narrative of imagined fact (if the bull be permitted)
are in this earlier book in full force. But "Robinson Crusoe" is
not a rival because it does not study man-in-society; never was
a story that depended less upon this kind of interest. The
position of Crusoe on his desert isle is so eminently unsocial
that he welcomes the black man Friday and quivers at the human
quality in the famed footprints in the sand. As for Swift's chef
d'oeuvre, it is a fairy-tale with a grimly realistic manner and
a savage satiric intention. To speak of either of these fictions
as novels is an example of the prevalent careless nomenclature.
Between them and "Pamela" there yawns a chasm. Moreover,
"Crusoe" is a frankly picaresque tale belonging to the elder
line of romantic fiction, where incident and action and all the
thrilling haps of Adventure-land furnish the basis of appeal
rather than character analysis or a study of social relations.
The personality of Crusoe is not advanced a whit by his
wonderful experiences; he is done entirely from the outside.
Richardson, therefore, marks the beginning of the modern form.
But that the objection to Defoe as the true and only begetter of
the Novel lies in his failure, in his greatest story, to center
the interest in man as part of the social order and as human
soul, is shown by the fact that his less known, but remarkable,
story "Moll Flanders," picaresque as it is and depicting the
life of a female criminal, has yet considerable character study
and gets no small part of its appeal for a present-day reader
from the minute description of the fall and final reform of the
degenerate woman. It is comparatively crude in characterization,
but psychological value is not entirely lacking. However, with
Richardson it is almost all. It was of the nature of his genius
to make psychology paramount: just there is found his modernity.
Defoe and Swift may be said to have added some slight interest
in analysis pointing towards the psychologic method, which was
to find full expression in Samuel Richardson.