RICHARDSON AND THE FEMININE NOVEL
For women by women.
Euphues had addressed a dedication to the 'Ladies and Gentlewomen of England,' and had said openly that he would rather lie shut in a tiring closet than open in a study; but, writing for women as he did, he never tried to write as if he were himself a woman. On the contrary, Lyly's attitude was that of the gallant. The Elizabethan romancers who followed him were read by women but content to be men. Mrs. Behn, whose 'weltering sewerage' we have not had space to discuss, wrote for women, but certainly not less coarsely than if she had been writing for her own heroes. It was not until the eighteenth century that there was fairly launched a new story-telling, characteristically English in origin, without the fine careless heroism and improbability of romance, that it held was 'calculated for amusement only,' and different also from the mischievous realism of the picaresque. These ships, with their gallant scarlet and gold pennons, and their merry skull and cross-bones, had been long afloat before there came to join them a white barge with a lily at the prow and on her decks girls in white dresses, with their heads close together telling stories to each other. The author of a tale had hitherto been either a man, a god, or a rascal; he had never been content to be a girl. And the first of the new craftswomen was a fat and solid little printer and alderman of the City of London, called Samuel Richardson.
Samuel Richardson.
Richardson was an author of a kind quite new to English letters—neither a great gentleman like Sidney, nor a roisterer like Greene, nor a fanatic preacher like Bunyan, nor a journalist like Defoe; just a quiet, conscientious, little business man, who, after a duteous apprenticeship, had married his master's daughter like a proper Whittington, and, when she died, had married again, with admirable judgment in each case. It is not every one who can marry two wives and be unhappy with neither. As a boy, he had written love-letters for young women who were shy of their abilities. Girlish in his youth, he had preferred the tea-table to the tavern. Surrounded by women in his manhood, he was a grotesque little figure of a man, as inquisitive as an old maid, as serious over detail as a village gossip; walking in the Park, and looking at the feet of the women he met, and, as they passed him, quickly scanning their faces, and saying to himself, 'that kind of person,' or 'this kind of person,' and then going on to observe and summarise the next. He was accustomed, like a Japanese draughtsman, or a woman in a theatre, to complete and instantaneous observation. His was just the mind to show women what they could do; and this, with their constant applause and help, he did.
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
He had a lifetime of feminine society behind him when he was asked to write a series of letters on 'the useful concerns in common life' for the guidance of servant-girls, and, setting himself to the task, produced Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, and then, stepping on from his success, Clarissa Harlowe, and finally the monstrous Grandison. The books were written in a close atmosphere of femininity. 'My worthy-hearted wife and the young lady who is with us, when I had read them some part of the story, which I had begun without their knowing it, used to come into my little closet every night, with—"Have you any more of Pamela, Mr. R.? We are come to hear a little more of Pamela."' Every letter of Clarissa's was canvassed by the tea-parties that wept and trembled for her fate, and worshipped her proud little creator. And all his friends contributed their ideas of the perfect man to the making of Sir Charles Grandison. No author had ever written so before.
The novel by post.
I believe that the femininity of the resulting books was due to his choice of the epistolary method as well as to his own temperament, and his enviable opportunities of studying the character of the audience at which he aimed. If he had not happened upon it, if he had tried to tell his stories in the manner fashionable at the time, they would but have been exaggerations and amplifications of tales that Steele would have put most comfortably into a single number of The Tatler or Spectator. If he had used the autobiographical form he would have been prohibited from much of his detail, and all the effect of lighting his subject from several points of view. But letters were so new in story-telling that they helped him to be new himself, just as a new and unusual fashion of coat helps a man to be militantly original, within as well as without. And then letters, always describing events that have scarcely happened, excuse the most unlimited detail, the most elaborately particularised gossip or confession. Letters were the perfect medium for the expression of the feminine mind.
I do not deny that there are disadvantages in the novel by post, that concerns many characters in elaborate play. Richardson has, for example, to keep his corresponding couples, naughty Lovelace and uneasy Belford, Clarissa and the giddy Miss Howe, dodging apart again and again for the purpose of exchanging letters. We are tortured by Pamela's efforts for the good of her story, her letters sandwiched between tiles and buried in earth, the incredible agility of her postman John, and the forethought and luck that enables her to provide herself with ink and paper in the most impossible circumstances. And when Mr. Belford writes of Clarissa, 'there never was a woman so young who wrote so much and with such celerity,' we look at the huge volumes and find it easy to believe him. When we hear that 'Her thoughts keeping pace with her pen she hardly ever stopped or hesitated, and very seldom blotted out or altered,' we reflect that she certainly had not the time. And when later we are told that 'Last night, for the first time since Monday last, she got to her pen and ink; but she pursues her writing with such eagerness and hurry as show her discomposure,' we cannot help smiling to think how very advantageous such discomposure must be to Mr. Richardson, who is to edit the correspondence. There is this difficulty of credibility, and also occasional even more obvious awkwardnesses, as when the characters, always very obliging to their creator, have to enclose copies of letters that would not otherwise have got into print.
Richardson does not attempt illusion.
On the other hand, we cannot count these as serious blemishes on a form of art so far removed from any attempt at illusion. There is in Richardson's novels no sort of visualised presentment of life. We see his principal characters through little panes of glass over their hearts, and in no other way. I cannot for the life of me imagine what Clarissa really looked like, but I know well enough what she thought. Spasmodic reminders of Pamela's abstract prettiness produce little but an impatient desire to see a portrait. I remember but one glimpse of her, and that is in the first volume, when she has dressed herself up in her new homespun clothes, dangles a straw hat by its two blue strings, and looks at herself in the looking-glass. There comes an expression a little later, 'a pretty neat damsel,' and again, 'a tight prim lass,' and I think that the ghost of a little girl shows in the looking-glass, but only for a moment, like the reflection of a bird flying over a pool of water. Richardson's characters are decreasingly real from their hearts outwards. They have no feet. But their hearts are so beautifully exhibited that we cannot ask for anything else. To quarrel over them with Richardson is like quarrelling with the delightful Euclid because no one has ever been able to draw a straight line that should really be length without breadth. Such a line does not exist outside his books, yet Euclid is all in the right when he talks of geometry. Pamela and Clarissa do not exist outside their propositions, yet Johnson, talking fairly honestly, was able to say that there was more knowledge of the human heart in a letter of Richardson's than in all Tom Jones.
The passion for respectability.
It is knowledge of the human heart from the girl's point of view—the unromantic girl, for Richardson could never bring himself to believe in great passions. He would never have used as the text of a novel that sentence from the New Testament that has inspired so many later story-tellers: 'Her sins are forgiven her because she loved much.' Richardson's only passion is one not usually so called, and that is a passion for respectability. The desire for respectability, for her children's sake if not for her own, is part of every woman's armour in the battle of this world. In Richardson's two best novels it is something far more than this, an obsession that love cannot conquer nor goodness override. In Clarissa it is so Quixotic, so forlorn a hope as to be noble; but Pamela's respectability is a little disgusting. What, after all, is Pamela's story but the tale of a servant-girl who declaims continually about her honesty, writes foolish verse about it, lets her head fall on her master's shoulder, and refuses to be his except as his wife? She is quite right, of course, and most estimable. But her affronted virtue does not seem much more than a practical commercial asset, when she successfully marries the man who by every means in his power has sought to destroy it. Clarissa, on the other hand, has nothing to gain, nothing even to retain, except her self-respect. The respect of Howes, Belfords, and Harlowes could weigh but little with a being lifted from ordinary Philistine life into a conflict as unworldly as hers. She has the ivory dignity of some flowers, and the curious power of the book that traces her misfortunes is due to the spectacle of so flowerlike and fragile a being engaged in a struggle so terribly unequal. The struggle itself could hardly have been imagined by a wholly masculine writer. It is a kind of elaborate proposition, not a picture of life. It is like a chess problem in which we know that white mates in two moves, and are interested only in seeing how he does it. In Richardson, as in Euclid, we know always what is coming. Our artistic pleasure is in the logic and sequence of the intervening steps. If you expect a theorem to turn into a problem or vice versâ, the inevitability of Richardson annoys you; but if you read him in the right spirit that quality is your chief delight.
It is interesting to notice that Richardson, inventing girls' theorems, is unable to draw a hero in whom a man can believe. Lovelace, for example, is touched in in a way that makes women fall in love with him, but men feel for cobwebs in the air. Pamela's master is frankly incredible. And it is no bad illustration of Richardson's femininity that Charles Grandison, planned as the perfect man, has been found unbearable in the smoking-room, insipid at the tea-table, and has probably had no conquests but a few Georgian ladies'-maids. But the women, abstractions, algebraical formulæ, as they are, let us into secrets of the machinery of a woman's mind that no earlier novelist had been able to examine.
Richardson's influence.
Richardson's precise, intimate, feminine knowledge of women and feminine method of writing had a wider influence than that we are tracing in this chapter. He showed story-tellers a new world to conquer and quite unexplored possibilities in the telling of a tale. It was for this that he was translated by the Abbé Prévost, the Jesuit, soldier, priest and novelist, who wrote in Manon Lescaut of a passion greater and more self-sacrificing than any that had come in the way of the little printer of Salisbury Court. And when St. Preux and Julie exchange those letters that brought a new freedom of sentiment into literature, Rousseau, who taught them how to write, had himself been taught by Richardson.
FANNY BURNEY
Fanny Burney.
I do not intend any detailed portraiture of the later writers of the feminine novel, but only in a brief mention of two of them to suggest the course they took in the development of their art, until in the nineteenth century it combined with and became indistinguishable from the masculine novel that held it at first in a not lightly to be reconciled hostility. Let us look along the bookshelf for a volume called Evelina, or the History of a Young Lady's Entrance into the World. Thirty years had passed between the publication of Clarissa and that of Fanny Burney's best book, and in those years Fielding and Smollett had written, and Humphry Clinker had shown that it was possible to describe in letters other things than a series of attacks on the armour of respectability. Fanny Burney took more material with a lighter hand, stealing away the business of The Tatler, The Spectator, The Citizen of the World, and trying not only to 'draw characters from nature' but also to 'mark the manners of the time.' She had learnt from a diligent perusal of Richardson, avoided a too elaborate postal system, and made her butterfly task the easier by writing of herself, whereas he had to invent the Clarissas and Pamelas of his more bee-like labours.
Young lady's 'manners.'
Fanny Burney was the daughter of a popular music-master, whose house was always full of all sorts of people, so that she had the best of opportunities for observing that surface of life which she was able so incomparably to reproduce. She was able to see manners in contrast. Now 'manners' described by a man in a coffee-house—by Steele, for example, or Goldsmith, mean the habits and foibles of contemporary society. 'Manners' 'marked' at a young lady's rosewood desk mean vulgarity and its opposite, and the various shades between the two. In the essayist's eyes, manners were simply manners, to be described each one for its own sake. The feminine novelist found manners either good or bad, and was concerned with the tracing of a gossamer thread of distinction. The story of Evelina is not so much that of her love-affair with Lord Orville, but of the suffering or satisfaction of a sensitive person exposed alternately to atmospheres of bad manners or good. Evelina threads her way shyly along the border-line, and illustrates both sides by their effects upon her happiness. We are sorrier for her when she hears Miss Branghton cry out joyfully, 'Miss is going to marry a Lord,' than when she is in more serious trouble over her acknowledgment by her father. All the minor characters for whom the story makes a frame are set there as types less of character than of behaviour. There is Mrs. Selwyn with her habit of 'setting down' young men, and her characteristic praise of Lord Orville, 'there must have been some mistake about the birth of that young man; he was, undoubtedly, designed for the last age; for he is really polite.' There is Captain Mirvan, representing good birth and brutality of manners; Madame Duval, low birth seeking to veil itself in lofty affectation; the Branghtons, frank vulgarity; Mr. Smith, the tinsel gentility of the Holborn beau. Each character is in the book in order to inflict its peculiar type of manners on the heroine, so that we may watch the result. Evelina herself, delicious as she is, is given to us as a touchstone between good breeding and vulgarity.
Feminine standards of delicacy.
Miss Burney marks very clearly the introduction of the feminine standards of delicacy that were to rule the English novel of the nineteenth century. Evelina's criticism of Love for Love, written less than a hundred years before she saw it, distinguishes honestly between her own point of view and that of the best of men. 'Though it (the play) was fraught with wit and entertainment, I hope I shall never see it represented again; for it is so extremely indelicate—to use the softest word I can—that Miss Mirvan and I were perpetually out of countenance, and could neither make any observations ourselves, nor venture to listen to those of others. This was the more provoking, as Lord Orville was in excellent spirits, and exceedingly entertaining.'
JANE AUSTEN
Jane Austen.
Twenty years after Evelina, the novel of femininity took a further step in technique and breadth of design. Miss Austen, who in the last decade of the eighteenth century was writing the novels that were not to be published till after the first decade of the nineteenth, learnt from both her precursors. She was a proper follower of Richardson, but dispensed altogether with the artifice of letters, although the whole of her work is so intimate and particular in expression that it would almost seem to be written in a letter to the reader.[7] Like Miss Burney she had read the masculine novels of an ordinary life, whose strings were not so finely stretched as those of life in the books of the sentimental little printer; she had read Fielding and Smollett and the Essayists, and Miss Burney herself, but she carried the satire she had learnt from them deeper than Miss Burney's criticism of well or ill-bred manners. She deals more directly with existence. Miss Burney with lovable skill made her puppets play her game. Miss Austen's puppets played a game of their own. She remarked before writing Emma, 'I am going to take a heroine whom no one but myself will much like,' exactly as if she were a little girl rather capriciously choosing a new plaything. But Emma, once chosen, illustrates no special theorem, and is compelled to tread no tight-rope over the abyss of vulgarity. Miss Austen's world has the vitality of independent life, and is yet close under observation, like society in a doll's house. Her people are alive and real, and yet so small that she found it easy to see round them and be amused. Indeed, she grew so accustomed to laughing at them that she came to include the reader in her play. I am not sure if it would not be wise for any one who found a page of hers a little dull or incomprehensible, to consider very carefully and seriously if she is not being mischievous enough and insolent enough to win her silvery laugh from his own self. To read her is like being in the room with an unscrupulously witty woman; it is delightful, but more than a trifle dangerous.
The analysis of the heart.
But Miss Austen's satire is not so important as the clear, keen sight that made it possible. The feminine novel finds its justification and characteristic in the quick light gossiping knowledge of Miss Burney, in Miss Austen's bric-Ă -brac of observation, in Richardson's topographical accuracy among the hidden alleys and byways of the heart. Its tenderness of detail is its most valuable contribution to story-telling, associated though it is with feminine standards of decency, and the sharp point of feminine raillery. The first of these concomitants is a gift of doubtful, and certainly not universal, virtue. The second is no more than a variation, a different-tinted, other-textured version of the satire of men. But the gift to which they were attached has made possible some of the finest work of later artists, in those stories whose absorbing interest is the unravelling of tangled skeins of intricate psychology. Theirs is a minuteness in the dissection of the heart quite different from, and indeed hostile to, the free-and-easy way of men like Fielding and Smollett, and wherever we meet with this fine and delicate surgery practice we can trace its ancestry with some assurance to the feminine novel of the eighteenth century.