Clarissa.
But if Grandison be dull and Pamela contemptible Clarissa remains; and Clarissa is what Musset called it, ‘le premier roman du monde.’ Of course Clarissa has its faults. Miss Harlowe, for instance, is not always herself—is not always the complete creation she affects to be: there are touches of moral pedantry—anticipations of George Eliot—in her; the scenes in which she is brought to shame are scarcely real, living, moving, all the rest of it. But on the other hand is there anything better than Lovelace in the whole range of fiction? Take Lovelace in all or any of his moods—suppliant, intriguing, repentant, triumphant, above all triumphant—and find his parallel if you can. Where, you ask, did the little printer of Salisbury Court—who suggests to Mr. Stephen ‘a plump white mouse in a wig’—where did Richardson discover so much gallantry and humanity, so much romance and so much fact, such an abundance of the heroic qualities and the baser veracities of mortal nature? Lovelace is, if you except Don Quixote, the completest hero in fiction. He has wit, humour, grace, brilliance, charm; he is a scoundrel and a ruffian, and he is a gentleman and a man; of his kind and in his degree he has the right Shakespearean quality. Almost as perfect in her way is the enchanting Miss Howe—an incarnation of womanliness and wit and fun, after Lovelace the most brilliant of Richardson’s
creations. Or take the Harlowe family: the severe and stupid father, the angry and selfish uncles, the cub James, the vixen Arabella, a very fiend of envy and hatred and malice—what a gallery of portraits is here! And Solmes and Tomlinson, Belford and Brand and Hickman; and the infinite complexity of the intrigue; the wit, the pathos, the invention; the knowledge of human nature; the faculty of dialogue—where save in Clarissa shall we find all these? As for Miss Harlowe herself, all incomplete as she is she remains the Eve of fiction, the prototype of the modern heroine, the common mother of all the self-contained, self-suffering, self-satisfied young persons whose delicacies and repugnances, whose independence of mind and body, whose airs and ideas and imaginings, are the stuff of the modern novel. With her begins a new ideal of womanhood; from her proceeds a type unknown in fact and fiction until she came. When after outrage she declines to marry her destroyer, and prefers death to the condonation of her dishonour, she strikes a note and assumes a position till then not merely unrecognised but absolutely undiscovered. It has been said of her half in jest and half in earnest that she is ‘the aboriginal Woman’s Rights person’; and it is a fact that she and Helena and Desdemona and Ophelia are practically a thousand years apart. And this is perhaps her finest virtue as it is certainly
her greatest charm: that, until she set the example, woman in literature as a self-suffering individuality, as an existence endowed with equal rights to independence—of choice, volition, action—with man, had not begun to be. That of itself would suffice to make Clarissa memorable; and that is the least of its merits. Consider it from which point you will, the book remains a masterpiece, unique of its kind. It has been imitated but it has never been equalled. It is Richardson’s only title to fame; but it is enough. Not the Great Pyramid itself is more solidly built nor more incapable of ruin.