Eliza Heywood’s stories are probably as imbecile and as depraved as any fiction we possess to-day, but the women of England read them eagerly. They read too the iniquitous rubbish of Mrs. Aphra Behn; and no incident can better illustrate the tremendous change that swept over public sentiment with the introduction of good and decent novels than the well-known tale of Sir Walter Scott’s aunt, Mrs. Keith of Ravelston. This sprightly old lady took a fancy, when in her eightieth year, to re-read Mrs. Behn’s books, and persuaded Sir Walter to send them to her. A hasty glance at them was more than enough, and back they came to Scott with an entreaty that he would put them in the fire. The ancient gentlewoman confessed herself unable to linger over pages which she had not been ashamed nor abashed to hear read aloud to large parties in her youth.
It must be remembered, however, that Aphra Behn, uncompromisingly bad though she was, wrote the first English didactic novel, “Oroonoka,” the “Uncle Tom’s Cabin” of its day. It has the advantage of “Uncle Tom” in being a true tale, Mrs. Behn having seen the slave, Oroonoka, and his wife, Imoinda, in the West Indies, and having witnessed his tragic fate. It was written at the solicitation of Charles II., and was a popular anti-slavery novel, with certain points of resemblance to Mrs. Stowe’s famous book; in the grace and beauty of its Africans, for example; in the strength and constancy of their affections, and in the lavish nobility of their sentiments. Mrs. Behn knew as well as Mrs. Stowe that, if you want to produce a strong effect, you must not be too chary of your colors.
When the time came for the great flowering of English fiction, when Fielding and Richardson took England by storm, and France confessed herself beaten in the field (“Who would have thought,” wrote the Marquis d’Argenson, “that the English would write novels, and better ones than ours?”), then it was that women asserted themselves distinctly as patronesses well worth the pleasing. To Smollett and Defoe they had never given whole-hearted approbation. Such robustly masculine writing was scarcely in their way. But Fielding, infinitely greater than these, met with no warmer favor at their hands. It is easy to account for the present unpopularity of “Tom Joneses” in decorous households by saying that modest women do not consider it fit for them to read. That covers the ground now to perfection. But the fact remains that, when “Tom Jones” was written, everybody did consider it fit to read. Why not, when all that it contained was seen about them day by day? Its author, like every other great novelist, described life as he found it. Arcadia had passed away, and big libertine London offered a scant assortment of Arcadian virtues. Fielding had nothing to tell that might not have been heard any day at one of Sir Robert Walpole’s dinner-parties. He had the merit—not too common now—of never confusing vice with virtue; though it must be confessed that, like Dumas and Scott and Thackeray, he took very kindly to his scamps; and we all know how angry a recent critic permits himself to be because Thackeray calls Rawdon Crawley “honest Rawdon.” As far as can be seen, Fielding never realized the grossness of his books. He prefaced “Tom Jones” with a beautiful little sermon about “the solid inward comfort of mind which is the sure companion of innocence and virtue;” and he took immense credit to himself for having written “nothing prejudicial to the cause of religion and virtue, nothing inconsistent with the strictest rules of decency, nor which can offend even the chastest eye in the perusal.” What more than this could be claimed by the authors of “The Old Homestead” and “Little Lord Fauntleroy”?
I do not for one moment believe that it was the blithe and brutal coarseness of Fielding’s novels that exiled them from the female heart, that inconsistent heart which never fluttered over the more repellent indecency of “Pamela.” Insidious influences were at work within the dovecotes. The eighteenth-century woman, while less given to self-analysis and self-assertion than her successor to-day, was just as conscious of her own nature, its resistless force, its inalienable laws, its permanent limitations; and in Richardson she recognized the artist who had divined her subtleties, and had given them form and color. His correspondence with women is unlike anything else the period has to show. To him they had an independence of thought and action which it took the rest of mankind a hundred years longer to concede; and it is not surprising to see the fervent homage this stout little tradesman of sixty received from his female flatterers, when we remember that he and he alone in all his century had looked into the rebellious secrets of their hearts with understanding and with reverence.
To any other man than Richardson, the devout attentions of so many women would have been a trifle fatiguing. They wrote him letters as long as Clarissa Harlowe’s. They poured out their sentiments on endless reams of paper. They told him how they walked up and down their rooms, shedding torrents of tears over his heroine’s distress, unable to either go on with the book, or to put it resolutely down. They told him how, when “Clarissa” was being read aloud in a bed-chamber, the maid who was curling her mistress’s hair wept so bitterly she could not go on with her work, so was given a crown for her sensibility, and sent out of the room. They implored and entreated him to end his story happily; “a turn,” wrote one fair enthusiast, “that will make your almost despairing readers mad with joy.” Richardson purred complacently over these letters, like a sleek old cat, and he answered every one of them, instead of pitching them unread into the fire. Yet, nevertheless, true and great artist that he was, in spite of all his vanity, these passionate solicitations moved him not one hair’s breadth from his path. “As well,” says Mr. Birrell, “hope for a happy ending for King Lear as for Clarissa Harlowe.” She died, and England dissolved herself in tears, and gay, sentimental France lifted up her voice and wept aloud, and Germany joined in the sad chorus of lamentations, and even phlegmatic Holland was heard bewailing from afar the great tragedy of the literary world. This is no fancy statement. Men swore while women wept. Good Dr. Johnson hung his despondent head, and ribald Colley Cibber vowed with a great oath that this incomparable heroine should not die. Years afterwards, when Napoleon was first consul, an English gentleman named Lovelace was presented to him, whereupon the consul brightened visibly, and remarked, “Why, that is the name of Clarissa Harlowe’s lover!”—an incident which won, and won deservedly for Bonaparte, the lifelong loyalty of Hazlitt.
Meanwhile Richardson, writing quietly away in his little summer-house, produced Sir Charles Grandison, a hero who is perhaps as famous for his priggishness as Lovelace is famous for his villainy. I think, myself, that poor Sir Charles has been unfairly handled. He is not half such a prig as Daniel Deronda; but he develops his priggishness with such ample detail through so many leisurely volumes. Richardson loved him, and tried hard to make his host of female readers love him too, which they did in a somewhat perfunctory and lukewarm fashion. Indeed, it should in justice be remembered that this eighteenth-century novelist intended all his books to be didactic. They seem now at times too painful, too detestable for endurance; but when “Pamela,” with all its loathsome details, was published, it was actually commended from the pulpit, declared to be better than twenty sermons, and placed by the side of the Bible for its moral influence. Richardson himself tells us a curiously significant anecdote of his childhood. When he was a little boy, eleven years old, he heard his mother and some gossips complaining of a quarrelsome and acrimonious neighbor. He promptly wrote her a long letter of remonstrance, quoting freely from the scriptures to prove to her the evil of her ways. The woman, being naturally very angry, complained to his mother of his impertinence, whereupon she, with true maternal pride, commended his principles, while gently censuring the liberty he had taken.
With Richardson’s splendid triumph to spur them on, the passion of Englishwomen for novel-reading reached its height. Young girls, hitherto debarred from this diversion, began more and more to taste the forbidden sweets, and wise men, like Dr. Johnson, meekly acknowledged that there was no stopping them. When Frances Chamberlayne Sheridan told him that she never allowed her little daughter to read anything but the “Rambler,” or matters equally instructive, he answered with all his customary candor: “Then, madam, you are a fool! Turn your daughter’s wits loose in your library. If she be well inclined, she will choose only good food. If otherwise, all your precautions will amount to nothing.” Both Charles Lamb and Ruskin cherished similar opinions, but the sentiment was more uncommon in Dr. Johnson’s day, and we know how even he reproached good Hannah More for quoting from “Tom Jones.”
With or without permission, however, the girls read gayly on. In Garrick’s epilogue to Colman’s farce, “Polly Honeycombe,” the wayward young heroine confesses her lively gratitude for all the dangerous knowledge she has gleaned from novels.
“So much these dear instructors change and win us,
Without their light we ne’er should know what’s in us.