Still, whatever may have to be said as to Richardson’s subjects, he is never coarse in his treatment of them. The pursuit of Pamela by Mr. B., or of Clarissa by Lovelace, through eight volumes, may weary; it does not corrupt. No man or maid on earth could lay it to his charge that he or she had been corrupted by these books, while no man on earth could read “Clarissa” without being touched by the noble ending. If “Clarissa” had never been written we should have said that the good-natured, fussy, essentially middle-class bookseller, Samuel Richardson, was unable to draw a lady; and it is curious to see how Clarissa stands out, not only among Richardson’s female characters, but among the female characters of all time; eminent she is for purity of soul, and nobility of feeling. There is no cant about her anywhere, no effort to pose or to strain after a state of mind which she cannot naturally experience. The business-like manner in which she makes her preparations for death have nothing sentimental about them, nothing that even faintly suggests the pretty death-beds with which Mr. Dickens and others have made us familiar; but I doubt if the most practical money-maker in Wall Street could read it without feeling uncomfortable.
How, after describing such a character as Clarissa, Richardson could turn to the whale-bone figures in “Sir Charles Grandison” is quite incomprehensible. Had he been ruined by his numerous female admirers and correspondents, or by his desire to become fashionable, or, as is most likely, by the wish to create in Sir Charles a virtuous foil to him whom he thought the wicked, witty, delightful, and detestable Lovelace? Whatever the reason, it is a thousand pities that he gave way to his impulse.
It would interest you as well as me to note little points of manners that are to be gathered from the three books. I have not time to write much more, but will tell you two or three that have struck me. If you read them, as I still hope you may, you will see what early risers they all are, even the wicked Mr. B.; while Clarissa, when in Dover Street, usually gives Lovelace his interviews at six in the morning. One hears of two-o’clock-in-the-morning courage. How much more wonderful is love that rises at six!
Richardson was a woman’s novelist, as Fielding was a man’s. I sometimes think of Dr. Johnson’s mot: “Claret for boys, port for men, and,” smiling, “brandy for heroes.” So one might fancy him saying: “Richardson for women, Fielding for men, Smollett for ruffians,” though some of his rough customers were heroes, too. But we now confine ourselves so closely to “the later writers” of Russia, France, England, America, that the woman who reads Richardson may be called heroic. “To the unknown heroine” I dedicate my respect, as the Athenians dedicated an altar to “the unknown hero.” Will you be the heroine? I am afraid you won’t!
GÉRARD DE NERVAL
To Miss Girton, Cambridge.
Dear Miss Girton,—Yes, I fancy Gérard de Nerval is one of that rather select party of French writers whom Mrs. Girton will allow you to read. But even if you read him, I do not think you will care very much for him. He is a man’s author, not a woman’s; and yet one can hardly say why. It is not that he offends “the delicacy of your sex,” as Tom Jones calls it; I think it is that his sentiment, whereof he is full, is not of the kind you like. Let it be admitted that, when his characters make love, they might do it “in a more human sort of way.”
In this respect, and in some others, Gérard de Nerval resembles Edgar Poe. Not that his heroes are always attached to a belle morte in some distant Aiden; not that they have been for long in the family sepulchre; not that their attire is a vastly becoming shroud—no, Aurélie and Sylvie, in Les Filles de Feu, are nice and natural girls; but their lover is not in love with them “in a human sort of way.” He is in love with some vaporous ideal, of which they faintly remind him. He is, as it were, the eternal passer-by; he is a wanderer from his birth; he sees the old château, or the farmer’s cottage, or even the bright theatre, or the desert tent; he sees the daughters of men that they are fair and dear, in moonlight, in sunlight, in the glare of the footlights, and he looks, and longs, and sighs, and wanders on his fatal path. Nothing can make him pause, and at last his urgent spirit leads him over the limit of this earth, and far from the human shores; his delirious fancy haunts graveyards, or the fabled harbours of happy stars, and he who rested never, rests in the grave, forgetting his dreams or finding them true.
All this is too vague for you, I do not doubt, but for me the man and his work have an attraction I cannot very well explain, like the personal influence of one who is your friend, though other people cannot see what you see in him.
Gérard de Nerval (that was only his pen-name) was a young man of the young romantic school of 1830; one of the set of Hugo and Gautier. Their gallant, school-boyish absurdities are too familiar to be dwelt upon. They were much of Scott’s mind when he was young, and translated Bürger, and “wished to heaven he had a skull and cross-bones.” Two or three of them died early, two or three subsided into ordinary literary gentlemen (like M. Maquet, lately deceased), two, nay three, became poets—Victor Hugo, Théophile Gautier, and Gérard de Nerval. It is not necessary to have heard of Gérard; even that queer sham, the lady of culture, admits without a blush that she knows not Gérard. Yet he is worth knowing.