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.