My verse, and Queensberry’s tears above thy urn.’
Everyone knew of the misunderstanding between him and Addison from the commencement of his career; yet in expressing his regret for the essayist’s death, he observed there was in Addison’s conversation ‘more charm than he had heard in any other man’s.’ High praise from a supposed adversary, but praise that was assuredly due to him.
In the Penny London Advertiser, under the date of June 13-15, 1744, and the heading ‘Home News,’ it is stated that ‘Last week the body of Mr. Pope was privately interred at Twickenham, when twelve men and twelve women were entirely new cloathed, and attended his corpse to the grave, pursuant to his will.’[265] No reference is made to his genius, no word is said of his works; nor does it appear that any personal friends attended his funeral. I have said that, owing to his deformity and other causes, his life had been pronounced one long disease. I wonder if his more robustly-constituted critics took this fact into consideration when sitting in judgment on the bitterness, irritability, and other sins of omission and commission of the man of whom the friends around his death-bed observed ‘that his humanity survived his understanding,’ and whom Gay had said ‘he loved as his own soul.’ Think of fifty-six years’ habitation of a misshapen, dwarfed, feeble body, in which he could never have known freedom from physical depression, and say how many of us under the same conditions might not have dentated sharpest incisors rather than wisdom-teeth.
In 1748 Richardson, after eight years’ abstinence from novel-writing, produced his crowning work, ‘Clarissa Harlowe,’ a book that occasioned intenser excitement and more eager expectation than any work of fiction that had preceded it. To understand this, one has only to take a course of eighteenth-century belles-lettres, as exhibited in the romances of the magazines, and so-called memoirs, and narratives of the day.
In these no attempt is made to depict human nature naturally, or to endue the characters represented with the ordinary language, idiosyncrasies, temper, or feelings of living beings. Richardson’s style was formal and spiritless, and the epistolary form in which he developed his long-drawn stories absolutely wearisome; but he painted men and women, and made them speak. Their joys and sorrows, trials and temptations, were true to Nature, as were their weaknesses and vices; and this living force in his delineations—the human passion and the human pathos, that make many of his descriptions throb with life—touched the hearts of his readers, unaccustomed to such graphic treatment, with spontaneous sympathy, and set all England weeping over the imaginary wrongs and sorrows of Miss Clarisse, which Mr. Lang tells us the Young Pretender, with a reward of £30,000 for his apprehension hanging over his head, requested a lady of his acquaintance to secure for him. Not only matrons and maidens, but men also, persisted through the seven or eight volumes with unflagging interest, and any amount of lachrymatory effusion, amongst them a Bishop, who cheerfully averred that he had ‘shed buckets full of tears over its pages.’[266] No wonder if the author (whom Horace Walpole and others regarded as a ‘conceited prig’) did feel a little lifted up in self-estimation, especially when Johnson sententiously observed to him that in writing his story of ‘Clarissa Harlowe’ he ‘had enlarged the knowledge of human nature, and taught the passions to move at the command of virtue.’
There is no doubt that Richardson’s writings initiated the English novel, which henceforth became the favourite form with writers of fiction. It will be remembered by those who have read ‘Clarissa Harlowe,’ a reprint of which, edited by Dallas, was brought out some years ago, that the heroine, in her innocence, takes shelter at the Upper Flask Tavern, and subsequently finds lodgings in Flask Road. Mrs. Barbauld tells us of her own knowledge of a Frenchman who paid a visit to Hampstead for the ‘sole purpose of finding the house in Flask Walk where Clarissa had lodged, and was surprised at the ignorance or indifference of the inhabitants on the subject,’ just as if Clarissa had been a living being.
Her story indelibly associates the author with Hampstead, where, indeed, the smooth-faced, precise, placid-looking little man might often be seen in retired corners of the pump-house or Long Room, or sidling behind the trees in the walks, or propped upon his stick, his favourite attitude, ‘one hand in his bosom, and the other supporting his chin.’ The year in which ‘Clarissa’ appeared was that in which Johnson, in spite of his poverty, had taken lodgings for the exacting Tetty in that ‘little house beyond the church,’ and was hard at work upon the ‘Vanity of Human Wishes,’ possibly to provide the means of paying for them. In this year—the ‘Clarissa’ year—the inhabitants of Hampstead being ‘very desirous to prevent any robberies or felonies being committed in the said parish,’ had joined with those of Hackney, Clapham, and probably other outlying suburbs, and subscribed amongst themselves to a common fund, which enabled them to offer a reward of ‘ten pounds to any person or persons who shall apprehend or take any highwayman or footpad, who shall commit any robbery within the said parish.’[267]
Similar announcements, differing in no way but in the name of the place, appeared almost simultaneously in the columns of the Daily Advertiser in the month of June, 1748.