As for description and dialogue, there is not very much of the former in Pamela, though it might not be unfair to include under the head those details, after the manner of Defoe (such as Pamela's list of purchases when she thinks she is going home), which supply their own measure of verisimilitude to the story. But there are some things of the kind which Defoe never would have thought of—such as the touches of the "tufts of grass" and the "pretty sort of wildflower that grows yonder near the elm, the fifth from us on the left," which occur in the gipsy scene. The dialogue plays a much more important part: and may be brought into parallel with that in the Polite Conversation, referred to above and published just before Pamela. It is "reported" of course, instead of being directly delivered, in accordance with the letter-scheme of which more presently, but that makes very little difference; to the first readers it probably made no difference at all. Here again that process of "vivification," which has been so often dwelt on, makes an astonishing progress—the blood and colour of the novel, which distinguish it from the more statuesque narrative, are supplied, if indirectly yet sufficiently and, in comparison with previous examples, amply. Here you get, almost or quite for the first time in the English novel, those spurts and sparks of animation which only the living voice can supply. Richardson is a humorist but indirectly; yet only the greatest humorists have strokes much better than that admirable touch in which, when the "reconciliations and forgivenesses of injuries" are being arranged, and Mr. B. (quite in the manner of the time) suggests marrying Mrs. Jewkes to the treacherous footman John and giving them an inn to keep—Pamela, the mild and semi-angelic but exceedingly feminine Pamela, timidly inquires whether, "This would not look like very heavy punishment to poor John?" She forgives Mrs. Jewkes of course, but only "as a Christian"—as a greater than Richardson put it afterwards and commented on it in the mouth of a personage whom Richardson could never have drawn, though Fielding most certainly could.
The original admirers of Pamela, then, were certainly justified: and even the rather fatuous eulogies which the author prefixed to it from his own and (let us hope) other pens (and which probably provoked Fielding himself more than even the substance of the piece) could be transposed into a reasonable key. But we ought nowadays to consider this first complete English novel from a rather higher point of view, and ask ourselves, not merely what its comparative merits were in regard to its predecessors, and as presented to its first readers, but what its positive character is and what, as far as it goes, are the positive merits or defects which it shows in its author.
The first thing to strike one in this connection is, almost of course, the letter-form. More agreement has been reached about this, perhaps, than about some other points in the inquiry. The initial difficulty of fiction which does not borrow the glamour of verse or of the stage is the question, "What does all this mean?" "What is the authority?" "How does the author know it all?" And a hundred critics have pointed out that there are practically only three ways of meeting this. The boldest and the best by far is to follow the poet and the dramatist themselves; to treat it like one of the magic lions of romance, ignore it, and pass on, secure of safety, to tell your story "from the blue," as if it were an actual history or revelation, or something passing before the eyes of the reader. But at that time few novelists had the courage to do this, daunted as they were by the absence of the sword and shield of verse, of the vantage-room of the stage. Then there is the alternative of recounting it by the mouth of one of the actors in, or spectators of, the events—a plan obvious, early, presenting some advantages, still very commonly followed, but always full of little traps and pits of improbability, and peculiarly trying in respect to the character (if he is made to have any) of the narrator himself. Thirdly, there is the again easy resource of the "document" in its various forms. Of these, letters and diaries possess some prerogative advantages; and were likely to suggest themselves very particularly at this time when the actual letter and diary (long rather strangely rare in English) had for some generations appeared, and were beginning to be common. In the first place the information thus obtained looks natural and plausible: and there is a subsidiary advantage—on which Richardson does not draw very much in Pamela, but which he employs to the full later—that by varying your correspondents you can get different views of the same event, and first-hand manifestations of extremely different characters.
Its disadvantages, on the other hand, are equally obvious: but there are two or three of them of especial importance. In the first place, it is essentially an artificial rather than an artful plan—its want of verisimilitude, as soon as you begin to think of it, is as great as that of either of the others if not greater. In the second, without immense pains, it must be "gappy and scrappy," while the more these pains are taken the more artificial it will become. In the third, the book is extremely likely, in the taking of these pains and even without them, to become intolerably lengthy and verbose. In the first part at least of the first part of Pamela, Richardson avoided these dangers fairly if not fully; in the second part he succumbed to them; in his two later novels, though more elaborate and important plots to some extent bore up the expansion, he succumbed to them almost more. Pains have been taken above to show how the first readers of Pamela might rejoice in it, because of its contrast with the character of the seventeenth-century novel which was most read—the Scudéry or "heroic" romance. It is not, I think, too severe to say that nothing but the parallel with that romance, and the tolerance induced by familiarity with it, could make any one put up with the second part of Pamela itself, or with the inhumanly prolonged divagation of Clarissa and Grandison. Nor, as has been hinted, is the solace of the letters—in the opportunity of setting forth different tempers and styles—here much taken.
There is no doubt that one main attraction of this letter-plan (whether consciously experienced or not does not matter) was its ready adaptation to Richardson's own special and peculiar gift of minute analysis of mood, temper, and motive. The diary avowedly, and the letter in reality, even though it may be addressed to somebody else, is a continuous soliloquy: and the novelist can use it with a frequency and to a length which would be intolerable and impossible on the stage. Now soliloquy is the great engine for self—revelation and analysis. It is of course to a great extent in consequence of this analysis that Richardson owes his pride of place in the general judgment. It is quite possible to lay too much stress on it, as distinguishing the novel from the romance: and the present writer is of opinion that too much stress has actually been laid. The real difference between romance per se and novel per se (so far as they are capable of distinct existence) is that the romance depends more on incident and the novel more on character. Now this minute analysis and exhibition, though it is one way of drawing or constructing character, is not the only, nor even a necessary, one. It can be done without: but it has impressed the vulgar, and even some who are not the vulgar, from Dr. Johnson to persons whom it is unnecessary to mention. They cannot believe that there is "no deception"—that the time is correctly told—unless the works of the watch are bared to them: and this Richardson most undoubtedly does. Even in his 'prentice work, every flutter of Pamela's little heart is registered, and registered probably enough: nor could the registry have been effected, perhaps, in any other way that should be in the least probable so well as by the letter and journal method. Of course this analysis was not quite new; it had existed in a sort of way in the heroic novel: and it had been eminently present in the famous Princesse de Clèves of Madame de la Fayette as well as in her French successors. But these stories had generally been as short as the heroics had been long: and no one had risen (or descended) to anything like the minuteness and fullness of Richardson. As was before pointed out in regard to the letter-system generally, this method of treatment is exposed to special dangers, particularly those of verbosity and "overdoing"—not to mention the greater one of missing the mark. Richardson can hardly be charged with error, though he may be with excess, in regard to Pamela herself in the earlier part of the book—perhaps even not in regard to Mr. B.'s intricacies of courtship, matrimonial compliment, and arbitrary temper later. But he certainly succumbs to them in the long and monstrous scene in which Lady Davers bullies, storms at, and positively assaults her unfortunate sister-in-law before she is forced to allow that she is her sister-in-law. Part of course of his error here comes from the mistake with which Lady Mary afterwards most justly reproached him—that he talked about fine ladies and gentlemen without knowing anything about them. It was quite natural for Lady Davers to be disgusted, to be incredulous, to be tyrannical, to be in a certain sense violent. But it is improbable that she would in any case have spoken and behaved like a drunken fishfag quarrelling with another in the street: and the extreme prolongation of the scene brings its impropriety more forcibly into view. Here, as elsewhere (a point of great importance to which I may invite attention), Richardson follows out, with extraordinary minuteness and confidence, a wrong course: and his very expertness in the process betrays him and brings him to grief. If he had run the false scent for a few yards only it would not matter: in a chase prolonged to something like "Hartleap Well" extension there is less excuse for his not finding it out. Nevertheless it would of course be absurd not to rank this "knowledge of the human heart" among the claims which not only gave him but have kept his reputation. I do not know that he shows it much less in the later part of the first two volumes (Pamela's recurrent tortures of jealous curiosity about Sally Godfrey are admirable) or even in the dreary sequel. But analysis for analysis' sake can have few real, though it may have some pretended, devotees.
The foregoing remarks have been designed, less as a criticism of Pamela (which would be unnecessary here), or even of Richardson (which would be more in place, but shall be given in brief presently), than as an account and justification of the book's position in the real subject of this volume—the History of the English Novel. And this account will dispense us from dealing, at corresponding length, with the individually more important but historically subordinate books which followed. Of these Clarissa, as few people can be ignorant, is a sort of enlarged, diversified, and transposed Pamela, in which the attempts of a libertine of more resolution and higher gifts than Mr. B. upon a young lady of much more than proportionately higher station and qualities than Pamela's, are—as such success goes—successful at last: but only to result in the death of the victim and the punishment of the criminal. The book is far longer than even the extended Pamela; has a much wider range; admits of episodes and minor plots, and is altogether much more ambitious; but still—though the part of the seducer Lovelace is much more important than that of Mr. B.—it is chiefly occupied with the heroine. In Sir Charles Grandison, on the contrary, though no less than three heroines exist after a fashion and are carefully treated, the author's principal object is to depict—in direct contrast to Mr. B. and Lovelace—a "Good Man"—the actual first title of the book, which he wisely altered. This faultless and insufferable monster is frantically beloved by, and hesitates long between, two beauties, the Italian Clementina della Porretta and the English Harriet Byron. The latter of these carries him off (rather because of religious difficulties than of any great predilection on his own part) and the piece ends with a repetition, extension, and intensification of the bounties showered upon Pamela by her husband, and her almost abject gratitude for them. Only of course "the good man" could never be guilty of Mr. B.'s meditated relapse from the path of rectitude, nor (one may perhaps add) does Miss Byron seem to possess the insinuating astuteness by which Pamela once more
"Reconciles the new perverted man,"
to adapt the last line of A Lover's Complaint to the situation.
Grandison, like Clarissa, has a much wider range of personage and incident than Pamela, and is again double the length of it. No detailed criticism of these enormous books (both of which are conducted in the letter-form, though, in the latter case especially, with long retrospects and narratives which rather strain the style) is possible here. But a few remarks on the characters of Lovelace and Clarissa, which have usually been regarded as Richardson's greatest triumphs, may fitly precede some on his whole character as a novelist.
Admiration and sympathy, tempered with a few reserves, have been the general notes of comment on Clarissa: and—as she goes through the long martyrdom of persecution by her family for not marrying the man she does not love; of worse persecution from the man whom she does love, but who will not marry her, at least until he has conquered her virtue; and of perhaps worst when she feels it her duty to resist his repentant and (as such things go) honourable proffers after he has treacherously deprived her of technical honour—compassion at least is impossible to refuse. But "compassion," though it literally translates "sympathy" from Greek into Latin, is not its synonym in English. It is a disagreeable thing to have to say: but Clarissa's purity strikes one as having at once too much questionable prudery in it and too little honest prudence: while her later resolution has as much false pride as real principle. Even some of her admirers admit a want of straightforwardness in her; she has no passion, which rather derogates from the merit of her conduct in any case; and though she is abominably ill-treated by almost everybody, one's pity for her never comes very near to love.