In Grandison, you have endeavoured to give an example of universal goodness and benevolence. But I am afraid you have strained and stretched that character too far; you have furnished him with too great a variety of accomplishments, some of them destructive, at least not so consistent with the principal and most shining virtue. The man is every thing, as Lucy or Harriet says; which no man ever was, or will be. Homer in the Odyssey, and in the character of Euemæus, has given an example of universal benevolence; but then he represents him an entire rustic, living constantly in the country, shunning all public concourse of men, the court especially, and never going thither, but when obliged to supply the riotous luxury and extravagance of the suitors. Mr. Fielding has imitated these circumstances, as far as was consistent with our manners, in the character of Allworthy, and has with admirable judgment denied him an university education, made him a great lover of retirement, seldom absent from his country seat, never at the metropolis but when called by business, and constantly leaving it, when that was over. The ingenious authoress of David Simple, perhaps the best moral romance that we have, in which there is not one loose expression, one impure, one unchaste idea; from the perusal of which, no man can rise unimproved, has represented, her hero, a character likewise of universal benevolence, agreeably to the part he was to act; of tender years, quite unimproved by education, unexperienced, and ignorant of the ways of the world. Should we now consider the matter a little deeply, we shall find a reason in nature for the practice of these just painters of men and manners. A human creature, in a simple unimproved state, is naturally generous and benevolent; but when he comes abroad into the world, and observes the universal depravity of morals, and the narrow selfishness that every where prevail, according to his particular temper or circumstances, he is either contaminated by the example, or contracts a misanthropical disposition, and hates or despises the greatest part of his species. There may be, and no doubt there are, men who have seen the world, who have been conversant, even in courts, during their whole lives, who yet have retained and exercised humane and benevolent dispositions; but such characters are very rare, and, for the reasons above specified, never can be poetically probable. Such, Sir, is your Grandison; he seems never to have enjoyed retirement, to have been abroad almost all his life-time, to have seen all the courts in Europe, and been conversant, with the great, rich, and powerful, in all nations. You represent him likewise to be a man universally learned, and tell us, at the same time, in capital letters, that SIR CH. GRAN. is a CHRISTIAN; and that too, in the strictest and most bigotted sense of the word; for he refuses the woman he loves, for a difference in religious principles. This, in my humble opinion, is likewise an inconsistency, for universal learning naturally leads to scepticism, and the most useful, as well as solid branch of human knowledge, consists in knowing how little can be known. There are several other inconsistencies in his character, particularly in some of his duelling stories; besides, at any rate, his benevolence has something showy and ostentatious in it; nothing in short of that graceful and beautiful nature which appears in Fielding’s Allworthy.
The character of Lovelace is yet more inconsistent, still more deficient in poetical probability, and indeed intirely contradictory to Homer and nature. In all Homer’s works, there are not two characters between whom there is a greater contrast and opposition, than between those of Achilles and Ulysses. They enjoy no quality in common, but that of valour; and the valour of the one is as different from that of the other, as can well be imagin’d; for they all along partake of their general characters, and are consistent with them. But you, Sir, who, in the mouth of Harriet Byron and that dear flighty creature Lady G. sometimes take upon you to criticize that great master of nature, shew that you have either never studied him, or profited very little by him; for in this one character of Lovelace, you have united these two dissimilar and discordant characters of Achilles and Ulysses; you have given him all the fierceness, cruelty, and contempt of laws, impetuosity, rashness, in short, all the furious ungovernable passions of the one, and have at the same time provided him with all the cunning, craft, dissimulation, and command over his passions, which so much distinguish the other. How to reconcile to probability, or even to possibility, the existence of such opposite and contradictory qualities in one human bosom, is a task which I leave to you.
The fine, or rather the naughty gentleman, in your Pamela, to whom Mr. Fielding very properly gives the sirname of Booby, is indeed one of the greatest bubbles, and blunderers that one can meet withal. You have informed us, that he had been a great rake, and had debauched several women; ’tis well you have done so, but he certainly had made little proficiency in that laudable science, for, from his whole behaviour towards his Pamela, one should be apt to think him the meerest novice in the world. He opens trenches before her properly enough, by giving her silk stockings and fine cloaths to feed her pride and vanity; but when he comes to make a more direct attack in the summer-house, how sheepishly does he act, and what blunders does he not commit? He attempts to kiss her, the girl, as is natural, struggles, and grows angry; he lets her go, and bribes her, with five guineas, to keep the secret. This was knocking his project in the head at once; and had he been guilty of no other blunders, as he was of innumerable, was sufficient to ruin his cause with her for ever. He was not to expect, that a girl, piously educated, would surrender at the very first, especially to a summons given in so blunt and indelicate a manner; on the contrary, he ought to have laid his account with meeting a good deal of anger and resistance; to have born all, with patience, and laughed off his attempt for an innocent frolic; and if she threatened to inform Mrs. Jervis, to have bidden her do so, and told her, that he would kiss Mrs. Jervis and her both. In which case she never would have opened her lips about the matter; in every succeeding attempt, he would have met with less and less resistance, till at last he might have accomplished his desires, before Miss Pamela had certainly known what he would be at. But by his offering to bribe her to silence, he betrayed all his designs, and informed her she had a secret to keep, which unless she had been constitutionally vicious, it was imposible for her not to disclose. Mr. Booby shews likewise the utmost ignorance of human nature, in thinking to gain his ends with a young and innocent girl by the force of money. All young girls are taught to put a value on their virginity, and unless debauched by their own sex, they never will part with it, but to those they like. None but well-disciplin’d ladies of the town are to be gained upon by meer money; and Mr. Booby, by the whole of his conduct, appears to be nothing but a downright Covent-garden rake. He was resolved to have Pamela, and marriage was indeed the only way left for him. This your first performance concludes with that happy event, and having sold well, I imagine you was induced to continue the story. But had I undertaken that task, without violating the probability or the consistency of the characters, I should have introduced Parson Williams very fairly making a cuckold of Booby, and providing him with an heir to his estate, which is the way all such Boobies ought to be treated, and a proper catastrophe for all such preposterous matches.
Your three Heroines are, Pamela, Harriet, and Clarissa, ladies all renowned for chastity and Bible-scholarship. The chastity of the first was from beginning to end never well attackt, and the defence she made is so far from being extraordinary, that had she surrendered at discretion, it ought to have been reckoned miraculous. There is nothing very characteristic about Harriet, yet is she a good sort of a girl enough, especially as times go. The men are sunk, and the women barely swim, saith the lively Charlotte Grandison. But the character of Clarissa is, indeed, admirable throughout the whole. Nature and propriety are not only strictly observed, but we see the greatest nobleness of soul, generosity of sentiments, filial affection, delicacy, modesty, and every female virtue, finely maintained and consistently conspicuous all along. The circumstances which induced her noble and generous spirit to contract a liking for Lovelace, are finely imagin’d; her delicacy and reserve, her disgust at his teazing ways, after she was in his power, are naturally to be expected from a woman of her superior accomplishments. There is something excessively pathetic, and even sublime, in her first address to him, after she was betrayed; her constant refusal of his proffer’d hand, her resignation to her fate, and her behaviour to her hard-hearted relations, are all equally noble, and all natural in a Clarissa. Her character, in short, is such, that unless one should be hunting for faults, scarce any can be found; and perhaps it is owing to such a disposition in me, that I cannot help observing she is rather too good, at least too methodically so: The division of her time, and her diary had been better omitted; all such things detract from the nature and simplicity of a character. The characters of her family are finely marked and distinguished, and well adapted for bringing on the catastrophe. There is something likewise extremely noble and generous in the friendship between Clarissa and Miss Howe. But I must here observe, that in this, your capital performance, you seem in a good measure to have exhausted your invention with respect to characters. For instance, that dear flighty creature Lady G. is nothing else but a second edition of Madam Howe’s lively daughter. They are both wits, and have both high notions of female prerogative, and the pre-eminence of their own sex over the other; they had both like to have run away with too worthless fellows, and both afterwards treated two honest well-meaning men, during the time of their courtship, like dogs; and both, I imagine, for all these reasons, will be great favourites with the female part of your readers. Pollexfen and his crew very much resemble Lovelace and his Beelzebubs; and Grandmamma Shirley is nothing else but a second mamma Horton; as Lord Goosecap is another Hickman.
It would take up too much time to animadvert upon all the rest of your male and female characters. I shall only observe in general, that you seem to have succeeded better in your subordinate ones, than in the principal; the divine Clarissa, as you justly call her, always excepted. Though some are faulty, yet many appear to be well marked and distinguished.
The third and last thing that is to be done in an epic or dramatic composition is, to inculcate some one great moral virtue, by making it the characteristic of the hero or the chief person. Thus Homer, in his Odyssey, proposes Ulysses as an example of prudence he professes to sing,
Τον ανδρα πολυτροπον.
The man for wisdom’s various arts renown’d.
And Virgil, in the person of Æneas, gives an example of piety to the Gods, he sings the pious Æneas. In the same manner, in the memoirs of Sir Cha. Grandison you propose an example of benevolence, and in Pamela of chastity; you celebrate the benevolent Grandison and the chaste Pamela. I have already, in the two foregoing articles, given my opinion sufficiently of the first, and shall here say somewhat more of the latter, and enquire a little into the nature of chastity.
The influence of custom, habit, and education, over human minds is prodigious and inconceivable. It is so great and extensive, that perhaps it is utterly impossible to determine what principles or conceptions we receive from nature, and what from the other sources. All women of honour and condition among civilized nations imagine, that what are called virgin delicacy and reserve, female chastity and modesty, are not only fit and proper, but natural and inherent in their sex. Fit and proper they certainly are, as the universal consent of all ages and nations shews; and besides, that fitness and propriety is founded on the nature of things, but natural and inherent they are not, as is equally manifest from experience. In ancient Greece, where the women were remarkable both for continence before marriage, and fidelity after it, customs prevailed diametrically opposite to all our most established notions of modesty and delicacy. It was customary among them, for the women to perform the offices of rubbers, sweaters, and cuppers to the men, when bathing; nor was this the employment of the servants, or female slaves, but of young ladies of the highest rank and quality. Thus, in the third Odyssey, when Telemachus is entertained at Nestor’s palace, his youngest daughter,