If Richardson had written in this vein throughout, he would have been popular as none but a few writers have been. But instead of allowing his mind to work like the good camera it was, he was constantly rattling it like a church poor-box to remind his hearers of another and a higher life. Thus in the letter describing the melancholy demise of Mrs. Sinclair, the wanton but still reclaimable Mr. Belford suddenly exlaims in one of those bathwaste gurgles of penitence that established Richardson’s respectability beyond all reasonable doubt:
Oh, Lovelace, what lives do most of us rakes and libertines lead! What company we do keep! … What woman, nice in her person, and of purity in her mind and manners, did she know what miry wallowers the generality of men of our class are in themselves, but would detest thoughts of associating with such filthy sensualists, whose favourite taste causes them to mingle with dregs and stews, brothels and common sewers.
And six pages further on we reach this passage, which suggests that either a sudden attack of delicacy, or merely a gradual decline in his stock of ideas on the subject of the unfortunate lady’s deficiencies, had affected the author.
To have done with so shocking a subject at once, we shall take notice that Mr. Belford in a future letter writes that the miserable woman to the surprise of the operators themselves [all this fuss was because she had broken a leg] (through hourly increasing torture of body and mind) held out so long as to Thursday, Sept. 21 and then died in such agonies as terrified into a transitory penitence all the wretches about her.
There is a great deal in these six dreadful but uplifting pages. And there is more even than there seems at first. It would be impossible to deny that Richardson appears to have enjoyed writing them. He enjoyed writing about a lot of things that seem pretty cheap goods at the present day. He was half-way to Shakespeare in some of his jokes, as for instance in the “whimsical scheme ” in Pamela when the disgruntled sister-in-law endeavours to discover whether the newly married pair are still in bed together at nine in the morning.
In the mechanical expression that is now current we should probably say that Richardson was obsessed by sex. We might with more justice say that he was obsessed by virtue. Certainly in his efforts to show what a hardy plant it was he never spared the pains of raking; or even of muck-raking. Richardson was a moralist with an almost botanical respect for the Fair Lily view of women; and a most unbotanical aversion from the Virgin Lily. Both Pamela and Clarissa are races between the Ring and the Rape, and in the better novel it is the rape that wins.
It would, however, be a mischievous view of Richardson to conclude that he enjoyed writing of the deflowering of women, except to show the perfection of the whole flower. If there had been so much as a single smear of real salacity in him it would have been detected at the time. It would be hard to imagine any man in the whole history of English letters harder to dupe on such a matter than Johnson; and Johnson was perfectly satisfied with Richardson’s deepest moral credentials. It was such later critics as Coleridge, who said, “His mind is so very vile a mind, so oozy, so hypocritical, praise-mad, canting, envious, concupiscent—” who had any serious doubts.
But what did not satisfy Johnson was the genuineness of the small change of Richardson’s character. Boswell reports the Doctor to have said that:
His perpetual study was to ward off petty inconveniences, and to procure petty pleasures; that his love of continual superiority was such, that he took care always to be surrounded by women, who listened to him implicitly, and did not venture to contradict his opinions; and that his desire of distinction was so great that he used to give large vails to Speaker Onslow’s servants, that they might treat him with respect.
Certainly so pitiable an action as tipping a porter to get a salute could only be the product of a tiny mind. To get satisfaction from the resulting bow would seem almost incredible. Vanity of this kind is a kind of self-deceit. And this dishonesty of his towards himself may give us a hint as to why his male characters, unlike his female—a most rare and remarkable thing—are such flabby failures. Writing of women, he had only to look about him to find his Pamelas and Clarissas and Miss Byrons in full bloom on every hedgerow. And he had a very good eye for them. But when he came to write of men he would naturally turn his eyes inwards, look into his heart, and find it all moral maxims and the manners of Tun-bridge Wells; a Grandison deprived of most of his grandeur.
Fielding said that the discovery of hypocrisy and the exposure of vanity are the true source of the ridiculous, the raw material of comedy. Probably it is for some such reason that Richardson appears to us such an absurd old buffer. He was more like a character sketch of his sort of man than any man should be. And he was not only like a character but like a caricature. He stands out from history with the pompous and unprepossessing dignity of a humane employer seen against a perpetual background of testimonials from his sober, industrious and grateful staff.
Richardson’s trade was that of printer, and it is said that he used to hide half-crowns among his types to encourage the early-bird type of workman. History, in recording this brief but illuminating fact, has omitted to tell us whether the ruse was successful (it may have been, for Richardson certainly was) or whether it merely resulted in a frantic and upsetting treasure-hunt every morning. No matter which; the picture of the solemn old donkey furtively popping his florins and sixpences into his type-case is sufficient.
One thing is certain: had young Samuel in his own apprentice days been fortunate enough to find so subtle and generous a master, he would have carried off the half-crown every time, just as he carried off his master’s daughter and so succeeded to the business.
All through life, his diligence, his youthful assiduity, his perseverance and overwhelming honesty were a constant source of inspiration and reward to him. He once confessed rather gloriously:
I served a diligent seven years to … a master who grudged every hour to me that tended not to his profit, even of those times of leisure and diversion which the refractoriness of my fellow servants obliged him to allow them, and were usually allowed by other masters to their apprentices. I stole from the hours of rest and relaxation my reading times for the improvement of my mind, and being engaged in correspondence with a gentleman, greatly my superior in degree, and of ample fortune, who, had he lived, intended high things for me, those were all the opportunities I had in my apprenticeship to carry on. But this little incident I may mention; I took care that even my candle was of my own purchasing, that I might not, in the most trifling instance, make my master a sufferer (and who used to call me the pillar of the house) and not to disable myself by watching or sitting up, to perform my duty to him in the daytime.
There is no record of what the “high things ” were that the superior gentleman had in store for young Samuel. But since, despite his ample fortune, the gentleman died in the middle of a correspondence with a writer of such formidable verbosity, it is perhaps not surprising that Richardson glosses over the incident: he may even have had the superior gentleman’s death on his conscience.
Even in those early days Richardson was already at his chosen task of letter-writing. Probably he was a man who could say a great many things in writing that he would not have had the spirit to say in the flesh: a great many feminine-minded men have this peculiarity. He only really became a man when he had a pen between his fingers. And then he became more than an ordinary man; rich in invention, painful in his sincerity and as untiring as a ledger-clerk.
Indeed Richardson himself is the best answer to the objection that is commonly made to his epistolary novels: that no one could have found time to write the letters. The answer is that Richardson did. He wrote them himself without amanuensis or mechanical aid, and still found time to manage one of the great printing houses of his day. If Pamela had been half the girl her creator was she could have tossed off those three-thousand word documents of hers and still have earned her keep helping the grimy Mrs. Jewkes. Pamela herself excused her genius by saying with a charming g
esture of depreciation: “I have such a knack of writing that when I am by myself I cannot sit without a pen in my hand.”
It was probably the awkwardness and infrequency of the mails that assisted Richardson in the composition of his letters. It is practice in letter writing as in other things that makes imperfect. Richardson lived in an age of extended leisure and sought to fill it. As a letter-writer, with similar encouragements he might easily have become a serious rival in length to Walpole himself. His longest epistolary novel, Clarissa, is a million words in length. (The average length of a modern novel is about 80,000.) He certainly wrote as though the post were not going out until the day after to-morrow week and Time himself were the carrier.
Thus he allowed himself one of the strangest, most leisured and most decorous flirtations of which we have record in all the history of literature—first under an assumed name and then under his own—with a Lady Bradshaigh. She, poor rural dame, was a lady of culture weary of her husband’s pigs. She saw salvation for her starving and thwarted soul in correspondence with a professional author. It is an eighteenth-century vignette of the country striving for the town. And Lady Bradshaigh began an interchange of letters with Richardson which steadily grew less purely literary and ideological, and more capricious and kittenish, until she provoked this portrait-of-the-artist-by-himself:
I will go through the park [wrote Richardson] once or twice a week to my little retirement, but I will, for a week together, be in it every day three or four hours, at your command, till you tell me you have seen a person who answers to this description, namely, short, rather plump than emaciated, notwithstanding his complaints about five foot five inches; fair wig; lightish cloth coat, all black besides; one hand generally in his bosom, the other a cane in it, which he leans upon under the skirts of his coat usually, that it may imperceptibly serve him as a support when attacked by sudden tremors or startings or dizziness, which too frequently attack him, but thank God, not so often as formerly; looking directly fore-right, as passers by would imagine, but observing all that stirs on either hand of him without moving his short neck; hardly ever turning back; of a light brown complexion; teeth not yet failing him; smoothish-faced and ruddy-cheeked; at sometimes looking to be about sixty-five, at other times much younger; a regular even pace, stealing away ground, rather than seeming to rid it: a grey eye, too often overclouded by mistiness from the head; by chance lively; very likely it will be if he has hopes of seeing a lady whom he loves and honours; his eye always on the ladies; if they have very large hoops he looks down and supercilious, and, as if he would be thought wise, but perhaps the sillier for that as he approaches a lady his eye is never raised first upon her face, but upon her feet, and thence he raises it up, pretty quickly for a dull eye; and one would think (if we thought him at all worth an observation) that from her air and (the last beheld) her face, he sets her down in his mind as so and so, and then passes on to the next object he meets; only then looking back, if he greatly likes or dislikes, as if he would see the lady appear to be all of a piece, in the one light or in the other.
It has become the custom to regard this letter as the supreme example of Richardson’s vanity. I am not sure that it would not be better to regard it as the supreme example of Richardson’s surpassing skill in describing the outward man—a great, and nowadays neglected, talent of the novelist. Personal vanity was, doubtless, at the bottom of it. But Richardson’s ego explained in terms of Narcissism is an exercise that we may leave to our children.
Richardson as a realist, indeed, was as capable as any of his time. Neither Fielding nor Smollett brought a closer inspection to more solidly imagined characters. Richardson certainly could describe the appearance of his people with a gusto that comes as startlingly as a hearty handshake from an anæmic man. His portrait of Mrs. Jewkes in Pamela (she got into Clarissa under the alias of Mrs. Sinclair, and even possibly started her bawdy life as the nurse in Romeo and Juliet) is a piece of work that in its powerful simplicity is guaranteed to go smack at the human eye:
Now I will give you a picture of this wretch. She is a broad, squat, pursy, fat thing, quite ugly, if anything human can be so called, about forty years old. She has a huge hand, and an arm as thick as my waist, I believe. Her nose is fat and crooked and her brows grow down over her eyes; a dead spiteful, grey, goggling eye, to be sure, she has. And her face is fat and broad; and as to colour, looks like as if it had been pickled a month in saltpetre: I daresay she drinks. She has a hoarse, man-like voice, and is as thick as she is long, and yet looks so deadly strong that I am afraid she would dash me at her foot in an instant, if I was to vex her—so that with a heart more ugly than her face, she frightens me sadly; and I am undone to be sure if God does not protect me; for she is very, very wicked—indeed she is.
The qualities that are lacking, qualities that Fielding, and to a lesser degree Smollett, and to a greater degree Sterne, possessed—are detachment and even the first flickers of humour. Richardson, however, made up for his paucity of humorous detachment in his richness of purpose. But purpose, especially religious purpose, has a peculiarly destructive effect upon a novelist’s talents.
Richardson, for instance, hated his villains and loved his heroines (he had no heroes to speak of) with a greater intensity of emotion than a novelist can safely allow himself. The reader is apt to feel a trifle self-conscious before Richardson’s obvious anxiety over Pamela’s virtue and Clarissa’s entirety. The body of the spotless Pamela is simply a white target waved about in front of Fate. It is there to have mud slung at it. One hit and the game would be over.
By the time he came to write Clarissa, Richardson had made the supreme discovery that it is the mind and not the body that is virgin or debauched. Clarissa is one of those natural virgins, so much more sinned against than sinning that to appreciate their fate fully the reader must accept the difficult but essential Doctrine of the Immaculate Seduction.
When Richardson had finished Clarissa he felt that precisely two-thirds of the pattern he was trying to impress on life was finished. He wrote a preface to his last work, Sir Charles Grandison, that is rather like the prospectus of a solemn and sincere quack who offers to cure the sins of society in three bottles. He said:
Pamela exhibited the beauty and superiority of virtue in an innocent and unpolished mind, with the reward which often, even in this life, a protecting Providence bestows on virtue. A young woman of low degree, relating to her honest parents the severe trials she met with from a master who ought to have been the protector not the assailer, of her honour, shows the character of a libertine in its truly contemptible light.
And he went on to explain that:
Clarissa displayed a more melancholy scene. A young lady of higher future, and born to happier hopes, is seen involved in such variety of deep distresses, as lead her to an untimely death.… The heroine, however, as a truly Christian heroine, proves superior to her trials, and her heart always excellent, refined, and exalted by every one of them, rejoices in the approach of a happy eternity. Her cruel destroyer appears wretched and disappointed, even in the boasted success of his vile machinations. But still (buoyed up by self deceit and vain presumption) he goes on, after a very short fit of imperfect, yet terrifying conviction, hardening himself more and more, till unreclaimed by the most affecting warnings and repeated admonitions he perishes miserably in the bloom of life, and sinks into the grave oppressed by guilt, remorse and horror.
Richardson always regarded the wages of sin as payable on this side. And he took considerable pleasure in acting as deputy cashier. But in his new book he chose to set a good example, and not a bad one, before his readers. The only trouble was that the example he set was too good. It was rather like setting up a photograph of Mount Everest as an inspiration for a suburban hiking club.
Richardson presented to the public in the person of Sir Charles Grandison “the example of a man acting uniformly well through a variety of trying scenes, because all his actions are regulated by one steady
principle: a man of religion and virtue, of liveliness and spirit; accomplished and agreeable; happy in himself and a blessing to others.”
And with conspicuous courage Richardson stood by his original intention of creating such a freak of virtue even when the loyal and lamblike critics turned against him. He admitted that it has been objected that Grandison “approaches too near the faultless character that critics censure as above nature.” “Yet it ought to be observed,” Richardson continued in defence, “that he performs no one action that is not in the power of any man in his situation to perform: and that he checks and restrains himself in no one instance in which it is not the duty of a prudent and good man to restrain himself.” The real trouble with Richardson as a novelist is apparent in that passage: he never could quite throw off a manner rather like that of a Headmaster in Holy Orders talking to a new batch of prefects.
Richardson always used the prefaces to later editions as a sparring ground for fights with the casual critics of earlier editions. And, of course, he always won, because he could have the first and the last word every time. The prefaces, in consequence of these disputations, form a valuable family photograph-album of eighteenth century fiction, showing both sides of the family—the reader as well as the writer.
Thus we come upon the objection of an “anonymous gentleman ” who suggests that “as soon as Pamela knows the Gentleman‘s love is honourable ” the style of the whole story “ought to be a little raised”; and the same anonymous gentleman makes this entirely salutary objection:
That females are too apt to be struck with Images of Beauty; and that the Passage where the Gentleman is said to span the Waist of Pamela with his hands is enough to ruin a Nation of Women by Tight-Lacing.
Poor Richardson! No wonder he never grew out of being a novelist-with-a-moral-purpose. The public simply would not let him. As soon as he allowed his imagination the least rein one reader or another would creep up behind and mutter “Judgment Day ” in his ear. Thus though his footsteps strayed always in a conspicuously straight and narrow path there were always some who accused him of trespassing.
The Facts of Fiction Page 2