Pamela

by Samuel Richardson

  ‘Now,’ said her nephew, ‘’tis my turn: I wish you joy with all my soul, madam; and by what I have seen, and by what I have heard, ’fore Gad, I think you have met with no more than you deserve; and so all the company says, where we have been. And pray forgive all my nonsense to you.’

  ‘I shall always, sir, I hope, respect as I ought, so near a relation of my good Lord and Lady Davers; and I thank you for your kind compliment.’

  ‘Gad, Worden,’ said he to her, who attended her lady for her commands, ‘I believe you‘ve some forgiveness too to ask; for we were all to blame, to make Mrs B. here fly the pit, as she did! Little did we think we made her quit her own house.’

  ‘Thou always,’ replied my lady, ‘say’st either too much or too little.’

  My lady sat down with me half an hour; and told me, that her brother had given her a fine airing. He had quite charmed her, she said, with his kind treatment of her; and, in his discourse, had much confirmed her in the good opinion she had begun to entertain of my discreet and obliging behaviour. ‘But,’ continued she, ‘when he would make me visit, without intending to stay, my old neighbours, (for Mrs Jones being nearest, we visited her first; and she scraped all the rest of the company together) they were all so full of your praises, that I was quite borne down; and, truly, I was Saul among the prophets! ’332

  You may believe how much I was delighted with this; and I spared not my acknowledgements.

  When her ladyship retired to her chamber, she said, ‘Good-night to you, heartily, and to your good man. I now kiss you out of more than form.’

  Join with me, my dear parents, in my joy for this happy turn; the contrary of which I so much dreaded, and was the only difficulty I had to labour with! This poor Miss Sally Godfrey, I wonder what is become of her, poor soul! I wish he would, of his own head,333 mention her again. Not that I am very uneasy, neither. You will say, I must be a little particular, if I were.

  My dear Mr B. gave me an account, when we went up, of the pains he had taken with his sister; and of all the kind things the company they had been in had said in my behalf. He told me, that when my health, as Mrs B. was toasted, and came to her, she drank it, in these words, ‘Come, brother, here’s your Pamela to you. But I shall not know how to stand this affair, when a certain lady and her daughters come to visit me.’ [One of those young ladies, my dear parents, was the person she was so desirous of seeing the wife of her brother.] ‘Lady Betty, I know,’ said she, ‘will rally me smartly upon it; and, you know, brother, she wants not wit.’ ‘I hope Lady Betty,’ replied he, ‘whenever she marries, will meet with a better husband than I should have made her; for, in my conscience, I think, I should hardly have made a tolerable one to any woman but my Pamela.’

  He told me, that they rallied him on the stateliness of his temper; and said, they agreed with him in opinion, that he would make an exceeding good husband where he was; but that he did so, must be owing more to my meekness, than to his complaisance: ‘For,’ said Miss Darnford, ‘I could see, well enough, when your ladyship’ (speaking to Lady Davers) ‘detained her, though he had but hinted to her, it seems, his desire of finding her at our house, he was so much out of humour, at her supposed non-complaisance, that mine and my sister’s pity for her was more engaged than our envy.’

  ‘Ay,’ said my lady, ‘he is a lordly creature; and cannot bear disappointment, nor ever could.’

  ‘Well, Lady Davers,’ replied he, ‘you, of all persons, should not find fault with me; for I bore a great deal from you, before I was at all angry.’

  ‘Yes,’ replied she; ‘but when I had gone a little too far, as, I own, I did; you made me severely pay for it. You know you did, Sauce-box. And he treated the poor thing too,’ added she, ‘whom I took with me for my advocate, so low had he brought me, in such a manner as made my heart ake for her: but part was art, I know, to make me think the better of her.’

  ‘Indeed, madam,’ said he, ‘there was very little of that; for, at that time, I cared not either for your good or bad opinion of her or of me. And, I own, I was displeased to be broken in upon, after your provocations, by either of you; and Pamela must learn that lesson – Never to come near me, when I am in those humours; which shall be as seldom as possible; for, after a while, if let alone, I come to myself, and am sorry for a violence of temper so like my dear sister’s here; and, for this reason, think it is no matter how few witnesses there are of its intemperance; especially since such witnesses, whether they deserve it or not, (as you see in my Pamela’s case) must be sufferers by it, if, unsent for, they come in my way.’

  He repeated the same lesson to me when alone; and, enforcing it, owned, that he was angry with me in earnest, just then; although more with himself, afterwards, for being so: ‘But when, Pamela,’ said he, ‘you wanted to take all my displeasure upon yourself, I thought it was braving me with your merit, and depending on my weakness, as if I must soon lay aside my anger, if it were transferred to you. I cannot bear, my dear, the thought, that you should wish, on any occasion whatever, to have me angry with you, or not to look upon my displeasure, as the heaviest misfortune that could befal you.’

  ‘But, sir,’ said I, ‘you know, that what I did was to try to reconcile my lady; and, as she herself observed, it was paying her a high regard.’ ‘It was so,’ replied he; ‘but never think of making a compliment to her, or to any body living, at my expence. Besides, she had behaved so intolerably, that I began to think you had stooped too much, and more than I ought to permit my wife to do; and acts of meanness are what I cannot endure in any body, but especially in those I love; and as she had been guilty of a very signal one, I had much rather have renounced her, at that time, than been reconciled to her.’

  ‘Sir,’ said I, ‘I hope I shall always behave so, as not to be thought wilfully disobliging for the future. I am sure, I shall want only to know your will to conform to it. But this instance shews me, that I may much offend, without designing it.’

  ‘My dear Pamela,’ replied he, ‘must not be too serious: I hope I shall not be a very tyrannical husband: yet do I not pretend to be perfect, or to be always governed by reason in my first transports; and I expect, from your affection, that you will bear with me, when you find me in the wrong. I have not an ungrateful spirit; and can, when cool, enter as impartially into myself, as most men; and then I am always kind and acknowledging, in proportion as I have been out of the way.

  ‘But, to convince you, my dear,’ continued he, ‘of your well-meant fault, (I mean, with regard to the consideration I wished you to have to the impetuosity of my temper; for I acknowledge there was no fault in your intention) I will remind you, that you met, when you came to me, while I was so much disordered, a reception you did not expect, and a harsh word or two that you did not deserve. Now, had you not broken in upon me, while my anger lasted, but staid till I had come to you, or sent to request your company, you would have seen none of this, but have met with that affectionate behaviour, which, I doubt not, you will ever merit. In this temper shall you always have a proper influence over me: but you must not suppose, whenever I am out of humour, that in opposing yourself to my passion, you oppose a proper check to it; but when you are so good as to bend like the slender reed, to the hurricane, rather than, like the sturdy oak, to resist it,334 you will always stand firm in my kind opinion; while a contrary conduct would uproot you, with all your excellencies, from my soul.’

  ‘sir,’ said I, (but tears were in my eyes, and I turned my head away to conceal them) ’ I will endeavour, as I said before, to conform myself, in all things, to your will.’

  ‘And I, my dear, will endeavour to make my will as conformable to reason as I can. And let me tell you, that the belief that you would, was one of the inducements I had to marry at all. For nobody was more averse to the state than myself; and now we are upon this subject, I will give you the reasons of my aversion to it.

  ‘We people of fortune, or such as are born to large expectations, of both sexes, are generally educat
ed wrong. You have occasionally touched upon this subject, Pamela, several times in your journal, and so justly, that I will say the less upon it now. We are usually headstrong in our wills, and being unaccustomed to controul from our parents, know not how to bear it.

  ‘Humoured by our nurses, through the faults of our parents, we practise first upon them; and shew the gratitude of our dispositions, in an insolence that ought at first to have been checked and restrained.

  ‘Next, we are to be favoured and indulged at school; and we take care to reward our masters for their required indulgences, with further grateful instances of our unruly dispositions.

  ‘After our wise parents have bribed our way through the usual forms, with very little improvement in our learning, we are brought home; and then our parents take their deserved turn. We torture their hearts by our undutiful behaviour; which, however ungrateful in us, is but the natural consequence of their culpable indulgence, from infancy upwards.

  ‘After we have, perhaps, half broken their hearts, a wife is looked for: birth, and fortune, are the first motives, affection the last (if it be at all consulted): and two people thus educated, thus trained up, in a course of unnatural ingratitude, and who have been headstrong torments to every one who had a share in their education, as well as to those to whom they owe their being, are brought together; and what can be expected, but that they should join most heartily in matrimony to plague one another? It is indeed just it should be so, because they by this means revenge the cause of all those who have been aggrieved and insulted by them, upon each other.

  ‘Neither of them having ever been subject to controul, or even to a contradiction, the man cannot bear it nom one, whose new relation to him, and whose vow of obedience, he thinks, should oblige her to yield her will entirely to his.

  ‘The lady (well-read in nothing, perhaps, but Romances) thinks it very ungallant now, for the first time, to be controuled, and that by a man, from whom she expected nothing but tenderness.

  ‘so great is the difference, between what they both expect from, and what they both find in, each other, that no wonder misunderstandings happen: that these ripen into quarrels; that acts of un-kindness pass, which, even had the first motive to their union been affection, as usually it is not, would have effaced all manner of tender impressions on both sides.

  ‘Appeals to parents or guardians often ensue: if, by mediation of friends, a reconciliation takes place, it hardly ever holds; for the fault is in the minds of both, and- neither of them will think so: whence the wound (not permitted to be probed) is but skinned over, and rankles at the bottom, and at last breaks out with more violence than before. Separate beds are often the consequence; perhaps elopements, guilty ones sometimes; if not, an unconquerable indifference, possibly aversion. And whenever, for appearance-sake, they are obliged to be together, every one sees, that the yawning husband, and the vapourish335 wife, are truly insupportable to each other; but, separate, have freer spirits, and can be tolerable company.

  ‘Now, my Pamela, I would have you think, and I hope you will have reason for it, that had I married the first lady in the land, I would not have treated her better than I will you; for my wife is my wife; and I was the longer in resolving on the state, because I knew its requisites, and doubted my conduct in it.

  ‘I believe I am more nice than many men; but it is because I have been a close observer of the behaviour of wedded folks, and hardly have ever seen it to be such as I could like in my own case. I shall, possibly, give you more particular instances of this, when we have been longer acquainted.

  ‘Had I married with no other views than most men have, on entering into the state, my wife might have been a fine lady, brought up pretty much in my own manner, and accustomed to have her will in every thing.

  ‘Some men come into a compromise; and, after a few struggles, sit down tolerably contented. But, had I married a princess, I could not have done so. Indeed, I must have preferred her to all her sex, before I had consented to go to church with her; for even in this best case, differences are too apt to arise in matrimony, that will sometimes make a man’s home uneasy to him; and there are fewer instances, I believe, of men’s loving better after matrimony, than of women’s; into the reasons of which it is not my present purpose to enquire.

  ‘Then I must have been morally sure, that she preferred me to all men; and, to convince me of this, she must have lessened, not aggravated, my failings; she must have borne with my imperfections; she must have watched and studied my temper; and if ever she had any points to carry, any desire of overcoming, it must have been by sweetness and complaisance; and yet not such a slavish one, as should make her condescension seem to be rather the effect of her insensibility, than of her judgment and affection.

  ‘She should not have given cause for any part of my conduct to her, to wear the least appearance of compulsion or force. The words command on my side, and obedience on hers, I would have blotted out of my vocabulary. For this reason I should have thought it my duty to have desired nothing of her that was not reasonable, or just; and that then she should, on hers, have shewn no reluctance, uneasiness, or doubt, to oblige me, even at half a word.

  ‘I would not have excused her to let me twice enjoin the same thing, while I took such care to make her compliance with me reasonable, and such as should not destroy her own free agency, in points that ought to have been allowed her: yet, if I was not always right, I should have expected that she should bear with me, if she saw me determined; and that she should expostulate with me on the right side of compliance; for that would shew me, (supposing small points in dispute, from which the greatest quarrels, among friends, generally arise) that she differed from me, not for contradiction’s sake, but desired to convince me for my own; and that I should, another time, take fitter resolutions.

  ‘This would have been so obliging a conduct, that I should, in justice, have doubled my esteem for one, who, to honour me, could give up her own judgment; and I should see she could have no other view in her expostulations, after her compliance had passed, than to rectify my notions for the future; and it would have been impossible then, but I must have paid the greater deference to her opinion and advice in matters of greater moment.

  ‘In all companies, she must have shewn, that she had, whether I altogether deserved it or not, an high regard and opinion of me; and this the rather, as such a regard would be not only a reputation, but a security, to herself; since, if ever we rakes attempt a married woman, our first encouragement, next to that of our own vanity, arises from her indifferent opinion, or from her slight, or contempt, of her husband.

  ‘I should have expected, therefore, that she would draw a kind veil over my faults; that such as she could not hide, she should endeavour to extenuate; that she would place my better actions in an advantageous light, and shew that I had her good opinion, at least, whatever liberties the world took with my character.

  ‘She must have valued my friends for my sake; been chearful and easy, whomsoever I had brought home with me; and whatever faults she had observed in me, have never blamed me before company; at least, with such an air as should have shewn she had a better opinion of her own judgment, than of mine.

  ‘Now, my Pamela, this is but a faint sketch of the conduct I must have expected from my wife, let her quality have been what it would; or I must have lived with her on bad terms. Judge, then, if, to me, a woman of the modish taste could have been tolerable.

  ‘The perverseness and contradiction, I have too often seen, even among people of sense, as well as condition, in the married state, had prejudiced me against it; and, as I knew I could not bear contradiction, surely I was in the right to decline entering into that state with a woman, who, by her education, was so likely to give it: and you see, my dear, that I have not gone among this class of people for a wife; nor know I, indeed, where, in any class, I could have found one so suitable to my mind as you. For here is my misfortune; I could not have been contented to have been but moderately happy in a
wife.

  ‘Judge you, from all this, if I could very well bear, that you should think yourself so well secured of my affection, that you could take the faults of others upon yourself; and, by a supposed supererogatory336 merit, think your interposition sufficient to atone for them. I know my own imperfections: they are many and great: yet will not allow that they shall excuse those of my wife, or make her think I ought to bear faults in her, that she can rectify, because she sees greater in me.

  ‘Upon the whole, I expect that you will bear with me, and consult my temper, till, and only till, you see I am capable of returning insult for condescension; and till you think I shall be so mean as to be the gentler, for negligent or pertinacious treatment. One thing more I will add, that I should scorn myself, if there was one privilege of a wife, that a princess, as such, might expect to be indulged in, that I would not allow to my Pamela. For you are the wife of my affection; I never wished for one before you, nor ever do I hope to have another.’

  I thanked him for these kind hints, and generous assurances; and told him, that they had made so much impression on my mind, that these, and his most agreeable injunctions before given me, and such as he should hereafter be pleased to give me, should be the indispensable rules for my future conduct.

  And, indeed, I am glad that I have fallen upon this method of making a journal of all that passes in these first stages of my happiness; because it will sink the impression still deeper; and I shall have recourse to my papers for my better regulation, as often as I shall mistrust my memory.

  Let me see: What are the rules I am to observe from this awful lecture? Why, these:

  1. I must not, when he is in great wrath with any body, break in upon him without his leave. – I will be sure to remember this.

  2. I must think his displeasure the heaviest thing that can befal me. – That I certainly shall.

  3. And so, that I must not wish to incur it, to save any body else from it. – Let me suffer for it, if I do.