The Facts of Fiction (3 page)

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.

Of course a man can stand a lot of criticism smilingly when he has been compared with Homer by anyone of the stature of Diderot. But Richardson found criticism where he can least have expected it. Even his apparently unexceptionable
Sir Charles Grandison
—his original title
The Good Man
, shows how abysmally innocent it was—stabbed the soul of Lady Bradshaigh. The plot of the piece seems to us as innocuous as that of Meredith's
Egoist
. Scott describes it in these words:

The only dilemma to which he (Sir Charles) is exposed in seven volumes is the doubt which of the two beautiful and accomplished women, excellent in disposition and high in rank, sister excellences as it were, both being devotedly attached to him, he shall be pleased to select for his bride; and this with so small a shade of partiality towards either, that we cannot conceive his happiness to be endangered wherever his lot may fall, except by a generous compassion for her whom he must necessarily relinquish.

But the eighteenth century had its standards even though they were not always our own. Lady Bradshaigh, immediately upon reading
Sir Charles Grandison
, wrote to Richardson as follows:

You have made me bounce off my chair that two good girls were in love with your hero, and that he was fond of both, I have such despicable notions of a divided love that I cannot have an idea how a worthy object can entertain such a thought.CF

I have quoted Lady Bradshaigh's opinion, not so much for the amusing trifle it is as because in such a piece of criticism the chief difficulties and perils of a novel-with-a-purpose may be seen. Art, in such works, walks handcuffed and the policeman that is the public has its eye on Life itself. If the novelist ruthlessly carries out his purpose the result is certain not to please any readers of fiction, except those who belong to the same group as the author. And if the novel, for one moment, steps out on its own, using its own imaginative muscles, the moralists at once begin to beat the author over the head with his Preface.

Richardson as a novelist was always a little embarrassed by his exertions as a moralist. That he made
Clarissa
a tragedy of classical bleakness and insisted on its remaining so despite such hysterical appeals as that from Colley Cibber and Letitia Pilkington: “Spare her virgin purity, dear sir, spare it. Consider if this wounds Cibber and me (who neither of us set up for immaculate chastity) what must it be to those who possess that inestimable treasure?” is the most convincing proof that Richardson could practise as a novelist as well as preach as a saint. And Richardson, to whom such appeals were common, must often have felt rather as the Creator would have felt had he received a petition on the seventh day asking for the removal from the Garden of Eden of the Tree of Good and Evil, with attendant Serpent. Both were appeals which the Creator was bound, in the interests of intelligent creation, to ignore.

The true defects of
Sir Charles Grandison
are that it was so slow, so trivial, so proper and so Italian (Italy was far more genteel than France at the time) that had a petition been got up on behalf of Miss Byron or Miss Selby, or even for Sir Charles himself on the eve of his duel with Sir
Hargreave Pollexfen, no one would have put himself to the trouble of signing it.

Sir Charles Grandison
was a failure (it can hardly be said to have failed) not so much because it was too Italian—Macaulay ingeniously suggested that shorn of its Italianate appendages it would make an excellent novel—as because its propriety was so uniformly of the order that led Johnson to remark that “Richardson taught the passions to move at the command of virtue.”