Samuel Richardson, 1689–1761. Born, in Derbyshire, 1689. Apprenticed to a stationer, 1706. Afterwards employed as compositor at a printing works. Set up as a printer on his own account, 1719. Married (i.) Martha Wilde. She died, 25 Jan. 1731. Married (ii.) Elizabeth Leake. Began novel writing, 1739. Master of Stationers’ Company, 1754. Died, in London, 4 July 1761. Buried in St. Bride’s Church. Works: “Pamela” (anon.), 1741–42; “Clarissa” (anon.), 1748; “The History of Sir Charles Grandison” (anon.), 1754 (2nd edn. same year). Posthumous: “Correspondence,” ed. by A. L. Barbauld (6 vols.), 1804. He edited: “A Tour thro’ … at Great Britain,” 1742; Sir T. Roe’s “Negotiations in his Embassy to the Ottoman Porte,” 1746; “The Life … of Balbe Berton” [1760?]. Collected Works: ed. by E. Mangin (19 vols.), 1811; ed. by Leslie Stephen (12 vols.), 1883.

Personal

  As I had never formed any great idea of a printer by those I have seen in Ireland, I was very negligent of my dress, any more than making myself clean; but was extremely surprised when I was directed to a house of very grand outward appearance, and had it been a palace, the beneficent master deserved it. I met a very civil reception from him, and he not only made me breakfast, but also dine with him and his agreeable wife and children. After dinner he called me into his study and showed me an order he had received to pay me twelve guineas, which he immediately took out of his escritoire and put into my hand; but when I went to tell them over, I found that I had fourteen, and, supposing the gentleman had made a mistake, I was for returning two of them, but he with a sweetness and modesty almost peculiar to himself, said he hoped I would not take it ill, that he had presumed to add a trifle to the bounty of my friend. I really was confounded till recollecting that I had read “Pamela,” and been told it was written by one Mr. Richardson, I asked him whether he was not the author of it. He said he was the editor: I told him my surprise was now over, as I found he had only given to the incomparable “Pamela” the virtues of his own worthy heart.

  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, and dizziness, which too frequently attack him, but, thank God, not so often as formerly; looking directly foreright, 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;… a grey eye, too often overclouded by mistinesses from the head; by chance lively; very lively it will be, if he have hope of seeing a lady whom he loves and honours; his eye always on the ladies.

  Poor Mr. Richardson was seized on Sunday evening with a most severe paralytic stroke. How many good hearts will be afflicted by this in many more countries than England! To how many will he be an inexpressible loss! But to consider him at present as lost to himself and perhaps with some sense of that loss is most grievous. It sits pleasantly upon my mind that the last morning we spent together was particularly friendly and quiet and comforting. It was the twenty-eighth of May—he looked then so well! One has long apprehended some stroke of this kind; the disease made its gradual approaches by that heaviness which clouded the cheerfulness of his conversation, that used to be so lively and so instructive; by the increased tremblings which unfitted that hand so peculiarly formed to guide the pen; and by perhaps the querulousness of temper most certainly not natural to so sweet and so enlarged a mind, which you and I have lately lamented as making his family at times not so comfortable as his principles, his study and his delight to diffuse happiness wherever he could, would otherwise have done. Well, his noble spirit will soon now I suppose be freed from its corporeal encumbrance; it were a sin to wish against it, and yet how few such will be left behind.

  At Mr. Nairne’s, he drew the character of Richardson, the authour of “Clarissa,” with a strong yet delicate pencil. I lament much that I have not preserved it; I only remember that he expressed a high opinion of his talents and virtues; but observed, that “his perpetual study was to ward off petty inconveniences, and procure petty pleasures; that his love of continual superiority was such, that he took care to be always surrounded by women, who listened to him implicitly, and did not venture to controvert his opinions; and that his desire of distinction was so great, that he used to give large vails to the Speaker Onslow’s servants, that they might treat him with respect.”

  A literary lady has favoured me with a characteristick anecdote of Richardson. One day at his country-house at Northend, where a large company was assembled at dinner, a gentleman who was just returned from Paris, willing to please Mr. Richardson, mentioned to him a very flattering circumstance,—that he had seen his “Clarissa” lying on the King’s brother’s table. Richardson observing that part of the company were engaged in talking to each other, affected then not to attend to it. But by and by, when there was a general silence, and he thought that the flattery might be fully heard, he addressed himself to the gentleman, “I think, Sir, you were saying something about,—” pausing in a high flutter of expectation. The gentleman provoked at his inordinate vanity, resolved not to indulge it, and with an exquisite sly air of indifference answered, “A mere trifle, Sir, not worth repeating!” The mortification of Richardson was visible, and he did not speak ten words more the whole day. Dr. Johnson was present, and appeared to enjoy it much.

  Richardson’s conversation was of the preceptive kind, but it wanted the diversity of Johnson’s, and had no intermixture of wit or humour. Richardson could never relate a pleasant story, and hardly relish one told by another: he was ever thinking of his own writings, and listening to the praises which, with an emulous profusion, his friends were incessantly bestowing on them, he would scarce enter into free conversation with any one that he thought had not red “Clarissa,” or “Sir Charles Grandison,” and at best, he could not be said to be a companionable man. Those who were unacquainted with Richardson, and had red his books, were led to believe, that they exhibited a picture of his own mind, and that his temper and domestic behaviour could not but correspond with that refined morality which they inculcate, but in this they were deceived. He was austere in the government of his family, and issued his orders to some of his servants in writing only. His nearest female relations, in the presence of strangers, were mutes, and seemed to me, in a visit I once made him, to have been disciplined in the school of Ben Jonson’s Morose, whose injunction to his servant was, “Answer me not but with your leg.” In short, they appeared to have been taught to converse with him by signs; and it was too plain to me, that on his part, the most frequent of them were frowns and gesticulations, importing that they should leave his presence. I have heard it said, that he was what is called a nervous man; and how far nervosity, with so good an understanding as he is allowed to have possessed, will excuse a conduct so opposite to that philanthropy which he laboured to inculcate, I cannot say: his benevolence might have taken another direction, and in other instances be very strong; for I was once a witness to his putting into the hand of Mr. Whiston the bookseller, ten guineas for the relief of one whom a sudden accident had made a widow.

  He was delighted by his own works. No author enjoyed so much the bliss of excessive fondness. I heard from the late Charlotte Lenox the anecdote which so severely reprimanded his innocent vanity, which Boswell has recorded. This lady was a regular visitor at Richardson’s house, and she could scarcely recollect one visit which was not taxed by our author reading one of his voluminous letters, or two or three, if his auditor was quiet and friendly.

  Richardson, the author of “Clarissa,” had been a common printer, and possessed no literature whatever. He was very silent in company, and so vain that he never enjoyed any subject but that of himself or his works. He once asked Douglas, Bishop of Salisbury, how he liked “Clarissa.” The bishop said he could never get beyond the Bailiff scene. The author, thinking this a condemnation of his book, looked grave; but all was right when the bishop added, it affected him so much that he was drowned in tears, and could not trust himself with the book any longer. Richardson had a kind of club of women about him—Mrs. Carter, Mrs. Talbot, &c.—who looked up to him as to a superior being; to whom he dictated and gave laws; and with whom he lived almost entirely. To acquire a facility of epistolary writing he would on every trivial occasion write notes to his daughters even when they were, in the same house with him.—(Bishop Douglas and Dr. Johnson).

  Richardson was, in person, below the middle stature, and inclined to corpulency; of a round, rather than oval, face, with a fair ruddy complexion. His features, says one, who speaks from recollection, bore the stamp of good nature, and were characteristic of his placid and amiable disposition. He was slow in speech, and, to strangers at least, spoke with reserve and deliberation; but, in his manners, was affable, courteous, and engaging, and when surrounded with the social circle he loved to draw around him, his eye sparkled with pleasure, and often expressed that particular spirit of archness which we see in some of his characters, and which gave, at times, a vivacity to his conversation, not expected from his general taciturnity and quiet manners.

  His moral character was in the highest degree exemplary and amiable. He was temperate, industrious, and upright; punctual and honourable in all his dealings; and with a kindness of heart, and a liberality and generosity of disposition, that must have made him a very general favourite, even if he had never acquired any literary distinction.—He had a considerable share of vanity, and was observed to talk more willingly on the subject of his own works than on any other. The lowness of his original situation, and the lateness of his introduction into polite society, had given to his manners a great shyness and reserve; and a consciousness of his awkwardness and his merit together, rendered him somewhat jealous in his intercourse with persons in more conspicuous situations, and made him require more courting and attention than every one was disposed to pay. He had high notions of parental authority, and does not seem always quite satisfied with the share of veneration which his wife could be prevailed on to shew for him. He was particularly partial to the society of females; and lived, indeed, as Mrs. Barbauld has expressed it, in a flower-garden of ladies.

  He was unceasingly industrious; led astray by no idle views of speculation, and seduced by no temptations to premature expenditure. Industry brought independence, and, finally, wealth in its train; and that well-won fortune was husbanded with prudence, and expended with liberality. A kind and generous master, he was eager to encourage his servants to persevere in the same course of patient labour by which he had himself attained fortune; and it is said to have been his common practice to hide half-a-crown among the types, that it might reward the diligence of the workman who should first be in the office in the morning. His hospitality was of the most liberal, as well as the most judicious kind…. The predominant failing of Richardson seems certainly to have been vanity; vanity naturally excited by his great and unparalleled popularity at home and abroad, and by the continual and concentred admiration of the circle in which he lived. Such a weakness finds root in the mind of every one who has obtained general applause, but Richardson, the gentleness of whose mind was almost feminine, was peculiarly susceptible of this feminine weakness, and he fostered and indulged its growth, which a man of firmer character would have crushed and restrained.

  His own manners were strict and formal with regard to his family, probably because he had formed his notions of life from old books, and also because he did not well know how to begin to do otherwise (for he was naturally bashful), and so the habit continued through life. His daughters addressed him in their letters by the title of “Honoured Sir,” and are always designating themselves as “ever dutiful.” Sedentary living, eternal writing, and perhaps that indulgence in the table, which, however moderate, affects a sedentary man twenty times as much as an active one, conspired to hurt his temper (for we may see by his picture that he grew fat, and his philosophy was in no respect as profound as he thought it); but he was a most kind-hearted generous man; kept his pocket full of plums for children, like another Mr. Burchell; gave a great deal of money away in charity, very handsomely too; and was so fond of inviting friends to stay with him, that when they were ill, he and his family must needs have them to be nursed.

  The great author was accustomed to be adored. A gentler wind never puffed mortal vanity. Enraptured spinsters flung tea-leaves around him, and incensed him with the coffee-pot. Matrons kissed the slippers they had worked for him. There was a halo of virtue around his nightcap. All Europe had thrilled, panted, admired, trembled, wept o’er the pages of the immortal little kind honest man with the round paunch. Harry came back quite glowing and proud at having a bow from him. “Ah,” says he, “my lord, I am glad to have seen him!”

  Good Samuel Richardson—for you really were a good man, in a higher sense to your mind than your own “Sir Charles Grandison”—forgive me if I cannot forbear a smile now and then at your little vanities, so inseparable from the adulation of your “ladies” of every degree, from the precise Mrs. Chapone to the erring Mrs. Pilkington; for men of various morals, from Dr. Young to Colley Cibber. You are, perhaps, amongst the most famous of those who have been writers as well as publishers; but you command my admiration from the fact that you never neglected the duties of your station to surrender yourself to the temptation that beset the man who depends upon authorship alone for holding a firm standing in social life.

  He was a printer and bookseller, a joiner’s son, who at the age of fifty, and in his leisure moments, wrote in his shop parlour: a laborious man, who, by work and good conduct, had raised himself to a competency and sound information; delicate, moreover gentle, nervous, often ill, with a taste for the society of women, accustomed to correspond for and with them, of reserved and retired habits, whose only fault was a timid vanity. He was severe in principles, and had acquired perspicacity by his rigour.

  Richardson died of apoplexy, July 4, 1761, in this house in Parson’s Green, and was buried, at his own request, by the side of his first wife, in the Church of St. Bride, in Fleet Street. A large stone in the pavement of the middle aisle, near the centre of the church, and by the side of the pews numbered 12 and 13 in 1885, records the fact that he lies beneath it. The parish, during the century or more that has elapsed since his death, has not had interest enough in the Father of the English Novel to erect a tablet to his memory; and the stone above him, placed there by the loving hands of his family, is concealed from the public by the coarse matting that generally covers it.

  It may safely be said of Richardson that, after attaining to independence, he did more good every week of his life—for he was a wise and most charitable man—than Fielding was ever able to do throughout the whole of his.

Pamela, 1741–42

  Two booksellers, my particular friends [Mr. Rivington and Mr. Osborne] entreated me to write for them a little volume of Letters in a common style, on such subjects as might be of use to those country readers who were unable to indite for themselves. “Will it be any harm,” said I, “in a piece you want to be written so low, if we should instruct them how they should think and act in common cases as well as indite?” They were the more urgent for me to begin the little volume for this hint. I set about it; and, in the progress of it, writing two or three letters to instruct handsome girls who were obliged to go out to service, as we phrase it, how to avoid the snares that might be laid against their virtue, the above story recurred to my thought; and hence sprung “Pamela.”

  A work, usually found in the servant’s drawer, but which, when so found, has not unfrequently detained the eye of the mistress, wondering all the while by what secret charm she was induced to turn over a book, apparently too low for her perusal, and that charm was—Richardson.

  Taking the general idea of the character of a modest and beautiful country girl, and of the ordinary situation in which she is placed, he makes out all the rest, even to the smallest circumstance, by the mere force of a reasoning imagination. It would seem as if a step lost would be as fatal here as in a mathematical demonstration. The development of the character is the most simple, and comes the nearest to nature that it can do, without being the same thing. The interest of the story increases with the dawn of understanding and reflection in the heroine; her sentiments gradually expand themselves, like opening flowers.

  Thought what fame was on reading in a case of murder that “Mr. Wych, grocer at Tunbbridge, sold some bacon, flour, cheese, and, it is believed some plums, to some gipsy woman accused. He had on his counter (I quote faithfully) a book, the ‘Life of Pamela,’ which he was tearing for waste-paper, &c. In the cheese was found, &c., and a leaf of “Pamela’ wrapt around the bacon!” What would Richardson, the vainest and luckiest of living authors (i. e., while alive)—he who, with Aaron Hill, used to prophesy and chuckle over the presumed fall of Fielding (the prose Homer of human nature), and of Pope (the most beautiful of poets)—what would he have said, could he have traced his pages from their place on the French prince’s toilets (see Boswell’s “Johnson”) to the grocer’s counter and the gipsy murderess’s bacon!!!

  It will be Richardson’s eternal praise, did he merit no more, that he tore from his personages those painted vizors, which concealed, under a clumsy and affected disguise, everything like the natural lineaments of the human countenance, and placed them before us barefaced, in all the actual changes of feature and complexion, and all the light and shade of human passion. It requires a reader to be in some degree acquainted with the huge folios of inanity, over which our ancestors yawned themselves to sleep, ere he can estimate the delight they must have experienced from this unexpected return to truth and nature.

  I do not remember a more whimsical surprise than having been once detected—by a familiar damsel—reclined at my ease upon the grass, on Primrose Hill (her Cythera), reading—“Pamela.” There was nothing in the book to make a man seriously ashamed at the exposure; but as she seated herself down by me, and seemed determined to read in company, I could have wished it had been—any other book. We read on very sociably for a few pages; and, not finding the author much to her taste, she got up, and—went away. Gentle casuist, I leave it to thee to conjecture whether the blush (for there was one between us) was the property of the nymph or the swain in this dilemma. From me you shall never get the secret.

  It would be idle to say that a work which was so extensively read, does not possess merits of a very high order. But, on the other hand, it is clear, that however great its attractions, they were much over-estimated and over-praised. The moral teaching which received the approbation of Pope and Sherlock should not be lightly spoken of; yet, with all due deference to such great authorities, it may be questioned whether many readers have risen from the perusal of Richardson’s novel with more elevated notions of female honour than they before entertained. His morality was that of the age—rather the virtue of prudence than principle.

  This first novel is a flower—one of those flowers which only bloom in a virgin imagination, at the dawn of original invention, whose charm and freshness surpass all that the maturity of art and genius can afterwards cultivate or arrange.

  I have already given the substance of the first two volumes in which the rich squire, Mr. B. (as he is called throughout the novel), finally marries and takes home the girl who had been the servant of his wife and against whom, ever since that lady’s death, he had been plotting with an elaborate baseness which has never before been, and I sincerely hope will never hereafter be described. By this action Mr. B. has in the opinion of Richardson, of his wife, the servant-girl and the whole contemporary world, saturated himself with such a flame of saintliness as to have burnt out every particle of any little misdemeanor he may have been guilty of in his previous existence; and I need only read you an occasional line from the first four letters of the third volume in order to show the marvelous sentimentality, the untruth towards nature, and the purely commercial view of virtue and of religion which make up this intolerable book.

  The name, “Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded,” sounds like a tract, and “Pamela” is, indeed, a very long tract.

  Few writers—it is a truism to say so—have excelled him in minute analysis of motive, and knowledge of the human heart. About the final morality of his heroine’s long-drawn defence of her chastity it may, however, be permitted to doubt; and, in contrasting the book with Fielding’s work, it should not be forgotten that, irreproachable though it seemed to the author’s admirers, good Dr. Watts complained (and with reason) of the indelicacy of some of the scenes.

  While the story of “Pamela” suffers as a story from the slowness of movement which, in a less degree (though the slowness is even greater), injures that of Clarissa, the former heroine, unlike the latter, is herself as severe a sufferer as a heroine from the delay. Her figure, to begin with, is one which will not stand much de-romanticizing. Mrs. Pamela’s virtue, though no doubt quite sincere and genuine, is (as of course it should be) of a very soubrettish type, exceedingly, not to say pharisaically, self-conscious, not refined or elevated by the slightest admixture of delicacy, and obviously associated with a very shrewd eye to the main chance. All this, of course, is true enough to Nature; but truth to Nature becomes useless unless it falls into the impartial hands of Art.

  Sir John Herschel tells an amusing anecdote illustrating the pleasure derived from a book, not assuredly of the first order. In a certain village the blacksmith had got hold of Richardson’s novel, “Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded,” and used to sit on his anvil in the long summer evenings and read it aloud to a large and attentive audience. It is by no means a short book, but they fairly listened to it all. “At length, when the happy turn of fortune arrived, which brings the hero and heroine together, and sets them living long and happily according to the most approved rules, the congregation were so delighted as to raise a great shout, and procuring the church, actually set the parish bells ringing.”

  His “Pamela” survives, not as the virtuous serving-maid he tried to portray, but as a perfectly true picture of an atrocious prude, who well knew how to play her cards to advantage.

  Along with its uncouthness, moreover, Richardson’s novel is not without some excellent features of its own. It is prolix to tediousness, but there is at the same time considerable ingenuity in invention. There is an almost painful elaboration of expression, and the phraseology is stilted, but there is consistency in the portraits, and the attempt at character painting is not without a degree of success. Pamela exerts a steady influence for good, until all about her are converted by the power of her example. The wicked Mr. B. succumbs, and even the notorious Mrs. Jewkes is won to penitence and the path of virtue. It is the fashion to laugh, as Fielding did, at this tedious, moralizing, sentimental story; and yet there is a good deal in it that is both homely and wholesome. Richardson plainly did not possess the art that may be claimed by Fielding or Smollett or Sterne; but he was sincere, and honestly pure in his aim, which is more than can be said of any one of the other three.

  Pamela, indeed, may be virtuous, but she is anything but pure-minded; and in this lies her security? Unsuspecting innocence may easily become the prey of vice, but the reader feels that if Pamela falls, it will be with her eyes open. And the worst of it is that in spite of her oft-repeated protestations against her master’s wickedness, she is supposed all the time to have a secret leaning to him, and dreads nothing more than to incur his anger…. Putting aside these grave faults of taste and morality, there can be no doubt that the heroine is a masterpiece of characterisation. To this is due the pathetic and moving effect produced by her sufferings; she is so life-like that one feels the same kind of interest in them as in those of a real person…. A book the defects of which can hardly be over-stated; whose warped morality, glaring want of taste, and improbability of incident, would seem sufficient to obscure all the merit that cannot be denied to it. It is only when we remember that both plan and subject matter were entirely original, and that the sentiments and treatment correspond to the ordinary tone of lower middle-class feeling at the time, that we can comprehend or sympathise with the immense enthusiasm it excited. It inaugurated a new school of fiction, and if its permanent popularity in England was somewhat impaired by the speedy publication of Fielding’s parody, its effect on the literary development of France and Germany, where many imitations were produced, was of the greatest importance.

Clarissa Harlowe, 1748

  When I tell you I have lately received this Pleasure (i. e., of reading a new master-piece), you will not want me to inform you that I owe it to the author of “Clarissa.” Such Simplicity, such Manners, such deep Penetration into Nature; such Power to raise and alarm the Passions, few Writers, either ancient or modern, have been possessed of. My Affections are so strongly engaged, and my Fears are so raised, by what I have already read, that I cannot express my Eagerness to see the rest. Sure this Mr. Richardson is Master of all that Art which Horace compares to Witchcraft

  I begin by a confession which ought to do some credit to my honesty because it might do little honour to my discernment. Of all the imaginative works I have read, and my self-conceit does not lead me to except my own, none have given me greater pleasure than the one now submitted to the public.

  I was such an old fool as to weep over “Clarissa Harlowe,” like any milkmaid of sixteen over the ballad of the “Lady’s Fall.” To say truth, the first volume softened me by a near resemblance of my maiden days; but on the whole ’tis most miserable stuff. Miss How, who is called a young lady of sense and honour, is not only extremely silly, but a more vicious character than Sally Martin, whose crimes are owing at first to seduction, and afterwards to necessity; while this virtuous damsel, without any reason, insults her mother at home and ridicules her abroad; abuses the man she marries; and is impertinent and impudent with great applause. Even that model of affection, Clarissa, is so faulty in her behaviour as to deserve little compassion. Any girl that runs away with a young fellow, without intending to marry him, should be carried to Bridewell or to Bedlam the next day. Yet the circumstances are so laid, as to inspire tenderness, notwithstanding the low style and absurd incidents; and I look upon this and “Pamela” to be two books that will do more general mischief than the works of Lord Rochester.

  I do not think that the age can show a more faithful, more delicate, more spirited touch. We do not read, we see what he describes.

  I yet remember with delight the first time it came into my hands. I was in the country. How deliciously was I affected! At every moment I saw my happiness abridged by a page. I then experienced the same sensations those feel who have long lived with one they love, and are on the point of separation. At the close of the work I seemed to remain deserted.

  This novel may display more talent than Sir Charles Grandison (though, when I recollect the character of Clementina, I should be disposed to contest even this point), but it has certainly interested and delighted me less. Till the grand catastrophe we are exasperated to maddening impatience by the incessant and varied persecutions of the helpless heroine.

  The character of Lothario seems to have been expanded by Richardson into that of Lovelace; but he has excelled his original in the moral effect of the fiction. Lothario, with gaiety which cannot be hated, and bravery which cannot be despised, retains too much of the spectator’s kindness. It was in the power of Richardson alone, to teach us at once esteem and detestation; to make virtuous resentment overpower all the benevolence which wit, and elegance, and courage, naturally excite; and to lose at last the hero in the villain.

  The plot, as we have seen, is simple, and no under-plots interfere with the main design. No digression, no episodes. It is wonderful that without these helps of common writers he could support a work of such length. With Clarissa it begins—with Clarissa it ends. We do not come upon unexpected adventures and wonderful recognitions, by quick turns and surprises; we see her fate from afar, as it were through a long avenue, the gradual approach to which, without ever losing sight of the object, has more of simplicity and grandeur than the most cunning labyrinth that can be contrived by art…. As the work advances, the character rises; the distress is deepened; our hearts are torn with pity and indignation; bursts of grief succeed one another, till at length the mind is composed and harmonized with emotions of milder sorrow; we are calmed into resignation, elevated with pious hope, and dismissed glowing with the conscious triumphs of virtue.

  Richardson has strengthened Vice, from the mouth of Lovelace, with entangling sophistries and abstruse pleas against her adversary Virtue, which Sedley, Villiers, and Rochester wanted depth of libertinism enough to have invented.

  The effect of the death of Clarissa—or of Mary Stuart—on the heart, by no means depends on the fact that the one really died, but on the vivacity of the exhibition by the two great painters, Hume and Richardson…. I have been reading “Clarissa Harlowe,” and my frame is so easily disturbed, that a few of the most common sentences in the first hundred pages of the first volume have brought tears from me…. I have just finished poor “Clarissa,” and my body is too weak for writing a criticism—even if my mind had power for it. She left her father’s house on the 10th of April, and died on the 7th of September.

  Except by “Clarissa Harlowe,” I was never so moved by a work of genius as by “Othello.” I read seventeen hours a day at “Clarissa,” and held the book so long up, leaning on my elbows in an armchair, that I stopped the circulation and could not move. When Lovelace writes, “Dear Belton, it is all over, and Clarissa lives,” I got up in a fury and wept like an infant, and cursed and d——d Lovelace till exhausted. This is the triumph of genius over the imagination and heart of its readers.

  But though the character of Lovelace may not perhaps be objectionable in its moral tendency, there is no representation, in the whole range of fiction, which is such an outrage on verisimilitude. Such a character as Lovelace not only never existed, but seems incompatible with human nature. Great crimes may be hastily perpetrated where there is no strong motive for their commission, but a long course of premeditated villainy has always some assignable object which cannot be innocently attained.

  Clarissa is, however, his masterpiece, if we except Lovelace. If she is fine in herself, she is still finer in his account of her…. I should suppose that never sympathy more deep or sincere was excited than by the heroine of Richardson’s romance, except by the calamities of real life. The links in this wonderful chain of interest are not more finely wrought, than their whole weight is overwhelming and irresistible. Who can forget the exquisite gradations of her long dying-scene, or the closing of the coffin-lid, when Miss Howe comes to take her last leave of her friend; or the heart-breaking reflection that Clarissa makes on what was to have been her wedding-day?

  The work on which his fame as a classic of England will rest forever. The publication of “Clarissa” raised the fame of the author to the height. No work had appeared before, perhaps none has appeared since, containing so many direct appeals to the passions, stated too in a manner so irresistible. And high as his reputation stood in his own country, it was even more exalted in those of France and Germany, whose imaginations are more easily excited, and their passions more easily moved by tales of fictitious distress, than are the cold-blooded English.

  Blest be the shade of Richardson, who bequeathed to us the divine Clarissa, shining through sufferings, glorious in her fall, and almost visible in her ascent to the regions of immortality. Matchless creation of the only mind that ever conceived and drew truly a Christian heroine, with all her sex’s softness, loveliness, and grace, and all the self-devotion, undeviating rectitude, and lively faith of the primitive martyrs! What are his numerous blemishes but dust in the balance when compared to his endless beauties? But then his faults are obvious to every common mind, and no common mind takes in his merits.

  It is wonderful how the cause is seen in the effect. So we find it in Richardson. “Clarissa” is a story in the midst of temptation; but he comes clear and triumphantly out of the ordeal, because his own imagination is not contaminated by it. If there had been the least hint of an immoral tendency, the slightest indication of a wish to inflame the passions, it would have been all over with him. The intention will always peep out—you do not communicate a disease if you are not infected with it yourself.

  “Clarissa,” is a treatise on strategy. Twenty-four volumes to describe the siege and capture of a heart: It is worthy of Vauban.

  He had, in fact, the power of making any set of notions, however, fantastical, appear as “truths of holy writ,” to his readers. This he did by the authority with which he disposed of all things and by the infinite minuteness of his details. His gradations are so gentle, that we do not at any one point, hesitate to follow him, and should descend with him to any depth before we perceive that our path had been unequal. By the means of this strange magic, we become anxious for the marriage of Pamela with her base master; because the author has so imperceptibly wrought on us the belief of an awful distance between the rights of an esquire and his servant, that our imaginations regard it in the place of all moral distinctions. After all, the general impression made on us by his works, is virtuous. Clementina is to the soul a new and majestic image, inspired by virtue and by love, which raises and refines its conceptions. She has all the depth and intensity of the Italian character, with all the purity of an angel. She is at the same time one of the grandest of tragic heroines, and the divinest of religious enthusiasts. Clarissa alone is above her…. Clarissa Harlowe is one of the books which leave us different beings from those which they find us. “Sadder and wiser” do we arise from its perusal.

  I read the last volume of Clarissa, which I have not opened since my voyage from India in the Lord Hungerford. I nearly cried my eyes out.

  I spoke to him [Lord Macaulay] once about “Clarissa.” “Not read ‘Clarissa!’” he cried out. “If you have once thoroughly entered on ‘Clarissa,’ and are infected by it, you can’t leave it. When I was in India, I passed one hot season at the hills, and there were the governor-general, and the secretary of government, and the commander-in-chief, and their wives. I had ‘Clarissa’ with me: and, as soon as they began to read, the whole station was in a passion of excitement about Miss Harlowe and her misfortunes and her scoundrelly Lovelace! The governor’s wife seized the book, and the secretary waited for it, and the chief justice could not read it for tears!” He acted the whole scene: he paced up and down the Athenæum library: I daresay he could have spoken pages of the book—of that book, and of what countless piles of others!

  Nothing can exceed the finished manner in which every personage of this splendid fiction is placed before the reader. The bashaw-father; the weak, amiable, depressed mother; the brutish brother; the sister who could never forgive the slight to her own attractions; the uncles; the hideous suitor whom her family wished Clarissa to marry; even the maid-servant—nay more, even the dead grandfather,—are your very intimate acquaintance. They remind one of those quaint old cabinet pictures, family portraits, which we see hung about near one grand painting—a Correggio, perhaps, or a Raphael—delineating the purest and most perfect form of female loveliness. The portraits are out of keeping with this gem of the collection; they are too inferior even to act as foils: And so it is that we wonder how such a being as Clarissa could have been reared amid persons so thoroughly common-minded as the generality of her kinsfolk; so above that world which was all in all to them, and to rise in which was the great aim of their existence.

  It is like a deluge of very weak and lukewarm green tea, breakfast cup after breakfast cup. After the first of the four volumes, into which the Tauchnitz edition is divided, we gave way. I was much interested with Richardson’s method, and admired the particularity with which he puts his characters upon the canvas, and makes them live more in the smallest circumstances of daily life. By force of accumulated details they acquire fulness and reality. But when they come to act, when all the minutiæ of their internal hesitations and emotions are insisted on with wearisome prolixity, one begins to feel that what one wants in Art is something other than the infinite particulars of life. Then Richardson, to my mind, is essentially a bourgeois, his imagination mediocre, his sentiment mawkish.

  Here is an old stationer, fat, well to do, loving money and good living, vain as a peacock, worried to death by small critics who continually gave him dyspepsia and agonies of indigestion, and only soothed by the highly spiced flattery and the spiteful reprisals on his enemies of a circle of foolish female friends; here is, to all appearance, one of the most unfit men in the world, who, after making money till he is fifty, is led by the paltry ambition of making more, to write a work which turns out to be utterly different from his first intention, and to prove the author a great moralist, who has the most intimate acquaintance with the human heart, its passions, foibles, strength, and virtues; who can describe almost as minutely as Defoe; who can teach while he amuses, and instruct the heart in virtue while he drives away the admiration for vice; who is powerful, tragic, pathetic, and eminently original; and whose art is so great that his readers follow their enchanter through eight long volumes, heaving a sigh of regret when they lay them down; while the student of morality pronounces them to have been a benefit to the human race.

  He was a respectable tradesman,… a good printer,… a comfortable soul,… never owing a guinea nor transgressing a rule of morality,… and yet so much a poet, that he has added at least one character (Clarissa Harlowe) to the inheritance of the world, of which Shakespeare need not have been ashamed—the most celestial thing, the highest imaginative effort of his generation.

  You cannot read through twenty pages of “Clarissa” without feeling that you are mainly in the company, not of the preacher Richardson, but of real live men and women, whose movements, and sentiments, and motives are of importance to watch, and one of whom, the heroine, is a creature to inspire that deep interest always felt in any creature perfectly beautiful: her we can follow into the profoundest misfortunes, and still “in the midmost heart of grief” can “clasp a secret joy.” To show, too, that Richardson felt what other artists feel, that a work of art must be mainly beautiful, the figure of Clarissa is made to occupy a place in his picture far more prominent than any one else; and a vast deal of the material which goes to make up the minor figures grouped about this central perfection, and distributed over the distance and middle distance, a great proportion of the narrative upon which our ideas of the rest are formed, comes to us polarised through the medium of Clarissa’s noble and lucid mind; so that, while we are frequently disgusted with the matter, we never lose sight of the perfection of Clarissa, whether as actor or narrator.

  There is no need that you should shout to make us afraid; that you should write out the lesson by itself, and in capitals, in order to distinguish it. We love art, and you have a scant amount of it; we want to be pleased, and you don’t care to please us. You copy all the letters, detail the conversations, tell everything, prune nothing; your novels fill many volumes; spare us, use the scissors; be a literary man, not a registrar of archives. Do not pour out your library of documents on the high-road. Art is different from nature; the latter draws out, the first condenses. Twenty letters of twenty pages do not display a character; but one sharp word does. You are rendered heavy by your conscience, which drags you along step by step and low on the ground; you are afraid of your genius; you rein it in; you dare not use loud cries and frank words for violent moments. You flounder into emphatic and well-written phrases; you will not show nature as it is, as Shakspeare shows it, when, stung by passion as by a hot iron, it cries out, rears, and plunges over your barriers. You cannot love it, and your punishment is that you cannot see it.

  To me, I confess, “Clarissa Harlowe” is an unpleasant, not to say odious book…. If any book deserved the charge of “sickly sentimentality,” it is this, and that it should have once been so widely popular, and thought admirably adapted to instruct young women in lessons of virtue and religion, shows a strange and perverted state of the public taste, not to say public morals.

  Unfortunately, Macaulay’s stay on the Neilgherries [in 1834] coincided with the monsoon. “The rain streamed down in floods. It was very seldom that I could see a hundred yards in front of me. During a month together I did not get two hours walking.” He began to be bored, for the first and last time in his life: while his companions, who had not his resources, were ready to hang themselves for very dulness…. There were no books in the place except those that Macaulay had brought with him; among which, most luckily, was “Clarissa Harlowe.” Aided by the rain outside, he soon talked his favourite romance into general favor…. An old Scotch doctor, a Jacobin and a freethinker, who could only be got to attend church by the positive orders of the governor-general, cried over the last volume until he was too ill to appear at dinner. The chief secretary—afterward, as Sir William Macnaghten, the hero and the victim of the darkest episode in our Indian history—declared that reading this copy of “Clarissa” under the inspiration of its owner’s enthusiasm was nothing less than an epoch in his life. After the lapse of thirty years, when Ootacamund had long enjoyed the advantage of book-club and a circulating library, the tradition of Macaulay and his novel still lingered on with a tenacity most unusual in the ever-shifting society of an Indian station.

  Nowhere in either English fiction or poetry is there drawn a figure more beautiful, intense, and splendid than that of Clarissa…. Is probably, with all its many defects, the grandest prose tragedy ever penned.

  By the universal acknowledgment of novel-readers, Clarissa is one of the most sympathetic, as she is one of the most lifelike, of all the women in literature, and Richardson has conducted her story with so much art and tact, that her very faults canonise her, and her weakness crowns the triumph of her chastity.

  “Pamela” and “Clarissa” are both terribly realistic; they contain passages of horror, and are in parts profoundly pathetic, whilst “Clarissa” is desperately courageous. Fielding, with all his swagger and bounce, gold lace and strong language, has no more of the boldness than he has of the sublimity of the historian of Clarissa Harlowe…. “Clarissa Harlowe” has a place not merely amongst English novels, but amongst English women.

  Let each to be judged after his kind: to break the glass of Richardson’s hot house and let in the common air would only be to kill the tropical plants that he has grown under those fostering limitations; his characters live in a sick-room, but they would die in the open air. Any one who has once learnt to breathe in those confines must feel the beauty and charm of the sentimental growths that there luxuriate; a detached scene from “Clarissa” may jar on the critical sense, but read through, the book carries the reader clear of daily life, creates its own canons, and compels intent admiration.

  It has been truly said that “Clarissa Harlowe” is to “La Nouvelle Héloïse” what Rousseau’s novel is to “Werther;” the three works are inseparably connected, because the bond between them is one of heredity. But while “Werther” and “Héloïse” are still read “Clarissa” is scarcely read at all, and this, beyond doubt, is the reason that, while no one thinks of disputing Goethe’s indebtedness to Rousseau, it is to-day less easy to perceive the extent to which Rousseau is indebted to Richardson.

  If the story of Clarissa still lives, it is not by virtue of any of the subordinate characters, but by reason of the one matchless central figure, who stands unrivalled among the other inventions of her creator. And, as long as the English language is spoken or its literature read, the “divine Clarissa” will hold her own among the noblest of its ideal women, with Imogen, and Portia, and Cordelia. Torn from the proud pedestal of maidenhood, dragged in an unclean company through foul and miry ways, a sacrifice to vanity rather than to lust, she loses none of her charm or potency. For through her there speaks the authentic voice of the best women of all ages, who refuse to disassociate love and respect from the most sacred of human relationships, or to subject themselves to the humiliation of a union unsanctioned by these motives.

Sir Charles Grandison, 1754

  Will you permit me to take this opportunity, in sending a letter to Dr. Young, to address myself to you? It is very long ago that I wished to do it. Having finished your “Clarissa” (oh, the heavenly book!) I could have prayed you to write the history of a manly Clarissa, but I had not courage enough at that time. I should have it no more to-day, as this is only my first English letter—but I have it! It may be because I am now Klopstock’s wife (I believe you know my husband by Mr. Honorst), and then I was only the single young girl. You have since written the manly Clarissa without my prayer. Oh, you have done it to the great joy and thanks of all your happy readers! Now you can write no more, you must write the history of an angel.

  Richardson has sent me his “History of Sir Charles Grandison,” in four volumes octavo, which amuses me. It is too long, and there is too much mere talk in it. Whenever he goes ultra crepidam, into high life, he grossly mistakes the modes; but, to do him justice, he never mistakes nature, and he has surely great knowledge and skill both in painting and in interesting the heart.

  I have now read over Richardson—he sinks horribly in his third volume (he does so in his story of Clarissa). When he talks of Italy, it is plain he is no better acquainted with it than he is with the kingdom of Mancomugi. He might have made his Sir Charles’s amour with Clementina begin in a convent, where the pensioners sometimes take great liberties; but that such familiarity should be permitted in her father’s house, is as repugnant to custom, as it would be in London for a young lady of quality to dance on the ropes at Bartholomew fair: Neither does his hero behave to her in a manner suitable to his nice notions. It was impossible a discerning man should not see her passion early enough to check it, if he had really designed it. His conduct puts me in mind of some ladies I have known, who could never find out a man to be in love with them, let him do or say what he would, till he made a direct attempt, and then they were so surprised, I warrant you!

  Do you never read now? I am a little piqued that you say nothing of Sir Charles Grandison; if you have not read it yet, read it for my sake. Perhaps Clarissa does not encourage you; but in my opinion it is much superior to Clarissa.

  A masterpiece of the most healthy philosophy…. Antiquity, can show nothing more exquisite.

  You admire Richardson, monsieur le marquis; how much greater would be your admiration, if, like me, you were in a position to compare the pictures of this great artist with nature; to see how natural his situations are, however seemingly romantic, and how true his portraits, for all their apparent exaggeration!

  I don’t like those long and intolerable novels “Pamela” and “Clarissa.” They have been successful because they excite the reader’s curiosity even amidst a medley of trifles; but if the author had been imprudent enough to inform us at the very beginning that “Clarissa” and “Pamela” were in love with their persecutors, everything would have been spoiled, and the reader would have thrown the book aside.

  M. de Voltaire, in his numerous writings, which I have read and re-read, has avoided, so far as I know, all mention of Richardson, whether favourable or otherwise, though he has treated of every other writer, however obscure…. It is impossible that the author of “Nanine” should fail to appreciate “Pamela;” he has certainly read “Clarissa” and “Grandison,” poems to which antiquity can produce no worthy rival. He must know that these masterpieces of feeling, truth, and moral teaching have found readers of both sexes, in every country and of every age. I suppose that, since M. de Voltaire’s manner of writing is diametrically opposed to Richardson’s, the silence he has preserved in regard to this author of genius is founded on principle.

  Clarissa! with Heaven itself radiant in your saintly beauty; free, in all your pain, alike from hatred and from bitterness, suffering without a groan, and perishing without a murmur; beloved Clementina! pure, and heavenly soul, who, amidst the harsh treatment of an unjust household, never lost your innocence with the loss of your reason;—your eyes, bright souls, hold me with their charm; your sweet likeness hastens to fill my fairest dreams!

  Throughout the entire composition, the author exhibits great powers of mind; but especially in describing the agitations caused by the passion of love in the bosom of the amiable and enthusiastic Clementina; whose madness is so finely drawn, that Doctor Warton thought it superior to that of Orestes in Euripides; and heightened by more exquisite touches of nature even than that of Shakspeare’s Lear. Amongst other beauties in this work may be counted, the truth and delicacy with which the author has sketched the numberless portraits it contains, the innocent love of Emily Jervois, the imposing effect with which Sir Charles is introduced, and the great art shewn in keeping him constantly in view.

  Sir Charles Grandison, whom I look upon as the prince of coxcombs; and so much the more impertinent as he is a moral one. His character appears to me “ugly all over with affectation.” There is not a single thing that Sir Charles Grandison does or says all through the book from liking to any person or object but himself, and with a view to answer to a certain standard of perfection for which he pragmatically sets up. He is always thinking of himself, and trying to show that he is the wisest, happiest, and most virtuous person in the whole world. He is (or would be thought) a code of Christian ethics: a compilation and abstract of all gentlemanly accomplishments. There is nothing I conceive, that excites so little sympathy as this inordinate egotism; or so much disgust as this everlasting self-complacency. Yet his self-admiration, brought forward on every occasion as the incentive to every action and reflected from all around him, is the burden and pivot of the story.

  But as my friend, Sir Charles Grandison, has no other sin to answer for than that of being very long, very tedious, very old-fashioned, and a prig, I cannot help confessing that, in spite of these faults, and perhaps because of them, I think there are worse books printed, now-a-days and hailed with delight among critics feminine, than the seven volumes that gave such infinite delight to the beauties of the court of George the Second.

  Of fiction, read Sir Charles Grandison.

  Other works, of a very different character, fell into my hands about this time. Sir Charles Grandison, despite its stately formality, did me good. I think its tone of old-fashioned, homely chivalry has a healthy influence on young people.

  In this novel is one of the most powerful of all our author’s delineations—the madness of Clementina. Shakspeare himself has scarcely drawn a more affecting or harrowing picture of high-souled suffering and blighting calamity. The same accumulation of details as in “Clarissa,” all tending to heighten the effect and produce the catastrophe, hurry on the reader with breathless anxiety, till he has learned the last sad event, and is plunged in unavailing grief. This is no exaggerated account of the sensations produced by Richardson’s pathetic scenes. He is one of the most powerful and tragic of novelists; and that he is so, in spite of much tediousness of description, much repetition and prolixity of narrative, is the best testimony to his art and genius.

  “Sir Charles Grandison,” published, in 1753, was Richardson’s most celebrated romance. The hero is a huge compendium of noble qualities, in whose possible existence every one firmly believed. My uncle Jacob used to tell me of having, as a child, seen his mother absorbed in reading “Sir Charles Grandison.” And such reading was no trifling matter; it required much time and thought. These romances came like great events into our life, which at that time had little to do with political agitations. The translations spread in every direction among us. The marvellously broad and plain treatment of universally-useful and well-understood moral problems made a thorough knowledge of these romances almost a duty as well as an enjoyment. There seemed to be no more agreeable way of appropriating to oneself a life experience of the noblest kind than this convenient and most innocent one. Romances of this kind proved the best form in which to comprise all that might be conducive to genuine moral training. They came in as a supplement when the sermon from the pulpit had not fulfilled its task; and for this reason a great number of the romance writers belonged to the clerical profession.

  It would be allowing too much, however, to the third of Richardson’s romances, “Sir Charles Grandison,” to say that it reaches the same level of ideal portraiture as “Clarissa Harlowe.” In delineating, at the request of his friends, as he tells us, “the man of true honour,” in the person of this irreproachable baronet, Richardson had no such dramatic contrast to inspire him as in his second and greatest romance. Sir Hargrave Pollexfen is but a commonplace and vulgar foil to the virtues of the hero, and there is no thread of pathos or of tragedy running through the story, or indeed appearing in it, except episodically, to give play to the author’s strongest powers. Sir Charles Grandison shows himself a man of true honours, in eight volumes; and that is about all that can be said of the romance. Unlike, “Clarissa,” its narrative cannot be said to hang fire through the diffuseness of the narrator’s method; for in strictness of language it contains no narrative at all.

  With Sir Charles Grandison I am unacquainted—there are many impediments in this brief life of man; I have more than once, indeed, reconnoitred the first volume with a flying party, but always decided not to break ground before the place till my siege guns came up; and it’s an odd thing—I have been all these years in the field, and that powerful artillery is still miles in the rear…. As to Sir Charles at least, I have the report of spies; and by the papers in the office of my Intelligence Department, it would seem he was a most accomplished baronet. I am the more ready to credit these reports, because the spies are persons thoroughly accustomed to the business; and because my own investigations of a kindred quarter of the globe (“Clarissa Harlowe”) has led me to set a high value on the Richardsonians.

  In “Sir Charles Grandison” the story is arrested while the characters are displayed, contrasting their thoughts, plans, and sentiments. And there is an incessant doubling back on what has gone before; first a letter is written describing what “Has passed,” this letter is communicated by its recipient to a third character, who comments on it, while the story waits. This constant repercussion of a theme or event between one or more pairs of correspondents produces a structure of story very like “The House that Jack Built.” Each writer is narrating not events alone, but his or her reflections on previous narrations of the same events. And so, on the next-to-nothing that happened there is superimposed the young lady that wrote to her friend describing it, the friend that approved her for the decorum of the manner in which she described it, the admirable baronet that chanced to find the letter approving the decorum of the young lady, the punctilio of honour that prevented the admirable baronet from reading the letter he found, and so on. It is very lifelike, but life can become at times a slow affair, and one of the privileges of the novel-writer is to quicken it. This privilege Richardson foregoes.

General

  This author never deluges the pavement with blood; he does not transport you into distant lands; he does not expose you to the cannibalism of savages; he never loses himself in magic realms. The world where we live is the scene of his action; the basis of his drama is reality; his persons possess all possible actuality; his characters are taken from the midst of society; his incidents from the manners of all polite nations; the passions that he paints are such as I have myself felt; the same objects inspire them, and they have the energy which I know them to possess. The misfortunes and afflictions of his heroes are of the same kind as continually threaten me; he illustrates the ordinary progress of things around me. Without this art my mind, yielding with difficulty to imaginary descriptions, the illusion would be but momentary, and the impression weak and transitory…. I still remember the first time that I chanced upon the works of Richardson. I was in the country. How deliciously did their perusal affect me. With every passing minute I saw my happiness diminish by a page. Very soon I experienced the same sensation as men feel who have lived together in intimate friendship and are on the point of separation. At the end I felt as if I were left all alone…. He bequeathed to me a lasting and pleasing melancholy; sometimes my friends perceive it and ask me, What is the matter with you? You are not the same as usual; what has happened to you? They question me about my health, my fortune, my relations, my friends. O my friends, “Pamela,” “Clarissa,” and “Grandison,” are three great dramas! Torn from reading them by important business, I felt an overwhelming distaste for it; I neglected my work and returned to Richardson. Beware of opening these enchanting books when you have any important duties to perform…. O Richardson, Richardson, first of men in my eyes, you shall be my reading at all times! Pursued by pressing need; if my friend should fall into poverty; if the limitations of my fortunes should prevent me from giving fit attention to the education of my children, I will sell my books; but you shall remain on the same shelf as Moses, Euripides and Sophocles, and I will read you by turns.

  Those deplorably tedious lamentations, “Clarissa” and “Sir Charles Grandison,” which are pictures of high life as conceived by a bookseller, and romances as they would be spiritualized by a Methodist teacher…. Many English books, I conclude, are to be bought at Paris. I am sure Richardson’s Works are, for they have stupified the whole French nation: I will not answer for our best authors.

  Erskine. “Surely, Sir, Richardson is very tedious.” Johnson. “Why, Sir, if you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story as only giving occasion to the sentiment.”

  The most moral of all our novel writers is Richardson, the author of Clarissa, a writer of excellent intentions, and of very considerable capacity and genius; did he not possess the unfortunate talent of spinning out pieces of amusement into an immeasurable length.

  He was a man of no learning nor reading, but had a vivid imagination, which he let loose in reflections on human life and manners, till it became so distended with sentiments, that for his own ease, he was necessitated to vent them on paper. In the original plan of his “Clarissa,” it was his design, as his bookseller once told me, to continue it to the extent of twenty-four volumes, but he was, with great difficulty, prevailed on to comprise it in six. The character of Richardson as a writer is to this day undecided, otherwise than by the avidity with which his publications are by some readers perused, and the sale of numerous editions. He has been celebrated as a writer similar in genius to Shakespeare, as being acquainted with the inmost recesses of the human heart, and having an absolute command of the passions, so as to be able to affect his readers as himself is affected, and to interest them in the successes and disappointments, the joys and sorrows of his characters. Others there are who think that neither his “Pamela,” his “Clarissa,” nor his “Sir Charles Grandison” are to be numbered among the books of rational and instructive amusement, that they are not to be compared to the novels of Cervantes, or the more simple and chaste narrations of Le Sage, that they are not just representations of human manners, that in them the turpitude of vice is not strongly enough marked, and that the allurements to it are represented in the gayest colours; that the texture of all his writings is flimsy and thin, and his style mean and feeble; that they have a general tendency to inflame the passions of young people, and to teach them that which they need not to be taught; and that though they pretend to a moral, it often turns out a bad one. The cant terms of him and his admirers are sentiment and sentimentality.

  The Shakspeare of novelists.

  He has drawn in Lovelace and Grandison models of a debauched and of an elevated character. Neither of them is eminently calculated to produce imitation; but it would not perhaps be adventurous to affirm that more readers have wished to resemble Lovelace, than have wished to resemble Grandison.

  Richardson’s good people in short are too wise and too formal, ever to appear in the light of desirable companions, or to excite in a youthful mind any wish to resemble them. The gaiety of all his characters is extremely girlish and silly, and is much more like the prattle of spoiled children, than the wit and pleasantry of persons acquainted with the world. The diction throughout, is heavy, vulgar, and embarrassed; though the interest of the tragical scenes is too powerful to allow us to attend to any inferior consideration.

  Richardson has perhaps lost, though unjustly, a part of his popularity at home; but he still contributes to support the fame of his country abroad. The small blemishes of his diction are lost in translation. The changes of English manners, and the occasional homeliness of some of his representations, are unfelt by foreigners.

  Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot made a frequent and arbitrary use of romance, as being a form eminently adapted to the conveyance of certain peculiar ideas of their own. But if this form be regarded as a distinct poetic species, as regular narrative in prose, sketching the transient features of society, it will be found that, in this respect, too, French writers have frequently copied from English models, but have seldom, if ever, equalled them. In point of originality and power of representation Richardson perhaps occupies the highest place in this peculiar style of composition. If he, likewise, has become antiquated, if his striving after the ideal was not attended with special success owing to exactness of details occasionally tedious, we have a proof of the incompatibility of direct poetic connexion with the hard realities of life, though disguised in prosaic garb. If his genius availed not to solve the problem, it was because its solution was little short of impracticable.

  The loaded sensibility, the minute detail, the morbid consciousness of every thought and feeling in the whole flux and reflux of the mind, in short, the self-involution and dream-like continuity of Richardson.

  Richardson’s nature is always the nature of sentiment and reflection, not of impulse or situation. He furnishes his characters, on every occasion, with the presence of mind of the author. He makes them act, not as they would from the impulse of the moment, but as they might upon reflection and upon a careful review of every motive and circumstance in their situation. They regularly sit down to write letters; and if the business of life consisted in letter-writing, and was carried on by the post (like a Spanish game at chess), human nature would be what Richardson represents it. All actual objects and feelings are blunted and deadened by being represented through a medium which may be true to reason, but is false in nature. He confounds his own point of view with that of the immediate actors in the scene; and hence presents you with a conventional and factitious nature, instead of that which is real…. Richardson’s wit was unlike that of any other writer—his humour was so too. Both were the effect of intense activity of mind—laboured, and yet completely effectual.

  The power of Richardson’s painting in his deeper scenes of tragedy, never has been, and probably never will be, excelled. Those of distressed innocence, as in the history of Clarissa and Clementina, rend the very heart; and few, jealous of manly equanimity, should read them for the first time in presence of society. In others, where the same heroines, and particularly Clarissa, display a noble elevation of soul rising above earthly considerations and earthly oppression, the reader is perhaps as much elevated towards a pure sympathy with virtue and religion, as uninspired composition can raise him. His scenes of unmixed horror, as the deaths of Belton and of the infamous Sinclair, are as dreadful as the former are elevating; and they are directed to the same noble purpose, increasing our fear and hatred of vice, as the former are qualified to augment our love and veneration of virtue.

  If Richardson’s style is not good—and of this we foreigners are no judges,—he will not live, for it is only by style that a writer lives…. But if Richardson has been forsaken only for vulgar expressions, unendurable by elegant society, he may revive; the revolution which is taking place, by lowering the aristocracy and raising the middling classes, will render less perceptible, or remove altogether, the traces of lowly habits and of an inferior language.

  This work of Richardson’s, and his “Pamela” were written purposely to guide the morals of the young, and of the latter it was said, Pamela is like snow; she covers all things with her whiteness. Snow, when much trodden under a warm sun, is soon converted into slop—which coalesces ere long into mud and mire; in this respect the moral lessons of Pamela and Clarissa do indeed resemble snow; they seem fitted to stir up the mud of the soul—“the earthly mire” of its nature—than permanently to cleanse and whiten it.

  Accustomed as we are to a more fiery, rapid, highly-coloured, and wide-awake mode of narration, we have in some measure lost our relish for the manner of this accomplished artist, who produces his effect by an uninterrupted accumulation of touches individually imperceptible, by an agglomerative, not a generative process, if our great modern works of creative fiction may be compared to the rapid and colossal agency of volcanic fire, the productions of Richardson may resemble the slow and gradual formation of an alluvial continent, the secular accumulation of minute particles deposited by the gentle yet irresistible current of a river. If the volcanic tract—the offspring of fire—be sublimely broken into thunder-shattered mountain-peak and smiling valley, yet the level delta is not less fertile or less adorned by its own mild and luxuriant beauty.

  Richardson too often paints the impossible in character, but he is unrivalled in the elaborateness of representation.

  The greatest and perhaps the most unconscious of Shakespeare’s imitators.

  We do not read Richardson’s novels much now; and it cannot be helped that we do not. There are the novels of a hundred years between us and him; time is short; and novels of eight or ten volumes, written in the tedious form of letters, and recording conversations and meditations in which the story creeps on inch by inch, without so much as an unexpected pistol-shot or a trick of Harlequin and Pantaloon to relieve the attention, have little chance against the brisker and broader fictions to which we have been accustomed. We have to remember, however, not only that, a hundred years ago, Richardson’s novels were read everywhere, both in Britain and on the continent, with a protracted sense of fascination, a leisurely intensity of interest, such as no British author of prose stories had ever commanded before, but also that almost every thoughtful critic who has read Richardson since has spoken of him as, all in all, one of the masters of our literature. Johnson would not allow Fielding to be put in comparison with Richardson; and, whenever Lord Macaulay names Richardson, it is as a kind of prose Shakespeare. When we read Richardson for ourselves, we can see the reasons which have led to so high an opinion. His style of prose fiction is perhaps more original than that of any other novelist we have had…. He writes on and on in a plain, full, somewhat wordy style, not always grammatically perfect; but every page is a series of minute touches, and each touch is from a thorough conception of the case which he is representing. In minute inquisition into the human heart, and especially the female heart, and in the exhibition of conduct as affected from day to day by growing complications of feeling and circumstance, Richardson is a master.

  The conceptions of character in Lovelace, Clarissa, Clementina, are founded in the preference of generals to particulars; that is, they are enduring types of great subdivisions in the human family, wholly irrespective of mutations in scene and manners. The knowledge of the world manifested in the creation and completion of such characters is subtler and deeper than Smollett or even Fielding exhibits in his lusty heroes and buxom heroines. Despite the weary tediousness of Richardson’s style, the beauties which relieve it are of a kind that bear translation or paraphrase into foreign languages with a facility, which is perhaps the surest test of the inherent substance and cosmopolitan spirit of imaginative writings. The wit and hardihood of Lovelace, the simplicity and naïveté of Clarissa, the lofty passion of Clementina, find an utterance in every language, and similitudes in every civilized race.

  Her [Jane Austen’s] knowledge of Richardson’s works was such as no one is likely again to acquire…. Every circumstance narrated in “Sir Charles Grandison,” all that was ever said or done in the cedar parlour, was familiar to her; and the wedding days of Lady L. and Lady G. were as well remembered as if they had been living friends.

  I am working at Richardson now, and will send you the paper by the end of the week. I suppose I ought to be ashamed to confess that, tedious as he often is, I feel less difficulty in getting through him than in reading Fielding, and that as a matter of taste I actually prefer Lovelace to Tom Jones! I suppose that is one of the differences between men and women which even Ladies’ Colleges will not set to rights.

  He combines whilst he observes; his meditation develops the ideas of the moralist. No one in this age has equalled him in these detailed and comprehensive conceptions, which, grouping to a single end the passions of thirty characters, twine and colour the innumerable threads of the whole canvas, to bring out a figure, an action, or a lesson.

  That Richardson (with all his twaddle) is better than Fielding, I am quite certain. There is nothing at all comparable to Lovelace in all Fielding, whose characters are common and vulgar types; of Squires, Ostlers, Lady’s maids, etc., very easily drawn.

  It is not unpleasant to think that the ladies of that time, by the way in which they petted, coaxed, and humoured him, conferred an innocent pleasure upon the truest of all the delineators of their sex, except perhaps Balzac, who, if he knows it better, is more unfortunate in his knowledge.

  He started from a didactic point of view, and represented men as they ought to be within the social circumstances of the England of his time. His fluency is extraordinary, but his composition is monotonous.

  Here is a man, we might say, whose special characteristic it was to be a milksop—who provoked Fielding to a coarse hearty burst of ridicule—who was steeped in the incense of useless adulation from a throng of middle-aged lady worshippers—who wrote his novels expressly to recommend little unimpeachable moral maxims, as that evil courses lead to unhappy deaths, that ladies ought to observe the laws of propriety, and generally that it is an excellent thing to be thoroughly respectable; who lived an obscure life in a petty coterie in fourth-rate London society, and was in no respect at a point of view more exalted than that of his companions. What greater contrast can be imagined in its way than that between Richardson, with his second-rate eighteenth-century priggishness and his twopenny-tract morality, and the modern school of French novelists, who are certainly not prigs, and whose morality is by no means that of tracts? We might have expected à priori that they would have summarily put him down, as a hopeless Philistine. Yet Richardson is idolised by some of their best writers; Balzac, for example, and George Sand, speak of him with reverence; and a writer who is, perhaps, as odd a contrast to Richardson as could well be imagined—Alfred de Musset—calls ‘Clarissa’ le premier roman du monde. What is the secret which enables the steady old printer, with his singular limitation to his own career of time and space, to impose upon the Byronic Parisian of the next century? Amongst his contemporaries Diderot, the atheistic author of one of the filthiest novels extant expresses an almost fanatical admiration for his purity and power, and declares characteristically that he will place Richardson’s works on the same shelf with those of Moses, Homer, Euripides, and other favourite writers; he even goes so far as to excuse Clarissa’s belief in Christianity on the ground of her youthful innocence.

  But the fact that Richardson commenced to write at fifty years of age, precludes the idea of his having possessed lofty creative genius: talent may slumber, as in his case, but genius never.

  While he was in Zurich, Wieland had been a rapturous admirer of Richardson’s novels; he joined with Gillert and many others in admiring the faultless heroes set before the world by this novelist, Pamela and Clarissa, and Grandison, and he even took the materials for a drama from one of these stories.

  Richardson has a certain standard, the standard of the respectability of the day, and he tries to raise his readers to it both by showing them what a fine thing his ideal looks when it is endowed with life, and by pointing out that the path of virtue is the path of safety, which cannot be forsaken without peril of imminent disaster. Unfortunately Richardson spoils by his eagerness the moral as well as the artistic effect of his books. He is so bent on showing us that virtue is intrinsically admirable and a good investment into the bargain that he becomes absolutely incredible, and we laugh instead of being convinced. His most morally impressive book is that which is also artistically the greatest—the book which telling of the heroic virtue of Clarissa shows us how it found its reward not in the cheap splendours amidst which we bid farewell to his earliest heroine, but in the solemn quiet of the grave, where the wicked Lovelace can no more trouble her, and she, the weary one, may lie at rest.

  The fashion of this world passeth away. Only a hundred and forty years ago, a group of ladies, chiefly young girls just grown up, might have been found seated in a summer-house of a large garden of North End, Hammersmith, working or drawing, and listening eagerly to a stout old gentleman who was reading to them from a manuscript. The ladies were Miss Mulso (afterwards Mrs. Chapone), Miss Highmore, Miss Fielding, and several others; the old gentleman was Richardson, the book was “Clarissa.” No one will dispute the severe propriety of any of these ladies, yet the far laxer standard which regulates the conduct of their great-granddaughters forbids “Clarissa” even to be taken by them from the library bookshelf, much less to be positively read aloud, unexpurgated, in full family conclave…. Yet the books that formed the interest and delight of our grandmothers cannot be wholly improper food for such of their descendants as have reached years of discretion. Therefore I, whose teens have long been a matter of history, may sit down to record the impressions made on me by Richardson’s novels.

  Richardson has to be not skimmed but studied; not sucked like an orange, nor swallowed like a lollipop, but attacked secundum artem like a dinner of many courses and wines. Once inside the vast and solid labyrinth of his intrigue, you must hold fast to the clue which you have caught upon entering, or the adventure proves impossible, and you emerge from his precincts defeated and disgraced. And by us children of Mudie, to whom a novel must be either a solemn brandy-and-soda or as it were a garrulous and vapid afternoon tea, adventures of that moment are not often attempted.

  Richardson’s great forte consists in the art of making his characters live; in this particular he has rarely been rivalled, never, I think, excelled, by other authors. He employs not the mental dissecting-knife of modern writers. He affects not to analyse with a pretence of profundity the inexplicable workings of the mind. His method, on the contrary, is that of nature herself. The characters of his creations are revealed to us, like those of our friends, in what they say and do; and with so much of nature, so much of consistency, in the representation, that they grow into our intimacy as our friends themselves; they excite our love, our esteem, our compassion, or it may be our scorn, our detestation, as if they were veritably sentient and sensible beings. In a word, the persons of Richardson’s novels are no mere problems in psychology, but, relatively to the reader’s affections, real creatures of flesh and blood, a consummation far more difficult of attainment.

  The position, therefore, of Richardson in our literature is that of a great Nonconformist. He was not manufactured according to any established process. If I may employ a metaphor borrowed from his own most honourable craft, he was set up in a new kind of type.

  No men were ever more absolutely antipathetic—more fundamentally and radically antagonistic than Richardson with his shrinking, prudish, careful, self-searching nature, and Fielding with his large, reckless, generous, exuberant temperament. Their literary methods were no less opposed. The one, with the schooling of a tradesman, was mainly a spectator ab intra; the other, with the education of a gentleman, mainly a spectator ab extra. One had an unrivalled knowledge of Woman; the other an unrivalled experience of Man. To Richardson’s subjective gifts were added an extraordinary persistence of mental application, and a merciless power of cumulative details; to Fielding’s objective faculty, the keen perceptions of a humorist, and a matchless vein of irony. Both were reputed to have written “le premier roman du monde.” Each has been called by his admirers the Father of the English Novel. It would be more exact to divide the paternity:—to speak of Richardson as the Father of the Novel of Sentiment, and Fielding as the Father of the Novel of Manners.

  It is true that the novel was developed, and not created, but it is not more true of Richardson’s novel than of any other new species of composition, such as Marlowe’s tragedy, or Scott’s romantic tale, or Byron’s personal epic. All alike are developed, not created, in the sense of having many affinities with the kind of literature immediately anterior to them. Thus in the novel of manners there are two elements—there is a description of ordinary character, and there is a plot-interest—i. e., there is a story. Both of these elements are found in the generation before Richardson, but not in combination. It was he that combined them in his novel of manners, and therefore is he entitled to the praise of having invented a new species of composition.

  There was no machinery, no plot, no classicism, no style—but sentiment in abundance and vast prolixity, and ever-recurring villainies, and “pillows bedew’d with tears.” The particularity and fulness of his descriptions were something wonderful; every button on a coat, every ring on the fingers, every tint of a ribbon, every ruffle on a cap, every ruffle of emotion, every dimple in a cheek is pictured, and then—the “pillows bedew’d with tears.”

  Richardson could not aspire to any literary graces; his resources were too few and his methods too simple for such an ambition. But in his delicate and discriminating character drawing he inevitably developed a new literary appliance. He was bound to eschew theory, to avoid any cataloguing of characteristics, to lay aside the old modes of the seventeenth-century Theophrastuses, and to subordinate his drawing of character to his story. He must perforce be simple, and proceed step by step, discarding all pedantry, and allowing the character to reveal itself with the inevitableness of reality.

  His style, at its worst, is diffuse, clumsy, and involved; and, at its best, is no more than blunt, direct, and unaffected. When his characters are discussing the “social problems” of their day the diction is no better than the average contemporary pamphleteer’s. His vocabulary is commonplace, shows no trace of selection, and is disfigured by that abuse of the current poetical phraseology into which even a Thomson was sometimes betrayed, and by force of which tears are transformed into “pearly fugitives.” We are not, indeed, to look to Richardson for that nameless quality of style which is the property of a scholar and a gentleman, such as Fielding was; for Richardson belongs to neither category. On the other hand, it would be grossly unfair to be blind to the great knack of extremely racy and idiomatic colloquial English which he displays in his dialogue; or to grudge him the merits of straightforwardness and spirit; or to refuse to admit that at times he shows complete command over the instrument of modern powers and compass. The effects, indeed, which he more than once achieves seem out of all proportion to the poverty of his means.

  To-day the works of Richardson are entirely forgotten. Of these once famous novels the public no longer knows anything beyond the titles. Even the critics scarcely pay any attention to the man who was considered the greatest of all English writers in point of pathos, and if “Tom Jones,” the “Vicar of Wakefield” and “Robinson Crusoe” are still read, “Clarissa Harlowe” is read no more than “Clélie” or “Le Grand Cyrus.” This neglect may be explained, but it cannot be justified. Richardson’s work must always be of the highest importance in the history of fiction, by reason of the magnitude of the revolution he effected. His very faults even, obvious as they are, stamp him with originality.

  I do not for one moment believe that it was the blithe and brutal coarseness of Fielding’s novels that exiled them from the female heart, that inconsistent heart which never fluttered over the more repellent indecency of “Pamela.” Insidious influences were at work within the dovecotes. The eighteenth-century woman, while less given to self-analysis and self-assertion than her successor to-day, was just as conscious of her own nature, its resistless force, its inalienable laws, its permanent limitations; and in Richardson she recognized the artist who had divined her subtleties, and had given them form and color. His correspondence with women is unlike anything else the period has to show. To him they had an independence of thought and action which took the rest of mankind a hundred years longer to concede; and it is not surprising to see the fervent homage this stout little tradesman of sixty received from his female flatterers, when we remember that he and he alone in all his century had looked into the rebellious secrets of their hearts with understanding and with reverence.

  What was Richardson’s addition to literature may be described in a condensed form as a combination of art in the progress of a narrative, force in the evolution of pathos, and morality founded upon a profound study of conduct. Of the group, he was the one who wrote least correctly; Richardson, as a pure man of letters, is the inferior, not merely of Fielding and Sterne, but of Smollett. He knows no form but the tedious and imperfect artifice of a series of letters. He is often without distinction, always without elegance and wit; he is pedantic, careless, profuse; he seems to write for hours and hours, his wig thrown over the back of a chair, his stockings down at heel. But the accidents of his life and temperament had inducted him into an extraordinary knowledge of the female heart; while his imagination permitted him to clothe the commonplace reflections of very ordinary people in fascinating robes of simple fancy. He was slow of speech and lengthy, but he had a magic gift which obliged every one to listen to him. The minuteness of Richardson’s observations of common life added extremely to the pleasure which his novels gave to readers weary of the vagueness, the empty fustian of the heroic romances. His pages appealed to the instinct in the human mind which delights to be told over again, and told in scrupulous detail, that which it knows already. His readers, encouraged by his almost oily partiality for the moral conventions, gave themselves up to him without suspicion, and enjoyed each little triviality, each coarse touch of life, each prosaic circumstance, with perfect gusto, sure that, however vulgar they might be, they would lead up to the triumph of virtue. What these readers were really assisting at was the triumph of anti-romantic realism.

  Richardson’s expressed, and beyond the slightest doubt his sincere, purpose in all was, not to produce works of art, but to enforce lessons of morality. Yet posterity, while pronouncing his morals somewhat musty and even at times a little rancid, has recognised him as a great, though by no means an impeccable artist.

  We are not likely to overestimate the historical position of Richardson; we are more likely to underestimate it. Moreover, in the logical sequence of minor incident, “Clarissa Harlowe” has been excelled only by the maturest work of George Eliot. And yet the weaknesses and shortcomings of Richardson are apparent, and were apparent in his own time. His ethical system was based upon no wide observation or sound philosophy; it was the code of a Protestant casuist. He was a sentimentalist, creating pathetic scenes for their own sake and degrading tears and hysterics into a manner. His language was not free from the affectations of the romancers; even his friends dared tell him with caution and circumlocution that he was fond of the nursery phrase. He was unacquainted, as he said himself, with the high life he pretended to describe.

  To the smaller details of his art, it need hardly be said, Richardson paid no attention whatever. He has no style at all; he wrote just as he talked, and as he composed those innumerable epistles on which we have drawn so largely. His sentences are often quite invertebrate, and innocent of anything that could do duty for a predicate, the finite verb being replaced by a participle or adjective. He never troubles about the symmetry of his paragraphs, and he never wastes time in compressing into ten words what is easier to say in twenty. There is no nice choice of epithet, nor fastidious rejection of the trite or homely; if he had been more careful he could never have been so prolix. And there is not in his books what has often redeemed the style of writers no less homely in their way, that appeal to, and constant illustration by means of natural beauty, which elevate the novels of a writer so much inferior to him as Mrs. Radcliffe.