5

Happy Ever After in Sir Charles Grandison

Sir Charles Grandison is a rebel with a cause; Richardson’s good man lives his life in open and principled protest against the aristocratic mores of his day. He refuses to duel, drink, or drab, and he will not squander his money in country sports, London amusements, or the temptations found on the Grand Tour. As a narrative, Sir Charles Grandison is in equally frank rebellion against the comic conventions and expectations that its readers, in both Richardson’s time and our own, bring to the text. It refuses to end with marriage.

The reader of Shakespeare’s comedies and Jane Austen’s novels will search those canonical heavyweights in vain for a depiction of its heroes’ and heroines’ married lives—no Mrs. Darcy, no Hermia and Lysander household. Furthermore, neither author depicts a happily married couple whose courtship might conceivably itself have furnished narratable plot material. Elizabeth Bennett has no models on which to base her performance of the new role she takes at novel’s end. For Austen, married couples are mismatched (Mr. and Mrs. Bennet, Sir Thomas and Lady Bertram) or they are both so awful/limited/inconsequential that they deserve each other (Mr. and Mrs. Elton, John and Fanny Dashwood, Sir William and Lady Lucas, Lieutenant and Mrs. Price). Shakespeare’s couples tend to be wranglers (Titania and Oberon, the Capulets), and he often resorts to widows and widowers (Egeus, Prospero, the Countess of Rousillon) when filling in the blocking or enabling figures of the older generation. In Austen, the few examples of marital felicity tend to be a star below the sphere of the novel’s protagonists (the Gardiners are in trade, Admiral and Mrs. Croft are by no means rich), and in Shakespeare the only pair that might fit the bill of happily married couple are Margaret and George Page, who get along well but nevertheless bet on different horses in the race to marry off their daughter Anne in The Merry Wives of Windsor. (Incidentally, marriage fares little better in the plays that the First Folio identifies as tragedies or histories.)

I insist on this seven-league booted march across two summits of the undergraduate syllabus not primarily because Richardson was a careful reader of Shakespeare and Austen was a careful reader of Richardson (though both statements are true), but rather because Shakespeare and Austen exemplify a tradition that is as old as New Comedy and continues today, according to which marriage brings down the curtain on young lovers and married life is ridiculous, or unhappy, or exclusively concerned in meddling in the affairs of the young.¹ The eighteenth-century sentimental comedies of Richard Steele that Lady G and Harriet Byron love to cite to each other in Sir Charles Grandison fall squarely into this tradition, as do Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones (in the latter of which Fielding makes Squire Allworthy a widower, unlike his stated real-life analogue Ralph Allen, whose wife outlived him by two years). Richardson’s first novel does not follow this pattern; nearly half of Pamela narrates the first two and a half weeks of its heroine’s married life, to say nothing of his continuation Pamela in Her Exalted Condition. Richardson’s final novel builds the representation of happy married life into the foundation of its narrative structure. Like its hero’s conscientious objection to the dueling code, this generic protest on the part of Sir Charles Grandison is conscious and purposeful.² Clarissa is more direct than its successor about the relationship between narrative and immortality, because its heroine lives and dies in a way that at once impels the reader to postulate an afterlife for her and to regard her textual legacy as a road map for getting there. Sir Charles Grandison moves death from center stage to the wings, where it preys on minor characters such as Sir Charles’s father, Mr. Danby, and the penitent Sir Hargrave Pollexfen. But it considers the theme of immortality structurally, by breaking open the traditional courtship plot. To put the argument in a nutshell: life does not end with marriage for Richardson because life does not end, period. And telling the story of a life with no imagined end—a life lived in view of Christian immortality—requires a fundamental shift in the concepts of plot and narrative closure.

Changing One’s State: Marriage and Immortality

Samuel Johnson famously argued that Samson Agonistes has a beginning and an end but no middle.³ Similarly, one might say that Sir Charles Grandison has a beginning and a middle, but no end. Richardson does not close with the Grandisons’ marriage, or even with a less traditional milestone such as the birth of a Grandison heir or Clementina’s final choice between married and monastic life. Rather, he simply stops, and when Julia Bere, an admiring reader, asks him to continue, he replies that the events narrated in the seven published volumes “bring it down pretty near to the present time,” rendering further narration impossible.⁴ As it happens, this is a slightly disingenuous protest: Richardson’s letter to Bere was written in May 1754 and the day/date alignments in the novel, and the fact that it takes place after the ’45 and before the calendar reform of 1752, establish without doubt that he used a calendar to set the action from January 1749 to May 1750. Thus, Richardson did in fact leave a practicable if not overgenerous temporal margin for further updates from his cast of characters, and he certainly might have decided Clementina’s fate without encroaching on the time of composition. It is nevertheless highly significant, and appropriate, that when Richardson is asked to extend the narrative, his demurral appeals first to obstacles in the chronology and then only secondarily to the state of the plot.

To a greater extent even than Clarissa, whose earthly plot is after all end-stopped by the finality of death, Sir Charles Grandison imports into narrative fiction the diurnal, sequential, almost plotless nature of the Spectator or Night Thoughts. Moreover, it imports into such plot as it does have the structural principle of morally formative repetition, with both reader and character reaping improvement from the same things happening over and over again. Sir Charles Grandison depicts a world in which human life is not a unidirectional sequence of crises and inflection points, leading to a tightly plotted denouement. Rather, it is iterative and incremental, circling back to places it has been before. From an aesthetic standpoint, one might call this formal realism. Richardson called it instruction.

Harriet Byron disposes of suitor after suitor, and acquires surrogate parent after surrogate parent, each according to his or her deserts. Wherever he goes, Sir Charles is inevitably called upon to defuse duels, execute wills, and intervene in scenes of attempted violence on the public roads. (His repeated refusals to fight, though indisputably admirable, have the side effect of making Sir Charles’s endless peregrinations through England and continental Europe into a parody of chivalric shaggy dog stories like Le Morte D’Arthur; by the time he conciliates Mr. Greville in the sixth volume, Sir Charles has become a cautionary illustration to authors of the tedium that can result when knights errant undergo Norbert Elias’s civilizing process and begin to refuse to fight each other.) Marriage negotiations between the Catholic Porretta family and Sir Charles have the same rhythm, with the moral polarity reversed, of the narrator’s endlessly repeated appeals to Lorenzo in Night Thoughts; they exhort him again and again to convert, but he never does. Clementina makes a nonaggression pact with her family on the topic of marriage on 3:374–75, only to break it on 3:426 with a renewed request to be allowed to enter a nunnery. The wounds of Jeronymo della Porretta, into which Mr. Lowther and his Italian surgical colleagues introduce “hollow tents” of lint in order to promote the discharge of “matter,” are a synecdoche for the various plots of Sir Charles Grandison itself: they are never quite allowed to close (2:452).

This is not to say that nothing happens in the novel: on the contrary, everything does, from the birth of Lady L and Lady G’s squalling “marmousets” to the cheerful senectitude of Grandmother Shirley and the pious death of Sir Harry Beauchamp (3:261). The reader sees every aspect of eighteenth-century bourgeois and aristocratic private life; in particular, as I have argued above, Richardson devotes exceptional narrative energy to depicting not only the single but also the married state. Moreover, his characters spend much of their time talking about these two states, and the transition from the one to the other. In Sir Charles Grandison, the “married state,” particularly for women, is an abstraction that need not have reference to any particular spouse. Hence Sir Charles wants his sister Charlotte to marry on the principle that he “is a great friend to the married state; especially with regard to our sex,” and the married Charlotte, Mrs. Shirley, Lady Gertrude, and the girls of Selby-House can reason casuistically on the merits of singleness and marriage in various economic and family situations (1:290, 3:408).⁵ As Harriet’s various proposals demonstrate, marriage is not so much a passionate meeting of souls, or even a bilateral contract, as it is an initiation into a new set of kinship and friendship networks. Harriet has far more interaction with Sir Rowland Meredith and the Countess of D. than with either Mr. Fowler or the Earl of D., her nominal suitors. Sir Charles, writing to Dr. Bartlett from Bologna with his offer to Clementina yet pending, hopes that Harriet Byron will be happy in life: “The Countess D. is a worthy woman: The Earl, her son, is a good young man: Miss Byron merits such a mother; the Countess such a daughter” (2:455). One need not have recourse to the psychologizing hypothesis that Sir Charles is reluctant to think directly about Harriet and the earl as a pair to explain this bizarre placing of emphasis. Harriet would in fact be marrying her mother-in-law as much as she would be marrying the earl, who unlike his resourceful and articulate mother is a narrative nonentity.⁶ Only downright villains such as Sir Hargrave woo with reference to their personal merits and the intensity of their love (see 1:112–15) rather than by appealing to their place in a larger social context. The Grandisons, of course, ally themselves to Harriet as an extended family group (with Lord L and even Lord G into the bargain).

Harriet’s suitors, Sir Charles not excepted, assume that the primary function of marriage is not the creation of a new emotional or erotic dyad; rather, marriage transposes the bride into a new social space. Sir Charles’s youngest sister shows marriage in a different but equally non-dyadic light: as a crucible of personal transformation. While retaining the essential features of her individuality, Charlotte Grandison becomes Lady G by changing her habits and manners, and smoothing out the impertinent or improper aspects of her personality.

Marriage, for Richardson, is an allegorical type of immortality: just as human existence is divided between a terrestrial “state of trial” and a posthumous “happier state,” the former comprises, in the preferred course of things, a “single state” or “maiden state” followed by the “happy state” of matrimony.⁷ In each case, individual selfhood persists, though it is irreversibly transformed and irrevocably transposed into a new milieu. (Strikingly, this analogy makes the woman’s experience of marriage, which involves greater alteration, paradigmatic for the universal experience of transformed posthumous survival; like the related New Testament image of Christ as the bridegroom and the church as the bride, Richardson’s typology of marriage and immortality makes women of us all.) In Clarissa, Richardson invites his reader to sublate human tragedy into divine comedy, drawing the reader from earth to heaven. Sir Charles Grandison continues on beyond the traditional end of human comedy, and in so doing depicts, typologically speaking, heaven on earth. This formulation echoes Jocelyn Harris’s claim that Richardson’s works express his hope for “a temperate, very English paradise here on earth,” but I wish to emphasize that this paradise figures the literal immortality of the human soul, not just the possibilities of moral and political reform.⁸ Hence Sir Charles offers a prophecy in volume 4 that he will go on to fulfill himself in volumes 6 and 7: “May the man, said he, who shall have the honour to call Miss Byron his, be, if possible, as deserving as she is! Then they will live together the life of angels” (2:339). Richardson never uses the phrase “happy ever after” (the OED gives no example before 1853), but it perfectly describes what Sir Charles Grandison is about.

The conceptual and lexical resonances between changing one’s state from singleness to marriage and changing one’s state from life to immortality echo throughout the text of Sir Charles Grandison, as thinking about marriage invariably sets Richardson’s characters thinking about the afterlife. This thinking tends to be causal in nature: marriage has this or that implication for one’s posthumous fate. But underlying this metonymic relationship is the metaphoric one in which marriage provides an earthly model for how the afterlife works. Most famously, Clementina refuses to marry Sir Charles because she fears that marriage to a Protestant would endanger her salvation. Sir Charles reasons as follows with Jeronymo when persuading him to renounce his mistress and marry:

Virtuous love, my dear Jeronymo, looks beyond this temporary scene; while guilty attachments usually find a much earlier period than that of human life. Inconstancy, on one side or the other, seldom fails to put a disgraceful end to them. But were they to endure for life, what can the reflexions upon them do towards softening the agonies of the inevitable hour?

Remember, my Jeronymo, that you are a MAN, a rational and immortal agent; and act up to the dignity of your nature. Can sensual pleasure be the great end of an immortal spirit in this life? (2:140–41)

Sir Charles’s argument here mingles causal/metonymic and analogical coordinations of marriage and immortality. On the one hand, “virtuous love … looks beyond this temporary scene” in the sense that it gives us nothing to regret on our deathbed (unlike “guilty attachments,” which bring no comfort in the “inevitable hour” of death). Marriage is virtuous and thus a causal factor in a happy afterlife. But it is also an unbreakable lifelong commitment, and as such an appropriate end for “a rational and immortal agent” (unlike “guilty attachments,” which virtually always end with “inconstancy”). Marriage is virtuous precisely because its long duration is analogical to immortality and as such has a dignity worthy of an immortal such as man. In this appeal to Jeronymo’s dignified manly nature, Sir Charles offers the weight and seriousness of marriage as an inducement; in a prenuptial catechizing that he gives to Charlotte on the morning that she becomes Lady G, this same weight takes on a more forbidding aspect: “Her brother had been talking to her,” Harriet reports to Lucy Selby, “and had laid down the duties of the state she was about to enter into, in such a serious manner, and made the performance of them of so much importance to her happiness both here and hereafter, that she was terrified at the thoughts of what she was about to undertake” (2:338). Thoughts of the “here” of marriage bring thoughts of the “hereafter” in their train.⁹

Later in Lord G and Charlotte’s wedding day, Sir Charles turns the topic of conversation to marriage again, wishing the couple happiness. Lord W (a case study in the unhappiness of keeping a mistress like Mrs. Giffard rather than marrying a wife like Miss Mansfield) expresses his gratitude for the match Sir Charles made for him: “All the joys of my present prospects, all the comforts of my future life, are and will be owing to you” (2:239). Here “future life” refers both to Lord W’s remaining years on earth (which will be comforted by Lady W’s solicitude for his gout rather than embittered by Mrs. Giffard’s termagancy) and to his fate thereafter (which will be formed by his years spent as a married man rather than the keeper of a mistress, as per Sir Charles’s argument to Jeronymo). This ambiguity is reinforced by Lord W’s awkward next remark, which imputes to marriage a status traditionally given to the afterlife, to wit that of being a reward: “Here had he stopt, it would have been well: But turning to me [writes Harriet], he unexpectedly said, Would to God, madam, that YOU could reward him! I cannot; and nobody else can” (2:339). This is even more of a faux pas than Lord W knows: after all, Clementina was offered to Sir Charles with the intention of rewarding him, and the consequences were not as the would-be rewarders hoped. In covering the awkwardness and blushes that follow Lord W’s plainspoken words, Sir Charles continues and develops their implication, for he replies with the remark quoted above that Harriet and her eventual husband would “live together the life of angels.”

Examples of the marriage/afterlife analogy in Sir Charles Grandison might be multiplied—after all, this is the book that is never content to teach a given lesson only once. One further example, too striking to omit, occurs at the beginning of volume 6. Harriet describes to Lady G her sensations when she realizes that she is the woman whom Sir Charles wishes to marry:

I know not how to describe what I felt in my now fluttering, now rejoicing, now dejected heart—

Dejected?—Yes, my dear Lady G. Dejection was a strong ingredient in my sensibilities. I know not why. Yet may there not be a fullness in joy, that will mingle dissatisfaction with it? If there may, shall I be excused for my solemnity, if I deduce from thence an argument, that the human Soul is not to be fully satisfied by worldly enjoyments; and that therefore the completion of its happiness must be in another, a more perfect state. You, Lady G. are a very good woman, tho’ a lively one; and I will not excuse you, if on an occasion that bids me look forward to a very solemn event, you will not forgive my seriousness. (3:18–19)

Harriet is repeating an argument for immortality that she might well have read in the Spectator or in Butler’s Analogy of Religion: that the perfectibility of the soul and the imperfect state of the world suggest that the former survives the latter, to find hereafter happiness and improvement that were not available on earth. Indeed, Harriet’s reasoning might imply that even marriage to Sir Charles cannot be “the completion of … happiness” for her soul.¹⁰ But this is not the primary force of her response, in which marriage and death are fixed and portentous future events that contrast with her current fluttering state. The prospect of a wedding, “a very solemn event,” renews her awareness of the afterlife; the married state points beyond itself to the “more perfect state” that follows.

Indeed, the fixity of marriage vows makes an imprudent choice a type of hell. Thus the “proud, affected, and conceited” Miss Cantillon’s elopement with a penniless “nominal captain” and Laurana Sforza’s suicide are in a sense parallel cases of making a premature but irrevocable choice. “Her punishment was of her own choosing,” Harriet says of the former, while Sir Charles reflects soberly in the latter case that an “immortal Being [has fixed] its eternal state by an act dreadful and irreversible; by a crime that admits not of repentance; and shall we not be concerned?” (1:42, 3:13, 3:14, 3:448). In the Analogy of Religion, Butler had argued that we can infer posthumous divine justice from the fact that crimes in general find their punishment in this world.¹¹ Sir Charles applies this general argument to the case of a marriage between a greedy yet beautiful young woman and a rich and lustful old man, pointing out that when the woman, no longer young, inherits the money and marries a young rake in her turn, she will now very probably be the despised mate to the young second husband that her old first husband was to her: “The violators of the social duties are frequently punished by the success of their own wishes. Don’t you think, my Lord, that it is suitable to the divine benignity, as well as justice, to lend its sanctions and punishments in aid of those duties which bind man to man?” (1:430). In the continuous moral fabric of the Butlerian universe, marriage is once more both metonymy and metaphor for divine justice as a whole.¹²

Presented with the central eighteenth-century vindication of the afterlife—that its rewards and punishments would complete the work of God’s justice left manifestly unfinished on earth—skeptics such as Hume could reply that humans certainly did not live their lives as though they were particularly concerned with futurity: “The whole scope or intention of man’s creation … is limited to the present life. With how weak a concern, from the original, inherent structure of the mind and passions, does he ever look farther?”¹³ The essay from which this quotation is taken, “Of the Immortality of the Soul,” could not have been known to Richardson, and it was in any case not printed until 1755 (in a small run that Hume himself quickly suppressed), a year after the conclusion of Sir Charles Grandison. But it represents a broader challenge to which both Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison respond. The characters whom Richardson holds up as examples invariably live their lives with simultaneous reference to this life and the next. This is not to say that Sir Charles, or Harriet, or Grandmother Shirley emulate the otherworldly melancholy of Night Thoughts (although Harriet does call Young her “favorite author” and quotes seven heavenly minded lines from Night the Eighth, which is much further into Night Thoughts than most of Young’s readers got [1:298]). On the contrary, Mrs. Shirley, who, in Lucy Selby’s account, “has already one foot among the stars,” and thus serves as an emblem of the continuity between earth and heaven, is avowedly a friend to innocent amusements and pleasures (3:264; in the index that Richardson included at the end of the seventh volume, repeated reference is made to her being a promoter of the innocent pleasures of youth). In the center of a cluster of references to heaven and the afterlife around the marriage of Harriet and Sir Charles, the following verses, which the latter sings while accompanying himself on his “noble organ,” sum up their shared attitude:

My soul, with gratitude profound

Receive a Form so bright!

And yet, I boast a bliss beyond

This angel to the sight.

When charms of mind and person meet,

How rich our raptures rise!

The Fair that renders earth so sweet,

Prepares me for the skies!

“I thought at the time, I had a foretaste of the joys of heaven,” reports Harriet on hearing the performance (2:274–75). Carol Houlihan Flynn’s wickedly funny line, that “Sir Charles Grandison is a classic saint’s life” in which “unfortunately, the corpse walks among his admiring mourners, complacently accepting their choruses of praise,” works because it assumes what Richardson’s novel attempts to disprove: that death is a static end, and that heaven and earth are radically discontinuous.¹⁴

Of course, this angelic duet between Harriet and Sir Charles is counterpointed by a minor third. If the married state is heaven on earth, is God not doing an injustice to the deserving Clementina? For Sir Charles, Harriet’s beauty and mind make life sweet and preparation for the afterlife easy; these two forces interfere rather than harmonize for Clementina, who sees in her love for Sir Charles the possible perdition of her immortal soul. Clementina presents the reader with a softened and less crucial version of the imaginative challenge posed by Clarissa; Clarissa does not belong on earth, and so we must imagine her in heaven.¹⁵ Clementina, with her unsettled fate, is a similar reminder that even the happiest lives on earth are not fully perfected, fully synthesized with divine goodness. Sir Charles Grandison presents the marriage of Harriet and Sir Charles as an allegory of heaven, but at points where the characters reach toward a more literal imagination of what heaven will be like, they are faced with the vagueness and even inconsistency that is characteristic of the era. Harriet imagines a continuing relationship with Sir Charles, and Clementina imagines that all three will be in heaven together. Sir Charles, meanwhile, points out that in heaven there will be no sex (a proleptic argument, by the way, against Hume’s skeptical reasoning in “Of the Immortality of the Soul” that the mental inferiority of women is an argument for mortalism) and imagines his resurrected body being drawn out of sleep in the ground.

Heaven, unknowable in its sensory particularity, functions for Sir Charles Grandison as a synthesis of theses that cannot be harmonized on earth; it is the place where the marriage relationship that unites Harriet and Sir Charles will be capacious enough to contain Clementina as well. But it will do so, the novel implies, in terms that continue and develop those of earthly life. Refused by Clementina for the final time, and leaving Naples for England and Harriet, Sir Charles promises to correspond with the woman who will not be his wife. In typical Grandisonian fashion, her first letter to him chews over yet once more the courtship she has broken off: “Nothing but the due consideration of the brevity as well as vanity of this life, in which we are but probationers, and of the eternity of the next, could have influenced me to act against my heart” (2:612). In the reply that follows immediately, Sir Charles quotes his correspondent’s words back to her virtually verbatim: “‘Nothing’, says the most generous and pious of her Sex, ‘but the due consideration of the brevity as well as vanity of this life, and of the duration of the next, could have influenced me to act against my heart’” (2:614, emphasis added). Sir Charles has silently changed “eternity,” with its connotations of stasis and timelessness, to “duration,” which in contrast carries Addisonian suggestions of continuation and the endless extension of time. Resolved to be silent on matters of confessional controversy, Sir Charles nevertheless signals his commitment to the Addisonian/Anglican picture of a horizontal afterlife.

Lifespan and Plot

To articulate why Richardson’s thematic preoccupation with immortality has deep formal implications, it is necessary to return to the roots of the most fundamental constitutive feature of narrative: that it has a plot. Aristotle’s Poetics, which Richardson encountered through the Spectator and through the English translation of René Rapin’s Reflections on it, will stand in here for the incumbent Western tradition.¹⁶ Aristotle distinguishes between narrative poetry and history in two ways in chapter 23 of the Poetics: first, the historian “describes the thing that has been,” whereas the poet describes “a kind of thing that might be.”¹⁷ Second, narrative poetry should have a plot, like tragedy: that is to say, “based on a single action, one that is a complete whole in itself, with a beginning, middle, and end, so as to enable the work to produce its own proper pleasure with all the organic unity of a living creature” (1459a18–21; compare Rapin 2:186–87). History, by contrast, is structured by time rather than plot: “A history has to deal not with one action, but with one period and all that happened in that to one or more persons, however disconnected the several events may have been” (1459a22–24). As such, history presumably lacks “the organic unity of a living creature” (this is less of a mouthful in Greek: history is merely not like zoon holon, “a complete organism”) and the pleasure that comes with it. Aristotle is aware that his rule here can be broken, that there is no necessary connection between his ontological criterion (poetry is probable, narrative is factual) and his formal criterion (poetry has a single action, history covers a given period of time). Poems such as “the Cypria and Little Iliad” (post-Homeric epics describing incidents from the Trojan War, now lost) have the narrative form of histories, and thus are inferior to the works of Homer (1459b2; compare Rapin 2:187–88). Though the notorious nonsurvival of Aristotle’s treatise on comedy leaves us on uncertain ground, we can nevertheless imagine that he would be equally unhappy with Sir Charles Grandison and would prefer Fielding’s Joseph Andrews, which, as a “comic epic poem in prose,” was consciously tailored to fit within the approved Aristotelian taxonomy as a fiction with a beginning, middle, and end.

Aristotle’s comparison of narrative poetry and history occurs near the end of the Poetics, as part of his discussion of epic. His concept of plot points back to a fuller discussion earlier in the treatise, in which he considers tragedy. In Aristotle’s view, plot is “the first and the most important thing in tragedy,” and it is required to have “beginning, middle, and end” (1450a26). In explaining why this is the case, Aristotle offers an extended comparison (which, as we have seen, remains in his mind throughout the Poetics) of a tragic plot with a living organism:

To be beautiful, a living creature, and every whole made up of parts, must not only present a certain order in its arrangement of parts, but also be of a certain definite magnitude.… Just in the same way, then, as a beautiful whole made up of parts, or a beautiful living creature, must be of some size, but a size to be taken in by the eye, so a story or plot must be of some length, but of a length to be taken in by the memory.… As a rough general formula, a length which allows of the hero passing by a series of probable or necessary stages from bad fortune to good, or from good to bad, may suffice as a limit for the magnitude of the story. (1450a34–36, 1451a2–6, 11–15)

This comparison of a plot (muthos) to a living being (zoon) appears to be a considerable conceptual reach; as the twentieth-century commentator Gerald F. Else tartly points out, it “involves a change of medium from sight to sound and from space to time. Aristotle seems unaware of any difficulties, such as a modern aesthetician might raise, about the validity of the transfer from one sense to the other.”¹⁸ But we would do well to remember that Aristotle is not only a founder of Western aesthetics, but also the founder of biology and zoology. Plots and animals are two things he has thought carefully about. What does it mean that he sees the former as a simile for the latter?

The connection is that for Aristotle the beautiful order of a complete organism is the result of a process of development. A “beautiful living creature” (kalon zoon) and “the organic unity of a living creature” (zoon holon) are both the culmination of nutrition and growth, the teleological process of a creature reaching its appropriate size and shape.¹⁹ A finished plot looks like a mature animal because each has passed through a necessary sequence of stages: infancy, youth, maturity; beginning, middle, end. Animal life and narrative plot are both bound to follow a course that is inherent in their nature, and as such each is finite.

This comparison comes naturally to Aristotle because it is thematized in the Athenian tragedies that exemplify his aesthetics. Consider the parable of the lion from the chorus of Aeschylus’s Agamemnon:

A man raised as his own

a lion cub, not weaned

yet, robbed of the breast

gentle in the beginning.…

And often in his arms

he rocked it like a baby.…

But as time passed it showed

the color of its bloodlines

and in return for all

the kindness it received

from those who fostered it,

it made a bleak, forbidden

feast, cruel slaughter of all.²⁰

The eighteenth-century scholar will, of course, recognize the source of Clarissa’s third “mad paper,” which tells the story of “a lady” who “took a great fancy to a young Lion, or a Bear, I forget which.”²¹ Both the chorus and Clarissa draw the same moral: that the lion “showed the color of its bloodlines,” or, as Clarissa puts it, “what it did, was in its own nature” (5:304–5). We may note something different: that the lion grows from being a cub (or, in Clarissa’s version, a “whelp”) into maturity and thus its own treacherous nature. The chorus anticipates Aristotle’s metaphor of the plot as a complete organism insofar as its lion may be read as an allegory of tragedy itself: it grows up over time to its full proportions and ends with “a chaos of strewn / corpses.”²²

Equally striking in its coordination of plot and the span of animal life is the case of Sophocles’s Oedipus the King, Aristotle’s touchstone of a perfect plot. The play nowhere recites the famous riddle of the Sphinx. But it assumes that the audience has the riddle in mind throughout: the identity of the creature walks on four feet, on two feet, and on three feet is an inescapable subtext of the play. As Diskin Clay puts it in his commentary, “Oedipus is revealed as an infant on Kathairon, a man standing steady at the height of his power, and a blind exile who must walk upon the earth with a staff to support him and direct his way.”²³ The course of a man’s life is like a day, which in turn is like the plot of a tragedy: each has a beginning, a middle, and an irrevocable end. (Indeed, this was particularly true of tragedies like those of Sophocles that were performed in Athens: in the ordinary course of things, each play was only performed a single time). The riddle of the Sphinx is thus a progenitor of Aristotle’s conception of plot. Oedipus the King does not depict the death of Oedipus (that is reserved for Sophocles’s final play, Oedipus at Colonus). But the final words of the chorus describe the inevitability and finality of death:

Keep your eyes on that last day, on your dying.

Happiness and peace, they were not yours

unless at death you can look back on your life and say

I lived, I did not suffer.²⁴

But what if death is not the end? For Sophocles, Oedipus has a certain numinous afterlife, insofar as his corpse, buried on the outskirts of Athens, exerts a tutelary power.²⁵ But what if, to undertake a wrenchingly anachronistic thought experiment, Oedipus were to live on instead in eighteenth-century heaven? The finality of death would be suspended, and with it, analogically, the aesthetic logic of an end-stopped plot. For the Addisonian eighteenth-century Christian, man is the organism that never stops improving, a kalon zoon that becomes ever more beautiful in the afterlife and a zoon holon whose full perfection is only partially realized on earth. To return from ancient Greece to Samuel Richardson: what walks on four, then on two, then on three, then “with one foot among the stars,” then, presumably, with both feet among the stars? Why, Grandmother Shirley, who narrates her early education and is only taken lame when she is leading out her granddaughters at a ball. What has a beginning and a middle but no end? Sir Charles Grandison.