IT IS DIFFICULT TODAY TO SUGGEST SERIOUSLY THAT ANY THINKING, responsible person sit down and read a book; the glorified comic magazine we call the modern “novel” has taken too firm a hold on our racing, bewildered minds. It is too easy to read a thin volume where everything is said only once, and seven or eight words suffice for a sentence, just as seven or eight pat phrases suffice for an idea; why read anything “long” or, worse still, “old”? Why, for instance, read a stuffy old character like Samuel Richardson, who looms only very vaguely back there beyond Henry James and past Thackeray and is more than obscured by Jane Austen; why read Richardson, who was certainly very moral and extremely long and, not to put too fine a point on it, dull?
I can think of, offhand, three reasons. I can find in someone like Richardson three attributes somehow lost today and intensely, humanly, valuable: peace, principle, kindness—three qualities as emphatically stuffy and old-fashioned as your grandmother’s wedding gown, and as emphatically lost from general circulation.
Peace would come first today, I should think. Out of a time when things moved slowly, and conversation was formal and, if you like, stilted, and when a man could, if he chose, write a book a million words long and expect people to have time for it, Richardson made three books. They move along like molasses; no small action is consummated in less than ten pages. They line up, volume after volume full of solid, meaningful words, and they are leisurely, relaxed, and gracious. Richardson was a fat little man who ran a fine printing business and worked hard at it; he sat daily at tea with groups of admiring ladies; he liked his cat and he liked his garden and he liked gossip about high life, and he had plenty of time. With all his interests and all his busy concerns—and he stayed plump; he liked his food—he wrote three novels, Pamela; or, Virtue Rewarded; Clarissa; or, The History of a Young Lady; and The History of Sir Charles Grandison, which, placed side by side, would fill up two mystery-story shelves in a modern library.
Page after page, volume after volume of intimate letters go into these novels, letters back and forth from one character to another, describing events, commenting on the descriptions, reflecting on the moral implications of several courses of action, requesting more comments, all taking plenty of time, with nobody hurrying. In any dramatic crisis, the heroine has time for a polysyllabic remonstrance, which she reports faithfully in her letters; the villain has time for a lengthy insincere apology, which he reports faithfully in his letters; and both explain their actions minutely, and ask for comments from their correspondents, which they get, along with recapitulations of what might have been done under the circumstances, and comments on that. And in all of it, there is a vast sense of leisure to reflect, to choose, to be graceful. Peace provides the opportunity to have time to think.
Principle is a great inspiration, too. Sir Charles Grandison (who may be the perfect man) cannot marry the woman he loves, or even let her suspect that he loves her, because he feels himself responsible to another woman who is devoted to him. Clarissa Harlowe is abducted and seduced, but she cannot marry Lovelace, her repentant seducer, although offered riches, a title, the forgiveness of her family, and perfect respect from all her friends, because her conception of herself as honorable has been destroyed. Pamela is kidnapped, besieged, commanded, bribed, tormented, and deceived, but cannot bring herself to yield to the irrepressible Mr. B. until she is offered a genuine wedding ring. It all sounds like the most outrageous nonsense, and yet what is it but Richardson’s exaggerated notion of honor? And is it possible that honor, however exaggerated, can really be ridiculous? Pride of self, dignity, respect: these still exist today, one hopes, and although Pamela and Clarissa and dear Sir Charles keep their values in an area once removed from the area in which our values lie today, are they so foolish? Is a sinful man the less sinful because his crimes are against a standard more rarified than ours? Lovelace, who ruined Clarissa, is not perhaps as bad a man as Faulkner’s Popeye, but Lovelace is certainly as real a sinner in his sphere; moreover, he has more time to be bad and to be subtle about it than Popeye.
The goodness of Richardson’s good characters—and all his characters are very sharply divided, half being devils, half angels—is in the same terms as the badness: That is, they are good in a sense that, translated into terms we understand fully, comes out as qualities we like and admire and would like to own ourselves.
Kindness, the third attribute, is an outlandish word to use about a writer, or about writing, or about anything except people and the way they feel. And yet kindness is a strong quality felt in Richardson’s writing, the sort of kindness that evokes the tremendous tenderness the man himself must have felt, and tossed about embarrassingly on everyone who came his way. His characters, for instance, are nice to one another. One of them may abhor another; some of them—again, like Lovelace—outrage every precious tenet of a rigid morality and bring this outrage to bear on others; frequently these precise, lazy people are cross with one another, and stirred to anger. Harriet Byron was completely out of patience by about volume eight, when Sir Charles was sedately making absolutely sure that no conceivable shred of formality had been inadvertently overlooked. Nevertheless, implicit in every word, in every comment upon a comment, is the deep conviction of sympathy: not “We are all from the same mind: Richardson’s,” but “We are all from the same people: the mortals.” That is a valuable thing to record, and perhaps it takes ten volumes to put it across.
There is very little humor in Richardson, and, to be honest, some of the books are pretty heavy going—Pamela’s reflections on the education of her children, or some of the long stretches in Grandison where everyone takes a breather from the burning question (is it honorable or is it not?) and they just sit back and write long letters scrutinizing themselves—but without every word of it you couldn’t really be satisfied that Sir Charles ought to propose or that Pamela deserves her husband. The richness of it is in those long muddy sections, the dark background of the bright tapestry. After Pamela’s prolonged musings on children, we are disrespectfully delighted to see Mr. B. contemplate an elopement with a designing widow.
It takes a long time to read Richardson, and even so, he is only that stuffy little man a long way back—down the length of years to the eighteenth century, standing beyond even Thackeray and just behind Fielding—but peace, principle, and kindness are qualities that may even survive our own distempered time.