The Facts of Fiction Read Online Free PDF Page A

imaginative muscles, the moralists at once begin to beat the author over the head with his Preface.
    Richardson as a novelist was always a little embarrassed by his exertions as a moralist. That he made
Clarissa
a tragedy of classical bleakness and insisted on its remaining so despite such hysterical appeals as that from Colley Cibber and Letitia Pilkington: “Spare her virgin purity, dear sir, spare it. Consider if this wounds Cibber and me (who neither of us set up for immaculate chastity) what must it be to those who possess that inestimable treasure?” is the most convincing proof that Richardson could practise as a novelist as well as preach as a saint. And Richardson, to whom such appeals were common, must often have felt rather as the Creator would have felt had he received a petition on the seventh day asking for the removal from the Garden of Eden of the Tree of Good and Evil, with attendant Serpent. Both were appeals which the Creator was bound, in the interests of intelligent creation, to ignore.
    The true defects of
Sir Charles Grandison
are that it was so slow, so trivial, so proper and so Italian (Italy was far more genteel than France at the time) that had a petition been got up on behalf of Miss Byron or Miss Selby, or even for Sir Charles himself on the eve of his duel with SirHargreave Pollexfen, no one would have put himself to the trouble of signing it.
    Sir Charles Grandison
was a failure (it can hardly be said to have failed) not so much because it was too Italian—Macaulay ingeniously suggested that shorn of its Italianate appendages it would make an excellent novel—as because its propriety was so uniformly of the order that led Johnson to remark that “Richardson taught the passions to move at the command of virtue.”
    For some reason, virtue, at least the kind of virtue that leads its possessors to be called good, is tolerable only in a woman. Virtue of that sort is usually the last resort of an idle feminine mind. In a man it can be a positive vice. And that monster of rectitude, Sir Charles Grandison, comes down to us as virtuous merely because the aggregate of his qualities amounts to nothing higher than his not being vicious.
    Another reason why
Sir Charles Grandison
is a poorish novel is that Richardson in reaching above his height in society was also stepping out of his depth in experience. That is, however, more a reason why people should have affected to laugh at the book in its own day than now.
    A reader has to be a formidable historian to be disturbed by errors in the differences of manners between one social structure and another two centuries distant. And though Lady Mary Wortley Montagu in her
Letters
remarks that Richardson “has no idea of the manners of high life,” and adds that his virtuous young ladies “romp like wenches round a maypole,” I doubt if many readers would be aware of such solecisms to-day if they had been left to find them out for themselves.
    It is a habit, and almost an unavoidable one, in writing of Richardson, to enumerate all his weaknesses, faults anddeficiencies, and conclude by saying what a great writer he is. He certainly does appear, when one comes to compare his books with his biography, to have given as an author more than he had as a man to give.
    He is all but unread to-day, not because of any obvious defects in his work but because time is harder to come by than it was in his day. And to go to Richardson without time is like going to Homer without Greek.
Clarissa
is a full week’s work. To get from it what it has to offer—a really amazing upheaval of the emotions—it has to be read as though it were being gone through for an examination.
    Richardson’s contribution to thought, Dr. Baker remarks, is “a loftier ideal of personality.” He might have added that Richardson was the first novelist to raise women to the full dignity of literary responsibility. For he began a process that it was