are deprived of the train of definite and sometimes paltry circumstances by which they are attended in real life. Richardson does not know what "love" and "honour" are. He observes each particular case, describes it, turns it over and over, weighs it twice or thrice, and finally comes to a conclusion upon it-at the price of having to repeat the whole process when the next case occurs. It is the method adopted by spiritual directors and writers of sermons. It had to be introduced into fiction, and this could only be done by an author with a passion for ethical problems.

V

Lastly, if, in addition to his faithful observation of the external world, to the art with which he manages to bring his characters before the reader, and to the richness and abundance of his moral reflexions, we take into account his intensely sensitive nature and his peculiar gift of passionate attachment to his own creations, we shall have included all, or nearly all, the principal characteristics of Richardson's genius.

His sensibility was extraordinary, and, even at that maudlin period, seems to have been sincere. Consequently, the tears of every reader, during his own day, were at his command. When I read Clarissa, Miss Fielding wrote to him, "I am all sensation; my heart glows." Another of his correspondents abandons the attempt to describe her feelings, and lays down her pen: "Excuse me, good Mr Richardson, I cannot go on; it is your fault-you have done more than I can bear." 2 Richardson's successors in English fiction felt at liberty gently to banter the "enraptured spinsters" who "incensed" the master" with the coffee-pot," kissed the slippers they worked for him, and

1 M. Brunetière (Le roman naturaliste, p. 292) maintains that Richardson drew much of his inspiration from Bourdaloue. It is, at any rate, beyond doubt that the works of the French sermon-writer were very popular in England. Burnet said to Voltaire that Bourdaloue had "effected a reformation among English as well as among French preachers." (Cf. Lettre au duc de la Vallière.)

2 Mrs Barbauld, vol. iv., p. 241 (Letter from Lady Bradshaigh).

believed they saw a "halo of virtue" around his night-cap.1 Some of the forms taken by sensibility in the eighteenth century were extremely ludicrous, but does it follow that Richardson and Rousseau were insincere?

Richardson was not only sensitive, but also it must be admitted-sensual. In Pamela there is noticeable a singular freedom in touching upon certain delicate subjects. Pamela receives from her master a present of a pair of stockings; she blushes. "Don't blush, Pamela," he says; "dost think I don't know pretty maids wear shoes and stockings?" Amenities of this sort are not rare. The author may seem to dwell at too great length on the advances to which a girl of fifteen is exposed from her master. Certain details are repulsive, and other features astonish us. Pamela seems too familiar with the fact that dejection commonly follows sensual pleasure: "We read in Holy Writ, that wicked Ammon, when he had ruined poor Tamar, hated her more than ever he loved her, and would have turned her out of door." 2 In Clarissa there are long scenes which take place in a disorderly house, and are anything but chaste. Does the fault lie with the age? Is it not that with Richardson, as with Rousseau, sensibility borders upon sensuality?

Works which appeal so constantly and so powerfully to the stronger emotions certainly cannot be read with impunity. There is something sickly and sensual in Richardson's melancholy, a melancholy, as Diderot said, "at once sweet and lasting." It is too palpably an enjoyment of a morbid state of physical depression. Written for women, about women, and by an essentially feminine writer, these novels did much to prepare the way for the "vague lachrymosity" of Hervey, Ossian, and Rousseau. To Richardson must be accorded the most important place in the history of "melancholy." It was he who made languor of soul and hidden tenderness fashionable, and developed the popular taste for soft and melancholy feelings. All his readers 1 Thackeray, The Virginians, vol. i. 2 Ballantyne, vi., p. 35.

3

3 On this topic see Leslie Stephen, History of English thought in the eighteenth century, vol. ii.

have mourned with Lovelace over the lost reflection of Clarissa, and all have sympathized with his words

"I have been traversing her room, meditating, or taking up everything she but touched or used: the glass she dressed at I was ready to break, for not giving me the personal image it was wont to reflect of her, whose idea is for ever present with me. I call for her, now in the tenderest, now in the most reproachful terms, as if within hearing; wanting her, I want my own soul, at least everything dear to it. What a void in my heart! what a chillness in my blood, as if its circulation were arrested! From her room to my own; in the dining-room, and in and out of every place where I have seen the beloved of my heart, do I hurry ; in none can I tarry; her lovely image in every one, in some lively attitude, rushing in upon me.

.."1

The exquisite sadness of passion, though from Rousseau and Goethe it received a more lyrical expression, was already to be found in Richardson. His emotions, like theirs, were constantly being stirred by the thought of love, because, for him as for them, love is what the soul demands with irresistible force. With all its attendant moods of agitation, anxiety and depression, it is the highest and the deepest manifestation of our innermost self. This, for our pious novelist, is beyond doubt. Carlyle once maintained that in the lives of the majority love occupies but an insignificant place. In the novels of Richardson it occupies not only the most important, but every place. Of all moral and social questions it is the chief. Nor is the love here treated of the mere gallantry which formed the staple of French fiction and French drama in the seventeenth century, but rather that tragic and terrible love which is a matter of life and death. Love, in the novels of Marivaux, Lesage and Prévost, whatever importance they attach to it, is, it should be remarked, as yet a mere accident or a means to getting on in the world. Nowhere, even in Manon Lescaut, does it attain the dignity of a social duty. With Richardson it takes possession of the whole man, and absorbs the entire interest. "Our feelings," Saint-Évremond once said, "are wanting in a certain intensity; the impulses which half-roused passions excite in our souls can neither leave them in their usual condition nor carry them out of themselves."2 This intensity in which the passions were deficient was expressed 1 1 Ballantyne, vol. i., p. 266. 2 Sur les tragédies (1677).

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by Richardson with genius, because love, as he conceived it, was no mere accident or stroke of good fortune, but, in a sense, the most essential of human duties.

Love, passionate love, is the main point of all his novels. Pamela loves her unworthy master, Clarissa loves the monster Lovelace, Henrietta Byron and Clementina are distracted with love for Grandison, and innumerable trials are the reward of passion in every case. Pamela is reviled, imprisoned and overwhelmed with outrageous insults; Clarissa is done to death; Clementina loses her reason. Who will say that passion is not tragic? What a subject for study in this lingering anguish of a heart! And what wonder that Richardson devoted so much labour to the task? "Clarissa," wrote Alfred de Vigny, “is a treatise on strategy. Twenty-four volumes to describe the siege and capture of a heart: it is worthy of Vauban."1 Such a feat is possible only to the man who is thoroughly convinced that if love is the source of man's greatest sorrows, it is also the sole principle of his nobility.

But when this man happens to be an Englishman and a Protestant, there is also, of course, a moral to be drawn from these adventures in the field of love. Two objects have to be reconciled, that of arousing the reader's feelings and that of instructing him, of being at once impassioned and thoroughly moral, very pathetic and highly improving. And this being so, one subject only is possible: love thwarted yet struggling, whether against external obstacles or against itself. This, in truth, is the only story Richardson has to tell, and the victims. of this fatality are always women. All four-Pamela, Clarissa, Clementina, Henrietta-or, if Miss Jervins and Olivia be included, all six-strive either against their passion or against their duty. By one happiness is sacrificed to innocence, by another to filial duty, and by a third to religion; while Henrietta, who suffers the least of all, heroically leaves the field to her fortunate rival when she perceives that Clementina is the object of Grandison's affection.

Now no one has ever described these inward struggles as 1 Journal d'un poète, 1833.

Richardson has done. Who had thought of depicting the conflict in a woman's heart between love and religion before he did? 1 What heroine of fiction or of tragedy had refused, like Clementina, to give herself to the man she loves rather than renounce her religion? Or, rather, what novelist had ventured to transfer such a subject to the days in which he was writingto introduce characters, Protestant or Catholic, belonging to 1750? Pathetic is the struggle in Clementina's soul when she learns that Grandison refuses to renounce his belief. The noble girl has but to say one word in order to ensure her happiness she need not even sacrifice her faith; but that one word will impair the dignity of her love. So she refuses to say it, and it is under these circumstances that she writes Grandison the following admirable letter: 2

"O thou whom my heart best loveth, forgive me!-Forgive me, said I, for what? For acting, if I am enabled to act, greatly? The example is from thee, who, in my eyes, art the greatest of human creatures. My duty calls upon me one way my heart resists my duty, and tempts me not to perform it. Do thou, O God, support me in the arduous struggle! Let it not, as once before, overthrow my reason. . . . My tutor, my brother, my friend! O most beloved and best of men! Seek me not in marriage! I am unworthy of thee. Thy soul was ever most dear to Clementina! Whenever I meditated the gracefulness of thy person, I restrained my eye, I checked my fancy: and how? Why, by meditating the superior graces of thy mind. And is not that soul, thought I, to be saved? Dear, obstinate, and perverse! And shall I bind my soul to a soul allied to perdition? That so dearly loves that soul as hardly to wish to be separated from it in its future lot. O thou most amiable of men! How can be sure, that, if I were thine, thou wouldst not draw me after thee, by love, by sweetness of manners, by condescending goodness? I, who once thought a heretic the worst of beings, have been already led, by the amiableness of thy piety, by the universality of thy charity to all thy fellow-creatures, to think more favourably of all heretics, for thy sake. Of what force would be the admonitions of the most pious confessor, were thy condescending goodness, and sweet persuasion, to be exerted to melt a heart wholly thine? . . . O most amiable of men!-O thou whom my soul loveth, seek not to entangle me by thy love! Were I to be thine, my duty to thee would mislead me from that I owe to my God. . . ."

The love which inspires such a letter is a noble feeling. It is rendered greater by contact with the religious sentiment which 1 We must not, however, forget the famous Lettres d'une religieuse portugaise, nor Mme. de La Fayette's master-piece La Princesse de Clèves.

2 Ballantyne, vol. iii., p. 508.