Una narración autoengendrada

Vanity Fea: Clarissa la crítica, y su ética del buen gusto: Una narración autoengendrada

Clarissa la crítica, y su ética del buen gusto: Una narración autoengendrada

Comentamos aquí sobre la integración de algunos aspectos éticos, estéticos, psicológicos y narrativos en la novela epistolar Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady de Samuel Richardson (1747-48), en concreto la encarnación de un ideal ético-estético en el personaje de Clarissa, y la elección consciente de una técnica narrativa que va unida en esta obra a un efecto de autogénesis. 

Texto completo:

Clarissa la crítica, y su ética del buen gusto: 

Una narración autoengendrada

https://doi.org/10.17613/34ra-rf87

Author(s):

José Angel GARCÍA LANDA (see profile)

Date:

2021

Group(s):

English Literature, Literary theory, Narrative theory and Narratology

Subject(s):

Novel criticism, Samuel Richardson, Aesthetics, Narratology, Criticism

Item Type:

Article

Tag(s):

Clarissa, Self-begetting fiction, English Novel

Permanent URL:

https://doi.org/10.17613/34ra-rf87

English abstract: This paper deals with the integration of a number of ethical, aesthetic, psychological and narrative issues in Samuel Richardson's epistolary novel Clarissa, or the History of a Young Lady (1747-48), and more specifically with the incarnation of an ethical-aesthetic ideal in the character of Clarissa, and the deliberate choice of a narrative technique associated to a self-begetting dimension in this work.

 

 

 

_____. "Clarissa la crítica, y su ética del buen gusto." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 11 July 2021.*

         https://vanityfea.blogspot.com/2021/07/clarissa-la-critica-y-su-etica-del-gusto.html

         2021

_____. "Clarissa la crítica, y su ética del buen gusto: Una narración autoengendrada." Ibercampus (Vanity Fea) 12 July 2021.*

         https://www.ibercampus.es/clarissa-la-critica-y-su-etica-del-buen-gusto-41329.htm

         2021 DISCONTINUED 2024 – Online at the Internet Archive:

         https://web.archive.org/web/20220214082059/https://www.ibercampus.es/clarissa-la-critica-y-su-etica-del-buen-gusto-41329.htm

         2024

_____. "Clarissa la crítica, y su ética del buen gusto: Una narración autoengendrada / Clarissa the Critic and Her Ethics of Good Taste: A Self-Begetting Narrative." SSRN 28 Dec. 2021.*

         http://ssrn.com/abstract=3946233

         2021

_____. "Clarissa la crítica, y su ética del buen gusto: Una narración autoengendrada." Academia 14 Nov. 2021.*

         https://www.academia.edu/61666121/

         2021

_____. "Clarissa la crítica, y su ética del buen gusto: Una narración autoengendrada." ResearchGate 8 Jan. 2022.*

         https://www.researchgate.net/publication/357680683

         2022

_____. "Clarissa la crítica, y su ética del buen gusto: Una narración autoengendrada." Humanities Commons 15 Jan. 2022.*

         https://doi.org/10.17613/34ra-rf87

         https://hcommons.org/deposits/item/hc:44217/

         2022

_____. "Clarissa la crítica y su ética del buen gusto: Una narración autoengendrada." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 15  Jan. 2022.*

         https://vanityfea.blogspot.com/2022/01/clarissa-la-critica-y-su-etica-del-buen.html

         2022

_____. "Clarissa la crítica y su ética del buen gusto: Una narración autoengendrada." Net Sight de José Angel García Landa 5 Jan. 2023.*

         https://personal.unizar.es/garciala/publicaciones/clarissalacritica.pdf

        2023

_____. "Clarissa la crítica y su ética del buen gusto: Una narración autogenerada." In García Landa, Vanity Fea 30 Jan. 2026.*

         https://blogdenotasvanityfea.blogspot.com/2026/01/clarissa-la-critica-y-su-etica-del-buen_30.html

         2026

—oOo—

Clarissa la crítica, y su ética del buen gusto

 

 

Una de las últimas cartas-capítulos de Clarissa: Or, The History of a Young Lady (1747-48) de Samuel Richardson, está escrita por la amiga de la heroína, Anna Howe, que detalla las múltiples virtudes y capacidades de la difunta heroína Clarissa. Aquí encontramos unos puntos de crítica literaria y estética que sin duda corresponden también a los ideales de su autor, pues en la virtuosa Clarissa se conjugan todos los ideales; no sólo belleza, bondad y piedad cristiana, amén de una auténtica feminidad, sino también la inteligencia, el buen juicio, el criterio justo, el gusto, la elegancia con sprezzatura, el saber estar, la empatía y la atención a los demás en el trato social... un complejo equilibrado de virtudes que también se aplican a la literatura y la crítica. Richardson no era bello ni apuesto caballero (es un poco el trasunto real del Mr. Hickman de esta novela), pero intentaba imitar a la heroína en sus demás cualidades, quizá pecando como ella un tanto por el lado de la excesiva insistencia moralizante (pecando de franco puritanismo, vamos, en su caso):

In all her readings, and in her conversations upon them, she was fonder of finding beauties than blemishes, and chose to applaud both authors and books, where she could find the least room for it. Yet she used to lament that certain writers of the first class, who were capable of exalting virtue, and of putting vice out of countenance, too generally employed themselves in works of imagination only, upon subjects merely speculative, disinteresting, and unedifying; from which no useful moral or example could be drawn.

But she was a severe censurer of pieces of a light  or indecent turn,which had a tendency to corrupt the morals of youth, to convey polluted images, or to wound religion, whether in itself, o rthorugh the sides of its professors, and this, whoever were the authors, and how admirable soever the execution. She often pitied the celebrated Dr. Swift for so employing his admirable pen that a pure eye was afraid of looking into his works, and a pure ear of hearing anything quoted from them. "Such authors, she used to say, were not honest to their own talents, nor grateful to the God who gave them." Nor would she, on these occasions, admit their beauties as a palliation; on the contrary, she held it an aggravation of their crime, that they, who were so capable of mending the heart, should in any places show a  corrupt one in themselves; which must weaken the influences of their good works; and pull down with one hand what they built up with the other. 

All she said, and all she did, was accompanied with a natural ease and dignity, which set her above affectation, or ths suspicion of it; insomuch that this degrading fault, so generally imputed to a learned woman, was never laid to her charge. For, with all her excellences, she was forwarder to hear than speak, and hence no doubt derived no small part of her improvement.

Although she was well read in the English, French, and Italian poets, and had read the best translations of the Latin classics; yet seldom did she quote or repeat from them, either in her letters or conversation, though exceedingly happy in a tenacious memory; principally through modesty and to avoid the imputation of that affectation which I have just mentioned.

Mr. Wyerley once said of her, she had such a fund of knowledge of her own, and made naturally such fine observations upon persons and things, being capable, by the EGG [that was his familiar expression], of judging of the BIRD, that she had seldom either room or necessity for foreign assistances. 

But it was plain, from her whole conduct and behaviour, that she had not so good an opinion of herself, however deserved; since, whenever she was urged to give her sentiments on any subject, although all she thought fit to say was clear and intelligible, yet she seemed in haste to have done speaking. Her reason for it, I know, was twofold; that she might not lose the benefit of other people's sentiments, by engrossing the conversation; and lest, as were her words, she should be praised into loquaciousness, and so forfeit the good opinion which a person always maintains with her friends, who knows when she has said enough. It was, finally, a rule with her, "to leave her hearers wishing for her to say more, rather than to give them cause to show, by their inattention, an uneasiness that she had said so much."  (Clarissa, IV, 504-5, Letter CLXVIII—Miss Howe to John Belford, Esq. - uso la edición de Everyman en 4 vols.)

Lo bueno si breve dos veces bueno, viene a convenir Clarissa con gracia y con Gracián. 

Además Clarissa es una artista del bordado, del buen gusto y la originalidad en el vestir, y en su vaquería hace unas cuajadas admirables, también ordeña en persona, no contentándose con ordenar ordeñar. Y dibuja bien, no llega a pintar gran cosa pero lo haría si se dedicase a ello. En suma acumula dotes, algunas de ellas que tienen que ver con el juicio y la apreciación crítica, tanto del arte como del carácter y la sociedad. Un poquito antes encontramos este pasaje:

Her skill and dexterity in every branch of family management, seem to be the only excellence of her innumerable ones which she owed to her family: whose narrowness, immensely rich, and immensely carking, put them upon indulging her in the turn she took to this part of knowledge; while her eleder sister affected dress withoug being graceful in it; and the fine lady, which she could never be; and which her sister was without studying for it, or seeming to know she was so.

It was usual with the one sister, when company was expected, to be half the morning dressing; whle the other would give directions for the whole business and entertainment of the day; and then go up to her dressing-room , and, before she could well be missed [having all her things in admirable order], come down fit to receive company, and with all that graceful ease [la famosa sprezzatura a la que aludíamos antes] and tranquillity as if she had nothing else to think of.

Long after her [hours perhaps of prevous preparation having passed], down would come rustling and bustling the tawdry and awkward Bella, disordering more her native disorderliness at the sight of her serene sister, by her sullen envy, to see herself so much surpassed with such little pains, and in a sixth part of the time.

Yet was this admirable creature mistress of all these domestic qualifications without the least intermixture of narrowness. She knew how to distinguish between frugality, a necessary virtue, and niggardliness, an odious vice: and used to say, "That  to define generosity, it must be called tha happy medium between parsimony and profusion."

She was the most graceful reader I ever knew. She added, by her melodious voice, graces to thse she found in the parts of books she read out to her friends, and gave grace and signification to others where they were not. She had no tone, no whine. Her accent was always admirably placed. The emphasis she always forcibly laid as the subjet require. No buskin elevation, no tragedy-pomp, could mislead her; and yet poetry was poetry indeed when she read it. 

But if her voice was melodious when she read, it as all harmony when she sang. And the delight she gave by that, and by her skill and great compass, was heightened by the ease and gracefulness of her air and manner, and by the alacrity with which she obliged. 

Nevertheless, she generally hose rather to hear others sing or play, than either to play or sing herself.

She delighted to give praise where deserved: yet she always bestowed it in such a manner as gave not the least suspicion that she laid out for a return of it to herself, though so universally allowed to be her due. 

She had a talent of saying uncommon things in such an easy manner that everybody thought they could have said the same; and which yet required both genius and observation to say them.

Este último ejemplo del arte de la conversación de Clarissa —o arte del juicio, o del discernimiento y percepción, o del ingenio— merece algo más de comentario. Richardson conocía sin duda la definición del ingenio de Alexander Pope, 

True wit is nature to advantage dressed

What oft was thought, but never so well expressed. 

(Essay on Criticism)

Pero parece Richardson aquí adelantarse a la objeción que le haría Samuel Johnson a la formulación de Pope:

If wit be well described by Pope, as being "that which has been often thought, but was never before so well expressed," they certainly never attained, nor ever sought it; for they endeavoured to be singular in their thoughts, and were careless of their diction. But Pope's account of wit is undoubtedly erroneous: he depresses it below its natural dignity, and reduces it from strength of thought to happiness of language.

  If by a more noble and more adequate conception that be considered as wit which is at once natural and new, that which, though not obvious, is, upon its first production, acknowledged to be just; if it be that which he that never found it wonders how he missed, to wit of this kind the metaphysical poets have seldom risen. Their thoughts are often new, but seldom natural; they are not obvious, but neither are they just; and the reader, far from wondering that he missed them, wonders more frequently by what perverseness of industry they were found. (Johnson, "Life of Cowley").

Vemos que, a diferencia del ingenio barroco de los poetas metafísicos, las observaciones y juicios de Clarissa son a la vez novedosos y naturales, el ejemplo perfecto de este segundo y más acertado tipo de ingenio definido por Johnson. Y que producen el efecto observado también por Johnson: una sensación de iluminación como de haber traído a la luz algo que se intuía imperfectamente, o que se tenía en la punta de la lengua del entendimiento sin poder expresarlo. O bien son juicios y observaciones que, por un curioso efecto de retrospección, producen esa sensación (quizá engañosa) de "eso debería haberlo dicho yo, pues casi lo había pensado si bien no de manera tan redonda".

Y todo ello, como decimos, con la necesaria soltura, discreción y sprezzatura, sin forzar la situación y su fluidez natural para desviar la atención hacia sí misma:

She was as much above reserve as disguise. So communicative, that no young lady could be in her company half an hour and not carry way instruction with her, whatever was the topic. Yet all sweetly insinuated; nothing given with the aire of prescription: so that while she seemed to ask a question for information sake, she dropped in the needful instruction, and left the instructed unable to decide whether the thought (which being started, she, the instructed, could improve) came primarily from herself, or from the sweet instructress.

                                                                                                (Clarissa, IV, 500).

Es un arte al cual sin duda aspira Richardson, que en su historia de Clarissa, o mejor dicho, nos dice, su "dramatic narrative" (IV, 554), quiere instruir deleitando y haciendo que la moral se extraiga espontáneamente de la historia. Es un arte del escritor basado en un arte previo de sus escritores-narradores, potenciado por ellos, pues Clarissa también es gran escritora de cartas, casi tanto como el propio Richardson, y hasta en las cartas del maquiavélico Lovelace se observan observaciones inteligentes y penetrantes sobre el mundo y las personas. 

(Entre paréntesis, no deja de llamar la atención que el puritano y benevolente Richardson pudiera extraer de su mente un personaje tan moralmente encallecido como Lovelace y darle vida espontánea y credibilidad; eso quizá hizo que muchos como Henry Fielding sospecharan de la autenticidad y sinceridad del puritanismo de Richardson. Como mínimo, un rincón de su mente contenía un Lovelace con todas sus artimañas y cínicos razonamientos). 

"Women, born to be controul'd,

Stoop to the forward and the bold."

Says Waller—and Lovelace too!  (IV, 562)

Ay, and Richardson too... 

Sobre Clarissa como escritora y crítica de la escritura, también tiene juicios atinados su amiga del alma Anna Howe, una segunda Clarissa en muchos aspectos, aunque con menos empatía y paciencia, y con una dosis adicional de feminismo agresivo. Pero si Clarissa sabe escribir y apreciar, lo mismo puede decirse de Anna, que aprecia sus aprecios en lo que valen:

She was an admirable mistress of all the graces of elocution. The hand she wrote, for the neat and free cut of her letters (like her mind, solid, and above all flourish), for its fairness, evenness, and swiftness, distinguished her as much as the correctness of her orthography, and even punctuation, from the generality of her won sex, and left her none, amongst the most accurate of the other, who excelled her.

And here you may, if you please, take occasion to throw in one hint for the benefit of such of our sex as are too careless in their orthography [a consciousness of a defect in which generally keeps them from writing]. She was used to say, "It was a proof that a woman understood the derivation as well as sense of the words she used, and that she stopped not at sound, when she spelt accurately."

On this head you may notice, that it was always matter of surprise to her that the sex are generally so averse as they are to writing; since the pen, next to the needle, of all employments is the most proper, and best adapted to their geniuses; and this as well for improvement as amusement: "Who sees not, would she say, that those women who take delight in writing, excel the men in all the graces of the familiar style? The gentleness of their minds, the delicacy of their sentiments (improved by the manner of their education), and the liveliness of their imaginations, qualify them to a high degree of preference for this employment: while men of learning, as they are called (that is to say, of mere learning), aiming to get above that natural ease and freedom which distinguish this (and indeed every other) kind of writing, when they think they have best succeeded, and got above, or rather beneath, all natural beauty."

Then, stiffened and starched [let me [, Anna Howe,] add] into dry and indelectable affectation, one sort of these scholars assume a style as rough as frequently are their manners: they spangle over their productions with metaphors: they rumple into bombast: the sublime, with them, lying in words and not in sentiment, they fancy themselves most exalted when least understood; and down they sit, fully satisfied with their own performances, and call them MASCULINE. While a second sort, aiming at wit, that wicked misleader, forfeit all title to judgment. And a third, sinking into the classical pits,  there poke and scramble about, never seeming to show genius of their own; all their lives spent in commonplace quotation; fit only to write notes and comments upon other people's texts; all their pride, that they know those beauties of two thousand years old in another tongue, which they can only admire, but not imitate, in their own.

And these, truly, must be learned men, and despisers of our insipid sex!

But I need not mention the exceptions which my beloved friend always made [and to which I subscribe] in favour of men of sound learning, true taste, and extensive abilities: nor, in particular, her respect even to reverence for gentlemen of the cloth, which, I dare say, will appear in every paragraph of her letters wherever any of the clergy are mentioned. Indeed the pious Dr. Lewen, the worthy Dr. Blome, the ingenious Mr. Arnold, and Mr. Tompkins, gentlemen whom she names, in one article of her will, as learned divines with whom she held an early correspondence, well deserved her respect; since to their conversation and correspondence she owed many of her valuable acquirements. 

Nor were the little slights she would now and then (following, as I must own, my lead) put upon such mere scholars [and her stupid and pedantic brother was one of those who deserved those slights] as despised not only our sex, but all such as had not had their opportunities of being acquainted with the parts of speech [I cannot speak low enough of such] and with the dead languages, owing to that contempt which some affect for what they have not been able to master; for she had an admirable facility in learning languages, and read with great ease both Italian and French. She had begun to apply herself to Latin; and having such a critical knowledge of her own tongue, and such a foundation from the two others, would soon have made herself an adept in it. (IV, 494-96)

Añade el autor en las ediciones subsiguientes un "Postscript" en el que comenta sobre las reacciones del público lector, y defiende tanto el final trágico de su historia como su moralidad y, con cierto interés especial, el método narrativo que ha elegido. Transcribo unos párrafos de esta Defensa del Método Epistolar, aquí ya en propia persona no interpuesta (hay que suponer) de Richardson, desenmascarado aquí ya no como el "Editor" de unas cartas sino como el "Autor" de una historia.

"Some have wished that the story had been told in the usual narrative way of telling stories designed to amuse and divert, and not in letters written by the respective persons whose history is given in them. The author thinks he ought not to prescribe to the taste of others; but imagined himself at liberty to follow his own. He perhaps mistrusted his talents for the narrative kind of writing. He had the good fortune to succeed in the epistolary way once before [with Pamela]. A story in which so many persons were concerned either principally or collaterally, and of characters and dispositions so various, carried on with tolerable connection and perspicuity, in a series of letters from different persons, without the aid of digressions and episodes foreign to the principal end and design, he thought had novelty to be pleaded for it: and that, in the present age, he supposed would not be a slight recommendation.

Besides what has been said above, and in the Preface, on this head, the following opinion of an ingenious and candid foreigner, on this manner of writing, may not be imprperly inserted here:

"The method which the author has pursued in the History of Clarissa, is the same as in the Life of Pamela: both are related in familiar letters by the parties themselves, at the very time in which the events happened: and this method has given the author great advantages, which he could not have drawn from any other species of narration. The minute particulars of events, the sentiments and conversations of the parties, are, upon this plan, exhibited with all the warmth and spirit that the passion supposed to be predominant ast the very time could produce, and with all the distinguishing characteristics which memory can supply in a history of recent transactions.

"Romances in general, and Marivaux's amongst others, are wholly improbable; because they suppose the history to be written after the series of events is closed by the catastrophe: a circumstance which implies a strength of memory beyond all example and probability in the persons concerned, enabling them, at the distance of several years, to relate all the particulars of a transient conversation: or rather, it implies a yet more improbable confidence and familiarity between all these persons and the author. 

"There is, however, one difficulty attending the epistolary method; for it is necessary that all the characters should have an uncommon taste for this kind of conversation, and that they should suffer no event, not even a remarkable conversation to pass, without immediately committing it to writing. But for the preservation of the letters once written, the author has provided with great judgment, so as to render this circumstance highly probable." (1).

(1). This quotation is translated from a Critique on the History of Clarissa, written in French, and published at Amsterdam. The whole Critique, rendered into English, was inserted in the Gentleman's Magazine of June and August 1749. The author has done great honour in it to the History of Clarissa; and as there are remarks published with it, which answer several objections made to different passages in the story by that candid foreigner, the reader is referred to the aforesaid magazine for both.  

It is presumed that what this gentleman says of the difficulties attending a story thus given in the epistolary manner of writing, will not be found to reach the history before us. It is very well accounted for in it, how the two principal female characters came to take so great a delight in writing. Their subjects are not merely subjects of amusement; but greatly interesting to both: yett many ladies there are who now laudably correspond, when at distance from each other, on occasions that far less affect their mutual welfare and frienships, that those treated of by these ladies [Clarissa and Anna Howe]. The two principal gentlemen [Lovelace and Belford] had motives of gaiety and vainglory for their inducements. It will generally be found, that persons who have talents for familiar writing, as these correspondents are presumed to have, will not forbear amusing themselves with their pens, on less arduous occasions than what offer to these. These four (whose stories have a connnection with each other) out of the great number of characters which are introduced in this history, are only eminent in the epistolary way: the rest appear but as occasional writers, and as drawn in rather by necessity than choice, from the different relations in which they stand with the four principal persons. (Clarissa, IV, 562-63)

Esta "motivación realista" de la narración en Clarissa, que tanto preocupaba a Richardson y también a su crítico, le lleva casi a explicitar la autogénesis de la novela dentro de la ficción. Culmina la historia con la recolección de las diferentes cartas que hace Belford, como amigo y ejecutor testamentario tanto de Lovelace como de Clarissa, tras la muerte de ambos. Belford será también una especie de narrador cuasi-omnisciente (retrospectivo, y en tercera persona) en una "Conclusion: Supposed to be written by Mr. Belford," Y nos lleva a plantear una estructura de la Historia de Clarissa como una novela autoengendrada, según veíamos aquí al hablar de "The Self-Begetting Clarissa."

El concepto de la "novela autoengendrada" lo introdujo Steven Kellman:

Kellman, Steven. "The Fiction of Self-Begetting." Modern Language Notes 91 (1976).

_____. The Self-Begetting Novel. London: Macmillan, 1980.

Y se refiere a este fenómeno estructural: que parte del movimiento argumental de una novela se dirige hacia la explicación de la génesis de la novela misma y más en concreto de su forma narrativa concreta: una historia de "cómo llegó a existir este texto", o cómo los propios acontecimientos de la novela dan lugar a la narración que hemos leído, en tanto que recreación narrativa de esos acontecimientos. Observemos que Richardson ya parte de una adhesión a la ficción convencional de presentar su novela como una "colección editada" de cartas personales escritas entre  diversos interlocutores o más bien corresponsales. 

En el último volumen (IV), el confidente de Lovelace, Belford, alude a sus gestiones hacia el establecimiento de tal compilación editorial de la correspondencia que estamos leyendo, en tanto que ejecutor testamentario designado por Clarissa, y da todavía un paso más hacia convertirse él mismo en el primer lector de la novela, además de su (futuro) editor. Naturalmente, gran parte de la acción de Clarissa tiene que ver con la lectura de cartas no dirigidas a uno mismo—los personajes están constantemente prestando cartas, interceptándolas, recopiándolas, censurándolas o falsificándolas, las suyas propias o las de otros. Y de este modo la experiencia de leer Clarissa comienza en la propia acción de Clarissa, y es de hecho parte de esa acción. 

Aquí tenemos a Belford (IV, carta XXX) comentando en una carta dirigida a Lovelace sobre las emociones especiales inherentes a la lectura de una narración epistolar, comparada con las narraciones en primera persona subsiguiente, o memorias autobiográficas que se basan en la retrospección. Clarissa ve que no necesita escribir tales memorias sobre sí, pues su historia ya está escrita:

She acknowledges that if the same decency and justice are observed in all your letters, as in the extracts I have obliged her with (as I have assured her they are), she shall think herself freed from the necessity of writing her own story: and this is an advantage to thee which thou oughtest to thank me for.

But what thinkest thou is the second request she had to make to me? No other than that I would be her executor! Her motives will appear before thee in proper time; and then, I dare to answer, will be satisfactory.

You cannot imagine how proud I am of this trust. I am afraid I shall too soon come into the execution of it. As she is always writing, what a melancholy pleasure will the perusal and disposition of her papers afford me! Such a sweetness of tempr, so much patience and resignation, as she seems to be mistress of; yet writing of and in the midst of present distresses! How much more lively and affecting, for that reason, must her style be, her mind tortured by the pangs of uncertainty (the events then hidden in the womb of fate) than the dry narrative, unanimated style of a person relating difficulties and dangers surmounted; the relater perfectly at ease; and if himself unmoved by his own story, not likely greatly to affect the reader.

Queda claro que a través de estos comentarios del "compilador" o editor Belford vemos también las reflexiones narratológicas del propio autor implícito, que ofrece así en boca del personaje una justificación del estilo narrativo que Richardson eligió para Clarissa y para sus otras novelas. Como vemos está atento no sólo a sus consecuencias para el retrato psicológico de los personajes y sus sentimeintos sino también para la identificación del lector con esos sentimientos, y con la incertidumbre que asegura una actividad narrativa no dominante y ubicada en un punto ulterior retrospectivo, sino múltiple y atrapada en las incertidumbres de la vida, del destino, y de la interpretación ambigua de las situaciones y de las intenciones ajenas. Los efectos logrados, tanto a nivel de suspense como en la cuestión de la empatía y la caracterización, justifican plenamente la técnica narrativa seguida en The History of Clarissa.

Todo esto conduce tanto a Belford como a Richardson a preservar la forma epistolar como la más adecuada para el tipo de historia aquí narrada, y para el efecto estético, psicológico y ético buscado. Hay una continuidad fluida entre las cualidades morales y experiencia de Clarissa el personaje, y su imagen textual en Clarissa la novela. Podemos sostener, por tanto, que la novela presenta su autogénesis tanto al nivel de los acontecimientos de la historia y de los personajes, como al nivel del novelista-autor y de las opciones artísticas y narratológicas que ha elegido—para narrar su historia, y para impartir su instrucción moral y estética, a la par que desarrolla el arte y la técnica de la novela.

The Self-Begetting Clarissa

 

—oOo—

Letter XXXVI - Mr. Lovelace to Miss Clarissa Harlowe

Monday, Aug. 7

Little as I have reason to expect either your patient ear, or forgiving heart, yet cannot I forbear to write to you once more (as a more pardonable intrusion, perhaps, than a visit would be), to beg of you to put it in my power to atone, as far as it is possible to atone, for the injuries I have done you.

Your angelic purity, and my awakened conscience, are standing records of your exalted merit and of my detestable baseness: but your forgiveness will lay me under an eternal obligation to you—forgive me, then, my dearest life, my earthly good, the visible anchor of my future hope! As you (who believe you have something to be forgiven for) hope for pardon yourself, forgive me, and consent to meet me, upon your own conditions, and in whose company you please, at the holy altar, and to give yourself a title to the most repentant and affectionate heart that ever beat in a human bosom.

But perhaps a time of probation may be required. It may be impossible for you, as well from indisposition as doubt, so soon to receive me to absolute favour as my heart wishes to be received. In this case I will submit to your pleasure; and there shall be no penance which you can impose that I will not cheerfully undergo, if you will be pleased to give me hope that, after an expiation, suppose of months, wherein the regularity of my future life and actions shall convince you of my reformation, you will at last be mine.

Let me beg the favour then of a few lines, encouraging me in this conditional hope, if it must not be a still nearer hope, and a more generous encouragement. 

If you refuse me this, you will make me desperate. But even then I must, at all events, throw myself at your feet, that I may not charge myself with the omission of any earnest, any humble effort, to move you in my favour: for in YOU, madam, in YOUR forgiveness, are centred my hopes as to both worlds: since to be reprobated finally by you will leave me without expectation of mercy from above! For I am now awakened enough to think that to be forgiven by injured innocents is necessary to the Divine pardon; the Almighty putting into the power of such (as is reasonable to believe) the wretch who causelessly and capitally offends them. And who can be entitled to this power if YOU are not?

Your cause, madam, in a word, I look upon to be the cause of virtue, and as such, the cause of God. And may I not expect that He will assert it in the perdition of a man, who has acted by a person of the most spotless purity as I have done, if you, by rejecting me, show that I have offended beyond the possibility of forgiveness? 

I do most solemnly assure you that no temporal or worldly views induce me to this earnest address. I deserve not forgiveness from you. Nor do my Lord M. and his sisters from me. I despise them from my heart for presuming to imagine that I will be controlled by the prospect of any benefits in their power to confer. There is not a pearson breathing but yourself who shall prescribe to me. Your whole conduct, madam, has been so nobly principled, and your resentments are so admirably just, that you appear to me even in a divine light; and in an infinitely more amiable one at the same time, than you could have appeared in, had you not suffered the barbarous wrongs that now fill my mind with anguish and horror at my own recollected villainy to the most excellent of women.

I repeat that all I beg for the present is a few lines, to guide my doubtful steps; and (impossible for you so far to condescend) to encourage me to hope that, if I can justify my present vows by my future conduct, I may be permitted the honour to style myself

                        Eternally yours,

                                                R. Lovelace.

 

—oOo—

The Self-Begetting 'Clarissa'

 

Samuel Richardson's epistolary novel Clarissa, or The History of a Young Lady adheres to what Steven Kellman called 'the fiction of self-begetting':

Kellman, Steven. "The Fiction of Self-Begetting." Modern Language Notes 91 (1976).

_____. The Self-Begetting Novel. London: Macmillan, 1980.

 

That is, part of the movement of the novel's plot is towards an explanation of the genesis of the novel itself, 'how the text came to exist' — or how the events in the novel beget the novel itself as a narrative account of those events. Note that of course Richardson adheres to the fictional convention of presenting his novel as an "edited" collection of actual letters between a number of correspondents. In the last volume  Lovelace's confidant Belford comments on his moves towards such an editorial compilation of letters, as Clarissa's future executor, and makes one more move towards becoming the first reader of the novel as well as the editor. Of course much of the action in Clarissa is about reading letters not addressed to you—the characters are constantly borrowing, lending, copying or forging letters by others, written to themselves or to others—and thus the experience of reading Clarissa begins in the action of Clarissa, and indeed is part of the action of Clarissa itself. Here is Belford (Letter XXX) commenting in a letter to Lovelace on the peculiar thrills of reading epistolary narrative, as compared to subsequent or memoir narratives relying on hindsight:

She acknowledges that if the same decency and justice are observed in all your letters, as in the extracts I have obliged her with (as I have assured her they are), she shall think herself freed from the necessity of writing her own story: and this is an advantage to thee which thou oughtest to thank me for.

But what thinkest thou is the second request she had to make to me? No other than that I would be her executor! Her motives will appear before thee in proper time; and then, I dare to answer, will be satisfactory.

You cannot imagine how proud I am of this trust. I am afraid I shall too soon come into the execution of it. As she is always writing, what a melancholy pleasure will the perusal and disposition of her papers afford me! Such a sweetness of temper, so much patience and resignation, as she seems to be mistress of; yet writing of and in the midst of present distresses! How much more lively and affecting, for that reason, must her style be, her mind tortured by the pangs of uncertainty (the events then hidden in the womb of fate) than the dry narrative, unanimated style of a person relating difficulties and dangers surmounted; the relater perfectly at ease; and if himself unmoved by his own story, not likely greatly to affect the reader.

Clearly the implied author Richardson's comments show through these reflections of his "compiler" and editor Belford, and give us a rationale for the narrative style he chose for Clarissa and his other novels. Arguably, therefore, the novel presents its self-begetting both at the level of the fictional characters and at the level of the author's own artistic choices.

—oOo—

 

 

 

 

 

Meditation (Saturday, July 15)

 From Richardson's The History of Clarissa, vol. IV, let. 3 (6-7).

"Mrs. Lovick gave me, at my request, the copy of a meditation she showed me, which was extractd by the lady from the Scriptures, while under arrest at Rowland's, as appears by the date. The lady is not to know I have taken a copy."

 

MEDITATION

Saturday, July 15

O that my grief were thoroughly weighed, and my calamity laid in the balance together!

For now it would be heavier than the sand of the sea: therefore my words are swallowed up.

For the arrows of the Almighty are within me; the poison whereof drinketh up my spirit. The terrors of God do set themselves in array against me.

When I lie down, I say, When shall I arise? When will the night be gone? And I am full of tossings to and fro, unto the dawning of the day.

My days are swifter than a weaver's shuttle, and are spent without hope—mine eye shall no more see good.

Wherefore is light given to her that is in misery: and life unto the bitter in soul?

Who longeth for death; but it cometh not; and diggeth for it more than for hid treasures?

Why is light given to one whose way is hid; and whom God hath hedged in?

For the thing which I greatly feared is come upon me!

I was not in safety; neither had I rest; neither was I quiet: yet trouble came.

But behold God is mighty, and despiseth not any.

He giveth right to the poor—and if they be bound in fetters, and holden in cords of affliction, them He showeth them their work and their transgressions.

 

—oOo—

Crash Course Classics - Samuel Richardson

Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded: Summary and Analysis

Epistolary Literature (In Our Time)

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss the great 18th Century fashion for epistolary literature. From its first appearance in the 17th Century with writers like Aphra Behn, epistolary fiction, fiction in the form of letters, reached its heyday in the 18th Century with works like Clarissa by Samuel Richardson. At over a million words, it's a contender for the longest English novel. It inspired impassioned followers such as Denis Diderot who described reading Richardson's novels like this: 

“In the space of a few hours I had been through a host of situations which the longest life can scarcely provide in its whole course. I had heard the genuine language of the passions; I had seen the secret springs of self-interest and self-love operating in a hundred different ways: I had become privy to a multitude of incidents and I felt I had gained in experience.” 

This sense of the reader gaining a privileged peek into the psychology of the protagonists was a key device of the epistolary form and essential to the development of the novel. Its emphasis on moral instruction also propelled the genre into literary respectability. These novels were a publishing sensation. Philosophers like Rousseau and Montesquieu took up the style, using it to convey their ideas on morality and society.So why was letter writing so important to 18th Century authors? How did this style aid the development of the novel? And why did epistolary literature fall out of favour?With John Mullan, Professor of English at University College London; Karen O’Brien, Professor in English at the University of Warwick; and Brean Hammond, Professor of Modern English Literature at the University of Nottingham.

 

 

 

 

University of Nottingham.

Lovelace's Stage Directions

The Eighteenth-century Novel (Saintsbury)

From George Saintsbury's A History of English Literature.
Book IX: Middle and Later Eighteenth-century Literature.  

 Ch. II, "The Eighteenth-century Novel"

Richardson - Fielding - Smollett - Sterne - Minor novelists - Walpole - Beckford - Mrs. Radcliffe - Lewis


Some reference has been made earlier to the differences, or rather the hesitations, of opinion in reference to the exact history of the English novel (1). But for general purposes these may be neglected. The early prose romance, the Euphuist innovation, major and minor, the philosophical or Utopian fantasy, the brief Elizabethan tale, the long-winded translations or imitations of the Scudéry Heroic story, the picaresque miscellany, and the like, are stages obvious as the general history unfolds itself. As to the exact position which the great names of Bunyan and of Defoe hold, difference may be agreed to with resignation. What is certain is that about the beginning of the second quarter of the eighteenth century, the period immediately succeeding the appearance of Defoe's work, there began a development of the prose novel, and that this, partly though by no means wholly owing to one group of great writers in the style, had made very great progress by the beginning of the third, about which time we find lady Mary Wortley Montagu in Italy receiving boxes full of new novels from her daughter in England.

(1) This history has been put briefly, but with much knowledge and grace, in Mr. W. A. Raleigh's The English Novel (London, 1894).

It is so difficult to mark out the precise stages by which the modern novel came into being, that the wisest critics have abstained from attempting it. We can only say that, for the nearly three generations which passed between the Restoration and the publication of Richardson's Pamela, there was an ever greater determination and concentration towards completed prose fiction; and that the use of the general form in two such different ways by two such different men as Swift and Defoe is sufficient proof how near, by the end of the second decade or so, that completed form was. But there was not much general practice of it (1). Mrs. Manley and Mrs. Haywood, women of no very good reputation, followed in the footsteps of Afra Behn, and achieved a certain popularity, but the novels of the former are thinly-veiled political libels. The earlier books of Mrs. Haywood are in seventeenth-century styles, and though she lived to do better in Betsy Thoughtless (1751) and Jemmy and Jenny Jessamy (1753), these were not published till long after the three great re-creators of the novel had shown the way. To them, therefore, we may as well turn at once. 

(1) The minor novels of the eighteenth century are not generally accessible save in the original editions. There is, indeed, one useful and rather full collection, Harrison's Novelists, but, as a whole, it is very bulky, and duplicates much that every one has on his shelves in other forms. Richardson has been sometimes, Fielding, Smollett, Sterne, and Miss Burney have been often, reprinted.

Richardson

Samuel Richardson, by a great deal the oldest, by a little the precursor in actual publication, and indirectly the inspirer of his greatest and nearest successor, was born in 1689 in Derbyshire, his father being a joiner, his mother of rather higher rank. He went to Charterhouse, and was apprenticed in 1706 to a printer, whose daugher he afterwards married. After setting up for himself he became very prosperous, had a house in Salisbury Court, Fleet Street, and another, first at North End, then at Parson's Green, was Master of the Stationers' Company in 1754, and King's Printer in 1761. A year later he died of apoplexy. He was contented for many years to print books without writing them, and he was past fifty when a commission or suggestion from two well-known London publishers, Rivington and Osborne, for a sort of Model Letter-writer (he had in his youth practised as an amateur in this art) led to the composition of Pamela, which (at least the first part of it) was published in 1740, and became very popular. Richardson had already made some acquaintance with persons of a station superior to his own, and the fame of his book enlarged this, while it also tempted him to fly higher. In 1748 he produced Clarissa, which is usually considered his masterpiece, and in 1753 Sir Charles Grandison. Except one paper in The Adventurer, he published nothing else, but left an enormous mass of correspondence. Pamela, or Virtue Rewarded, gives the story of a girl of low degree who, resisting temptation, marries her master, and in the second and less good part reclaims him from irregular courses; Clarissa, that of a young lady of family and fortune, who, partly by imprudence, partly by misfortune, falls a prey to the arts of the libertine Lovelace and, resisting his offers of marriage, dies of a broken heart, to be revenged in a duel by her cousin; Sir Charles Grandison, that of a young man of still higher family and larger fortune, who is almost faultless, and constantly successful in all his endeavours, and who, after being the object of the adoration of two beautiful girls, the Italian Clementina della Porretta and the English Harriet Byron, condescends to make the latter happy. 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. It is noteworthy that his popularity was as great abroad as at home—indeed, it far exceeded that which any English writer, except Scott and Byron, has obtained on the Continent during his lifetime. His adoption of the letter-form influenced novelists very powerfully, and though his style and spirit were less imitable, there is no doubt that they practically founded the novel of analysis and feeling, as distinguished from the romance of adventure.

His fault is an excessive long-windedness (Clarissa and Sir Charles Grandison are by far the longest novels of great merit in English, if not in any language), an inability, which grew upon him, to construct a stroy with any diversified and constantly lively interest, an almost total lack of humour, and a teasing and meticulous  minuteness of sentimental analysis, and history of motive and mood. To those Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, a formidable critic, added, justly enough, though not so importantly from our point of view as from hers, an ignorance of the society which, in his two later novels, he endeavours to depict. His merits, on the other hand, are a faculty of vivid, though too elaborate, presentation of the outward accessories of his scenes; a real, though somewhat limp, grasp of conversation; an intense, though not very varied or extensive, mastery of pathos; and, above all, a one-sided, partial, but intimate and true, knowledge of human motive, sentiment, and even conduct, his time being considered. The proviso is necessary; and the overlooking of it (with perhaps some personal reasons) was at the bottom of Johnson's now almost incomprehensible preference of Richardson over Fielding. Richardson knew the feminine character of his time with a quite extraordinary thoroughness and accuracy, though his men are much less good; whereas Fielding knew both men and women first, eighteenth-century men and women only afterwards, and however well, in a minor degree. Nor, though Johnson had plenty of humour himself, was he likely to resent the absence of it in Richardson, as he resented the presence of a kind different from his own in Fielding.

Great, however, as are Richardson's qualities, and immense as was the impetus which his popularity and his merits combined gave to the English novel, he cannot be said to have given that novel anything like a final or universal form. The scheme of letters, though presenting to the novelist some obvious advantages and conveniences, which have secured it not merely immediate imitation but continuance even to the present day, has disadvantages as obvious, and can never rise to the merits of prose narrative from the outside (1). But it is one of not the least curiosities of literature that the attainment of the true and highest form actually resulted from an exercise in parody, which certainly, cannot be regarded as in itself a very high, and has sometimes been regarded as almost the lowest, form of literature. It is less curious, and much less unexampled, that the author of this parody was a man who had already tried, with no very distinguished success, quite different kinds of writing.

(1) In combination it can do wondrously, as in Redgauntlet.

Fielding

Henry Fielding was born at Sharpham Park, in the south of Somerset, on 22nd April 1707. His birth was higher than that of any mano of letters of all work who had preceded him. The house of Fielding claimed kindred with that of Hapsburh; it had ranked among English gentry since the twelfth century; and in the century before the novelist's birth it had been ennobled by two peerages, the earldom of Denbigh in England and that of Desmond in Ireland. Herny Fielding himself was great-grandson of the first Earl of Desmond of this creation, but was, of course, unconnected with the great Geraldines who came to an end when they rebelled against Elizabeth. His grandfather was a canon of Salisbury, his father a general in the army who had seen service under Marlborough; his mother's father was a Justice of the King's Bench, and it was at his house that the novelist was born. Nor is it to be omitted that he was a near cousin of Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, whose mother was a Fielding.

But though his pedigree was thus undeniable, his immediate forebears had for two generations been younger sons, and his own patrimony was little or nothing. He was, indeed, well educated at Eton and at Leyden, but he seems to have found himself at twenty-one in London with a nominal allowance and no particular interest for any profession, though, like other young gentlemen, he was of the Inns of Court. He turned to the stage, and for not quite ten years produced a large number of plays, neither very bad nor very good, of which Tom Thumb, a burlesque "tragedy of tragedies," is perhaps the best, and certainly the only one which has kept any reputation. About 1735 he seems to have married a Miss Charlotte Craddock, who was very beautiful, very amiable, and an heiress in a small way; but whether, as legend asserts, Fielding really set up for a country gentleman on the strength of her fortune, and spent it on hounds and showy liveries, is quite uncertain. His theatrical enterprises being interfered with by some new legislation in 1737, he turned seriously to the law, was called to the Bar, and practised or at least went on circuit, while in 1739 he contributed largely to the Champion, a paper on the Spectator pattern (1). His first published, though probably not his first written novel, The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and of his Friend Mr. Abraham Adams, appeared in February 1742, when its author was almost exactly thirty-five. It was successful, and next year Fielding published three volumes of Miscellanies, the important parts of which are A Journey from this World to the Next, in the Lucianic manner which Tom Brown had made popular, and the mighty ironic story of Jonathan Wild. His wife died soon after this publication, and he married again but not for some years afterwards. He returned to periodical essay-writing (the True Patriot and the Jacobite's Journal) in '45 on the Whig side, and in 1759 he produced his third and greatest novel, Tom Jones. Meanwhile, Lyttelton had obtained for him the position of Bow Street Magistrate, as it was called, or Justice of the Peace for Westminster, an office which, though poorly paid, was of enormous importance, for its holder practically had the police of London, outside the City, in his hands. He dischrged its duties to admiration, and found time not merely to publish his last novel, Amelia, in 1751, but to conduct the Covent Garden Journal for the greater part of 1752. His health, however, was ruined, and, trying to restore it by travel, he undertook in June 1754 the voyage to Lisbon which forms the subject of his last book, issued after his death. He reached the Portuguese capital in August, but died on the 8th of October.

(1). Fielding's dramatic, periodical, and miscellanous works must be sought in their original editions, the best of which is in 4 vols. 4to (London, 1762), or in the great édition de luxe of Mr. Leslie Stephen. The present writer attempted a selection from them in the last volume of an issue of the novels, the Journey, and the Voyage, which he superintended (12 vols. London, 1893).

Fielding's first novel started as a deliberate burlesque of Pamela. Its hero is the brother of Richardson's heroine, and her trials are transferred to this Joseph. Nor did Fielding ostensibly give up his scheme throughout the book; but his genius was altogether too great to allow him to remain in the narrow and beggarly elements of parody, and after the first few Chapters, we forget all about Richardson's ideas and morals. The great character of Mr. Abraham Adams—a poor curate, extremely unworldly, but no fool, a scholar, a tall an of his hands, and a very Good Samaritan of ordinary life—is only the centre and chief of a crowd of wonderfully lifelike characters, all of whom perform their parts with a verisimilitude which had never been seen before off the stage, and very seldom there; while the new scheme of narrative gave an infinitely wider and more varied scope than the stage ever could give. Moreover, one of the instruments of this vivid presentation—an instrument the play of which not seldom sufficed in itself to make the literary result—was a very peculiar irony, almost as intense as Swift's, though less bitter, indeed hardly bitter at all, and dealing with life in a fashion which, but for being much more personal and much less poetic, is very nearly of the same kind as Shakespeare's.

In his next published book, Jonathan Wild, this irony predominates, and is more severe. The hero was a historical personage, an audacious and ingenious blend of thief and thief-taker, who had been hanged ten years earlier. Fielding's ostensible object in composing an imaginary party-history of him was to satirise the ideas of "greatness" entertained by the ordinary historian—a design showing not imitation of, but sympathy with, certain ways of thought diversely illustrated by Swift and Voltaire. But his genius, intensely creative, once more broke away from this ideal—though the ironic side of Jonathan Wild is stronger than anything else in English or any literature outside the Tale of a Tub, and so strong that the book has probably on the whole shocked, pained, or simply puzzled more readers than it has pleased. But it is really as full of live personages as Joseph Andrews itself; and if these, being drawn almost entirely from the basest originals, cannot be so agreeable as the not more true but far more sympathetic characters of the earlier-published novel, they are, as literature, equally great, and perhaps more astonishing.

It was, however, in his third and longest novel, Tom Jones, that Fielding attained a position unquestionable by anything save mere prejudice or mere crotchet. Joseph Andrews had been, at least in inception, only a parody, and Jonathan Wild mainly a satire; the former, though not destitute of plot, had had but an ordinary and sketchy one, and the latter chiefly adapted actual facts to a series of lifelike but not necessarily connected episodes. Tom Jones, on the contrary, is as artfully constructed as the most nicely proportioned drama, and, long as it is, there is hardly a character or an incident (with the exception of some avowed episodic passages, made tolerable and almost imperative by the taste of the day and the supposed example of the classical epic) which is not strictly adjusted to the attainment of the story's end. To us, perhaps, this is a less attraction than the vividness of the story itself, the extraordinarily lifelike presentation of character, and (though this is a charm less universally admitted) the piquancy of the introductory passages. In these (after a manner no doubt copied from the parabases or addresses to the audience in the chorus of the older Attic comedy, and itself serving, beyond all doubt likewise, as a model to the later asides of Thackeray — Fielding takes occasion sometimes to discuss his own characters, sometimes to deal with more general points. But the characters themselves, and the vivacity with which they are set to work, are the thing. The singular humanity of Tom Jones himself, a scapegrace even according to the ideas of his time, but a good fellow; the benevolence, not mawkish or silly, of Allworthy; the charms and generosity of Sophia; the harmless foibles of Miss Western, the aunt, and the coarse but not offensive clownishness of her brother, the Squire, with the humours of Partridge the schoolmaster, and others, have always satisfied good judges. Even among the black sheep, Lady Bellaston, shameless as she is, is a lady; and at the other end of the scale, Black George, rascal as he is, is a man. Only perhaps the villain Blifil is not exactly human, not so much by reason of his villainy, as because Fielding, for some reason, has chosen to leave him so.

There is somewhat less power and life in Amelia, though its sketches of London society in the lower and middle classes are singularly vivid, and though the character of the heroine as an amiable wife, not so much forgiving injuries as signoring their commission, has been almost idolised by some. But no other novelist of the time — and by this the novelists were numerous — could have written it.

On the whole, if we are to pronounce the novel as such present for the first time in the pages of any writer, it must be in those of Fielding rather than in those of Richardson. Johnson, in his prejudice, endeavored to set the latter above the former by comparing Fielding to a man who can only tell the time, and Richardson to one who can put together the watch. The point may be very stoutly argued; but if it be admitted, it can be turned against Johnson. For Fielding does tell the clock of nature with absolute and universal correctness, while Richardson's ingenious machinery sometimes strikes twenty-five o'clock, and constantly gives us seconds, thirds, and other troublesome details instead of putting us in possession of the useful time of day. And in fact the comparison itself will not really hold water. Fielding does not parade his mechanism as Richardson does, but his command of it is every whit as true, and in reality as delicated. He first in English (1), he thoroughly, and he in a manner unsurpassable, put humanity into fictitious working after such a fashion that the effect hitherto produced only by the dramatist and poet, the practical re-creation and presentation of life, was achieved in the larger and fuller manner possible only to the prose novelist.

(1) "In English," for, as he himself was eager to confess, Cervantes in Spanish had not merely preceded him, but had served as his model.

Smollett

The novels of Tobias George Smollett relapse in appearance and general plan upon a form — that of the "picaresque" or adventure-novel — older than that of Fielding or even of Richardson; but in reality they contributed largely to the development of the new fiction. Their author was born in 1721 at Dalquhurn, in the West of Scotland, and was a member of a good family, of which, had he lived a little longer, he would have become the head. He was born, however, the younger son of a younger son, and the harsh treatment of Roderick Random by his relations has been thought to reflect upon his own grandfather, Sir James Smollett of Bonhill, Judge of the Commissary Court of Scotland, M.P., and Commissioner for the Union. However this may be, Smollett, though well educated, had to make his own way in the world, and was apprenticed to a Glasgow surgeon. He practised at different times during his life, but his real profession was literature, by which he set out to make his fortune in London at the age of eighteen. He did not make it with a bad and boyish tragedy, The Regicide (1), but took the place of surgeon's mate on board a man-of-war in the Carthagena expedition of 1640. He does not seem to have served long, but remained for some years in the West Indies, and probably they married his wife, Anne Lascelles, a small heiress. Returning to England he tried poems and plays with no success, and then in 1748 turned to novel-writing with a great deal, as the deserved reward of Roderick Random. 

From this time onward, Smollett was a novelist by taste and genius, and a man of letters of all work by necessity. In the former capacity he wrote and published Peregrine Pickle (1751), Ferdinand, Count Fathom (1753), Sir Lancelot Greaves in 1760, and in 1771 Humprey Clinker. In the latter he edited the Critical Review, wrote a very popular and profitable History of England, gave an account, in an ill-tempered but not uninteresting book, of his Travels in France and Italy, and did a great deal of miscellaneous work, including a fierce and foul, but rather dull, political lampoon, The Adventures of an Atom. His health, between hard work and the hard living then usual, brok down early, and making a second visit to italy, he died at Leghorn in October 1771.

(1) Smollett's plays and poems are seldom reprinted with the numerous editions of his novels, but may be found in Chalmers; his History is on all the stalls; his criticism and miscellaneous works have never been, and are never likely to be collected in full. The Travels, which are worth reading, have been more than once reprinted.

Smollett's miscellaneous work, though almost always competent, and sometimes much more, need not detain us; his novels, excellent in themselves, are of the highest historical importance. It has been said that he fell back on the adventure-scheme. Plot he hardly attempted; and even, as regards incident, he probably, as Thackeray says, "did not invent much," his own varied experiences and his sharp eye for humorous character giving him abundant material. In Roderick Random he uses his naval experiences, and perhaps others, to furnish forth the picture of a young Scotchman, arrogant, unscrupulous, and not too amiable, but bold and ready enough; in Peregrine Pickle he gives that of a spendthrift scapegrace, heir to wealth; in Fathom he draws a professional chevalier d'industrie. The strange fancy which made him attempt a sort of "New Quixote" in Sir Launcelot Greaves has seldom been regarded as happy, either in inception or inresult; but in Humphrey Clinker we have the very best of all his works. It is written in the letter form, the scenes and humours of many places in England and Scotland are rendered with admirable picturesqueness, while the book has seldom been excelled for humorous character of the broad and farcical kind. Matthew Bramble, the testy hypochondriac squire who is at heart one of the best of men, and in head not one of the foolishes; his sour-visaged and greedy sister Tabitha; her maid Winifred Jenkins, who has learnt the art of grotesque misspelling from Swift's Mrs. Harris, and has improved upon the teaching; the Scotch soldier of fortune, Lismahago, — these are among the capital figures of English fiction, and in the earlier books are the Welsh surgeon's mate Morgan, Commodore Trunnion, and others.

Besides this conception of humorous if somewhat rough character, and a remarkable faculty of drawing interiors which acompanies it, and in which he perhaps even excels Fielding, Smollett made two very important contributions too the English novel. The first was the delineation of national types in which he, almost for the first time, reduced and improved the stock exaggerations of the stage to a human and artistic temper. The second, not less important, was the introduction, under proper limitations, of the professional interest. He had, though less of universality than Fielding, yet enough of it to be successful with types in which he had only observation, not experiment, to guide him, but he was naturally most fortunate with what he knew from experience, sailors and "medical gentlemen." Until his time the sailor had been drawn almost entirely from the outside in English literature. Smollett first gives him to us in his habit as he lived, and long continued to live. To these great merits must be added one or two drawbacks — a hardness and roughness of tone approaching ferocity, and not more distinguished from the somewhat epicene temper of Richardson than from the manly but kindly spirit of Fielding, and an exreme coarseness of imagery and language — a coarseness which can hardly be called immoral, but which is sometimes positively revolting.


Sterne 


One element, however, or one special conmixture of elements, remained to be added in fiction, and then (if we except such minor varieties as the terror-novel to be handled shortly) it remained with no important addition or progress until the day of Scott and Miss Austen within the present [19th] century. This was supplied, that the three kingdoms might be separately and proportionately represented, by Laurence Sterne (1), an Irishman by birth at least, and something of an Irishman in temperament.

(1) The standard edition of Sterne — novels, sermons and not quite complete letters — is in 10 vols. The work other than the novels has been often omitted in reprints; but, as in the case of Fielding, the present writer has arranged a selection from it in 2 vols (London, 1894).

 The Sternes were an East-Anglian family which, after a member became Archbishop of York in the seventeenth century, was chiefly connected with Yorkshire. Laurence was the son of Roger Sterne, a captain in the army, who was the younger son of Simons Sterne of Erlington, third son of the Archbishop, and he was born at Clonmell, where his father was quartered, in 1713, was educated at Halifax, and went thence to Jesus College, Cambridge, of which, many years before, the Archbishop had been Master. He took his degree in 1736, and orders soon afterwards, receiving the livings of Sutton and Stillington as well as minor preferment in York chapter. He married Elizabeth Lumley in 1741, and for some twenty years seems to have felt, or at any rate indulged, no literary ambition. But on New Year's Day 1760 there appeared in York and London the first volume of The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gent. It was immediately popular, it made its author a lion in the capital and it turned his attention definitely to literary work, society, and foreign travel. During the remaning nine years of his life he continued Tristram Shandy at intervals, issued some volumes of Sermons, travelled and resided abroad, and embodied some of the results of this travel in A Sentimental Journey. This last appeared only just before his death, after some previous escapes from long disease, on 18th March 1768.

Sterne's work — his Sermons  even to some degree, his two novels to a much greater — is the most deliberately and ostentatiously eccentric in the higher ranges of English literature; and being so, contains an element of mere trick, which inevitably impairs its value. If a man will not, and does not, produce his effects withouth such mechanical devices as continual dashes, stars, points, and stopped sentences, even blank pages, blackened pages, marbled pages, and the like, he must lay his account with the charge that he cannot produce them without such apparatus. The charge, however, is in Sterne's case unjust; for though the "clothes-philosophy" of his style is fantastically adjusted, there is a real body both of style and of matter beneath.

Tristram Shandy, the pretended history of a personage who rarely appears, is, in fact, a "rigmarole" of partly original, partly borrowed, humour, arranged in the syle which the French call fatrasie, and of which Rabelais' great books are the most familiar, though not quite the normal, type. Although Tristram himself is the shadow of a shade, Sterne manages to present the most vivid character-pictures of his father, Walter Shandy, and his Uncle Toby (the latter the author's most famous, if not his greatest, creation), together with others, not much less achieved, of Corporal Trim, Uncle Toby's servant and comrade in the Marlborough wars, Mrs. Shandy, Widow Wadman, Dr. Slop, and others. And he thus gives a real novel-substance to a book which coould otherwise hardly pretend to the title of a novel at all. The Sentimental Journey, a pretended (and no doubt partly real) autobiographic account of a journey through France to the Italian frontier, is planned on no very different general principles, and has its own medallions of character, though they are less elaborately worked and less closely grouped.

Both books depend for their literay effect on a large number of means — out-of-the-way reading, of which Sterne availed himself with a freedom which has brought upon him the charge of plagiarism; very real though occasionally exaggerated pathos; a curiosly fertile though not extremely varied fancy; and a considerable indulgence, not in coarseness of the Smollettian kind, but in indecent hint and innuendo.  But their main appeal lies in two things — a kind of humour which, though sometimes artificial and seldom reaching the massive and yet mobile humanity of Fielding, has a singular trick of grace, and a really intimate knowledge of human nature, combined and contrasted with a less natural quality, to which Frnace at the time gave the name of "Sensibility" and England that of "Sentiment." It was this last which gave Sterne his immediate popularity, though perhaps for a generation or two past that popularity has been rather endangered by it; and it is still this which gives him his most distinct place, though not his greatest value, in literary history. For it, like the prominence of a less definite kind of the same quality in Richardson, shows the reaction from the rather excessive hardness and prosaic character of the earlier decades. This reaction was not yet directed in the right way. It was still powdered and patched, deliberate, artificial, fashionable. It bore to true passion very much the same relation which the mannerism of Ossian bore to true romance, and Strawberry Hill Gothic to real Pointed architecture. It was theatrical and mawkish; it sometimes toppled over into the ludicrous, or the disgusting, or both. But it shows at worst a blind groping after something that could touch the heart as well as amuse the head. 

Minor novelists

Perhaps it was the popularity of Richardson and Fielding, as early as the first years of the fifth decade of the century, but more probably the aura or prevalent tendency of general thought, which brought about a great expansion and multiplication of the novel about 1750 (1).

(1) Most of the books mentioned from this point to the end of the chapter will be found in the above-noted collection of Harrison, or in Scott's Ballantyne novels, sometimes in both. The latter, in ten capacious but unwieldy volumes, contains all the four great novelists (including Smollett's translations), the Adventures of a Guinea, Johnson's, Walpole's, and Goldsmith's novels, Mackenzie, Bage, Mrs. Radcliffe, Gulliver's Travels, Cumberland's Henry, and Clara Reeve's Old English Baron. 

Few of the minor results of this retain much reputation even with students of the subject, and most are not over-accessible.Some of them have obtained an additional prop from the mention and criticism of Lady Mary (vide supra et infra). We have mentioned Mrs. Haywood's books. Francis Coventry's Pompey the Little (1751) was the most amusing, as Charles Johnstone's Chrysal, or The Adventures of a Guinea (1760) was the most powerful, of a kind of personal fiction whereof a memorable example survives in the Memoirs of a Lady of Quality, inserted (one regrets to say for money) by Smollett in Peregrine Pickle, and doubtless rewritten by him from the materials of the beautiful and liberal Viscountess Vane. The too notorious Dr. Dodd attempted to combine Sterne and Smollett, and succeeded in combining the most objectionable parts of each without any of their genius, in The Sisters; Dr. Hawkesworth followed Dr. Johnson with steps of his usual inequality in Almoran and Hamet (1761). But the most interesting work in fiction of the middle of the century is to be found in two books, eccentric in more senses than one. John Buncle (1750-66) and The Fool of Quality (1766-70). The first was the work, though by no means the only work, of a curious Irishman named Thomas Amory, who was born in 1691 and died in 1788, who assures us that he was intimate with Swift, and on whom it would be extremely interesting to have Swift's opinion. Amory began in 1755, with a book, not improbably composed on French models and called Memoirs of Several Ladies of Great Britain. But this, though interesting, pales before the Life of John Buncle, Esq. The hero is an enthusiastic Unitarian, the husband of seven wives of surpassing beauty, a man of letters in a way, a man of science and distinctly marked with the madness which no doubt existed in a temperate and intangible form in his creator. The book, which is entirely sui generis, fascinated Hazlitt, and has been reprinted, but never widely read.

A much more respectable and an almost equally interesting book, though a worse novel, seeing that it attempts innumerable things which the novel cannot manage, is The Fool of Quality. The author of this, Henry Brooke, was like Amory and Irishman, was born in County Cavan in 1703, and died at Dublin in 1783. He was, also like Amory, mad, and died so. He had money, education, and abundant ability, while in his earlier manhood he was familiar with the best literary society of London. In 1735 he published a poem called Universal Bounty, which is worth notice, though it has been too highly praised; four years later a play, Gustavus Vasa. The Fool of Quality, or The Adventures of Henry, Earl of Morland, is a wholly unpractical book and a chaotic history, but admirably written full of shrewdness and wit, and of a singularly chivalrous tone. Nor must we leave out the really exquisite Peter Wilkins, of an almost unknown author, Robert Paltock, which appeared in 1751. In conception it was a sort of following of Gulliver, but Paltock has little satire and no misanthropy, and the charm of his book, which once was a boys' book, and now delights some men, depends on his ingenious wonders, and on the character of the flying girl Youwarkee, the only heroine (except Fielding's) of the eighteenth-century novel who has very distinct charm.

Walpole 

The contributions of Johnson and Goldsmith to the novel will be best mentioned with their other work. But the history, as we can give it here, of eighteenth-century fiction proper is incomplete without a notice of the curious terror-novel which, anticipated by Horace Walpole, had its special time in the last decade of the century, the work of Fanny Burney, that of Mackenzie, and some others. Walpole himself will occupy us later. The incongruity of most of his work and character with the Castle of Otranto has always attracted and puzzled critics; nor is there perhaps any better explanation than that the Castle, momentous as its example proved, was mainly an accident of that half-understood devotion to "the Gothick" which was common at the time (1764) and of which Walpole as a dilettante, if not as a sincere disciple, was one of the chief English exponents. The story is a clumsy one, and its wonders are perpetually hovering on the verge of the burlesque. But its influence, though not immediate, was exceedingly great.

Its nearest successor, the Old English Baron of Clara Reeve in 1777, imitated rather Walpole's Gothicism than its ghostliness. Nor can the extremely remarkable and almost isolated novelette of Vathek (1783) be set down to Walpolian influence thoguh it undoubtedly did exemplify certain general tendencies of the day. Its author, William Beckford, was the son of a rather prominent politician in the city of London, and inherited very great wealth. He travelled a good deal, leaving much later literary memorials of his travels; he collected books; he built two gorgeous palaces, one in England, at Fonthill in Wiltshire, and another in Portugal, at Cintra; and he in many respects was, and perhaps deliberately aimed at being, the ideal English "milord" of continental fancy—rich, eccentric, morose, generous at times, and devoted to his own whimsical will. Such a character is generally contemptible in reality, but Beckford possessed very great intellectual ability, and Vathek stands alone. Its debts to the old Oriental tale are more apparent than real, those to the fantastic satirical romance of Voltaire, though larger, do not impair its main originaly; and a singular gust is imparted to its picture of unbridled power and unlimited desire by the remembrance that the author himself was, in not such a very small way, the insatiable voluptuary he draws. The picture of the Hall of Eblis at the end has no superior in a certain slightly theatrical, but still real, kind of sombre magnificence, and the heroine Nouronihar is great.

Mrs. Radcliffe

Mrs. Radcliffe (Anne Ward)—who was born in 1764, and did not die until 1822, but who published nothing after the beginning of the nineteenth century, though some work of hers appeared posthumously—produced in the course of a few years a series of elaborate and extremely popular work, which has not retained its vitality so well as has Vathek—The Castles of Athlin and Dunbayne (1789), A Sicilian Romance (1790), The Romance of the Forest (1791), the celebrated Mysteries of Udolpho (1795), and The Italian (1797). Mrs. Radcliffe is prodigal of the mysteries which figure in the title of her most famous work, of castles and forests, of secret passages and black veils; but her great peculiarity is the constant suggestion of supernatural interferences, which conscientious scruple, or eighteenth-century rationalism, or a mere sense of art, as constantly leads her to explain by natural causes.

Lewis

Matthew Lewis, her successor, and (though he denied it) pretty certainly her imitator, had no such scruples, and in his notorious Monk and other stories and dramas simply lavished ghosts and demons. This department of the novel, unless Vathek be ranked in it, nothing of very high literary value, but its popularity was immense, and it probably did some real good by enlarging the sphere and quickening the fancy of the novelist. 

There are more than a few names of note who might be criticized if space permitted, and who must at any rate be mentioned. Henry Mackenzie (1745-1831), who followed Sterne in sentiment, though not in other ways, drew floods of tears with The Man of Feeling (1771), The Man of the World, and Julia de Roubigné; the political philosopher Godein, who will reappear, produced, besides his still famous Caleb Williams (1794), other novels, St. Leon (1799), Fleetwood, Mandeville, etc.; Holcroft the dramatist (1745-1809) gave Alwyn, Hugh Trevor,  and especially Anna St. Ives (1792); Robert Bage, a freethinking Quaker and a man of business, wrote no less than six fictions, some of them of great lenght; Mrs. Inchbald (1753-1821), a beauty, an actress, a dramatist, and a novelist, gave to her Simple Story a certain charm; Hannah More (1745-1833), who was petted by Johnson in her youth, and petted the child Macaulay in her age, wrote Cœlebs in Search of a Wife, a moral novel not untinged with social satire. The Zeluco of Dr. John Moore (1719-1802) is not insignificant. But the most important, though far from the most gifted, novelist of the latter years of the century was Frances Burney (1752-1840), the daughter of a historian of music, who was the intimate friend of Johnson and most of the men of letters of his time, a pet of the great lexicographer and of the society of the Thrales, for some time a member of the household of Queen Charlotte, and then the wife of a French refugee. From him she took the name Madame D'Arblay, by which she is more commonly known as a diarist, though almost the whole of that delightful part of her work deals with her maiden years. Miss Burney wrote in Evelina (1778) a not very well-arranged but extremely lively picture of the entrance of a young girl into society; in Cecilia (1781) a much more ambitious and regular but less fresh story of love and family pride. Her later novels, Camilla (1796) and The Wanderer (1814) were, the former, a partial, the latter a complete, failure. Her importance, however, consists in the fact  that, at any rate in youth, she had a singular knack of catching the tone and manners of ordinary and usual society, and that by transferring these to her two first books she showed a way which all novelists have followed since. Her great predecessors of the middle of the century had not quite done this. Some of the stock ingredients of the older novel are indeed thrown in for Evelina's benefit—the discovery of parentage, the bold attempts of unscrupulous lovers, etc. — but they are of no real importance in the story, which draws its entire actual interest from the faithful presentation of the most possible, probable, and ordinary events and characters.

Daiches on Sterne

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