The First Modern Novel – 3

Today’s installment concludes The First Modern Novel,
our selection by Edmund Gosse.

If you have journeyed through all of the installments of this series, just one more to go and you will have completed a selection from the great works of three thousand words. Congratulations!

Previously in The First Modern Novel.

Time: 1740
Place: England

The story is again told entirely in letters; it is the history of the abduction and violation of a young lady by a finished scoundrel and ends in the death of both characters. To enable the novelist to proceed, each personage has a confidant. The beautiful and unhappy Clarissa Harlowe corresponds with the vivacious Miss Howe; Robert Lovelace addresses his friend and quondam fellow-reveler, John Belford. The character of Clarissa is summed up in these terms by her creator: “A young Lady of great Delicacy, Mistress of all the Accomplishments, natural and acquired, that adorn the Sex, having the strictest Notions of filial Duty.” Her piety and purity, in fact, are the two loadstars of her moral nature and the pursuit of each leads her life to shipwreck.

By the universal acknowledgment of novel-readers, Clarissa is one of the most sympathetic, as she is one of the most lifelike, of all the women in literature and Richardson has conducted her story with so much art and tact that her very faults canonize her and her weakness crowns the triumph of her chastity. In depicting the character of Lovelace, the novelist had a difficult task, for to have made him a mere ruffian would have been to ruin the whole purpose of the piece. He is represented as witty, versatile and adroit, the very type of the unscrupulous gentleman of fashion of the period. He expiates his crimes, at the close of a capital duel, by the hands of Colonel Morden, a relative of the Harlowe family, who has seen Clarissa die. The success of Clarissa, both here and in France, was extraordinary. As the successive volumes appeared and readers were held in suspense as to the fate of the exquisite heroine, Richardson was deluged with letters entreating him to have mercy. The women of England knelt sobbing round his knees and addressed him as though he possessed the power of life and death.

The slow and cumbrous form of Clarissa has tended to lessen the number of its students but there is probably no one who reads at all widely who has not at one time or another come under the spell of this extraordinary book. In France its reputation has always stood very high. Diderot said that it placed Richardson with Homer and Euripides, Rousseau openly imitated it and Alfred de Musset has styled it the best novel in the world. To those who love to see the passions taught to move at the command of sentiment and who are not wearied by the excessively minute scale, as of a moral miniature-painter, on which the author designs his work, there can scarcely be recommended a more thrilling and affecting book. The author is entirely inexorable and the reader must not hope to escape until he is thoroughly purged with terror and pity.

After the further development of Fielding’s genius and after the advent of a new luminary in Smollett, Richardson once more presented to the public an elaborate and ceremonious novel of extreme prolixity. The History of Sir Charles Grandison, in seven (and six) volumes, appeared in the spring of 1754, after having been pirated in Dublin during the preceding winter. Richardson’s object in this new adventure was, having already painted the portraits of two virtuous young women — the one fortunate, the other a martyr — to produce this time a virtuous hero and to depict “the character and actions of a man of true honor,” as before, in a series of familiar letters. There is more movement, more plot, in this novel than in the previous ones; the hero is now in Italy, now in England and there is much more attempt than either in Pamela or Clarissa to give the impression of a sphere in which a man of the world may move. Grandison is, however, a slightly ludicrous hero. His perfections are those of a prig and an egoist and he passes like the sun itself over his parterre of adoring worshippers. The ladies who are devoted to Sir Charles Grandison are, indeed, very numerous but the reader’s interest centers in three of them — the mild and estimable Harriet Byron, the impassioned Italian Clementina della Porretta and the ingenuous ward Emily Jervois. The excuse for all this is that this paragon of manly virtue has “the most delicate of human minds,” and that women are irresistibly attracted to him by his splendid perfections of character. But posterity has admitted that the portrait is insufferably overdrawn and that Grandison is absurd. The finest scenes in this interesting but defective novel are those in which the madness of Clementina is dwelt upon in that long-drawn patient manner of which Richardson was a master. The book is much too long.

Happy in the fame which “the three daughters” of his pen had brought him and enjoying prosperous circumstances, Richardson’s life closed in a sort of perpetual tea-party, in which he, the only male, sat surrounded by bevies of adoring ladies. He died in London, of apoplexy, on July 4, 1761. His manners were marked by the same ceremonious stiffness which gives his writing an air of belonging to a far earlier period than that of Fielding or Smollett; but his gravity and sentimental earnestness only helped to endear him to the women. Of the style of Richardson there is little to be said; the reader never thinks of it. If he forces himself to regard it, he sees that it is apt to be slipshod, although so trim and systematic. Richardson was a man of unquestionable genius, dowered with extraordinary insight into female character and possessing the power to express it; but he had little humor, no rapidity of mind and his speech was so ductile and so elaborate that he can scarcely compete with later and sharper talents.

This ends our series of passages on The First Modern Novel by Edmund Gosse. This blog features short and lengthy pieces on all aspects of our shared past. Here are selections from the great historians who may be forgotten (and whose work have fallen into public domain) as well as links to the most up-to-date developments in the field of history and of course, original material from yours truly, Jack Le Moine. – A little bit of everything historical is here.

We want to take this site to the next level but we need money to do that. Please contribute directly by signing up at https://www.patreon.com/history

Some History Moments selections posted before 2012 need to be updated to meet HM’s quality standards. These relate to: (1) links to outside sources for modern, additional information; (2) graphics; (3) navigation links; and (4) other presentation issues. The reader is assured that the author’s materiel is faithfully reproduced in all History Moments posts.