Posted here Sunday, June 27, 2004 at 9:08:14 AM 
Some thoughts on the current culture: why does nothing seem to have much impact in "modern" times? Look at an earlier period.
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on Richardson, from the wonderful history of english lit, on line at the easy click through
http://www.bartleby.com/220/0109.html
But his novels deserve more than the disinterested curiosity of students; their significance is other than relative. Taken by themselves, they constitute a literary achievement of enduring worth. The moral passion with which they are instinct may not appeal to us unreservedly; yet the forceful grasp of the stories holds us fast so soon as we have become reconciled to the atmosphere; and those regions of the human heart in which nature and grace, selfishness and love are always at war slowly and pitilessly open themselves to us, while we read, together with some part, at least, of the free, individual, spontaneous life of the shallow self. Richardson’s realism is great in its handling of minute details, its imaginative power, its concatenation of events. Though the picturesque aspects of the world are hardly ever called up by him, the material circumstances of the drama in which his characters are engaged stand depicted with diligent fulness, and the inner incidents of the sentient, struggling soul have never been more graphically or abundantly narrated. His style is a self-created instrument of small intrinsic merit but of excellent utility; it shows variety enough to adjust itself to the personalities of different correspondents; it moves on with a certain elaborate ease, but knows how to rise, at times, to a straightforward, telling energy. It is not free from artistic, or even from grammatical, flaws, but, considering Richardson’s personal lack of culture, it bears witness to a remarkable natural gift. Its tone is most often slightly self-conscious, with a preference for Latin, genteel words and phrases; but it not unfrequently displays the strength of racy idioms and the charm of native English simplicity. |
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| Richardson’s influence upon the course of English and European literature cannot be overestimated. To understand the extent and meaning of the effect exercised by him at home, the state of the English novel before and after him should be borne in mind. The assertion, frequently made, that he put an end to the romance of fancy, after the pattern of The Grand Cyrus, should not be repeated without qualification; the vogue of the D’Urfé and Scudéry school had long been on the wane, and the tendency to realism had already come to the front, principally through Defoe and Swift. But it is certain that Pamela, besides being the first notable English novel of sentimental analysis, heralded the advent of everyday manners and common people to artistic acceptance. The claims of Richardson to the favour of contemporary readers were, thus, manifold; he stirred their emotions, and gave definite satisfaction to their latent thirst for sentiment; he presented them with living, actual, flesh-and-bone heroes and heroines, and responded to their longing for reality and substance in fiction; he imparted a moral lesson, and, thus, found himself at one with the rising reaction against the sceptical levity of the preceding age. One more point should be emphasised: at the very moment when the social power of the middle classes was growing apace, Richardson, himself one of them, exactly expressed their grievances and prejudices. His novels are filled with a spirit of bourgeois—it might almost be said, popular—criticism of the privileges and the corruption of the great; and, at the same time, they are flavoured with the essence of snobbishness. It is easy to exaggerate the fondness with which Richardson dwells on the manners of servants or “low” people; the class with which he deals, that forming, so to say, the social plane of his novels, is the gentry. To him, the right of birth is an all but impassable barrier, and Pamela is no exception; she remains an inferior in her own eyes, if not exactly in those of her husband. No doubt, the higher circles of society in which Sir Charles Grandison moves were not known to Richardson from personal experience, and it is unnecessary to dwell on the mistakes with which he has been charged in his description of aristocratic life; still, he took a secret delight in holding intercourse, though it were of a more or less imaginary sort, with the nobility, and his conception of a gentleman was certainly not in advance of his time. Both the impatient self-assertion of the middle class, and its quiet settling down into conservative grooves of feeling, are thus foreshadowed. The story of Pamela is an illustration of the Christian equality of souls, quite in keeping with the widespread modern tendency to exalt a sentimental, theoretical democracy; it breathes, on the other hand, an involuntary subservience to the intrinsic dignity of rank and riches. In both ways, the social tone of Richardson’s novels was that of a class, which, thenceforth, contributed its own elements to the formation of the literary atmosphere. |
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This general, diffused effect is of more importance than the direct and particular influence of Richardson on his imitators or disciples in England. The course of the English novels was not shaped by him alone, since Fielding rose to eminence almost simultaneously with him; but who can gauge the exact indebtedness of Tom Jones to Pamela and Clarissa? Is not a negative impulse an efficient motive power in its way; and, besides, was not the example of the older writer of positive value to the younger? Among the novelists who came after them, Sterne, in a large measure, may be included among the descendants of Richardson. So may Henry Brooke, whose Fool of Quality (1766–70) 2 bears some resemblance in matter to Sir Charles Grandison, Oliver Goldsmith, the kind-hearted moralist of The Vicar of Wakefield (1766), 3 and Henry Mackenzie, author of The Man of Feeling (1771). 4 Special mention should, also, be made of Fanny Burney, who wrote her first novel Evelina (1778) in the epistolary style, 5 and of Jane Austen, who used the same method in the first form of Sense and Sensibility (1811). 6 With both these writers, Richardson’s influence, engrafted on a passionate admiration, was supreme; yet it need hardly be added that they both and, preeminently, Jane Austen, achieved distinct originality. It is a characteristic fact that, within the fifty years which followed Richardson’s death, it should be impossible to single out any novelist on whom his individual spirit may be said to have descended, while there is hardly one who might not be said to have inherited something from him. With the new century and its new literature, his action did not cease to be felt; but it sank into subterranean channels, and dissolved into the general tendency in fiction to realism, accepted morality and mental analysis. These sources of inspiration are still fresh and running in the English novel of the present day; and, through them, the impulse given by Richardson is as notable as ever.
Whatever estimate may be formed of the relative merits of Richardson and Fielding individually, the significance of the former is seen to be immeasurably superior to that of his great rival, so soon as the wider field of European literature is taken into account. From the author of Clarissa is derived one of those pervading lines of influence out of which was woven the web of international life and thought in the latter half of the eighteenth century. By falling in with the revival of feeling on the continent, Richardson helped the wave of sentimentalism to break loose, and, thus, had a large share in the rise of the cosmopolitan age. In France, his works may be said to have played as great a part as any indigenous production. The admirable disquisition of Joseph Texte has thrown full light on this episode, which is one of paramount importance in the history of French letters. Public taste was then in a state of transition. The latent possibilities of French genius were stirred as by the coming of a new springtime; fresh powers of imagination and emotion were seeking to assert themselves in the dry atmosphere of philosophical rationalism. The decay of classical ideals left room for new subjects and a new treatment; not only the manners of man in the abstract, but the complexity of the individual, not only the dignity of tragic or epic heroes, but the charm of real, everyday scenes and characters, were dimly felt to lie still unexplored—a field of boundless promise for a resolutely modern and original literature. Akin to the craving for sentiment and to the desire for reality in fiction was the moralising propensity; the spirit of the time indulged easily in free enquiries into problems of conduct, since the power of the old beliefs was in all spheres shaken by criticism. Richardson’s novels answered to all those aspirations. The Anglomanie had fairly set in before he became the idol of the French public; but no English writer was more widely read in France during the eighteenth century. He was fortunate in being translated by abbé Prévost, himself a distinguished novelist and a warm admirer of English manners. Pamela was gallicised as early as 1742; Clarissa in 1751; Grandison from 1755 to 1758, with that freedom of adaptation and suppression which is characteristic of the time. |
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| It would be out of place here to attempt more than a summary notice of the fortune with which Richardson’s novels met in France. They were eagerly welcomed and only a very few dissentient voices made themselves heard in the chorus of praise; their author was worshipped by the swelling crowd of the votaries of sensibility. A series of imitations and sequels of the novels, and of plays founded upon them, bore witness to the lasting favour of the public. The reception of Clarissa was still more enthusiastic than that of Pamela; and even the somewhat stiff self-consciousness of Grandison could not blunt the appetites of French readers, forgetful, for once, of their keen susceptibility to the ridiculous. The versatile genius of Voltaire himself was carried away by the fashion of the day, and his Nanine (1749) was a strangely dissimilar dramatisation of Pamela; later, the irrepressible antipathy of his temperament broke out in angry condemnations of the novels. 7 Worthy of special notice is Diderot’s Éloge de Richardson (1761), a somewhat indiscriminate, but, on the whole, penetrating, criticism, laying eloquent stress on some of the main aspects of the English writer’s real greatness, and turning them to account as a confirmation of Diderot’s own dramatic theory. Still more momentous in the history of French and European literature is the admiration of Jean-Jacques Rousseau for Richardson. That his Nouvelle Héloïse (begun 1756, completed 1760) was suggested by Clarissa has, from the first, been a commonplace of literary criticism. The similitude in the theme and in its treatment, indeed, is extremely striking. Rousseau’s heroine conquers her passion for Saint-Preux when virtue claims her under the more pressing form of duty to a husband, as Clarissa subdues her love for Lovelace when he has proved unworthy of her. In both stories, the death of the heroine crowns a pathetic tale with a supreme consummation. The French Claire and the English Miss Howe play pretty much the same part as confidantes. That both novels are written in the form of letters furnishes tangible proof of an influence which Rousseau never attempted to deny. The inner analogies are of still greater importance. A didactic spirit breathes through La Nouvelle Héloïse, a spirit of sober and earnest morality; the book aims at vindicating the sanctity of marriage, and at illustrating the artistic interest of domestic manners; it stands opposed to the artificial, aristocratic tone of older French fiction, as well as to the cynical mockery of Lesage. Needless to say, Rousseau’s genius touched the book with its own originality; a more impassioned fervour of emotion, a poetical worship of nature, a self-indulgent enjoyment of melancholy moods, set upon it the distinct stamp of romanticism, while Richardson’s sensibility kept within the bounds of the inner life, and was checked by his puritanism when half-way to romantic morbidness. It was his fate, nevertheless, to become one of the most active among the literary forces from which was to spring, together with the revival of letters, a state of moral unrest which would have caused his conscience many an anxious qualm. Not only most French novelists after 1760, but the leaders of the new school, from 1790 to 1830, either directly or through Rousseau, felt the inspiring and guiding influence of Richardson. |
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