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A QUIET CORNER IN A LIBRARY

A QUIET CORNER
IN A LIBRARY
WILLIAM HENRY HUDSON
Author of
“Idle Hours in a Library” etc.
LONDON
GEORGE G. HARRAP AND COMPANY
2 & 3 PORTSMOUTH STREET KINGSWAY W. C.
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(ſhe ſtatto - 3%icºſtallax 39texx,
Chicago
To My Friend
WILLIAM RAMSDEN-PRICE
"Oh! les vieux amis ! . . .. il
n'y a que ça de solide!"
LABICHE: Les Petits Oiseaux, I, xi
PREFACE
THE following papers may best be described perhaps
as by-products of the writer's more serious work in
literature. They grew naturally out of studies upon
which for a good many years past I have been engaged
with other ends in view, but they represent the mood
of relaxation rather than that of strenuous effort.
While I should be sorry to think that they are super-
ficial in the ordinary sense of the word, I would
nevertheless ask the reader to remember that they are
not offered as exhaustive essays on the subjects with
which they deal. The title chosen for the volume
at the suggestion of a friend will I hope be under-
stood to indicate something of its general tone and
character.
It is perhaps worth while to mention that no portion
of the book has hitherto appeared in print. Of the
contents individually little needs to be said. The
essay on Tom Hood is the expansion of a lecture origi-
nally prepared a good many years ago for audiences
in California. The remaining papers, which, as will be
seen, have many points of connection, are concerned
with certain aspects of eighteenth-century literature
in which I have long been specially interested. That
on Lillo merely touches the fringe of a subject which
I am treating at length and in all its bearings, literary
and social, in a volume on George Lillo and the Middle
Class Drama of the Eighteenth Century, now nearing
completion.
If I shall have succeed&l in transmitting to the reader
Vil
PREFACE
of these pages something of the pleasure which I my-
self experienced in collecting materials for them during
many hours of leisurely wandering in the highways and
byways of literature, I shall be well satisfied.
WILLIAM HENRY HUDSON
London, January, 1915
viii
CONTENTS
Page
Tom Hood: The Man, the Wit, and ag
the Poet . . . . . . . . I
Henry Carey: The Author of “Sally in
Our Alley” . . . . . 59
George Lillo and “The London Merchant” 93
Samuel Richardson: The Father of the
English Novel . . . . . . . 163
PROEM
Old Dick on his favorite cushion
Purrs lazily at the fire;
Jack on his chair is dreaming, I know, .
Of his tramp through the rain and the mire;
And from the room adjoining,
Where SHE sits and charms the keys,
Come strains of one of Schumann's
Most magical melodies.
The night has fallen early,
With a welter of wind and rain;
'T is a dismal scene that meets my gaze
Through the blurred window-pane.
So I draw the curtains quickly,
And shut it away from sight,
And turn to my little book-lined world
Of love, and warmth, and light.
O world of pure enchantment,
Where pleasure never palls 1
O friends of many times and tongues
Who watch me from the walls/

Your spell is strong upon me! —
Across the driving rain
There are voices calling — calling —
But to-night they call in vain.
Here is my quiet corner,
And my book that waits thereby: —
Now, pray, in the whole of London Town,
Who more happy than I?
A QUIET CORNER IN A
LIBRARY
TOM HOOD: “THE MAN, THE WIT,
AND THE POET’”
I
T is with an odd feeling of disenchantment,
dashed often, I think, with a certain sense of
the pathos of things, that from time to time
we turn back to the books which were our
chosen companions in years gone by. In an
idle hour, more by accident, probably, than
design, we take from the shelf some volume
once deeply cherished for its wit or wisdom,
its poetry or romance. How willingly, then,
would we renew the old charm! How
strangely, how irrevocably, that old charm
seems to have fled! We remember with
the vividness of yesterday the feelings of rapt
admiration and intense sympathy with which
we were wont to linger spellbound over those
once magic pages. How they glowed and
sparkled in those other days! How they
clutched us by the very heartstrings! How elo-
quent they were—how tender—how beautiful!
A QUIET CORNER IN A LIBRARY
There is no fascination in the literature
we afterwards come to love quite equal to
the fascination of those enchanters of our
youth. And behold! “whither is fled the
visionary gleam? Where is it now, the glory
and the dream?” The life has evaporated,
the spell has been broken! The chances are
that the poetry seems tumid to us; the romance
tawdry; the moralizing trite; the humor flat
and futile. We shake our wiser heads sadly;
and, not without a sigh, we lay the book aside.
Requiescat in pace—for it is part and parcel
of our own dead selves. Let us deal with it
gently, as we should deal with the memory of a
schoolboy friend into whose willing ear we once
poured our heart's secrets, and whom we pass”
in the street with a formal handshake or half
a dozen commonplace words of recognition.
The history of our taste in fiction, for
example, will generally exhibit some extraor-
dinary mutations. It is quite true, as the
sage Benedick tells us, that “a man loves the
meat in his youth that he cannot endure in
his age.” I recall my own experience. There
was the typical case of Ivanhoe. Some years
ago, while writing a book on Scott, I went
through the Waverley Novels afresh in the
chronological order of their production; and
this is how I had to report concerning that
2
TOM HOOD
prime favorite of my boyhood: “Ivanhoe was
the first that left with me a distinct feeling
of disappointment. I remembered it as rapid,
passionate, full of breathless incident and
enthralling interest; I found it a superb piece
of stucco-work, melodramatic and wholly
unreal.” Somewhat later, when I began to be
interested in philosophical speculations, and
Scott failed me a little, I recollect that I was
held spellbound by Ernest Maltravers, Alice,
and Zanoni. I know perfectly well (I have
not looked into them since) that to-day I
should regard these books as superficial, pre-
tentious, and overwrought. In my quite
early manhood (if I dare to confess it) I derived
immense entertainment from the grisettes and
little bourgeoisie of poor old Paul de Kock.
I tried one of his novels the other day; it
resembled nothing so much as an effervescing
drink from which all the fizz had gone. And
as for Charles Lever, over whose pages (though
I admit that this was in my very callow days)
I used to laugh immoderately; well, I recently
made an heroic attempt to read through
Charles O'Malley, in a brand-new edition
which I bought expressly for the purpose; and
I stuck ignominiously before I was halfway
through.
But one grows garrulous when one begins
3
, A QUIET CORNER IN A LIBRARY
to talk about oneself, and these reminiscences
into which I have wandered are no further to
the point. Let me come at once to the matter
by which such generalities were in the first
instance suggested.
II
The other day I chanced to turn over, for
the first time in I will not say how many years,
the pages of one of Tom Hood's Comic Annuals.
It were impertinent for me now to speak of
the delicate personal associations which cluster
about this book—of the melancholy trains of
thought which were started by the grotesque
pictures, and the whims and oddities of the
letter-press. But perhaps because these cer-
tain connections put me, as it were, at a wrong
point of view, but also, I am sure, because
of a profound change of taste, I read with
little amusement, and was even glad to put
the volume again in its place on the shelf. A
certain faint odor, as of something faded,
seemed to exhale from its pages. Tempora
mutantur, nos et mutamur in illis! Did I once
— I could not help asking myself — think
that these pages contained the very quin-
tessence of wit—the finest flavor of jesting?
On the whole—I was fain to confess it—
notwithstanding their frequent flashes and
4
TOM HOOD
coruscations, they now struck me as labored,
heavy, mechanical.
Yet in such a case as this we must be on our
guard lest revulsion of feeling should carry us
too far. Because in later life the operatic
mediaevalism of Ivanhoe is realized in all its
unsoundness; because the atrabilious eruptions
of Lara and The Corsair are no longer accepted
as giving the profoundest reading of life in the
most brilliant poetry the world has ever seen;
because the perfervid rhapsodies of Queen
Mab seem windy and meretricious, we do not
therefore pass a hasty and sweeping judgment
upon Scott, and Byron, and Shelley, or dream
of challenging their title to the high place
assigned to them in English letters. And
if any one takes the trouble to examine the
entire work of Tom Hood, he will soon dis-
cover that it is not on the strength of his
Comic Annuals that he is held in kindly
remembrance by all lovers of good literature.
Had he left these alone behind him, he himself
would have passed away with the temporary
fashions to which he catered. But as a matter
of fact, though they still, I suppose, bulk
large in popular estimation of him, such things
are really clogs upon his fame. We know
that they belong not to literature, but to
journalism; that they were actually mere
2 5
A QUIET CORNER IN A LIBRARY
potboilers, produced year by year, in days
of pain and sorrow and struggle, for the
immediate and urgent purpose of keeping
house and home together. If we must dismiss
them as unworthy of any serious attention,
let us do so, then, as gently as possible, and say
no more than we need about it.
But meanwhile there are other parts of
Hood's work which we cannot and must not
allow to pass into oblivion with them. There
is one searching question which we may fairly
put in regard to any writer, be he small or
great—a question upon the answer to which
must ultimately depend the view that we take
of him as a real personality, a permanent
living figure in literary history. Whatever
his work, his vital power, his temporary success
or failure, did he or did he not do something
which other men have not done at all, or not
done nearly as well? Press that question well
home, abide by the answer as a test, and you
will find that there are plenty of writers who
made a brilliant showing in the eyes of their
contemporaries, who even contrive to fill
considerable space in the chronicles, if only as
certain people of importance in their own
day, who none the less might drop out of
memory without leaving much of a gap by
their disappearance. And there are others.
6
TOM HOOD
on the contrary, who, superficially regarded,
may seem of far slighter stature, whose loss
would none the less be a very real loss, because
it would leave us the poorer by something which
no one else has given us—something altogether
personal with them. To this latter class Tom
Hood belongs. Judge him otherwise how we
may, we must all of us recognize that, when the
perishable parts of his over-voluminous produc-
tion are brushed aside, there remain certain
things which stand by themselves—things
of a kind that only Tom Hood has written–
that only Tom Hood could write.
III
Before we turn to these things, however,
let us briefly run over the story of Hood's
career of ill-health, struggle, and strenuous
activity. If it be indeed a general fact (as
we are continually told) that the lives of men
of letters make the saddest of all biographies,
the life of Hood was certainly not one of the
happy exceptions which may be taken to
prove the rule. Yet we read its melancholy
record with profound satisfaction; it brings us
in touch with an essentially noble and lov-
able man, and, no matter what the external
conditions, it is always a pleasure and an inspi-
ration to come into contact with such an one.
7
A QUIET CORNER IN A LIBRARY
Like his friend Charles Lamb, whom in so
many ways he resembled, Hood met trouble,
anxiety, and suffering with a cheerful courage
which puts to shame the heroic posturings and
grandiloquence of many who have made capital
out of affliction, and posed before the world
as great souls tried by the fiery ordeals of the
gods. What a completely satisfactory con-
trast he provides, for example, with his brilliant
contemporary, that flabby moralist of tran-
scendent genius, who made up by torrents of
eloquent preaching for weaknesses of practice
which rendered his career a spectacle alike
for sorrow and for contempt! Always kindly,
thoughtful, sympathetic, buoyant in stormiest
waters, with a ready jest even in dire emer-
gencies, and a steady hold upon the funda-
mentals of a simple faith, Hood stands before
us as a man whom we may indeed pity from
the bottom of our hearts, but for whom, after
all, our feelings are less of commiseration than
of warm admiration and high personal regard.
He was born on May 23, 1799, and first saw
the light—or, as he suggests, possibly the fog—
of day in the city of London; being thus able
to exult in the fact that, as a genuine Cockney,
he could rank himself with Milton, Gray,
Defoe, Pope, Byron, Lamb, Keats, and many
another town-born author whose fame has
8
TOM HOOD
“triumphed over the Bills of Mortality.” He
was one of six children, three of whom—and the
fact is ominous–early succumbed to pulmo-
nary trouble inherited from the mother's side.
His father, a Scotsman by birth, was at the
time of Tom's appearance on this planet a
partner in the firm of Vernon, Hood, and
Sharp, publishers in the Poultry. He was
also himself—as many publishers are not.—
of a literary turn of mind, and actually
perpetrated a couple of novels, long since
forgotten even by name. In this way Hood
accounts for the “dash of ink” that was
undoubtedly in his blood, and for the facility
with which, like a latter-day Faustus, he pres-
ently sold his soul to “that minor Mephis-
topheles, the Printer's Devil.”
In his rambling Reminiscences, written
toward the close of his life, he deals at con-
siderable length with the events and sur-
roundings of childhood; but delightful as his
recollections are, we must not here attempt
to follow them in detail. It will suffice to say
that, having acquired the rudiments of learn-
ing under the care of a couple of maiden ladies
rejoicing (if they did rejoice, which seems
unlikely) in the astonishing name of Hogs-
flesh, and having to that extent become, at
the very outset of his career, a good Baconian,
9
A QUIET CORNER IN A LIBRARY
§
he was presently sent, first to a suburban
boarding school (the “Clapham Academy.”
of his inimitable ode), and then for a short
time to a day school in Clerkenwell. Here his
education—such as it was—closed prematurely,
it would appear, with the closing of the school,
or perhaps more correctly, with its rather
sudden transformation from a boys' school
into a Ladies' Academy.
He had thus far contrived to pick up as
much as a quick boy of his age—he was about
fourteen—would be likely to appropriate for
himself from such instruction—a little Latin,
a fair knowledge of English grammar, French
enough to enable him by and by to earn his
first literary fee by revising a translation of
Paul et Virginie for the press, and a good
practical grasp of figures. It scarcely needs
to be added, however, that Hood's gains at
school represented only a very small fragment
of his real education. His own wit, alertness,
and early developed love of books provided
the rest. Even the lightest of his writings
will be found to testify to a wonderfully wide
and accurate knowledge of English literature.
This he must have obtained for himself by
his voracious reading during many happy
hours, then and in after years.
At this point, a family friend undertook to
10
TOM HOOD
do Mrs. Hood, already a widow, a good turn,
by introducing her only surviving son to the
mysteries of commerce. The boy, therefore,
took his place on a counting house stool,
which “served occasionally for a Pegasus on
three legs, every foot of course being a dactyl
or a spondee.” This simply means that, like
the rest of his kind, he often amused himself
by penning stanzas when he should have been,
if not engrossing, at least engrossed in some-
thing else. Or, as he himself puts it, his quill
would now and then “turn vagrant,” and
refresh itself, after the severe toils of daybook
or ledger, by “stray dips into the Castalian
pool.” The result was the most appalling
confusion:
“Now double entry — now a flowery trope—
Mingling poetic honey with trade wax—
Blugg Brothers—Milton–Grote and Prescott—Pope
Bristles—and Hogg–Glyn, Mills, and Halifax—
Rogers—and Towgood—Hemp—the Bard of Hope—
Barilla – Byron —Tallow — Burns — and Flax!”
It will be anticipated that, under these cir-
cumstances, his devotion to the ledger should
prove of brief duration; there was, in Slender's
immortal phrase, no great love between them
at the beginning, and it pleased Heaven to
decrease it on further acquaintance.
But the true cause of his retirement from
A QUIET CORNER IN A LIBRARY
commercial affairs was not the superior attrac-
tion of poetry, but something far more pro-
saic. His health gave out; his constitution
proved unequal to the strain of office confine-
ment; his appetite failed; and in the general
bankruptcy which followed, his principal
creditor, the stomach, received only an ounce
in the pound. By so much sitting, the doctors
told him—at least, this is Hood's way of para-
phrasing their warning — he was hatching a
whole brood of complaints. Change of air
was recommended; and he was, therefore,
shipped off, as per advice, in a Scotch smack,
to his father's relatives in Dundee.
Here he remained, it would seem, about
three years, returning to London in 1818,
apparently fully set up in health by the rugged
outdoor life he had been leading. In the light
of after events, however, we can see clearly
enough that this threatened illness, barely
warded off, was the first manifestation of con-
stitutional weaknesses which were presently
to cause so much of the tragedy of his life.
He did not now go back to business, but de-
termined to put to account his remarkable
deftness with the pencil by making art his
profession. He therefore entered the studio of
a maternal uncle, Robert Sands, the engraver,
and, after an apprenticeship of a couple of
12
TOM HOOD
years, began work for himself. The time and
energy devoted to this pursuit were by no
means wasted, for his pictorial skill was after-
wards made profitable in the always amusing,
and often exceedingly clever, illustrations
which did so much for the popularity of his
Whims and Oddities and Comic Annuals.
There is thus more of epigram than of sober
truth in his own remark that, like Pope's
“tape-tied curtains,” he was never meant to
draw; for draw he did, and so successfully,
that he drew not only pictures but public
attention.
None the less, it was not in art that he was
to find his real career. While he was working
with the engraver's style, the pen continued
to exercise its wonted fascination, and verse-
spinning was carried on with ever increasing
delight. At length, by what looks like the
happiest of accidents, he was induced to aban-
don design, and to make the Muse, with whom
hitherto he had merely flirted, his companion
for life. Changes in the management of the
London Magazine caused that then well known
periodical to pass into the hands of some friends
of his own. They offered him a place on the
staff; with the result that, at two-and-twenty,
Hood found himself installed as sub-editor
of a thriving journal and, in virtue of that office,
13
A QUIET CORNER IN A LIBRARY
a figure of some distinction in the metropolitan
literary world of the time.
Hood carried into his new work a zeal which
showed that the bowl had at last found its
natural bias; he took articles, he says, like a
candidate for Holy Orders, and accepted every
printer's proof as if it had been a proof of per-
sonal regard. Of his relations with the maga-
zine's prominent contributors—with Cary,
Proctor, Cunningham, many-tongued Bowring,
Hazlitt, Talfourd, Horace Smith, and many
another, and above all with dear Charles
Lamb —we get interesting glimpses in the
literary annals of the period. But what
concerns us mainly now is the development of
his own genius under the favoring influences
of his changed environment. Of course, the
larger part of his energy was absorbed by the
taxing routine labors of his position; but
meanwhile, the rapid ripening of his imagina-
tive powers was unmistakably proved by the
poems which from time to time he now pub-
lished in the London's pages.
He had, among other friendships, formed a
close intimacy with a young man whose
sister he afterwards married—John Hamilton
Reynolds, well known to every reader as the
special confidant and adviser of Keats. It
was through Reynolds that Hood came under
14
TOM HOOD
the spell of the genius of that brilliant and ill-
starred youth who about that time had died
in Rome, leaving who shall venture to say
what magnificent promises unfulfilled. As
the loving disciple of Keats, though not by
any means as a servile imitator—for his own
temper and manner were too original for that—
Hood produced his Lycus the Centaur, the
Ode to Autumn, and other poems, all marked
by a richness of fancy and a sensuous beauty
of language which frequently remind us of
the young master himself. Presently repub-
lished, with other verse of the same order,
but with a fuller and more certain quality of
art, these poems fell from the press almost
unnoticed and, even when noticed at all,
hardly anywhere rated at their real worth.
We wonder, looking back, at their failure, be-
cause it is in virtue of just these productions
that the historian of literature now speaks
of Hood as, in all essentials, the truest of
English poets in the years immediately pre-
ceding the rise of Tennyson. It may indeed
be urged that though to-day we fully recognize
the shortsightedness of Hood's contempora-
ries, these poems are even now as little read
as when they were first issued. But the reason
for this further neglect is not to be found in
any doubt concerning their merits, but rather
15
A QUIET CORNER IN A LIBRARY
in the immense popularity of Hood's later
productions —a popularity long disastrous
to his poetic fame. He was soon to become
generally known as a fun-maker of unrivaled
powers and seemingly ulnimited resources —
as a fellow of infinite jest and most excellent
fancy. And when once a man gets publicly
accepted as a wit, he is lucky indeed if, out
of the hundreds of folk whose laughter he has
stirred, there are ten who will ever show them-
selves willing to treat him seriously again.
As early as 1825 he opened the vein which,
for good or evil, in season and out of season,
he was henceforth to work with extraordinary
industry and success, when in collaboration
with Reynolds, now his brother-in-law, he
put forth a little volume of Odes and Addresses
to Great People. The quality of this collection
is perhaps best indicated by the fact that
Coleridge, finding no author's name on the
title page, wrote directly to Charles Lamb,
insisting that it must be his, Lamb's, work,
because, first, of the excellence of the puns, and
secondly, because of the absence of anything
harsh or unkind in the personalities of which
the book was made up. Three editions
quickly sold out, and Hood awoke to realize
that if literature were to be made to pay, it
must be literature of the kind in which he had
16
TOM HOOD
suddenly discovered his unique power. Hence-
forward he must be mainly the comic man—
and the comic man he continued for the most
part to be to the very end of his life.
And, indeed, what could he now do, save
accept as graciously as possible what seemed
like a ruling of fate? He was already a married
man; he had given, as Bacon has it, hostages
to fortune; and the risks that commonly
attend matrimony were in his case multiplied
by fragile health, and lack of any income be-
yond what he could earn by his pen. It is
well enough for the critic, viewing the matter
in the abstract, to set up high standards of
art, and to condemn poor Hood for the pros-
titution of his powers; but his problem was
not an abstract, but a grimly concrete, one;
and can we venture to blame him if, in the
circumstances, he turned aside from serious
poetry as a luxury of production in which he
could no longer afford to indulge, to another
sort of enterprise which at least promised some-
thing like a substantial return?
And let us at this point pause long enough
to make sure of the true bearings of any
adverse judgment we may feel obliged to pass
upon much of the hack work which Hood now
set himself to do. It is hard, after all, to deal
harshly with a man who devoted himself to
17
A QUIET CORNER IN A LIBRARY
\
the task of making us laugh; who, as a fact,
does often make us laugh, and whose merri-
ment is nearly always clean, wholesome, and
kindly. Our modern world is earnest and
strenuous and somber enough in all conscience,
and I for one am always ready to welcome a
little honest fooling as a very delectable
relief.
Our regret in Hood's case, then, is, first,
that his everlasting comic journalism so
exhausted his energies that the poet in him was
practically—though happily not altogether
—killed by the funny man; and secondly,
that (as with every professional jester, whose
humor has to be manufactured to order, even
at the least opportune times) much of his
output was necessarily labored, mechanical,
ineffective. No one—least of all a man of
Hood's melancholy temperament, harassed by
physical weakness and tormented by financial
anxieties—can always command a smile;
alas for those who, when the smile does not
come of itself, are compelled to force the best
imitation of it, for the result of their contor-
tions is often nothing but a grin! That there
is overmuch of the grin in Hood's humorous
writings it would be idle to deny. We feel
the deliberation, the set purpose, with which
he must have gone to work to fabricate many
18
TOM HOOD
of his sketches and poems. Go tol—we can
hear him say — our minor Mephistopheles is
at one door, and the butcher and baker are at
the other; it behooves me to be funny. And
he is accordingly funny through the required
number of pages—yes, even though his heart
is wrung with anxiety and his body racked with
pain. If, then, we may sometimes find the
fooling impotent, the pathos of the fooling
is never so. It is, moreover, only fair to add
that, given the conditions of its production,
the marvel is that Hood's humorous journalism,
year in, year out, should have been as light
and fresh and varied as was actually the case;
and that, taking one crop of wit with another,
he should so often have contrived to be, in
his own phrase, merry and wise instead of
merry and otherwise. One other point must
not be lost sight of. “We have laughed often
at folly and sometimes at wisdom,” says Lucan
to Rabelais, in Lord Lyttleton's brilliant
dialogue. It is to Hood's credit that he kept
his laughter for folly. Like Artemus Ward,
too, he scorned to secure a cheap effect by
descents into indecency and profanity. He
recognized always—what some of our latter-
day would-be wits might do well to remember—
that a joke which depends on indecency or
profanity had better not be made at all.
19
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Here, at any rate, we have Hood fully com-
mitted to a way in literature which was now
to be considered, by the larger reading public,
as peculiarly his own. A couple of series of
Whims and Oddities, containing some of his
most characteristic things in their particular
kind, appeared in 1826 and 1827; and then,
amid a good deal of other work which does
not now call for even passing notice, he pro-
duced, in 1829, the first of those Comic Annuals
which — a gigantic feat, when one comes to
think of it—he kept up single-handed, illus-
trations as well as letter-press, for nine succes-
sive years. Meanwhile the other side of his
genius found from time to time memorable,
if all too infrequent, expression. Such poems
as Eugene Aram, the Plea of the Midsummer
Fairies, and later—for we may anticipate a
little—the Haunted House and the Bridge of
Sighs, bore ample testimony to the fact that
the irrepressible punster was still a master of
delicate fancy and tragic passion.
But in the years during which the Comic
Annuals regularly ministered to the Christmas
amusement of an ever-widening public, the
clouds were gathering thicker and darker about
Hood's own life. In 1834 the failure of a
publishing house plunged him into difficul-
ties from which, to the very end, he never
20
TOM HOOD
completely extricated himself. Refusing, like
Scott, to shield himself behind the Bankruptcy
Act, he made over to his creditors what little
property he had, and, in the hope of presently
righting himself, took the desperate course
of mortgaging his brain to his publishers. A
year later, Mrs. Hood fell seriously ill. By
this time, too, Hood himself, like his family
and friends, realized that he was under the
doom of a disease, the progress of which might
indeed be arrested temporarily by care and
(if that were possible) release from worry, but
whose fatal issue was a question only of a
little shorter or a little longer delay.
Strange circumstances, these, in which to
find the great maker of laughter, the punctual
producer of quip and pun and whimsical
fancy for a public whose appetite for such
things had grown by what it fed on! Mainly
in the hope of economizing his slender resources,
Hood now took his family to the Continent,
where they lived for five years. If any hope
had been entertained that change of air and
scene might prove beneficial to Hood himself,
it had soon to be abandoned. Unceasing
toil as a mere bookseller's galley slave, and
constant anxiety about his wife's condition
combined to render his courageous fight for
life a struggle against overwhelming odds.
3 21
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And still the Comic Annuals made their punc-
tual appearance; and still the world laughed.
Alas, poor Yorick!
When by and by Hood returned to England,
it was with health completely and hopelessly
shattered. Yet with all his old steady pluck
and cheerfulness, he took up the burden of
life anew, rejoicing in a slight gleam of sunshine
through the breaking clouds. For two years
he was in receipt of a regular, if not very
princely, salary as editor of Colburn's New
Monthly Magazine, having succeeded in that
capacity another wit of fine powers but strik-
ingly different character—poor Theodore
Hook, then recently dead. ..
In January, 1844, he started a periodical of
his own, only to discover within a few months
that his constitution could not possibly stand
the tremendous double strain of editorial
responsibility and productive effort. In June
of that year the readers of the magazine were
informed in a few paragraphs of unmistakable
import, of the precarious condition of its
leader and chief support. “It is with feelings
of the deepest concern,” ran part of the notice,
“that we acquaint our subscribers and the
public with the circumstances that have,
during the past month, deprived the magazine
of the invaluable services of its editor. A
22
TOM HOOD
severe attack of the disorder to which he has
long been subject . . . has in the course of a
few weeks reduced Mr. Hood to a state of such
extreme debility and exhaustion that during
several days fears were entertained for his
life. Nevertheless, up to Thursday, the 23d,
he did not relinquish the hope that he should
have strength to continue in the present num-
ber the novel which he began in the last.
On the same evening, sitting up in bed, he
tried to invent and sketch a few comic designs,
but even this effort exceeded his strength, and
was followed by the wandering delirium of
utter nervous exhaustion. Next morning, his
medical advisers declared that the repetition
of any such attempt, at that critical period of
his illness, might cost him his life.”
He rallied, but the attack was really the
beginning of the end. At the same time, his
poetic genius, instead of sinking beneath the
burden of bodily infirmity, burst out suddenly
with fresh and wonderful power. In the
Christmas number of Punch, 1843, appeared
the famous Song of the Shiri; and this was
followed, at brief intervals, by the equally
famous Bridge of Sighs, the Haunted House,
and the Lay of the Laborer. What is remark-
able about these productions—apart from
their imaginative vigor and their technical
3 23
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perfection—is the nobly human spirit by which
they are pervaded. Referring to the cardiac
hypertrophy which was one of his serious
symptoms, Hood himself said that though an
enlarged heart was certainly inconvenient,
it was better to have an enlarged heart than
a contracted one. It was indeed the man's
large heart—his broad and deep sympathies—
which inspired these last of his poems. It
would seem that, as the darkness of the night
wherein no one can work closed rapidly about
him, his realization of the toils and sufferings
of others grew more and more intense. The
hand of death was upon him, but he thought
less of himself than of those outcasts of civili-
zation to a sense of whose tragedy he sought
to stir the world's sluggish conscience—the
half-starved seamstress in her garret, the
despairing girl seeking a suicide's escape from
misery in the black flowing stream.
In the issue of his magazine for February,
1845, appeared a couple of simple, but in their
very simplicity wonderfully pathetic, stanzas
in which the poet spoke of his approaching
death:
“Farewell, Life, my senses swim,
All the world is growing dim,
Thronging shadows cloud the light
Like the advent of the night.
24
TOM HOOD
Colder, colder, colder still
Upward steals a vapor chill.
Strong the earthy odor grows—
I smell the mold above the rose.
“Welcome, Life! the spirit strives!
Strength returns and hope revives!
Cloudy fears and shapes forlorn
Fly like shadows at the morn.
O'er the earth there comes a bloom,
Sunny light for sullen gloom,
Warm perfume for vapor cold—
I smell the rose above the mold!”
Three months later—on May 3, 1845–
Hood died. It is said that almost at the last
he remarked to a friend—the ruling passion
strong in death—that he was really dying to
please the undertaker, who wished to urn
(earn) a lively Hood (livelihood). He was
buried in Kensal Green Cemetery, and beneath
the bust which forms part of the memorial
afterwards erected by public subscription, is
inscribed, according to his own express wish,
the brief but sufficient epitaph: “He sang the
Song of the Shirt.” Was he not right in
believing that the memory of that song would
be cherished in every warm heart so long as
love and sympathy endure? “Ah,” said
Dickens to his friend Forster after visiting
Venice, “when I saw those palaces, how I
thought that to leave one's hand upon the
25
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time—lastingly upon the time—with one
tender touch for the mass of toiling people
that nothing could obliterate, would be to
lift oneself above the dust of all the doges in
their graves, and stand upon a giant's staircase
that Samson could not overthrow!”
We are justified in classing Hood among
those who are secure of this kind of immor-
tality.
IV
Without such an insight into Hood's life
and character as in the foregoing sketch I
have tried to give, it would be impossible to
deal fairly with his work. The abstract prin-
ciple that the artist is simply what he does —
that all we are finally concerned with is his
actual achievement, taken just as it stands—
may for the present safely be left to those who
care for literature only on the aesthetic side.
Those of us who love it as an expression of the
human spirit, its experiences and adventures,
its successes and its failures, will always think
instinctively of the man behind the book.
Hood's, at least, is surely one of those cases
in which a writer's production gains vastly
in interest and significance by being connected
directly with his personality and career. By
so regarding it, we are at once able, first, to
26
TOM HOOD
understand why so much of his writing falls
sadly short of the best that was in him, and
then (dismissing this merely mortal part of
his output) to apprehend the real power and
meaning of the still considerable portion which
remains.
For present purposes we may deal with
Hood's work as it naturally divides itself
under the three general heads of comic, seri-
ous, and serio-comic. This is only a rough
classification, it is true, but it will serve.
First, then, let us turn to the poems in which
we hear the tinkle of the bells on the jester's
Cap.
As a humorist pure and simple, Hood, though
he showed great versatility, was undoubtedly,
like many humorists of his generation, most
at home in the domain of broad farce. His
most original achievements, however, depend
for their success upon the amazing fertility
of his verbal wit. As a punster and master
of equivoque, he is still without a serious rival;
when the quantity and general quality of his
work in this direction are taken into account,
he stands out among his competitors like
Triton among the minnows. Of course, we
may make what charges we like against the
pun: we may call it the cheapest form of
joking, protest that it is possible only through
27
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a poverty of language of which nothing but
perverse ingenuity would seek to take advan-
tage; and even denounce it, with the Great
Cham himself, as an outward and visible sign
of inward and moral degradation. Or if we
do not go quite so far as this, we may still
urge that the pun is at best a luxury, to be used
sparingly, and never abused. It has often
been pointed out that the essence of any kind
of true joke is its unexpectedness (which, by
the way, is the reason, according to Mr. Zang-
will, why we are so delighted when we find
ourselves laughing over anything in Punch).
Unexpectedness is certainly, as Edgar Allan
Poe remarked, the essence of the pun as a form
of jesting. It should come suddenly, and with
a shock of surprise to us; to force it into
habitual and regular service is to destroy its
effectiveness.
Yet when punning is the thing which it
became in Hood's hands, I am afraid the crit-
icism is to some extent disarmed. If the
charm of suddenness and unexpectedness is
gone, we marvel the more at the punctuality
of the stroke; and this punctuality yields us,
in occasional moods at any rate, something
of the satisfaction which the exhibition of
complete dexterity in any field seldom fails
to aſſord. Analyzed carefully, we may insist,
28
TOM HOOD
the whole affair looks unpleasantly like a trick.
But, then, what a trick it is! Beyond this,
we must note the extraordinary perfection of
the results. The best of Hood's puns—they
may be reckoned by hundreds—may be
regarded as absolute models in their kind.
Illustrations come without number and without
seeking. We remember the unfortunate sol-
dier on the battlefield speaking of his fate:
“Without a coffin I shall lie
And sleep my sleep eternal—
Not even a shell, my only chance
Of being made a colonel.”
We remember the rival lovers going out to
fight a duel—how they chose a friend apiece
to remind them of the pleasant fact that,
even when dead, they would still have two
seconds to live; how when they took their
places, fear made them tremble so that they
found, to their astonishment, they were both
shaking hands; how one offered to withdraw
his charge against the other if that other's
ramrod would do the same; how they neverthe-
less felt that if they went off without a shot
there would be strange reports; and how, when
they had aimed, not at one another but at the
sun, the chronicler expressed a wish that all
other duels might have a similar upshot in the
end. We remember the soldier bold, Ben
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Battle, who, having lost his legs, was obliged
to lay down his arms; whose erstwhile sweet-
heart cruelly rejected him because, with his
wooden legs, he now stood upon such a very
different footing; and who finally committed
suicide by hanging himself with a clothes-
rope—thus for the second time enlisting in
the line. We remember the poacher whom bad
companions egged on to poach; the fat coach-
man whose back was too broad to be conceived
by any narrow mind; and the stone-deaf
old lady who bought an ear trumpet, with
surprising results, since “the very next day
she heard from her husband in Botany Bay.”
These are samples only—they might be mul-
tiplied almost indefinitely. But the best way
of illustrating Hood's power with the pun
will be to take a single poem and read it in
full. I select the highly pathetic ballad of
Faithless Sally Brown. For one dreadful cock-
ney pun—that about “eyewater"—at which
the American reader is likely to be shocked,
it may be well that I, as a Cockney, should
apologize in advance:
“Young Ben, he was a nice young man,
A carpenter by trade,
And he fell in love with Sally Brown
That was a lady's maid.
30
TOM HOOD
“But as they fetch'd a walk one day,
They met a press-gang crew—
And Sally, she did faint away,
While Ben, he was brought to.
“The boatswain swore with wicked words
Enough to shock a saint,
That though she did seem in a fit
'T was nothing but a feint.
“‘Come girl," he said, “hold up your head,
He'll be as good as me;
For when your swain is in our boat
A boatswain he will be.”
“So when they'd made their game of her,
And taken off her elf—
She rous'd, and found she only was
A-coming to herself.
“‘And is he gone, and is he gone,’
She cried—and wept outright;
“Then I will to the waterside,
And see him out of sight.”
“A waterman came up to her:
‘Now, young woman,’ said he,
"If you weep on so, you will make
Eye-water in the sea."
“‘Alas, they've taken my Beau Ben
To sail with old Benbow':
And her woe began to run afresh
As if she'd said, “Gee woe."
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“Says he, “They've only taken him
To the tender-ship, you see.”
“The tender-ship, cried Sally Brown,
“What a hardship that must bel
“‘O would I were a mermaid now,
For then I'd follow him—
But O—I'm not a fish-woman,
And so I cannot swim."
“Now Ben had sail'd to many a place
That's underneath the world;
And in two years the ship came home,
And all her sails were furl’d.
“But when he call'd on Sally Brown
To see how she got on—
He found she'd got another Ben
Whose Christian name was John.
“‘O Sally Brown, O Sally Brown;
How could you serve me so?
I've met with many a breeze before,
But never such a blow!"
“Then reading on his 'bacco box,
He heav'd a heavy sigh,
And then began to eye his pipe,
And then to pipe his eye.
“And then he tried to sing All's well,
But could not, though he tried;
His head was turn’d—and so he chew'd
His pig-tail till he died.
32
TOM HOOD
“His death, which happen'd in his berth,
At forty odd befell;
They went and told the sexton, and
The sexton toll'd the bell.”
Yes; this kind of thing is entirely out of date
now, I know. Yet if we can no longer admire
the fashion, we can surely still enjoy the clever-
ness. It is in feats of this sort, then—in feats
characterized by an almost boundless prodigal-
ity in quibble and equivocation, and at best,
as in the marvelous last stanza of the foregoing
poem, by absolute perfection of attainment,
that Hood is, as I have said, unsurpassed.
But now I must find space to exemplify
his humor in another direction. Many of his
comic poems are really humorous; that is,
they produce their effect not by verbal gym-
nastics, but by essential absurdity of situation
and treatment—by the revelation, in other
words, of the fundamental incongruity of
things. He writes an Ode to the Spring, in
which the sentimental fancies of the poets
are brought to the touch of hard reality:
—“where,” he pertinently asks (how perti-
nently will be understood by every reader
who knows anything of the vagaries of the
English climate),
“Where 's the spring in rheumatic legs,
Stiff as a table?”
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He gives us a picture of “Our Village” as
painted by “a villager,” and very rustic and
very unidyllic and very unlike the pictures
given by the poets the description is:
“Our village, that's to say, not Miss Mitford's village,
but our village of Bullock's Smithy,
Is come into by an avenue of trees, three oak pollards,
two elders and a withy;
And in the middle there's a green, of about not
exceeding an acre and a half;
It's common to all, and fed off by nineteen cows, six
ponies, three horses, five asses, two foals, seven
pigs, and a calf;
Besides a pond in the middle, as is held by a sort of
common law lease,
And contains twenty ducks, six drakes, three ganders;
two dead dogs, four drowned kittens, and twelve
geese –”
and so on, and so on. But for an extended
illustration of this phase of Hood's humor, I
cannot perhaps do better than to take the
Parental Ode to my Son, aged three years and
five months. This is, if you will, at bottom
a study of the real and the ideal. The poet,
in his capacity of doting father, apostrophizes
his child, linking poetic image to poetic image.
But meanwhile the youngster in the flesh gives
cause by his behavior for many domestic
asides, which jar somewhat with the high and
tender emotion of the address.
34
TOM HOOD
“Thou happy, happy elf!
(But stop—first let me wipe away that tear!)
Thou tiny image of myself—
(My love—he's poking peas into his earl)
Thou merry, laughing sprite,
With spirits feather-light,
Untouch'd by sorrow, and unsoil'd by sin–
(Good heavens! the child is swallowing a pinſ)
Thou little tricksy Puck,
With antic toys so funnily bestuck,
Light as the singing bird that wings the air —
(The door, the door! He'll tumble down the stair)
Thou darling of thy sire,
(Why, Jane, he'll set his pinafore afire!)
Thou imp of mirth and joy,
In love's dear chain so strong and bright a link,
Thou idol of thy parents (Drat the boy—
There goes my ink.)
“Thou cherub—but of Earth—
Fit playfellow for fays by moonlight pale,
In harmless sport and mirth—
(That dog will bite him if he pulls its tail)—
Thou human humming bee, extracting honey
From every blossom in the world that blows,
Singing in youth's Elysium ever sunny—
(Another tumble! that's his precious nose.)
Thy father's pride and hope
(He'll break the mirror with that skipping rope.)
With pure heart newly stamped from Nature's mint—
(Where did he learn that squint 2)
Thou young domestic dove—
(He'll have that jug off with another shovel)
Dear nursling of the hymeneal nest
(Are those torn clothes his best?)
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Little epitome of man!
(He'll climb upon the table—that's his plan.)
Touch'd with the beauteous tints of dawning life—
(He's got a knife!)
“Thou pretty opening rose!
(Go to your mother, child, and wipe your nose!)
Balmy and breathing music like the south—
(He nearly brings my heart into my mouth)
Fresh as the morn, and brilliant as its star
(I wish that window had another bar),
Bold as the hawk, yet gentle as the dovel—
(I tell you what, my love!
I cannot write, unless he's sent abovel)”
V
It is to the humorous portions of Hood's
work that, as I have said, his perishable pro-
ductions almost wholly belong. In passing
from these to his serious poetry we enter upon
a much smaller division; but in this division
nearly everything is good, while much is of
rare excellence.
Delicate fancy, an exquisite refinement of
feeling, and that true thaumaturgic touch
which gives a sudden and illuminating freshness
to even the tritest thought—these are among
the salient characteristics of Hood's higher
poetic mood. In the Plea for the Midsummer
Fairies, for instance, we feel that Queen Mab
herself must have been with the gentle dreamer;
we breathe the atmosphere of Shakespeare's
36
TOM HOOD
own elfin world; there is no heavy earthly
emphasis to mar the fragile texture of the
verses; the whole vision is so light and filmy
that it seems to have been woven out of moon-
beams and dew.
“And lo! upon my fix’d delighted ken
Appear'd the loyal Fays.--Some by degrees
Crept from the primrose buds that opened then,
And some from bell-shaped blossoms like the bees.
Some from the dewy meads and rushy leas,
Flew up like chafers when the rustics pass;
Some from the rivers, others from tall trees
Dropp'd like shed blossoms, silent to the grass,
Spirits and elfins small, of every class.
“Peri and Pixy, and quaint Puck the Antic,
Brought Robin Goodfellow, that merry swain,
And stealthy Mab, queen of old realms romantic,
Came too, from distance, in her tiny wain,
Fresh dripping from a cloud—some bloomy fain,
Then circling the bright Moon, had wash'd her car,
And still bedev'd it with a various stain:
Lastly came Ariel, shooting from a star,
Who bears all fairy embassies afar.
“But Oberon, that night elsewhere exiled,
Was absent, whether some distemper'd spleen
Kept him and his fair mate unreconciled,
Or warfare with the Gnome (whose race had been
Sometimes obnoxious) kept him from his queen,
And made her now peruse the starry skies
Prophetical, with such an absent mien;
Howbeit, the tears stole often to her eyes,
And oft the Moon was incensed with her sighs.”
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Yet more completely individual even than
such delicate fancy as this, is the somber
imagination which pervades so many of
Hood's pages—their brooding tenderness,
their subtle penetrative melancholy. Here
indeed we come into touch with the essential
nature of Hood himself. For to him as a
poet, no less than to him as a man, life pre-
sented itself as, first and last, mainly a tragedy
— a tragedy with many comic episodes, but
still a tragedy. His humor bubbled up con-
tinually to the surface of his thought—bright,
tricksy, irrepressible; it flashed and played
about many an unpromising theme; but there
was always sadness in the depths. For he
knew and felt the overwhelming darkness of
the human lot; he had himself explored those
gloomy recesses of existence—those windings
and turnings of its silva oscura—in which
many a one has missed his way, to stumble
like Dante along the downward path to hell;
he had heard across the ages, echoed in his
own soul, “the sad Vergilian cry, the sense of
tears in mortal things.” Hence the terrible
significance of his Ode to Melancholy, which
seems to be wrung out of his very heart.
“O clasp me, sweet,” he cries to his wife, after
dwelling on the mutability of all earthly love
and beauty: -
38
TOM HOOD
“O clasp me, sweet, whilst thou art mine,
And do not take my tears amiss,
For tears must flow to wash away
A thought that shows so stern as this!
Forgive, if somewhile I forget
In woe to come the present bliss,
As frighted Proserpine let fall
Her flowers at the sight of Dis.
Even so the dark and bright will kiss;
The sunniest things throw sternest shade;
And there is even a happiness
That makes the heart afraid.
Even the bright extremes of joy
Bring on conclusions of disgust,
Like the sweet blossoms of the May
Whose fragrance ends in must.
O, give her, then, her tribute just,
Her sighs and tears and musings holy;
There is no music in the life
That sounds with idiot laughter solely.
There's not a string attuned to mirth
But has its chord in melancholy.”
Other poets have lingered over the pathos of
our brief human life, and have reminded us that,
as mortals moving in a world of mortality, it is
part of our wisdom to seize the fleeting hour,
and force it to yield up its joy. It was left
for Hood to touch us to the quick by telling us
of the happiness “that makes the heart afraid.”
Among Hood's serious poems there are
several which are known wherever English
literature is read at all. I need therefore only
4 39
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allude to the superb Dream of Eugene Aram,
in which the workings of a crime-tortured soul
are laid bare with remorseless power; the
Bridge of Sighs, the wild effect of which is
marvelously enhanced by the headlong pace
and mad jingle of the verse; and that pitiful
appeal on behalf of the starving seamstress
upon which, as we have seen, Hood himself
was willing to stake his title to fame. Only
one poem in our language can be mentioned
in the same breath with The Song of the
Shirt—Mrs. Browning's Cry of the Children—
and even that, in my judgment, lags a long
way behind. In each case a voice was found
for despair hitherto inarticulate, in each case
those who could not speak for themselves
found one to speak for them with all the elo-
quence of sympathy; and the world was forced
to give heed. It is idle to criticize such works
from the technical side. There they are;
and men and women everywhere have accepted
them as belonging to that class of literature,
every utterance of which is, as it were, a deed.
Partly because of their familiarity, partly
because of their length, I must, a little unwill-
ingly, I confess, pass over the works just
referred to, with these general remarks.
Among briefer poems in which the divine accent
is most clearly heard, I must name, even if
, 40
TOM HOOD
in most cases I can do little more than name,
the delicate little lover's song about the Time
of Roses; the splendid ballad of Fair Inez;
the Death Bed scene, so absolute in its pathos
and simplicity; the great sonnet Silence, which
the late William Sharp ranked “among the
twelve finest sonnets in the language”; and
those stanzas of reminiscence, beginning “I
remember, I remember,” which, I will venture
to prophesy, will stand secure amid far-reaching
changes of taste, when many a more preten-
tious effort will have passed into oblivion.
For myself, at least, I am willing to admit
these stanzas have a place in that treasure-
volume which contains the things I should
most regret to lose from the accumulated
wealth of the world's poetry. For this ap-
parently slight and incidental poem deserves,
as it seems to me, to be ranked among our
“possessions forever” by reason of the finality
with which it expresses, through a bit of highly
personal recollection, a well-nigh universal
emotion. Who does not from time to time,
in an hour of quiet self-communion, catch
himself looking wistfully backward into that
dim past whose every detail memory touches
with the glowing colors of romance; who does
not love, at such an hour, to dwell upon the
thoughts of the lost freshness and bloom of
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those days when life was so different from all
it has since become, and the promise of it so
bright and golden in comparison with the after-
reality; and who does not understand some-
thing of the keen, searching sadness, which
none the less is hardly pain, with which the
recognition of this contrast gradually fills the
contemplative mind? And who, knowing
these things out of his own experience, does
not at once feel that Hood has become for
him the interpreter of this mood of regret and
yearning, speaking to him — as Browning says
it is the poet's special privilege to speak, and
better than he could have done for himself—
his own heart's language?
“I remember, I remember
The house where I was born,
The little window where the sun
Came peeping in at morn.
He never came a wink too soon;
Nor brought too long a day—
But now—I often wish the night
Had borne my soul away!
“I remember, I remember
The roses red and white,
The violets and the lily cups,
Those flowers made of light.
The lilac where the robin built;
And where my brother set
The laburnum on his birthday-
The tree is living yet!
42
TOM HOOD
“I remember, I remember
Where I was used to swing,
And thought the air must rush as fresh
To swallows on the wing.
My spirit flew in feathers then
That is so heavy now,
And summer pools could hardly cool
The fever on my brow.
“I remember, I remember
The fir-trees dark and high,
I used to think their slender tops
Were close against the sky—
It was a childish ignorance,
But now, 'tis little joy
To know I’m further off from heaven
Than when I was a boy!”
Before leaving this second division of Hood's
work, I have still to speak for a moment of
what, viewed from the purely artistic stand-
point, is undoubtedly to be pronounced his
masterpiece—The Haunted House. Here
conception and execution are alike beyond
praise: from the opening to the closing line
we are impressed by the writer's complete
mastery of an exceedingly difficult theme.
The poem is called by Hood himself a romance,
but it is not a romance in any ordinary accepta-
tion of the word; nor is it a story. It is just
a splendidly sustained description, wrought
with astonishing imaginative insight and skill,
and in such a manner, with so careful and sure
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a hand, that, amid all the accumulations of
minute detail, every touch is made to tell.
The subject is found in a couple of lines from
Wordsworth's Hart-leap Well, quoted by Hood
as his starting-point or text:
“A jolly place, said he, in times of old,
But something ails it now; the place is curst.”
Mystery broods over the poem from the first
phrase to the last.
“Some weighty crime, that heaven could not pardon,
A secret curse on that old building hung,
And its deserted garden.”
What that curse was, and how it came to
fall upon the once stately mansion, Hood does
not tell us; it is part of the strange and weird
power of the poem that we are left entirely
in the dark as to the horrible incident which,
in some bygone day, had brought down that
“prodigious ban of excommunication” under
which, year after year since then, the house
has been slowly rotting away. Dread, as of
some impalpable thing of terror, thus comes
to possess us as we read. We feel the truth
of the oft-repeated stanza:
“O'er all there hung a shadow and a fear;
A sense of mystery the spirit daunted,
And said, as plain as whisper in the ear.
The place is haunted!”
What the writer offers to us, then, is simply
- 44
TOM HOOD
an elaborate study of desolation, not done
with the broad brush, but by the piling up
of separate details; a study so complete, so
vivid, so realistic, that the least fanciful
reader finally yields himself to the poisonous
spell. Stanza by stanza, through the three
hundred and fifty-two lines of which the poem
is composed, Hood collects and emphasizes
every fact and image and symbol of waste
and decay; there is none so trivial that it
escapes his keen attention, none so seemingly
insignificant that he cannot wring from it
some fresh and horrible suggestion of doom,
and ruin, and utter devastation. From point
to point we are led through the scene with-
out—where no human figure evermore stirs
among the flowers that have run wild and the
weeds that have overgrown the once well
tended paths, where the birds build in the
porch, while the moping heron stands stiff
and motionless over the reedy pool, and the
rabbit makes his burrow on the lawn—to the
house itself.
“No dog was on the threshold, great or small;
No pigeon on the roof–no household creature—
No cat demurely dozing on the wall—
Not one domestic feature.”
Then, passing through the porch where the
wren has built her nest, we enter the strange
habitation—a habitation no more.
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“O very gloomy is the House of Woe,
Where tears are falling while the bell is knelling,
With all the dark solemnities which show
That Death is in the dwelling.
“O very, very dreary is the room
Where Love, domestic Love, no longer nestles,
But, smitten by the common stroke of doom,
The corpse lies on its trestles!
“But House of Woe, and hearse, and sable pall,
The narrow home of this departed mortal,
Ne'er looked so gloomy as that ghostly hall,
With its deserted portal.
“The centipede along the threshold crept,
The cobweb hung across in mazy tangle,
And in its winding sheet the maggot slept
At every nook and angle.
“The keyhole lodged the earwig and her brood,
The emmets of the steps had old possession,
And marched in search of their diurnal food
In undisturbed procession.
“As undisturb’d as the prehensile cell
Of moth or maggot, or the spider's tissue,
For never foot upon that threshold fell,
To enter, or to issue.”
Then we grope through the dark chambers,
half stifled by the stagnant air, yet chilled as
in a tomb. We pass along the silent corridors
in which our footsteps echo with a sharp
unearthly distinctness; we climb the dusty
46
TOM HOOD
|
stairways where a bat—or something in bat's
shape—startles us as it whirls by in the clammy
gloom. At length, as by the guidance of
fate, we reach the room we dread, yet are
compelled by some resistless power to enter.
There the death-watch ticks behind the
paneled oak, the arras heaves in inexplicable
tremor, and the lonely sunbeam that steals
in to find fly and midge banished, reveals a
bloody hand embroidered on the bed curtain,
and a few obscure spots, dumbly eloquent of
some monstrous deed, pointing across the floor
from bed to door. And again and again,
with fearful iteration, and as a fitting close
to each separate passage of description, comes
the refrain with its hint of intangible horror
and vague foreboding and alarm:
“O'er all there hung a shadow and a fear;
A sense of mystery the spirit daunted,
And said as plain as whisper in the ear,
The place is haunted.”
No mere summary and no selected passages
would suffice to give any adequate idea of the
power of this poem; it must be read, and read
through, and read at a sitting. To have writ-
ten this alone, said Poe—and Poe, weremember,
was the author of The Fall of the House of
Usher—would have secured immortality for
any poet of the nineteenth century.
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VI
Having now dealt separately with the
comic and the serious sides of Hood's genius, I
must say something of that exceedingly char-
acteristic part of his work in which the two
powers are not merely blended, but fused.
Strictly speaking, we are perhaps scarcely
justified in treating these poems as a distinct .
class, since in many productions which we
should not hesitate to pronounce simply
humorous there is a serious substratum, now
small, now quite important; and thus the
frontier-line between comic and serio-comic
could at no place be very definitely drawn.
But in the special works now to be considered,
our poet is wholly, intensely, in earnest; he
chooses the humorous medium because through
it he feels he can most forcibly express his
deepest criticism of life; and thus the union
of elements is so complete – their interpene-
tration so absolute—that the result may be
fairly called a fresh and independent literary
type. Because, moreover, these works are
of peculiar interest as revelations of Hood's
personality and outlook upon the world, it
seems convenient to detach them from the
rest of his writings and to regard them by
themselves. &
48
TOM HOOD
Of course there is nothing unique in such
intimate association between the keenest
sense of life's essentially tragic conditions and
the richest and most expansive humor. The
great humorists of the world have often been
the saddest as well as the wisest of men,
and the foundations of the deepest laughter
lie very close to the perennial sources of tears.
What Hood himself told us a little while ago
is universally true of all humor which has any
lasting hold upon us—there's not a string
attuned to mirth but has its chord in melan-
choly. When we consider Hood's work on
this side, then—when we read what for want
of a better name we may call his Gruesome
Grotesques—we do not claim for these a place
apart in literature, though perhaps nowhere
else is his individuality of touch more apparent.
We simply maintain that in virtue of these
productions he deserves to be classed among
the really great English masters in a particular
and very difficult field of composition, and
therefore to take a rank higher than that to
which either his wit alone or his poetic faculty
alone might be held to entitle him.
Perhaps we can best understand Hood's
method in these gruesome grotesques by
noting the startling effect with which he will
sometimes introduce a verbal quibble or bizarre *
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image even when he is dealing seriously with
a serious subject. Every reader of the Song
of the Shirt will recall an illustration of the
unexpected employment of a pun in the very
agony of the woman's passion and despair:
“Work — work — work —
In the dull December light!
And work—work—work—
When the weather is warm and bright;
When underneath the eaves
The brooding swallows cling,
As if to show me their sunny backs.
And twit me with the spring!”
The last line is a daring experiment in con-
trast. On the face of it, a pun ought to be
disastrous in such a context; yet no one, I
think, can fail to feel that its effect is that,
not of marring, but of heightening the tragedy
of the poem, as Lady Macbeth's frenzied
pun is felt to heighten the terror of the scene
which follows the murder of Duncan. In
Eugene Aram, again, the poet plays almost
ferociously with a fantastic image when he
makes the murderer tell us that grief was his
grim chamberlain, and lighted him to bed.
But—pace Edgar Allan Poe, who does not
seem to have grasped the significance of this
kind of art—what a fearful force such a touch
adds to the narrator's remorse! What a
50
TOM HOOD
white light it flashes into his mind! How
true psychologically that maniacal outburst
of morbid fancy!
In these cases, then, we have the grotesque
element introduced incidentally. Well, when,
instead of this method being occasional, the
pun, the bizarre image, the extravagant fancy,
the playful innuendo, are habitually employed
in the treatment of a serious theme, we have
what I have called the gruesome grotesques.
Take Death's Ramble by way of illustration.
Such a subject might well appeal to the somber
imagination of a Young or a Blair. But
Hood chooses to let his wit play about it, to
light it up with quip and fancy, to treat it in
the spirit of rollicking and seemingly irre-
sponsible humor, and the consequence is
that a ghastly conception grows more ghastly
than ever under his hands. Or take, again
(the thought of mortality was a persistent one
with Hood), his Death in the Kitchen—a veri-
table triumph in its kind. His text is from
Trim’s discourse in Tristram Shandy:-“Are
we not here now?” continued the corporal
(striking the end of his stick perpendicularly
on the floor, so as to give the idea of health
and stability) — “and are we not” (dropping
his hat upon the ground) “gone—in a mo-
ment!” On that hint the poet writes:
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“Trim, thou art right! "Tis sure that I,
And all who hear thee, are to die;
The stoutest lad and wench
Must lose their places at the will
Of Death, and go at last to fill
The sexton's gloomy trench.
“The dreary gravel— oh, when I think
How close we stand upon the brink,
My inward spirit groans!
My eyes are filled with dismal dreams
Of coffins, and this kitchen seems
A charnel full of bones!”
With this by way of introduction, Hood
proceeds to pass in review the various members
of the little world “below stairs,” and dwells
on the fact that, healthy and hearty as they
may all appear to be, the reaper who never
ceases reaping will in due course mow them
down in their turn:
“Yes, jovial butler, thou must fail,
As sinks the froth in thine own ale,
Thy days will soon be done!
Alas! the common hours that strike
Are knells, for life keeps wasting, like
A cask upon the run.
“Ay, hapless scullion, 'tis thy case,
Life travels at a scouring pace,
Far swifter than thy hand.
The fast-decaying frame of man
Is but a kettle or a pan
Time wears away with-sand.
52
TOM HOOD
“Thou needst not, mistress cook, be told
The meat to-morrow will be cold
That now is fresh and hot.
Even thus our flesh will, by and bye,
Be cold as stone.—Cook, thou must die,
There's death within the pot!
“Susannah, too, my lady's maid,
Thy pretty person once must aid
To swell the buried swarm.
The glass of fashion thou wilt hold
No more, but grovel in the mould
That's not the “mould of form.’
“Yes, Jonathan that drives the coach
He too will feel the fiend's approach,
The grave will cut him down!
He must in dust and ashes lie,
And wear the churchyard livery—
Grass green, turned up with brown.
“How frail is our uncertain breath;
The laundress seems full hale, but Death
Shall her last linen bring.
The groom will die, like all his kind;
And een the stable-boy will find
This life no stable thing!
“Nay, see the household dog—even that
The earth shall take; the very cat
Will share the common fall;
Although she hold (the proverb saith)
A ninefold life, one single death
Suffices for them all!
“Cook, butler, Susan, Jonathan;
The girl that scours the pot and pan,
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And those that tend the steeds—
All, all shall have another sort
Of service after this — in short;
The one the parson reads!”
Does any one laugh at this sort of grim
jesting? Do we not rather realize that it is
just by such apparent flippancy in the hands
of a master that the sternest facts are driven
most ruthlessly home?
Hood's greatest achievement in the line of
the grotesque, however—many think, his
greatest single achievement altogether—is
the marvelous extravaganza entitled Miss
Kilmansegg and her Precious Leg. A long
poem, running to some three thousand lines,
yet maintaining its brilliancy and its vitality to
the very end, this is perhaps open to criticism
on the ground that it is really too clever and
makes too great a demand upon the ordinary
reader, who finds his own faculties at constant
strain in the effort to keep pace with the
author's subtlety and rapidity of thought, with
the wit that flashes and sparkles on every
page, with the extreme allusiveness which
marks the poem throughout, and with its
sudden turns from sportive fancy to poetic
feeling, from poetic feeling to sweeping invec-
tive, and from sweeping invective back to
sportive fancy. But if the work is one to
54
TOM HOOD
be grappled with, it is one worth grappling
with. Hood describes it as a Golden Legend;
and such sub-title is full of caustic meaning.
A Golden Legend—yes! but in a transfigured,
sordid, latter-day sense—a study of mammon-
worship in our modern world. The heroine
of the narrative—born into untold wealth—
loses one leg in an accident; and by way of
substitute for the missing limb has one made,
not of vulgar cork or common wood (for such
would never suit with the taste of the great
heiress), but of the pure, sterling metal, with
the goldsmith's mark stamped on the calf.
“A wooden leg! what; a sort of peg
For your common Jockeys and Jennies!
No, no, her mother might worry and beg,
But nothing could move Miss Kilmansegg!
She could—she would have a golden leg
If it cost ten thousand guineas!”
What follows—how the fame of the costly
limb goes abroad through society and even
penetrates the East End; what wonder it
everywhere arouses; what honor it brings her;
how proudly she figures with it at a magnificent
fancy-dress ball; how a foreign count, inspired
by greed, throws himself at her foot (one
needn't say which foot) and wins her hand—
and her leg; and how presently he does her
to death by braining her with the leg itself—
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all these things may be read in the proper
place. But the fantastic plot—the under-
lying parable of which is at least as important
in our own day as it was in Hood's time—is
after all of less account than the incidents
and comments which are strung upon it.
Nothing in the poem is more wonderful than
the way in which the keynote is preserved
throughout, and every stanza made to bear
upon, and illustrate, the central theme—gold
and the power of gold in this new golden age
of ours. And at the end, the scattered threads
of the all-pervading moral are gathered together
and re-emphasized in the tremendous lines of
the epilogue:
“Gold! gold! gold! gold!
Bright and yellow, hard and cold.
Molten, graven, hammer'd, roll'd,
Heavy to get, and light to hold,
Hoarded, barter'd, bought, and sold,
Stolen; borrow'd, squander'd, doled,
Spurn’d by the young, but hugg’d by the old
To the very verge of the churchyard mould:
Price of many a crime untold.
Gold, gold, gold, gold!
Good or bad a thousand-fold!
How widely its agencies vary–
To save—to ruin—to curse—to bless—
As even its minted coins express,
Now stamp'd with the image of good Queen Bess,
And now of a Bloody Mary!"
56
TOM HOOD
I have gone through my program, and must
now bring my little study of Hood to a close.
Exhaustive that study has not been; on the
contrary, it has been superficial and slight.
But none the less I dare to hope that it may
help to interest a reader here and there in
one who still endears himself to those who
know him well as a man of singularly sym-
pathetic character, a jester whose wholesome
laugher is still contagious, and a poet of real
excellence and distinction. In these days of
rapid and vast production in literature, when
even the most industrious of us finds it impos-
sible to read half the new books that he ought
to read (or, at any rate, that the reviewers
tell him that he ought to read), there is an
obvious danger lest much that is good in the
literature of the past may be swamped and
forgotten. In these circumstances a critic
who is inspired by a warm personal feeling
for his subject may often do a useful if humble
service in redirecting our attention to some
favorite author, whose value, as he deems, is
commonly overlooked, and whose works are
not as well known as they ought to be. For
such a purpose, and in such a spirit, I have
written here of Tom Hood.
57
HENRY CAREY, THE AUTHOR OF
“‘SALLY IN OUR ALLEY”
I
DESCRIBE him in this way, for it seems
my best chance of enlisting attention for
him, since it is almost entirely on the strength
of this one ballad that poor Henry Carey takes
his place — so far as he takes any place at
all—in the annals of English literature. Yet
even this roundabout manner of speaking of
him may be deemed extravagant in its im-
plications, for of all those who know the
delightful tale of Sally and her 'prentice lover
(and who does not?), how many recognize
Carey as the author of it? And as for the
rest of his fairly voluminous work, with the
possible solitary exception of Chrononhoton-
thologos, that is rarely enough put down to
his credit, not, as he himself rather petulantly
complained, because the critics think it too
good to be his, but for an even more humil-
iating reason—that they do not think of it at
all, judging from the contemptuous silence
of the historians, we may safely say that
Carey is one of the most completely forgotten
of all the “forgotten worthies” of our
eighteenth-century literature.
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I confess that I should like to do something
to rescue his name from such oblivion. And
why not? This is an age of excursions and
alarums in the world of scholarship. The
spirit of exploration is abroad. Powerful
telescopes sweep the literary firmament, and
new stars are revealed which would never be
discernible by the naked eye. Erudite theses,
appallingly prolix and almost superhumanly
dull, are written about obscure people—the
obscurer the better—whose sole merit would
seem to the uninitiated to be that they are
the industrious writers' passport to academic
distinction. Critics gain reputation for learn-
ing and originality by finding out all sorts of
qualities of supreme greatness in poets so
very minor that the chances are that you
and I have never before heard of them. I
should therefore only be sailing with the
current if I posed as the “discoverer" of
Henry Carey and proceeded to make capital
out of his work.
Thus I might turn this little paper into a
thesis, into which I should of course be careful
to rake every scrap of information pertinent to
my subject and, to show my “thoroughness,”
a great deal having nothing whatever to do
with it. Or I might make it a eulogy where-
with to convince the world of its blindness
60
HENRY CAREY
regarding those extraordinary merits of my
hero which I alone have been privileged to
perceive. But let me be candid. This will
be neither thesis nor panegyric, because I do
not think Carey really worthy of either. He
is not, as I regard him, one of those writers
to whom posterity is called upon to make
tardy amends for contemporary neglect.
There is nothing great about the man or his
work. But on the other hand, there is a
good deal that is interesting—I mean humanly
interesting — about both. Carey is, to say
the least of it, quite as worthy of consideration
as many another minor poet or dramatist of
his time who never fails to get his paragraph
of recognition and appraisement from those
who discourse of literature in the Age of
Anne, while he is habitually passed over
without a word. And if this may seem a
poor excuse for talking about him, let me add
that he played his little part in the literary
movements of the early eighteenth century
with some success, and that his writings, upon
investigation, turn out to have more signifi-
cance than might have been anticipated, for
those, at all events, who care to look at litera-
ture in its broadly historical aspects. A few
pages may, therefore, quite fittingly be given
to his memory.
6]
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II
Of Carey's life, though the main outlines
are sufficiently clear, few particulars have
come down to us. We do not even know
the date of his birth, or anything definite
about his parentage, though common report
made him a natural son of George Savile,
the famous first Marquis of Halifax, who
died in 1695. This report, which there
appears to be no reason to question, is inci-
dentally supported by the reappearance of
the putative father's names as those of the
poet's son, George Savile Carey, who, it may
be of interest to mention in passing, was
grandfather of the celebrated actor, Edmund
Kean. Carey's mother is said to have been
a schoolmistress. We first hear of him in
1713 when, as a very young man, he made a
modest enough bow before the reading public
with a small volume of Poems on Several
Occasions under his arm. These poems are
neither better nor worse than the average
run of such effusions at the time, and we
may dismiss them by saying that they are
of a kind which no mortal man would
now want to read. Poetry, however, as he
afterwards urged by way of apology, was
only a pastime with him. His real profession
was music.
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HENRY CAREY
Unfortunately, he seems to have been
but poorly equipped for his lifework, since he
understood so little of the principles of his
art that, according to the trustworthy testi-
mony of an intimate friend, he was never
even able to put a bass to one of his own
songs. His chances of success were there-
fore exceedingly circumscribed, and we are
hardly surprised to find that his chief employ-
ment was in teaching in boarding schools
and “among people of middling rank and
private families.” But while lacking in
science, Carey possessed a genuine gift of
melody, and a ready power of inventing
original and catching airs for his own simple
lyrics. His songs and cantatas were very
numerous and in their own time enjoyed
considerable favor, though they would doubt-
less be pronounced thin and commonplace
now by those whose ears are attuned to, and
a good deal spoilt by, the intricacies of the
music of to-day.
An even better opening for his talents was,
however, furnished by the stage, for which
he wrote perhaps less frequently than might
have been expected, considering the gratify-
ing reception more than once accorded to his
efforts. A volume of his dramatic works,
published by subscription in 1743, contains
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eight pieces, and two others, never reprinted,
are mentioned in the bibliographies. With
one important exception — that of Chronon-
hotonthologos—these were all of the class of
musical plays—or ballad operas, as they
were then called—a species of composition
which had grown out of the popular Italian
opera and was at the same time a patriotic
protest against it. But in most cases, curi-
ously enough, Carey contented himself with
writing the libretto, leaving it to others to
provide the music for him.
The mystery in which the earlier part of
Carey's life remains enshrouded gathers about
it again at the close. He died in his house
in Great Warner Street, Clerkenwell, on
October 4, 1743, suddenly, but whether or
not by his own hand remains an unsettled
question. If indeed it was a case of suicide,
then it must have put a quite unlooked-for
tragic end to a career which, though cer-
tainly not without its difficulties and dis-
couragements, seems, so far as we can make
out, to have been rendered something more
than tolerable by a sanguine temperament
and general good spirits. In explanation of
the supposed desperate act it is alleged by
some that Carey really suffered acutely from
the envy and malevolence of his professional
64
HENRY CAREY
brethren, to which he makes frequent reference
in his prefaces and poems; by others again,
that he was in serious financial straits. That
his condition at the time was far from flourish-
ing is attested by the fact that his widow
and four small children were left, as a news-
paper advertisement of a benefit performance
at Covent Garden put it, “entirely destitute
of any provision.” But though Dibdin and
Hawkins both give the common story with-
out qualification, it is by no means certain
that it is well founded. The contemporary
record tells us only that “Carey got out of
bed . . . in perfect health, and was soon
found dead.” How the persistent rumor of
his having hanged himself originated, and
therefore what may be its value, it is impossible
now to determine.
III
In turning from Carey himself to his work
it will be natural for us to follow the logician's
plan of arguing from the known to the un-
known, and to begin with that part of it
which still makes its sure appeal to the sym-
pathy of readers.
To reproduce the ballad of Sally in Our
1 Dibdin sums up Carey's life and death in a single pithy
sentence which is worth, quoting as a curiosity of construction.
Carey, he writes, “led à life far from reproach, and hanged him-
self October 4th, 1743.
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Alley, or even to make extracts from it might,
in view of its familiarity, be justly deemed a
work of supererogation. But as this is one of
those poems which we are all glad of an excuse
to read once again, I yield to the temptation
and give it here in full.
SALLY IN OUR ALLEY
Of all the girls that are so smart
There's none like pretty Sally;
She is the darling of my heart,
And she lives in our alley.
There is no lady in the land
Is half so sweet as Sally;
She is the darling of my heart;
And she lives in our alley.
Her father he makes cabbage-nets
And through the streets does cry 'em;
Her mother she sells laces long
To such as please to buy 'em:
But sure such folks could ne'er beget
So sweet a girl as Sally!
She is the darling of my heart;
And she lives in our alley.
When she is by; I leave my work;
I love her so sincerely;
My master comes like any Turk;
And bangs me most severely –
But let him bang his bellyful,
I'll bear it all for Sally:
She is the darling of my heart,
And she lives in our alley.
66
HENRY CAREY
Of all the days that's in the week
I dearly love but one day –
And that's the day that comes betwixt
A Saturday and Monday;
For then I'm drest all in my best
To walk abroad with Sally;
She is the darling of my heart;
And she lives in our alley.
My master carries me to church;
And often am I blamed
Because I leave him in the lurch
As soon as text is named;
I leave the church in sermon-time
And slink away to Sally;
She is the darling of my heart;
And she lives in our alley.
When Christmas comes about again
O then I shall have money;
I'll hoard it up, and box it all;
I'll give it to my honey:
I would it were ten thousand pound,
I'd give it all to Sally;
She is the darling of my heart,
And she lives in our alley.
My master and the neighbors all
Make game of me and Sally,
And, but for her, I'd better be
A slave and row a galley;
But when my seven long years are out
O then I'll marry Sally,–
O then we'll wed, and then we'll bed . . .
But not in our alley!
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Now I need not consume space in praises
of such a little masterpiece as this; it will be
enough to quote Mr. Palgrave's remark that it
is worthy of the Ancients from its combination
of "grace, tenderness, simplicity, and humor,”
and even more “from the completeness and
unity of the picture presented.” But as very
few, I imagine, of those who have enjoyed it as
a ballad have ever been at the trouble to scru-
tinize its poetic character, consider the cir-
cumstances in which it was written, or estimate
its significance from the historical point of
view, it is at these things that we may properly
make it our business to glance.
In a note prefixed to the poem when it was
first included in a collection of his verse,
Carey has himself given us a most delightful
account of its origin. Its purpose was, he
declares, “to set forth the Beauty of a chaste
and disinterested Passion, even in the lowest
Class of Human Life.” And he continues:
“The real Occasion was this: A Shoemaker's
'Prentice making Holiday with his Sweet-
heart, treated her with a Sight of Bedlam,
the Puppet-shows, the Flying Chairs, and all
the Elegancies of Moorfields”—at that period,
as ever since the time of Henry II, a popular
place of resort for cockney pleasure-seekers.
“From whence proceeding to the Farthing
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HENRY CAREY
Pye-House, he gave her a Collation of Buns,
Cheesecakes, Gammon of Bacon, Stuff'd Beef,
and Bottled Ale,” a feast which, while it
shows that a chaste passion need not inter-
fere with a robust appetite, also suggests the
saddening reflection that the digestion of
youth must have been stronger then than it
is now. “Through all these Scenes,” Carey
goes on, “the Author dodged them, charmed
with the Simplicity of their Courtship: from
whence he drew this little Sketch of Nature.”
But being then young and obscure, he adds,
“he was much ridiculed by some of his
Acquaintance for this Performance: which
nevertheless made its Way into the Polite
World, and amply recompensed him by the
Applause of the divine Addison, who was
pleased (more than once) to mention it with
approbation.”
These naive remarks provide an admirable
introduction to the ballad which, re-read in
the light of them, will be found to gain a
freshness of interest in at least two ways. In
the first place, the little story purports to
be—and we have neither right nor reason to
question the author's statement—a direct
transcript from real life. This fact should
itself deepen its human meaning for us; to
me, at any rate, it gives an additional pleasure
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to feel behind the shadow-figures of the poet
the substantial flesh-and-blood actuality of
the young shoemaker and his buxom lass.
But this is not now the chief thing to be
considered. The point is, that it is the life
of the “lowest class” of society which fur-
nished the poet with the theme of his idyll. ,
Sally's father, as we have just read, hawked
cabbage-nets of his own making through the
streets; her mother sold laces to such as
“might please to buy 'em.” The lover
himself was only a 'prentice lad whose master
was wont, after the good old fashion of those
days, to “bang" him soundly for idling his
time away in fond oglings after the maiden
who made his heart beat faster whenever
she came in sight.
A strange, uncouth hero and a novel sort
of heroine for a sentimental love poem!
Queer substitutes indeed for the swains and
nymphs, the Corydons and Phylisses, who
in an orthodox pastoral landscape having
little resemblance to the common English
fields, did poetic duty for the simple folk
of the rough workaday world! Such would
be the natural judgment of readers of “good
taste” in that Augustan age when people
were terribly concerned about the “dignity”
of literature, when the theory of the stage
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HENRY CAREY
and the practice of the romancers kept all
high passion for men and women of the
“porcelain clay” of earth, and the critics
were beyond all things anxious that the
Muse should not smutch her raiment by
wandering out of Arcadia into the dirty
walks of “low” life. But Carey had found
a real idyll where few of his poetic contem-
poraries would have dreamed of looking for
one; he had felt its winning charm, and he
set himself to reproduce it as well as he could
in his own unsophisticated verse. And though
“some of his acquaintance” might deem him
a fool for his pains, the sweet, natural note
of his song presently arrested the attention
of even the artificial and jaded “polite world.”
of his day. To us, now that literature has
long since abandoned her dignity and is
willing to deal freely with the romance and
beauty somewhere hidden away in every
phase of human experience, there may be
nothing particularly striking or original in
Carey's little “sketch of Nature.” We can
understand its real importance, therefore,
only when by an effort of imagination we put
ourselves back for the moment in the period
of its composition.
And this real importance will become
clearer if we examine the full bearings of
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Addison's favorable opinion of Carey's work.
Augustan of the Augustans as he was in his
literary standards and ideals, that excellent
critic—for excellent he was according to
his lights—consistently represented the pre-
vailing taste and spirit of his time. In him
its so-called classicism found one of its most
complete exponents. His own verse, so ridicu-
lously overpraised by Macaulay, is marked
by the mechanical correctness which it was
held to be the poet's chief excellence to attain.
When he turned to the serious business of
the stage it was to produce a frigid tragedy
in strict adherence to the pseudo-classic
model. His famous criticism on Paradise
Lost, while it did much to bring Milton into
favor among eighteenth-century readers, suc-
ceeded in this largely by virtue of its limitations,
and is mainly of interest to us now as an
example of an obsolete method. His feeling,
or want of feeling for nature, which he occa-
sionally patronized but on the whole regarded
as a very poor substitute for art, and the
contempt which he expressed for Gothic
architecture, then, along with everything
else belonging to the Middle Ages, commonly
treated as barbarous, in like manner reveal
his close affinity with his time.
Yet there were ways in which Addison
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HENRY CAREY
transcended the taste of that time, and one
of these was the genuine interest which he
more than once manifested in a kind of poetry
then almost entirely ignored by cultivated
readers and official critics—the popular ballad
and song. In following the history of the
ballad revival (itself an important phase of
the democratization of literature) during the
latter half of the eighteenth century, we can
hardly throw too much weight upon the earlier
influence of Addison in breaking the ground
and opening the way. It is true that it is
difficult for us now to read without a smile
the pages in which he solemnly and cautiously
sets forth the artistic claims of the popular
ballad—their tone is so apologetic and their
praise so condescending; but we must not
forget that here too, as in the case of Milton,
his advocacy told the more directly because
it was based upon considerations and made
use of arguments which his readers could
readily appreciate.
His most noteworthy effort to gain a hear-
ing for the ancient folk song was his critical
dissertation on Chevy Chase, in which his
principal aim was to show that the unknown
maker of that stirring old ballad had actually
followed the “rules” of the classic epic as
faithfully as if “the Stagirite” had “o'er-
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looked each line.” But even more instructive
for us is his later essay on The Babes in the
Wood. Beginning in a vein of light humor
which, pleasant as it is, is clearly dictated
by the characteristic dread of being taken
too seriously, he goes on to describe the
poem as “a plain, simple copy of Nature,
destitute of all the helps and ornaments of
art,” yet charming “for no other reason
but because it is a copy of Nature.” There is
indeed “a despicable simplicity” in the
verse; the phrasing is “abject,” the expres-
sion “poor.” All this is admitted. But the
sentiments are so “genuine and unaffected,”
the whole narrative has something in it so
“moving,” that the poem is certain to touch
the “mind of the most polite reader with
inward meltings of humanity and compas-
sion.” Then follows the inevitable reference
to classic authority, and the “polite reader,"
we may surmise, was relieved to know that
if he gave way to his “inward meltings”
and wept over the untoward fate of the
“pretty babes,” he might do so with proper
justification, since Horace would have ap-
proved his tears. The entire essay is curiously
suggestive of that tendency to “damn with
faint praise” which, according to Pope's
spiteful description, was one of Addison's
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HENRY CAREY
characteristics. But taken in the light of
history it is seen to be one of the first indica-
tions of the breaking up of the great Augustan
tradition, and a critical anticipation of the
revival in English poetry of the natural note
and the simple utterance which had so long
been absent from it.
It is now quite evident why the “divine
Addison” was so pleasantly impressed by
Sally in Our Alley. This ballad, too, was
part of the revival in poetry of the natural
note and the simple utterance. So much
Addison saw, and he welcomed it accordingly.
But what he did not and of course could not
see, as we can realize very clearly, looking
back, is that Carey's unpretentious little
idyll has an even larger interest in the literary
movements of the time. For it is an early
manifestation of that rising democratic spirit
in literature which was soon to produce the
plays of Lillo and the novels of Richardson,
and in fullness of time to give birth to the
poems of Burns and Cowper, of Crabbe and
Wordsworth.
IV
Carey's other poems, though there are
several among them which fall into general
line with Sally, have now relatively little
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interest for us. An exception may, however,
be made in favor of the once well-known
lines, Namby-Pamby, or a Panegyric on the New
Versification, if only for the reason that
they added to our vocabulary the useful
and expressive compound which forms their
principal title. The parody was directed
against Ambrose Phillips (“Namby-Pamby,”
it is hardly necessary to explain, is a jocular
diminutive of that gentleman's Christian
name), who is remembered chiefly for his
friendship with Addison and his quarrel with
Pope, but who turns out, as will be seen, to
have yet a third claim to distinction. Phillips
had gained a certain reputation by the perpe-
tration of sundry “odes” (“odicles” Gray
might have called them) in short lines of
studied simplicity to or about various aristo-
cratic children of his acquaintance—the
address To Miss Margaret Pulteney (Daughter
of Daniel Pulteney, Esq.) in the Nursery, for
example, and that To Miss Charlotta Pulteney
in her Mother's Arms, and the Supplication for
Miss Carteret, in the Smallpox. The virtue of
these effusions may be inferred from such a
specimen as the following:
“Dimply damsel, sweetly smiling,
All caressing, none beguiling,
Bud of beauty, fairly blowing,
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HENRY CAREY
Every charm to Nature owing,
This and that new thing admiring,
Much of this and that enquiring—"
and so on, and so on. It will be seen that
Dr. Johnson was scarcely guilty of unreason-
able censoriousness when he remarked, with
characteristic ponderosity, that these poems
“are not loaded with much thought.” They
are not. Now Carey liked simplicity; but
this kind of simplicity was puerile and mawkish,
and in a happy moment he strung together a
number of jingling lines which, if rather
coarse in places, cleverly hit off the manner
of his brother bard and raised a laugh against
him. As thus:
“All ye poets of the age!
All ye witlings of the stage!
Learn your jingles to reform,
Crop your numbers and conform;
Let your little verses flow
Gently, sweetly, row by row,
Let the verse the subject fit,
Little subject, little wit,
Namby-Pamby is your guide,
Albion's joy, Hibernia's pride . . .
Now the venal poet sings
Baby clouts and baby things,
Baby dolls and baby houses,
Little misses, little spouses,
Little playthings, little toys,
Little girls and little boys.”
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Greatly to the poor author's annoyance,
this amusing trifle, like Sally in Our Alley,
was very commonly allowed to pass as the
work of this or that other writer. In his
epistle on Stage Tyrants he very naturally
complains of such unfair treatment; however
insignificant his performance may be, a man
wants the credit which is his due, and this
Carey, for some reason, always found it
difficult to obtain.
“Alas! what Fame, what Gain can I propose,
When others father fast as I compose?
To such a pitch is pert Presumption grown
"Tis well if this poor Piece be thought my own.
So when, long since, in simple Sonnet Lays [1]
I made the 'Prentice sing his Sally's Praise,
Tho' rude the Numbers, yet the Subject mov’d,
Immortal Addison the Song approv’d;
Then Prejudice with Envy did combine,
Because ’t was good, 't was thought too good for mine.
So common Fame did various Authors chuse
To Namby-Pamby, offspring of my Muse;
Till Pope, who ever prov'd to Truth a Friend,
With generous Ardor did my Cause defend;
Trac'd me obscure, and in Distraction's Spite,
Display'd me in a more conspicuous Light.”
Incidentally, we should like to know a good
deal more about Pope's chivalrous champion-
ship of Carey's pretensions. The reference
to his devotion to truth and generosity of
feeling certainly throws a flash of new light
78
HENRY CAREY
for us upon the “little Wasp of Twickenham.”
whom, unfortunately, we are not accustomed
to associate with disinterested actions of the
kind in question. .
V
As a dramatist Carey began his career
with the production of several pieces de-
scribed as “English operas” after “the Italian
manner.” For this class of play, in which
spoken dialogue alternated with solos and
duets, a ready audience had been prepared
by the vogue which Italian opera was then
enjoying on the metropolitan boards. But
the English opera was, as I have said, at once
an outgrowth from and a protest against this
exotic fashion. Addison, who wrote some
lively papers on the subject in The Spectator,
expressed the opinion of an influential part
of the public when he said that “our
great grandchildren will be very curious to
know why their forefathers used to sit together
like an audience of foreigners in their own
country, and to hear whole plays acted before
them in a tongue which they did not under-
stand.” Addison himself had tried his hand
1The foundations of English opera had indeed been laid at the
end of the preceding century by Henry Purcell, but its growth
was for a time checked by the popularity of the Italian form.
Strictly speaking, therefore, it is its revival to which reference
is made in this text.
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with a counter-attraction in Rosamund, and
though this proved a failure, it had opened
the way for many other experiments in the
same line. Carey's performances (whether,
like Amelia, serious, or, like The Honest
Yorkshireman, farcical) may be dismissed as
average specimens of their kind.
A later effort of his, however, though of
slighter texture, calls for more particular
mention. This is the interlude entitled Nancy,
or The Parting Lovers, originally presented
in 1739 on the outbreak of the war with
Spain. His own “argument” will show the
intimate connection in theme and spirit, and
therefore in historical significance, between
this little piece and his idyll of the alley.
“The subject of this interlude,” he wrote at
the time of its publication, “is taken from
Nature itself, and discovers the Force of
Love in Low Life. The Occasion was this.
At the Beginning of the late Impress, the
Author saw a young Fellow hurried away by
a Press-Gang, and followed by his Sweet-
heart, a very pretty Wench, and perfectly
neat, tho' plain in her Dress; her Tears,
her Distress, and moving Softness, drew
Attention and Compassion from all who
beheld her. From this small Hint the Author
drew the following Sketch.” Once more we
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HENRY CAREY
are pleased to recognize in Carey the inter-
preter of the humanity which is common to
all grades and fashions of life. On perusal,
the interlude, it is true, strikes us now as
crude and flat. Yet it hit the popular feeling
at the time, and under altered names—now
as The Press Gang, and now as True-Blue—
it was afterwards more than once put on
the stage successfully when war, or the pros-
pect of war, made its revival opportune.
But the satiric spirit was strong in Carey,
and though he was willing to make all the
capital he could out of the vogue of the opera,
he was even more willing to turn the jest
against it. His two burlesques, The Dragon
of Wantley and its continuation, The Drag-
oness, are full of verve and point, and repro-
duce with admirable effect all the salient
characteristics of the operatic method and
style. The former, produced at Covent
Garden, on October 26, 1737, enjoyed the
astonishing run of sixty-seven nights; the
latter, though scarcely less clever, suffered
the ill fortune of most sequels and was re-
ceived with much fainter applause. On the
title page of the printed Dragon the author's
name is transformed to “Sig. Carine.” In
his dedication to his friend, John Lampe, who
provided the music, Carey wrote over the
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same suggestive signature: “Many joyous
Hours have we shared during its compo-
sition, chopping and changing, lopping, eking
out and coining of Words, Syllables and
Jingle, to display in English the Beauty of
Nonsense, so prevailing in the Italian Operas.
This Pleasure,” he adds, “has since been
transmitted to the Gay, the good-natured
and jocular Part of Mankind, who have
tasted the Joke and enjoyed the Laugh;
while the Morose, the Supercilious, the Asi-
nine [sic], have been fairly taken, so far as
to be downright angry.” Why even “the
Asinine” went to the length of losing their
tempers is not exactly clear, but we must
suppose that they had their reasons. Lampe
seems to have entered heartily into the fun
of the thing, and his music — made, Carey
tells us, “as grand and pompous as possible”
in order to heighten its contrast with the
book—had not a little to do with the success
of their joint enterprise. Here is a brief
extract from the opening scene, which will
serve as an illustration of Carey's method.
Margery, daughter of Gaffer Gubbins, enters
in great agitation with news of the ferocious
doings of the Dragon.
“O Father, Father! as our noble Squire
Was sate at Breakfast at his Parlor Fire,
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HENRY CAREY
With Wife and Children all in a pleasant Tattle;
The Table shook, the Cups began to rattle;
A dismal Noise was heard within the Hall,
Away they flew, the Dragon scar'd them all:
He drank up all their Coffee at a sup;
And next devour'd their Toast and Butter up.”
Such gastronomic feats seem to indicate
that the Dragon is after all a rather domes-
ticated monster. But his onslaught upon
the breakfast table is productive of a general
upheaval in the household, as we learn from
the aria which follows:
“But to hear the Children mutter
When they lost their Bread and Butter;
And to see my Lady moan,
Oh, 'twould melt a Heart of Stone!
Here the Squire with Servants wrangling:
There the Maids and Mistress jangling;
And the pretty hungry Dears
All together by the Ears,
Scrambling for a Barley-Cake;
Oh, 'twould make one's Heart to ake.”
Carey's burlesque operas owe much of course
to Gay's famous “Newgate Pastoral,” the
Beggars' Opera; but he is not to be denied
the credit of having done exceedingly well on
the lines which his predecessor had opened up.
These parodies bring us round to another
of Carey's works, and the one which, leaving
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Sally in Our Alley out of the question, has
done most to preserve his name from oblivion.
This (to give it its full title) is Chronon-
hotonthologos, the Most Tragical Tragedy
that was ever Tragediz'd by any Company
of Tragedians. Here again Carey did not
strike out for himself. His own “tragedy
of half an act” was produced in 1734; and
it is evident that the impulse to its com-
position must have been derived directly
from Fielding's Tragedy of Tragedies, or the
Life and Death of Tom Thumb the Great,
which was performed with much applause in
1730 (and incidentally, it is said, made Swift
laugh for the only time on record) and ex-
panded from two acts to three the following
year. Fielding (working in his turn on the
inspiration of The Rehearsal) had made
terrific havoc among the tragic writers then
in possession of the stage, and shortly after-
wards, in his marvelously clever but fear-
fully coarse Covent Garden Tragedy, had
pressed home the attack with an elaborate
burlesque of Namby-Pamby Phillips' Dis-
tressed Mother. On these hints Carey wrote.
But though to this extent an imitator, he
was by no means a mere imitator, and in its
own way his work is as well conceived and as
deftly wrought as that of his model.
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HENRY CAREY
To enjoy Chrononhotonthologos to the full it is
of course necessary to have a more intimate
knowledge than most of us to-day can be
expected to possess, of the plays and play-
wrights of the close of the seventeenth and
first few decades of the eighteenth centuries.
... Yet though details may escape us, and some of
the wit may therefore appear rather childish
and unprofitable, it is not difficult to realize
the general scope and drift of Carey's fooling.
All that is requisite for this is to remember
that the English tragedy of the time was
still vitiated by the rant and inflated bom-
bast of the “heroic" type of play, and that
such experiments as were here and there
made in favor of greater restraint and decorum
—as in Cato and The Distressed Mother—
only offered the most chilling rhetoric as a
substitute for the older extravagance. Carey
saw, and saw rightly, that the contemporary
stage was hopelessly divorced from nature
and reality, and it was against its stilted
conventions, its inane verbiage, its violent
apings of genuine passion, that he directed
his spirited attack.
About a consistent plot he did not trouble
himself. A few incidents, devised to travesty
the prevailing mode, were enough for his pur-
pose. These provided him with the opportunity
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he wanted for his burlesque of the fashionable
tragic style.
The scene opens in the antechamber of
the king. Rigdum-Funnidos inquires of a
fellow-courtier after their royal master.
“Aldiborontiphoscophornio,
Where left you Chrononhotonthologos?” +
His Majesty, he learns, is fast asleep,
“Fatigu'd with the tremendous toils of war;
Within his tent, on downy couch succumbent,
Himself he unfatigues with gentle slumbers.”
One often wakes from a nap in a state of
irritability. This is the case with the king,
who announces his intention of forthwith
banishing Somnus, the god of sleep, from
his dominions. He orders that a grand
pantomime shall be prepared to “keep all
mankind eternally awake.” In the midst of
the entertainment, however, news is brought
that the King of the Antipodes has invaded
Queerummania with a mighty army. Chro-
nonhotonthologos, true to his heroic rôle, is
not in the least upset. He sends his great
captain, Bombardinian, forth to meet the
foe, and issues commands for the due cele-
bration of the coming victory.
1 It may be recalled that Rigdum-Funnidos and Aldiboronti-
hoscophornio were Scott's nicknames for the Ballantyne
rothers.
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HENRY CAREY
“Meantime, bid all the priests prepare their temples
For rites of triumph. Let the singing singers
With vocal voices most vociferous,
In sweet vociferation outvociferize
Ev’n sound itself.”
The King of the Antipodes is taken prisoner,
and despite the fact that that monarch walks
with his head where his feet should be, the
queen, Fadladinida, falls in love with him on
the spot. This gives rise to a little complica-
tion of interest and to some passages of a
sentimental kind between the queen and
her favorite attendant, quite in the approved
tragic style. A delightful touch is intro-
duced when the queen invites her ladies to
take tea with her, and, with a sudden lapse
from tragic dignity, remarks: -
“Bring in the tea things. Does the kettle boil?”
A few lines of this commonplace character,
cleverly interjected from time to time, serve
by contrast to bring out the bombastic quality
of the rest of the dialogue.
While the queen's love for the interesting
captive is taking its destined course, the
king accepts an invitation from Bombardinian
to drink wine with him in his tent. Seated
at table with the general and two ladies,
who are of the party, His Majesty expresses
his readiness to eat as well as drink. No
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sooner said than done, replies Bombardinian,
in effect:
“See that the table instantly be spread,
With all that art and nature can produce,
Traverse from pole to pole; sail round the globe:
Bring every eatable that can be eat;
The king shall eat, though all mankind be starv'd.”
This has the genuine grandiose ring of the
heroic stage. Unfortunately, the practical
cook, who evidently belongs to a much more
commonplace world, raises difficulties.
“I am afraid his majesty will be starved before I can
run round the world for a dinner. Besides,
where's the money?”
Such a question is naturally too much for
our tragedy king. He falls into a violent
temper, threatens the cook with instant
death, and is not in the least appeased when
that functionary replies:
“O pray; your majesty; spare my life; there's some
nice cold pork in the pantry; I'll hash it up
for your majesty in a minute.”
The king, without more ado, kills the “auda-
cious slave” for daring to make such a vulgar
suggestion. Then follows a quarrel between
Chrononhotonthologos and Bombardinian in
which the latter receives a blow. The gen-
eral's outraged feelings burst forth in a speech
for which many models could be found on the
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HENRY CAREY
stage of Carey's time. It admirably satirizes
the fustian which was then accepted as sub-
limity.
"A blowl Shall Bombardinian take a blow?
Blush, blush, thou sun I Start back, thou rapid ocean!
Hills, vales, seas, mountains! all commixing crumble,
And into chaos pulverize the world;
For Bombardinian has received a blow,
And Chrononhotonthologos shall die.”
A fight ensues, and the king is slain. Then
Bombardinian realizes the enormity of his
action, and for the moment thinks only of
his escape:
“Ha! What have I done?
Go, call a coach, and let a coach be call'd,
And let the man that calls it be the caller;
And in his calling, let him nothing call
But coach! coach! coach! Oh, for a coach, ye gods!”
But Bombardinian knows his business as a
stage hero, and when the physician arrives
in hot haste, he rises to the level of the great
occasion.
DOCTOR. My lord, he's far beyond the power of physic;
His soul has left his body and this world.
BOMB. Then go to tºother world and fetch it back
(Kills him)
And if I find thou triflest with me there;
I'll chase thy shade through myriads of orbs,
And drive thee far beyond the verge of nature.
Ha! call'st thou, Chrononhotonthologos?
I come! Your faithful Bombardinian comes!
\ .
º,
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He comes in worlds unknown to make new wars;
And gain thee empires numerous as the stars.
With which exordium, he completes his duty
by slaying himself. We do not wonder that
those gathered about, witnesses of this thrilling
scene, “all groan a tragedy groan.” Nothing
could be more appropriate.
Even to-day, when the absurdities here
caricatured have long since given place on
the stage to others of a different kind, Chro-
nonhotonthologos may still be depended upon
to furnish half an hour's genuine amusement.
For one thing in particular Carey deserves
a word of praise. He has resisted the temp-
tation to over-elaboration, and his lively
little piece gains much from its brevity.
In literature, as in life, one has one's likes
and one's dislikes, and it is often a hard
matter to give a rational account of either.
But I think I know how I first came to be
interested in Henry Carey. In part I was
drawn to him by a certain quality of simplicity
and sincerity which I recognized in him, and
which made him a refreshingly human figure
amid the artifices and affectations of his age.
Even more was I attracted by his broad
sympathies and the wholesome democratic
feeling which I found in his work. Here
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HENRY CAREY
was a man who at least was not afraid of
common life, and did not hesitate to seek his
themes for poetry outside the fashionable
world of the salon and the drawing room.
Such a man should not be altogether for-
gotten. And if there is that about him
which may still make its appeal to us on
the purely personal side, it should further-
more be remembered that despite the neglect
with which he is generally treated by the
critics, he has his place beside writers of
greater genius and influence in the literary
history of his time. Alike by his one admir-
able ballad, by his mock Italian operas, and
by his burlesque tragedy, he showed himself
to be on the side of the movements which
were tending silently toward the liberation
of literature from its social narrowness and
its artistic conventions. And thus he gave
both expression and impulse to that new
spirit which everywhere in English life and
letters began to be felt with constantly in-
creasing distinctness in the half century
immediately following his death.
91
GEORGE LILLO AND “THE LONDON
MERCHANT’’
I
ARLY in the sweltering summer of 1731
the well-known actor-manager, Theophi-
lus Cibber, who had then recently opened an
off-season at Drury Lane, announced as one
of his coming attractions an entirely original
drama to be called The Merchant, or the True
History of George Barnwell. The title itself
had a novel sound, and the curiosity of jaded
London playgoers was at once aroused. Then
little by little it leaked out that this was to be
a new kind of tragedy altogether. [ft was, the
public learned, a story, not of lofty passion in
a world of aristocratic refinement, but of crime
in “low life,” while its central figure was no
strutting king or romantic hero but a mere
'prentice lad who, according to the crude old
ballad upon which the play was founded, had
robbed his master, murdered his uncle, and
paid the penalty of his misdeeds on the gallows.
At this “the Town” took offense; such a “New-
gate tragedy" upset in advance all their
conventional notions of what was decent in
drama, and was in fact an open insult to their
taste. They condemned, we are told, “the
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presumption of the author in hoping to make
them sympathize in the sorrows of any man
beneath the rank of an emperor, king, or
statesman.” Cibber, who had accepted The
Merchant with alacrity, now began to tremble
a little in his shoes. But he resolved to perse-
vere with his venture, and on the night of the
twenty-second of June the already much-dis-
cussed drama was duly produced. The signs
were not auspicious for the actor-manager's
success, for among the audience were many
young bloods who had come in merrymaking
mood. An enterprising printer, quick to
seize his opportunity, had in the meantime
reproduced the original ballad, and we have
Cibber's authority for the statement, which
none the less smacks a good deal of exaggera-
tion, that “thousands” of copies were bought
"... and carried to the theater by “certain witty
and facetious persons” who hoped to get good
sport out of the performance by making a
“ludicrous comparison between the old song
and the new tragedy.” But total failure
waited upon their expectations. As the play
proceeded, a marked change became apparent
in the temper of the house. “So forcible and
pathetic were the scenes,” Cibber tells us,
“that these merry gentlemen were quite disap-
pointed and ashamed”; nay more, so complete
94
GEORGE LILLO
was the revulsion of feeling that ere long “they
were obliged to throw away their ballads and
take out their handkerchiefs.” The experi-
ment of author and manager was entirely
justified, for
“The pathos of the drama was so deep
That those who went to scoff remained to weep.”
An interesting detail connected with this
memorable performance may be added. Pope
himself was present at it, and expressed his
satisfaction with the piece.
Though the heat of the season was intense,
the play held the stage for twenty consecutive
nights, while during the following winter it
was again “frequently presented to crowded
houses, and warmly patronized by merchants
and other opulent citizens,” who, for reasons
which will become clear presently, “much
approved its moral tendency.” As the phrase
afterwards ran, the downfall of George Barn-
well, the 'prentice hero, drew more tears than
all the rants of Alexander."
Nor was this the sum of the drama's success.
Echoes of the sensation caused by it quickly
reached the court, with the result that (as we
1 I have given in the text the title under which the play was
originally produced. Shortly afterwards it was published as The
Ilondon Merchant, or the History of George Barnwell. It soon became
popularly known, however, as George Barnwell, and by this unau-
thorized name it has passed into history.
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learn from the “Monthly Intelligencer” of
the Gentleman's Magazine, under date July 2,
1731) “the queen sent to the playhouse in
Drury Lane for the manuscript” of the play
“to peruse it,” and this Mr. Wilkes accordingly
“carried to Hampton Court.” Now Queen
Caroline was a woman of literary taste and,
as was well known, took in general but little
account of the drama, and her interest regard-
ing this particular production was therefore
rightly deemed remarkable. Such evidence
of royal favor was doubtless very gratifying
to all concerned, though, adds Tom Davies
in reference to it, “I have not been able to
learn whether the author gained any emolu-
ment from the queen's curiosity.” At any
rate, all the members of the royal family at
different times “honored” the play “with
their appearance,” while thanks to the gener-
osity of the management the author in the
long run benefited to the tune of several thou-
sand pounds. When a little later The London
Merchant was published, it was eagerly pur-
chased by a still unsatisfied public, and by 1735
had reached its “fifth genuine edition.”
Such, in brief, is the story of the production
of a play which, though barely mentioned in
our ordinary histories of literature and now
remembered only as a vague tradition, has
96
GEORGE LILLO
still, as I hope to show, a good many substan-
tial claims upon our attention. But before I
turn to the consideration of its literary and
social interest I must first give some account
of its author and of the drama itself.
II
Of the author, George Lillo, our knowledge
is comparatively slight. Such information as
we possess regarding him is derived almost
entirely from the gossiping and careless Tom
Davies,” whose own chief authority, according
to his own statement, was in turn a partner in
trade of the deceased playwright, then living
in retirement in Chelsea. It must, however,
be added that of this retired partner nothing
otherwise is known. \
Lillo's father appears to have been a Dutch-
man who had settled in England and had taken
an English wife. He carried on business as a
jeweler—the diamond trade of London was
then largely in the hands of refugees from the
Low Countries—somewhere in the neighbor-
hood of Moorfields, and there the future drama-
tist was born on February 4, 1693. Springing
from a vigorously Protestant stock, he was
educated in the principles of dissent, though
1In the Life prefixed to a collective edition of the dramatist's
works, published in 1775.
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not, Davies is careful to insist, in those of the
“sourer sort.” This point is of importance,
for it helps us to understand the strong Puritan
spirit of his plays, of which I shall have more
to say later on. At the same time his youthful
environment, however conducive to morality,
must have been thoroughly unfavorable to
the development of his dramatic proclivities,
the growth of which remains a mystery. He
was brought up to his father's trade, and in
due course set up in business as a jeweler on
his own account. But in the meantime—
whether through quiet reading in his scanty
leisure or through surreptitious visits to that
haunt of all things evil, the theater—his
taste for the stage had somehow been stimu-
lated, and by and by the London tradesman
surprised his friends and, we may surmise,
shocked his fellow dissenters, by doubling
his part with that of a writer of plays. He
had reached the age of thirty-seven, however,
before he made his first bid for literary fame,
which he did with a worthless and quite ,
uncharacteristic piece called Sylvia, or the
Country Burial. Notwithstanding its singu-
larly lugubrious title, this was really one of
the innumerable brood of “ballad operas”
which had sprung up like mushrooms after
the enormously successful Beggar's Opera
98
GEORGE LILLO
had, according to the epigram of the day,
made Gay (its author) rich and Rich (the
manager) gay. It was performed, says Davies,
“with no very great applause,” and soon found
its place in the ever-growing catalogue of for-
gotten things. But Lillo was not discouraged,
and the next year he offered a very different
kind of work, The Merchant, to Theophilus
Cibber, with the results which we have seen.
The success of this experiment naturally
prompted further efforts, and for the few re-
maining years of his life he wielded a fairly
active pen. In 1734 he wrote a foolish masque,
Britannia and Batavia, on the marriage of
the Princess Royal of England and William,
Prince of Orange, and in 1735 produced The
Christian Hero, a tragedy based on the history
of the Albanian chieftain Scanderbeg and his
splendid resistance to the tyranny of the
Turks. “Too useful and solemn” for “the
general taste of an English audience,” this was
withdrawn after only four performances. Then
toward the close of the acting season of the
following year came the powerful drama,
Fatal Curiosity, which Fielding produced at
his Little Theatre, and of which the great
novelist afterwards spoke as “a Master-Piece
in its kind and inferior only to Shakespeare's
best Pieces,” and as giving its author “a title
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wº
9
to be call'd the best Tragic Poet of his Age.”
This was followed in 1738 by Marina, an
adaptation of Pericles, and in 1739 by Elme-
rick, or Justice Triumphant, for the matter of
which Lillo went back to an episode in Hun-
garian history. But this last play he only
just lived to finish and did not live to see per-
formed, though immediately after his death
it was “acted with success.” He died on
September 3, 1739, and was buried in the
vault of Shadwell Church. An unfinished
version of the Elizabethan domestic tragedy,
Arden of Feversham, was found among his
papers.
Despite his activity as an author during the
last nine years of his life, Lillo does not appear
to have neglected his business—a fact which
speaks volumes regarding the practical side
of his character. The tradition that just
before his death he had fallen on evil days,
though popularized immediately afterwards
by a phrase in Hammond's prologue to Elme-
rick describing him as “deprest by want” as
well as “afflicted by disease” (which may well
have been the case), may confidently be dis-
missed; we have Davies' word for it that he
died “in very easy circumstances, and rather
in affluence than want.” This is indeed shown
by the fact that he left considerable property
100
GEORGE LILLO
to his nephew. In connection with this
bequest a curious story got about to the effect
that he chose the young man as his heir because
he had found him “disposed to lend him a sum
of money at a time when he thought proper
to feign pecuniary distress, in order that he
might discover the sincerity of those calling
themselves his friends.” The story is roman-
tic, and Davies, who seems to have started
it, professed to have obtained it from Lillo's
mysterious partner in Chelsea. We learn
from another source, however, that the nephew
was astute enough to suspect the trick, and
knew very well what he was about when he
“supplied the humorist on his own terms.”
But as Thomas Campbell very justly pointed
out, the whole incident “bears an intrinsic
air of improbability. It is not usual for
sensible tradesmen to affect being on the verge
of bankruptcy; and Lillo's character was that
of an uncommonly sensible man.”
In personal appearance our dramatist was
anything but an Adonis, for he was short,
corpulent, and blind in one eye. Yet his
aspect, according to Davies, who first saw and
talked with him during the rehearsals of Fatal
Curiosity, was none the less pleasing; he was
1 Boaden's Memoirs of Mrs. Siddons, I, 271.
2 Specimens of the British Poets, V, 58.
8 101
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“plain and simple” in address and in “his
manner of conversation . . . modest, affa-
ble, and engaging”; while “in his moral con-
duct, and in the character, generosity, and
openness of his temper” he is even said to
have resembled his own Thorowgood in The
London Merchant—a compliment which, though
well meant, is somewhat impaired for us by
the fact that this same Thorowgood, as we
shall presently see, is a prosy and pragmati-
cal bore. But the most important and most
impressive account of him is to be found in
Fielding's remarkable eulogy, published in
The Champion only a few months after its
subject's death and while Elmerick “was acting
with deserved applause”:
“He had the gentlest and honestest Manners, and,
at the same Time, the most friendly and obliging. He
had a perfect Knowledge of Human Nature, though
his Contempt for all base Means of Application, which
are the necessary Steps to great Acquaintance,
restrained his Conversation within very narrow
Bounds. He had the Spirit of an old Roman, joined
to the Innocence of a primitive Christian. He was
content with his little State of Life, in which his excel-
lent Temper of Mind gave him an Happiness beyond
the Power of Riches; and it was necessary for his
Friends to have a sharp Insight into his Want of their
Services, as well as good Intentions or Abilities to serve
him. In short, he was one of the best of Men, and
those who knew him best will most regret his Loss."
102
GEORGE LILLO
Such a whole-hearted panegyric from such a
man is sufficient testimony to the sterling
qualities of Lillo's character.
III
So much for the author of The London
Merchant — a person of some importance in
his own day, as we can now see, though wholly
neglected in ours. Now for the play itself.
The plot is of the simplest, and a very brief
summary of it will suffice. George Barnwell
is a young apprentice in the employ of a pros-
perous merchant named Thorowgood, who is
paraded before us as an embodiment of all
the Virtues. But who in fact wearies and irri-
tates us by his oppressive sense of his own
goodness and dignity. Barnwell is a “well-,
made” stripling of eighteen, innocent and
bashful, amorous of temperament, and singu-
larly weak in will. His master, however,
thinks well of him, uses him in “affairs of
consequence,” and entrusts him with “consid-
erable sums of money.” It is thus that he is
unfortunate enough to attract the attention
of an iniquitous woman named Millwood, who
having herself suffered in early life through
the vileness of men, has come to feel a hatred
of them intense almost to monomania, and


comprehensive enough to embrace the sex as
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a whole. At the opening of the play we find
her laying snares to entrap the good-looking
young ºgº. in part by her
pressing need of money and in part by the
malign pleasure which she feels in compassin
the downfall of any man, however insignificant.
The fatuous youth, hopelessly deficient in
knowledge of the world, falls an easy prey to
her enticements, and his subsequent demorali-
zation is rapid and complete. He absents
himself from his employer's house, and though
Thorowgood's gentleness, forbearance, and
words of kindly counsel so stir him to remorse
that there seems a chance that his better
nature may yet reassert itself, the contrition
is only superficial and temporary. He has
tampered with sin, and when temptation
returns, as it soon does, he is powerless to
withstand its onset. 45unds are demanded by
his seductress, and they are provided by the
usual methods of theft and the falsification of
º: is this the worst. Acting on
the direct command of Millwood, in whose
hands he is now like potter's clay, and whose
avarice is described by her own maid as
“insatiate as the grave,” he waylays and
brutally murders his uncle, a “venerable”
gentleman of “large estates and fair charac-
ter.” All this takes place in a couple of days.
104
GEORGE LILLO
He is forthwith arrested, tried, and sentenced
to death; and we leave him in his dungeon,
as the keeper enters to announce that the
officers are in readiness to conduct him to
the gallows. Millwood, I may add, also
reaps the reward of her wickedness. The only
complication in the straightforward action
of this simple story is provided by the fact
that Thorowgood's only child, Maria, secretly
loves Barnwell, who thus, but for his wrong-
doing, might have attained the summit of an
apprentice’ ambition by marrying his mas-
ter's daughter.”
Such in bare outline is the action of our
drama – a regular “assize court story,” as
Wilhelm Schlegel happily called it. It is, in
fact, hardly more than a page out of the sor-
did annals of Newgate, thrown into dramatic
1 Lillo follows the old ballad (which may be read in Percy's
Reliques of Ancient English Poetry) pretty closely as far as the
murder of the uncle; after &#j'. goes his own way. This point
would doubtless have been noticed by the naughty witlings at
Drury Lane had they not been obliged, long before the point of
divergence was reached, to throw away their ballads and take to
their handkerchiefs. It is commonly supposed that the incidents
which formed the basis of the story took place in the reign of
izabeth; and in the first scene of the play we have references to
the King of Spain's “vast Armada,” “our peerless Elizabeth"
and “Walsingham, her wise and faithful secretary.” These,
however, constitute Lillo's only attempt at historic color. The
* manners” of The London Merchant are contemporary throughout.
The real scene of the tragedy appears to have been Ludlow in
Shropshire, where, according to a local historian, writing in 1822,
there was a “piece of ground,” still bearing the name of “Barnwell's
Green,” in which “the wretched victim of seduction waited to
rob and murder his friend and benefactor” (Historu and An-
tiquities of Ludlow, p. 20.1). Lillo's scene is “London and an
*:::::A; village"—tradition says Camberwell.
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A QUIET CORNER IN A LIBRARY
form, and might therefore conceivably have
been written by that friend of Mr. Sneer in
Sheridan's Critic, whose idea was to “drama-
tize the penal laws, and make the stage a
court of ease to the Old Bailey.” Qnly a
public heartily sick of the heroic fustian and
decorous insipidities of contemporary tragedy,
and therefore ready to welcome any change
that even suggested, however remotely, a
return to reality and common human nature,
could possibly have given their attention, to
say nothing of their tears, to such a production)
For, let me insist, the foregoing brief sketch
does no injustice to Lillo's work, but rather,
on the contrary, puts it in the most favorable
light. Often enough, to present in this way
the mere skeleton of a play is to leave out of
consideration the very elements which would
go far to explain its success — the grace or
power with which a theme, perhaps unattract-
ive or feeble in itself, is handled; the vigor
of separate scenes; the vitality of the dialogue;
the freshness or convincing truth of the char-
acterization. (But The London Merchant h
none of these redeemi ualities. It is, to
speak quite frankly, a most artless concoction,
in which a subject certainly not specially
hopeful, but of which something effective might
have been made by skillful treatment, is so



106
GEORGE LILLO
managed as to exhibit all its defects and
absurdities. The incidents are put together
with hardly a notion of stage effect; the move-
ment of the plot is clumsy; the dialogue is
vapid; the personages are mere lay figures.
The play is indeed dull, with all the combined
dullness of stilted language, mawkish senti-
ment, and commonplace morality.
Does this criticism seem to be unduly
drastic? A few extracts will be enough to
show that it does not err on the side of severity.
First, let us take the following dialogue
which occurs on the occasion of the appren-
tice' visit to Millwood's house, whither he has
been enticed by the lady's declaration that she
has “an affair of importance” on which she
wishes to consult him. Here we have a crucial
scene—a scène a faire, as the French would
call it; and this is what Lillo makes of it:
[Enter Barnwell, bowing very low; Lucy (Millwood's maid) at a
distance.
MILL. Sir! the surprise and joy–
BARN. Madam!
MILL. This is such a favour—(advancing)
BARN. Pardon me, madam —
MILL. So unhoped for—(still advances; Barnwell
salutes her, and retires in confusion). To see you here
—excuse the confusion—
BARN. I fear I am too bold.
MILL. Alas, sir, all my apprehensions proceed from
my fears of your thinking me so. Please, sir, to sit.
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‘I am as much at a loss how to receive this honour as
I ought, as I am surprised at your goodness in confer-
ring it.
BARN. I thought you had expected me; I promised
to come.
MILL. That is the more surprising: few men are
such religious observers of their word.
BARN. All who are honest are.
MILL. To one another. But we silly women are
seldom thought of consequence enough to gain a place in
your remembrance (laying her hand on his, as if by
accident).
BARN. (aside.) Her disorder is so great, she don't
perceive she has laid her hand on mine. Heaven, how
she trembles! What can this mean?
MILL. The interest I have in all that relates to
you (the reason of which you shall know hereafter)
excites my curiosity: and, were I sure you would pardon
my presumption, I should desire to know your real
sentiments on a very particular affair.
BARN. Madam, you may command my poor
thoughts on any subject. I have none that I would
conceal.
MILL. You'll think me bold.
BARN. No, indeed.
‘MILL. What, then, are your thoughts of love?
BARN. If you mean the love of women, I have not
thought of it at all. My youth and circumstances
make such thoughts improper in me yet. But, if you
mean the general love we owe to mankind, I think no
one has more of it in his temper than myself. I do not
know that person in the world, whose happiness I
do not wish, and would not promote were it in my
power. In an especial manner, I love my uncle and
my master; but above all, my friend.
108
GEORGE LILLO
MILL. You have a friend, then, whom you love?
BARN. As he does me, sincerely.
MILL. He is, no doubt, often blessed with your
company and conversation?
BARN. We live in one house together, and both
serve the same worthy merchant.
MILL. Happy, happy youth! Whoe'er thou art,
I envy thee, and so must all, who see and know this
youth (aside). What have I lost by being formed a
woman! I hate my sex, myself. Had I been a man,
I might perhaps, have been as happy in your friend-
ship, as he who now enjoys it; but as it is—Oh!
BARN. I never observed women before, or this is
sure, the most beautiful of her sex (aside). You
seem disordered, madam; may I know the cause?
MILL. Do not ask me, I can never speak it, what-
ever is the cause. I wish for things impossible. I
would be a servant, bound to the same master as you
are, to live in one house with you.
BARN. How strange, and yet how kind, her words
and actions are; and the effect they have on me is as
strangel I feel desires I never knew before. I must
be gone while I have power to go (aside). Madam,
I humbly take my leave.
And so on, and so on. Could anything con-
ceivably be tamer, more hopelessly undrama-
tic, more supremely ridiculous? One wonders
whether to admire the more the maundering
idiocy of the infatuated youth, or the clumsy
devices with which his seductress, supposed
as she is to be a perfect mistress in all the arts
of Phryne or Aspasia, contrives to throw her
coils about him,
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|
/ If any human being, listening to such stuff
as this, found it necessary to have recourse to
his handkerchief, we are almost driven to the
supposition that it must have been, not to dry
his tears, but to stifle his laughter.
One general consideration will probably
occur to every reader of the foregoing inter-
view. The moralist often has occasion to

deplore that in depicting vice in the interests
of virtue the writer of fiction, in order to make
his lesson clear is ept to paint vice itself in
too-glowing—and seductive-colors. Lillo, in
whom the didactic tendency was obviously
!
stronger than the dramatic, has certainly not
been guilty of this error.
Our next selection is perhaps even worse—
or, if worse be impossible, then let us say
equally bad in a different way. The scene is
in a wood “at some distance from a country
seat.” We first hear Barnwell soliloquize at
great length upon his dreadful situation, and
know that he has murder in his mind. Then
the uncle enters—the “venerable” gentleman
of “large estate and fair character.”
UNCLE. If I were superstitious, I should fear some .
danger lurked unseen, or death were nigh: a heavy
melancholy clouds my spirits; my imagination is filled
with ghastly forms of dreary graves, and bodies
changed by death. . . . .
[Enter Barnwell at a distance]
| 10
GEORGE LILLO
O death, thou strange mysterious power, seen every
day, yet never understood, but by the incommunicative
dead, what art thou? The extensive mind of man,
that with a thought circles the earth's vast globe, sinks
to the centre, or ascends above the stars; that worlds
exotic finds, or thinks it finds, thy thick clouds attempts
to pass in vain, lost and bewildered in the horrid gloom:
defeated she returns more doubtful than before; of
nothing certain, but of labour lost.
[During this speech, Barnwell sometimes presents the pistol,
and draws it back again, at last he drops it, at which his
uncle starts, and draws his sword.]
BARN. Oh, 'tis impossible.
UNCLE. A man so near me, armed and masked!
BARN. Nay then, there's no retreat. (Plucks a
poniard from his bosom and stabs him.)
UNCLE. Oh, I am slain! All gracious heaven,
regard the prayer of thy dying servant! Bless, with
thy choicest blessings, my dearest nephew; forgive my
murderer, and take my fleeting soul to endless mercy.
[Barnwell throws off his mask, runs to him, and kneeling by
him, raises and chafes him.]
BARN. Expiring saint! Oh, murdered; martyred
uncle! Lift up your dying eyes, and view your nephew
in your murderer! O do not look so tenderly upon
me. Let indignation lighten from your eyes; and
blast me ere you die. By heaven, he weeps in pity
for my woes. Tears, tears for blood. The murdered
in the agonies of death, weeps for his murderer. O.
speak your pious purpose; pronounce my pardon, thens.
and take me with you. He would, but cannot. O
why, with such fond affection do you press my murder-
ing hand? What! will you kiss me? (Kisses his hand;
uncle groans and dies.) Life that hovered on his lips
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A QUIET CORNER IN A LIBRARY
but till he had sealed my pardon, in that sigh expired.
He's gone for ever, and oh, I follow. (Swoons away
upon his uncle's dead body.) Do I still live to press
the suffering bosom of the earth? Do I still breathe,
and taint with my infectious breath the wholesome air?
Let heaven, from its high throne, in justice or in mercy
now look down on that dear murdered saint; and me
the murderer. And, if his vengeance spares, let pity
strike and end my wretched being. Murder; the
worst of crimes; and parricide the worst of murders,
and this, the worst of parricides.
O, may it ever stand alone, accurs'd,
The last of murders, as it is the worst. (Exit)
Comment on such drivel as this is clearly
unnecessary, and fortunately so, for it would
be hard to do justice to it. The foregoing
passages, which are given as samples, will
serve their full purpose if, while they afford
just a taste of the dramatic quality of Lillo's
epoch-making play, they also remind us how
essential it is in our present inquiry to keep
resolutely at the historic point of view. Our
first impulse on reading these extracts may
very naturally be to throw the work aside as
too absurdly puerile to have any possible
interest for us. But our impatience will be
checked if we remember that this is the play
which drew crowded and enraptured audiences
night after night, in the hot summer season
of its production, and broke down the preju-
dices of “the Town”; that this is the play
| 12
GEORGE LILLO
which Queen Caroline sent for and read from
the manuscript which “Mr. Wilkes carried
to Hampton Court"; that this is the play
which ran through five authorized editions
within a few years; that, more surprising tha
all, this is the play which called forth the
praise of Pope; which Rousseau picked out
for special eulogy;” which Diderot compared
with the great tragedies of Sophocles and
Euripides;* which Prévost deemed worthy
of detailed analysis;4 which Marmontel set
beside Racine's masterpiece;” which Lessing
took as a model for one of his own dramas;"
which Goethe mentioned with respect;” of
which Schiller spoke with admiration.*
Let me before passing on illustrate one spe-
cially distressing feature of this extraordinary

drama—its tendency to lose itself in barren
wastes of endless, flat, unprofitable—talk.
Here is part of the scene in the fourth act
between Thorowgood and Millwood, now
brought to bay. It will, I think, be admitted
that there is something large and impressive
in the conception of Millwood's passionate
sex-hatred. Unfortunately, the effective work-
ing out of this conception was beyond Lillo's
1 Cibber's Lives, V, 339. 2 Lettre a d’Alembert. 3 Entrefiens sur
Le Fils Naturel. 4 Pour et Contre, Nos. 99, 100, 109. 5 Poetique
francaise, ii. ... 6 Miss Sara Sampson. . . . Dichtung und Wahrheit,
k. III. 8 Crabbe Robinson's Diary, i. 137.
| 13
A QUIET CORNER IN A LIBRARY
Power. In place-of-the burning language of
nature he can give us only noisy declamation.
Trueman, Barnwell's fellow-apprentice and
friend, who has just secured the woman,
declares that not the least of her faults is the
abuse of her “uncommon perfections of mind
and body.”
MILL. If such I had, well may I curse your bar-
barous sex, who robb'd me of 'em, ere I knew their
worth, then left me, too late, to count their value by
their loss. Another and another spoiler came; and all
my gain was poverty and reproach. My soul disdained,
and yet disdains, dependence and contempt. Riches,
no matter by what means obtained, I saw secured the
worst of men from both; I found it therefore necessary
to be rich; and to that end I summoned all my arts.
You call 'em wicked; be it so. They were such as
my conversation with your sex had furnished me withal.
THOR. Sure, none but the worst of men converse
with thee.
MILL. Men of all degrees and all professions I have
known, yet found no difference but in their several
capacities; all were alike wicked to the utmost of their
power. In pride, contention, avarice, cruelty, and
revenge, the reverend priesthood were my unerring
guides. From suburb-magistrates, who live by ruined
reputations, as the unhospitable natives of Cornwall
do by shipwrecks, I learned that to charge my innocent
neighbours with my crimes was to merit their probec-
tion; for to screen the guilty is the less scandalous when
many are suspected, and detraction, like darkness and
death, blackens all objects and levels all distinction.
Such are yºur venal magistrates, who favour none
| 1.4
GEORGE LILLO
but such as; by their office; they are sworn to punish.
With them, not to be guilty is the worst of crimes;
and large fees, privately paid, is every needful virtue.
THOR. Your practice has sufficiently discovered
your contempt of laws, both human and divine; no
wonder then that you should hate the officers of both.
MILL. I hate you all; I know you, and expect no
mercy. Nay, I ask for none; I have done nothing that
I am sorry for; I followed my inclinations, and that the
best of you does every day. All actions are alike
natural and indifferent to man and beast, who devour;
or are devoured, as they meet with others weaker or
stronger than themselves.
THOR. What a pity it is, a mind so comprehensive;
daring, and inquisitive should be a stranger to religion's
sweet, but powerful charms.
MILL. I am not fool enough to be an atheist, though
I have known enough of men's hypocrisy to make a
thousand simple women so. Whatever religion is in
itself, as practised by mankind it has caused the evils
you say it was designed to cure. War; plague, and
famine hās (sic) not destroyed so many of the human
race as this pretended piety has done, and with such
barbarous cruelty as if the only way to honour Heaven
were to turn the present world into Hell.
THOR. Truth is truth, though from an enemy and
spoke in malice. You bloody, blind, and superstitious
bigots, how will you answer this?
MILL. What are your laws, of which you make your
boast, but the fool's wisdom and the coward's valour;
the instrument and screen of all your villainies, by
which you punish in others what you act yourselves,
or would have acted, had you been in their circum-
stances. The judge who condemns the poor man for

being a thief, had been a thief himself, had he been
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U.
poor. Thus you go on deceiving and being deceived;
harassing and plaguing and destroying one another:
but women are your universal prey.
Women, by whom you are; the source of joy,
With cruel arts you labour to destroy;
A thousand ways our ruin you pursue,
Yet blame in us those arts first taught by you.
O may from hence each violated maid,
By flattering; faithless, barbarous man betrayed,
When robbed of innocence and virgin fame,
From your destruction raise a nobler name;
To right their sex's wrongs devote their mind;
And future Millwoods prove, to plague mankind.
Now it will not be denied that here and there
in Millwood's invective we may detect for
a moment the accent of genuine personal
passion, but for the most part it is drowned
by generalities which, though doubtless they
impressed their first hearers by their boldness,
leave us unmoved because they are entirely
inappropriate to the circumstances. Here we
may note the point of Pope's one qualifying
criticism—that the author of The London
Merchant had in “aimed at a
greater elevation of language than was con-
sistent with the characters and the situation."
This tendency to rhetoric is, however, one of
several characteristics of Lillo's work which
show that while breaking with the conventions
of contemporary tragedy he was still under
its influence.

`--— 116
GEORGE LILLO
The didactic obsession, from which he is
never free for many pages together, is another
fertile source of undramatic verbiage. Nearly
everybody in the play moralizes, in season and
out of season, even Barnwell, even Millwood,
as we have seen; but the chief sinner in this
respect is the prodigious Thorowgood, whose -
pestilential habit it is to bestow his tediousness
upon every one who comes in contact with
him and to improve every occasion. In the
above dialogue with Millwood we have already
had a slight sample of his powers. This is how
he belectures the inoffensive prig, young True-
man, whose desire for information regarding
the financial situation brings down a perfect
torrent of instructive platitudes upon his head.

THOR. Your curiosity is laudable, and I gratify
it with the greater pleasure, because from thence you
may learn how honest merchants, as such, may some-
times contribute to the safety of their country, as they
do at all times to its happiness; that if hereafter you
should be tempted to any action that has the appearance
of vice or meanness in it, upon reflecting upon the
dignity of our profession; you may with honest scorn
reject whatever is unworthy of it.
THOR. Should Barnwell or I, who have the benefit
of your example, by our ill conduct bring any imputa-
tion on that honourable name, we must be left without
©XCUISE,
THOR. You compliment; young man. (Trueman
bows respectfully.) Nay, I am not offended. As the ,
name of merchant never degrades the gentleman, so
9 117
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by no means does it exclude him; only take heed not
to purchase the character of complaisance at the
expense of your sincerity.
Even poor Trueman's “respectful bow” is
thus made the text of a sermon on behavior
And when at the close of the scene that admir-
ing subordinate asks his master if he has any
“commands” for him, the inevitable moral
reflection is tagged to the reply.
THOR. Only to look carefully over the files to see
whether there are any tradesmen's bills unpaid, and if
there are, to send and discharge 'em. We must not
let artificers lose their time, so useful to the public and
their families, in unnecessary attendance.
Later on, the same patient listener is favored
with another disquisition on the greatness and
e º - - .*.--~~~"
dignity of commerce. '
- **-ºs--------~
“Methinks, I would not have you only learn the
method of merchandise, and practise it hereafter
merely as a means of getting wealth. "T will be well
worth your pains to study it as a science. See how it is
founded in reason and the nature of things; how it has
promoted humanity, as it has opened and yet keeps up
an intercourse between nations far removed from one
another in situation, customs, and religion, promoting
arts, industry, peace and plenty; by mutual benefits
diffusing mutual love from pole to pole.”
Trueman, whom we cannot but regard as a
Thorowgood in embryo, is equal to the occa-
sion, and plays up to his mentor in admirable

style:
| | 8
GEORGE LILLO
“Something of this I have considered, and hope, by
your assistance, to extend my thoughts much farther.
I have observed those countries, where trade is pro-
moted and encouraged, do not make discoveries to
destroy, but to improve mankind, by love and friend-
ship; to tame the fierce and polish the most savage; to
teach them the advantages of honest traffic, by taking
from them with their own consent their useless super-
fluities, and giving them in return what, from their
ignorance in manual arts, their situation, or some
other accident, they stand in need of.”
“”T is justly observed,” replies Thorow-
good, and proceeds to elaborate the economic
doctrines which his apprentice has expounded:
“The populous East, luxuriant, abounds with glitter-
ing gems, bright pearls, aromatic spices, and health-
restoring drugs. The late-found Western world glows
with unnumbered veins of gold and silver ore. On
every climate and on every country Heaven has
bestowed some good peculiar to itself. It is the indus-
trious merchant's business to collect the various
blessings of each soil and climate, and, with the product
of the whole, to enrich his native country.—Well!
I have examined your accounts; they are not only just,
as I have always found them, but regularly kept and
fairly entered. I commend your diligence. Method
in business is the surest guide. He who neglects it
frequently stumbles, and always wanders perplexed,
uncertain, and in danger.”
Happily for us, if not for Trueman, our mer-
chant remembers at this point that it is time
for him to go to the Exchange, and the edifying
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interview accordingly comes to an end. I
have spoken of Thorowgood as a pompous
and pragmatical bore. The reader is now in
a position to test for himself the justice of the
description. -
IV
In fairness to Lillo it must be said, and said
emphatically, that The London Merchant
does not represent him at his best. That
he was capable of much greater things is
shown by his later tragedy, Fatal Curiosity,
in which within the space of three very short
acts a terrible story of the workings of fate
is carried with breathless rapidity to a catas-
trophe as ghastly in its own way as that of
Oedipus the King. Of the immense power of
this compressed drama there can be no ques-
tion; we can scarcely wonder that the metro-
politan audience before which it was produced
“shrunk from the performance,” or that
Mrs. Inchbald in some critical remarks upon
it should warn the reader not to venture upon
its perusal unless he possessed “strong nerves”
as well as “sound taste.” Yet while in every
respect immeasurably superior to The London
Merchant as a piece of art, Fatal Curiosity
lacks the peculiar interest of its predecessor,
which keeps a distinct place in literary history
120
GEORGE LILLO
! ſo ,- º
because it marks a deliberate rupture with a
long-standing tradition and a bold attempt
to initiate a new kind of tragic drama. TIt is
to these matters that we shall turn directly.
Meanwhile they will serve to explain why in
dealing with Lillo here I chose to ignore abso-
lute values and to take him at a point where,
artistically weak, he is strong in historical
importance.
It should furthermore be remarked—again
in fairness to our author—that though to-day
we find The London Merchant dismal, prosy,
tiresome, and unconvincing, it kept the stage
as a popular stock-piece, especially in the
provinces, for more than a hundred years
after Lillo's death. This fact is sufficient
proof of its vitality. Despite the character-
istic protest of Charles Lamb, the apprentices
of London were regularly treated every Christ-
mas to “the nauseating sermon of George
Barnwell”: Hone noting that at Christmas,
1819, “the representation of this tragedy was
omitted at both the London theatres for the
first time.”” Some of the greatest actors
and actresses of the closing decades of the
eighteenth and of the early part of the nine-
teenth centuries, including Charles Kemble and
Mrs. Siddons, appeared in it, though it was

1On the Tragedies of Shakespeare. 2Every Day Book, December 26.
12]
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generally conceded that in assuming the rôle
of Millwood Mrs. Siddons sacrificed something
of her dignity; while strange as it must seem
to those of us who remember him only in
his later years, Sir Henry Irving frequently
performed in the character of Barnwell when
a member of the stock company of the Man-
chester Theatre Royal.
The popularity of The London Merchant is
still further exemplified by the fact that its
story presently passed from the stage to
narrative literature. It forms the theme of
a novel in three volumes which was published
in 1796 and dedicated by the author, Thomas
Skinner Surr, to Mrs. Siddons, who had then
recently appeared as Millwood. This was
followed by the Memoirs of George Barnwell,
the Unhappy Subject of Lillo's celebrated Tragedy;
derived from the most Authentic Sources, and in-
tended for the Perusal and Instruction of the Rising
Generation, by a Descendant of the Barnwell Family
(1810). Ten years afterwards this prolix chron-
icle was abridged and appeared as The Life and
History of George Barnwell. Whatever may
be the documentary value of these Memoirs—
a matter concerning which we may be per-
mitted to have our opinion—they at least
...i.44. ...º.º.º.º.º.
Siddons.)
122
GEORGE LILLO
possess one advantage over the original
tragedy. They contain a minute account
of the execution itself, including “the dying
groan” heard “by those nearest the fatal
spot,” and involuntarily “re-echoed by the
sympathetic throng”; and even of the subse-
quent cutting down of the body. Such
particulars were naturally calculated to deepen
the impression made by the story on “the
rising generation”; for whose further edifica-
tion there was also added “a parallel between
Sir Richard Whittington and George Barn-
well,” the moral of which is of course identical
with that conveyed by Hogarth's famous
designs of the good and bad apprentices.
Even well on in the nineteenth century,
moreover, casual references in general literature
prove that George Barnwell was by no means
forgotten. The tragedy itself was ridiculed
in the Rejected Addresses, thus:
“George Barnwell stood at the shop door,
A customer hoping to find, sir,
His apron was hanging before,
But the tail of his coat was behind, sir;
A lady so painted and smart,
Cried, Sir, I've exhausted my stock o' late,
I've got nothing left but a groat;
Could you give me four penn'orth of chocolate.”
Thackeray used the name George de Barnwell,
though nothing but the name, in his Novels
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by Eminent Hands, for his travesty of the
melodramatic criminal romances of Bulwer
Lytton; while for some reason or other the
play seems to have clung to the memory of
Dickens, who makes various references to it
as a piece of literature well known to himself
and his readers. “Never mind George Barn-
well,” exclaims Sam Weller, during his first
memorable interview with Mr. Pickwick in
the courtyard of the White Hart Inn. “Every-
body knows what sort of a case his was,
though it's always been my opinion, mind
you, that the young 'ooman deserved scragging
a precious sight more than he did.” Sim
Tappertit's declaration that the execution of
George Barnwell had “cast a stigma” on the
whole body of London 'prentices, will also be re-
called.” Again, Bailey, the lively young retainer
at Todgers', whose name was supposed to have
been originally Ben, was known to the inmates
of that respectable establishment as Uncle
Ben, “and that again had been corrupted
into Uncle; which, by an easy transition, had
again passed into Barnwell, in memory of the
celebrated relative in that degree who was
shot by his nephew George, while meditating
in his garden at Camberwell.” Evidently
#ººf.º.º.º.º.º.º.º.
2 Barnabu Rudge, Chap. IV. 3Martin chuzzleton, Chap. ix.
124
GEORGE LILLO
Jenkins and the rest of them must have been
familiar with Barnwell's story, or they would
never have worked their way round to such
a nickname. Once more our play reappears
in connection with Pip's early experiences
and the theatrical ambitions of the egregious
Mr. Wopsle. One day, Pip records, “as I
was loitering along the High Street, looking
in disconsolately at the shop windows, and
thinking what I would buy if I were a gentle-
man, who should come out of the bookshop
but Mr. Wopsle. Mr. Wopsle had in his hand
the affecting tragedy of George Barnwell, in
which he had that moment invested sixpence,
with a view to heaping every word of it on the
head of Pumblechook, with whom he was
going to drink tea.” Regarding Pip, who was
himself a 'prentice at the time, as having been
sent specially by Providence to be “read at,”
he bore him off to “the Pumblechookian par-
lour,” where the hapless youth underwent
one of the most dreadful experiences of his
life. Though Pip expressly states that he
“never assisted at any other representation
of George Barnwell,” the account which he
gives of it shows that at the very end of his
life Dickens still remembered vividly every
detail of the play."
1 Great Expectations, Chap. XV. -
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V
But I need not further pursue the fortunes of
The London Merchant on the boards or in
general literature. Our real interest in the
play to-day lies in its historical significance,
and to this it is time to turn. *
I have said that The London Merchant
represented a deliberate rupture with a long-
standing stage tradition and a bold attempt
to initiate a new kind of tragic drama. Now,
what was this stage tradition which Lillo had
the temerity to challenge? #:
tion that tragedy must of necessity be aris.
tocratic in its theme and characters. What
was the new kindſ of tragic drama that he
sought to introduce? It .*:-
Drama—the drama of middle-class people
and ordinary sociaſſife.
It will be remembered that when, just
before its production, the subject of The Lon-
don Merchant was announced, “the refined
part of the Town” took offense, and con-
demned in advance “the presumption of the
author in hoping to make them sympathize
in the sorrows of any man beneath the rank
of an emperor, king, or statesman.” The
attitude of “the Town” in this matter is to
us of the twentieth century in the last degree


126
GEORGE LILLO
unintelligible. In 1731 it was the logical
result of certain abstract theories which at
the time appeared to have their foundations
laid in the very nature of things. These
theories must be considered a little closely,
or the meaning of Lillo's innovation will never
be understood.
According, then, to the doctrine all but
universally propounded by critics and accepted
by dramatists, alike in England and on the
Continent, the distinction between the higher
and lower drama–Between tragedy àd
comedy—was at bottom a distinction of socialſ
status. The business of comedy was with T
the “middling” and lower classes. Serious
passion and deep emotion were the monopoly
of their betters — of the “illustrious” and
nobly born. Tragedy, that great supporter
of classicism, the French d'Aubignac expressly
declared, inheres not in the nature of the
catastrophe (to suppose this were a vulgar mis-
take) but in the rank of the persons. And
even Goldsmith, of all people in the world,
writing long after the Domestic Drama had
begun, reiterates the same view: “If we
apply to authority, all the great masters of
dramatic art have but one opinion. Their
rule is, that as tragedy displays the calamities
of the great, so comedy should excite our

127
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laughter by ridiculously exhibiting the follies
of the lower part of mankind.”. Tragedy,
therefore, was concerned, and concerned only
* 7-º-º-º-
and to the exclusion of all other matters, with
the misfortúñES-of-the-artstocracy and the
-v-es
“distresses.” Of the great. The Tife of the
“meaner sort" was aſſowed no place on boards
consecrated to pity and terror, but was to be
taken entirely as a topic for merriment, on
its comic side.
Put thus in brief, this doctrine will seem
to the reader so amazing that he may be
inclined to suspect me of exaggerating in the
interests of a thesis. In reply I can only
assure him that if this were the place to do so,
I could fill page after page with passages from
recognized authorities which would furnish
ample support for the statement made. He
would, however, hardly thank me for such a
pedantic parade of evidence, and would soon
tire of the monotonous repetition of the same
principle in slightly varying forms. I will
therefore content myself with an epitome.
By the Italian critics of the time of the
Renaissance and thence onward, the aristo-
cratic theory of tragedy was proclaimed with-
out a single dissentient voice; tragedy, we are
told by them again and again, is the drama of
illustrious persons and can admit within its
128
GEORGE LILLO
sacred circle only characters who belong to
the highest social ranks. Where Italian hu-
manists led the way it was natural that the
French classicists should follow, and if we
turn to Pellitier or Ronsard, to De Laudun or
Vauquelin de la Fresnay, to Pelet de la Mes-
nardière or, most important of all, to the Abbé
d'Aubignac, it is only to find the same concep-
tion reproduced with unvarying uniformity.
Such critics might differ among themselves
on questions of dramatic structure and tech-
nique; but on this matter of the essentially
aristocratic quality of tragedy they were
One,
Even in the later eighteenth century, despite
the stir of thought and the spread of new
ideas in literature no less than in life, many
of the French critics still clung tenaciously
to the ancient formula. Voltaire, strongly
conservative in this as in so many other ways,
stoutly maintained that tragedy requires
characters raised above the common plane;
while in the Encyclopédie itself—that work
which so distinctly marks the incoming of the
modern spirit—Joubert asserted that according
to the signification which is given to the word
(and as he held, properly given) tragedy is
“the imitation of the lives and speech of
heroes, subject by their elevation to passions
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and catastrophes, as well as to the manifesta-
tion of virtues, of the most illustrious kind.” "
The German pseudo-classicists—men like
Opitz and Gottsched—merely echoed the
opinions of their French masters without
adding anything of importance to them, and
among them therefore it was taken as an
axiom that tragedy deals with “men who are
conspicuous by their rank, name, and appear-
ance.” On the Continent, therefore, the theory
of tragedy now in question was for a long time
part and parcel of the orthodox critical creed.
But what about England? There surely we
might anticipate that the case was different.
Investigation shows, however, that it was not
so very different, after all. In the great age
of the romantic drama Gosson and Stubbes,
Webbe and Harrington and Puttenham, all
asserted in so many words that the great are
the only proper characters for tragedy, while
Jonson specifically included “dignity of per-
sons” among its fundamental requirements.
These writers represent of course only the
more academic taste of their time. But even
in practice—even in the work of Shakespeare
and his contemporaries—the influence of the
1 In modern France the word tragedy is still defined in this heroic
sense, plays of serious interest dealing with ordinary life and non:
illustrious people being called drames. According to this technical
distinction, therefore, Ibsen's Ghosts is not a tragedy but a drame.
But this is a matter of nomenclature only.
V
130
GEORGE LILY.O
aristocratic conception of tragedy still made
itself felt. Romantic tragedy in England, it
is true, was never so narrowly patrician as the
neo-classic tragedy of the Continent—a fact
the significance of which will be considered
presently; but it habitually confined itself to
subjects remote in quality and circumstances
from ordinary life; its chief characters were
taken for the most part from the ranks of
more or less illustrious people, its temper and
tone were unmistakably feudal." Then when in
the later seventeenth century the English drama,
like other kinds of literature, came to be
deeply affected by the precepts and example
of France, it was natural that the aristocratic
view of tragedy should assume a more rigorous
form and be more strongly emphasized.
“Tragedy, as we know," says Dryden, “is wont
to image to us the minds and fortunes of noble
persons"; and again, "in tragedy the design
is weighty and the persons great.” “Trag-
edy,” writes Rymer, “requires not only what
is natural but what is great in nature”; the
context showing that like Dryden’s “noble,”
“great” is to be taken in the conventional
social sense. Tragedy, according to Con-
greve, “distinguishes itself from vulgar poetry
1 Of the small group of Elizabethan Domestic Dramas, which
form an interesting exception to this general statement, I shall
have a word to say later.
131
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by the dignity of its characters.” Later
critics carry on the same tale. “The persons
whose actions tragedy would exhibit to us,”
Bishop Hurd asserts, “must be of principal
[that is, princely] rank and dignity.” In
George Selby Howard's Cyclopoedia tragedy
is defined as “a dramatic poem, representing
some signal action, performed by illustrious
persons, and which frequently has a fatal issue
or end.” Goldsmith's opinion has already
been quoted. Even Fielding, who fully sym-
pathized with Lillo's experiment in the drama,
and, as we shall see, gave it the benefit of his
support, none the less accepted the current
academic distinction between tragedy and
comedy, holding that the latter had to do with
“persons of inferior rank, and consequently
of inferior manners.” And such long con-
tinued to be the view of critics who adhered
to the classic position, one of whom—J. C.
Walker—at the very end of the century praises
the Italians for refusing to abandon the prin-
ciples they had learned from their masters,
the ancients, who had taught them that “the
tragic muse should always appear clad in
imperial purple.”
Clearly, then, we are keeping well within
1This is clearly implied in what he says about the serious and
the comic romances in the preface to Joseph Andrews.
132
GEORGE LILLO
the mark when we insist that both before
and after Lillo's time the aristocratic theory of
tragedy was deeply rooted and widespread.
Upon what considerations was that theory
supposed to rest? By what reasonings was
it upheld? Well, in the first place there was
of course the inevitable reference to the
authority of the classics, and especially of
Aristotle, a passage in whose Poetics (in fact,
mistranslated and misinterpreted) was re-
garded as providing all the critical ground
required. But more important than this,


there was also an appeal to experience. It
was solemnly contended that the impressive-
ness of tragedy, and with this its moral-power.
ultimately depend upon the rank and dignity—’
of the characters: that, in other words, we
are moved and influenced by a representation
of the misfortunes of the great, while the dis-
tresses of people in our own walk of life leave
us cold and indifferent. To us to-day, fresh
from the perusal, let us say, of Ghosts or
Rosmersholm, such an argument in support of
the aristocratic theory of tragedy seems even
more monstrous than the theory itself; our
one simple and sufficient answer to it is, that
obviously it has no basis in fact. Yet in the
large literature of the discussion we find it
cropping up again and again, and so potent
10 133
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was its sway that those who defended the
Domestic Drama were bound to take cogni-
zance of it: among them Lillo himself, as we
shall see directly. I will not burden my pages
with quotations, though they lie at hand in
embarrassing profusion. It will be enough
to say that even the author of The Vicar of
Wakefield, from whom surely a saner judg-
ment might have been expected, lays it down
as a rule “having the strongest foundations
in nature” that “the distresses of the mean
by no means affect us so strongly as the calami-
ties of the great.” If this astounding state-
ment has any significance at all, then it is
evident that we have no right to take any
interest in the “distresses” of dear Dr. Prim-
rose and his family.
The point of Lillo's experiment is now
apparent, and the resentment of “the refined
part of the Town” fully explained. The
London Merchant is a deliberate attempt to
break down the narrow limitations of tragedy
—to make it more human and to widen its
appeal by bringing it into touch with the com-
mon realities and interests of ordinary life.' I


1It may be noted in passing that Lillo's movement toward
realism in the higher drama was accompanied by a change in form:
prose he langua being substituted for
yerse. This too met with critical, opposition: - for
instance, pronounced prose in tragedy “the abomination of desola-
tion in the temple of the muses."

134
GEORGE LILLO
A few extracts from Lillo's dedication of his
play to Sir John Eyles, Member of Parliament
for the City of London, will serve to bring out
his own view of his innovation. Read without
reference to the critical doctrines which I have
summarized, much of his apology would seem
to us to be in the air. But we are now in a
position to see that he is really dealing with
issues which, though dead to-day, were living
issues at his time. The importance of this
dedication as a document will justify the length
of the quotation.

“If Tragick Poetry be, as Mr. Dryden has somewhere
said, the most excellent and useful kind of writing, the
more extensively useful the moraſ of any tragedy is,
the more excellent that piece must be of its kind.
“I hope I shall not be thought to insinuate that this,
to which I have presumed to prefix your name, is such;
that depends on its fitness to answer the end of tragedy,
the exciting of the passions, in order to the correcting
of such of them as are criminal, either in their nature
or through their excess. . . .
“What I wou'd infer is this, I think, evident truth;
that tragedy in so far from losing its dignity, by being
accommodated to the circumstances of the generality
of mankind, that it is more truly august in proportion
to the extent of its influence, and the numbers that are
properly affected by it. As it is more truly great to be
the instrument of good to many, than to a very small
part of that number.
“If Princes, etc., were alone liable to misfortunes,
arising from vice or weakness in themselves or others,
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there wou'd be good reason for confining the characters
in tragedy to those of superior rank; but, since the
contrary is evident, nothing can be more reasonable
than to proportion the remedy to the disease.
“I am far from denying that tragedies, founded on
any instructive or extraordinary events in history, or a
well-invented fable, where the persons introduced are
of the highest rank; are without their use, even to the
bulk of the audience. The strong contrast between a
Tamerlane and a Bajazet may have its weight with an
unsteady people and contribute to the fixing of them in
the interest of a Prince of the character of the former,
when, thro' their own levity, or the arts of designing
men; they are render'd factious or uneasy; tho' they
have the highest reason to be satisfied. The sentiments
and example of a Cato may inspire his spectators with
a just sense of the value of liberty, when they see that
honest patriot prefer death to an obligation to a tyrant,
who wou'd sacrifice the constitution of his country,
and the liberties of mankind, to his ambition or revenge."
I have attempted indeed to enlarge the province of the
graver kind of poetry, and should be glad to see it
t _ecarried on by some abler hand. Plays founded on
moral tales in private life may be of admirable use, by
carrying conviction to the mind with such irresistible
force as to engage all the faculties and powers of the
soul in the cause of virtue, by stifling vice in its first
principles. They who imagine this to be too much
to be attributed to tragedy, must be strangers to the
energy of that noble species of poetry.”
With equal clearness, though in a somewhat
more apologetic strain, these fundamental
1As several passages in his plays further attest, Lillo's politics
were those of the nonconformists of his time.



136
GEORGE LILLO
conceptions of tragedy and its objects are
brought out in the prologue to the same play,
spoken by Theophilus Cibber, and presumably
the work of Lillo himself:
“The Tragic Muse, sublime, delights to show
Princes distrest, and scenes of royal woe:
In awful pomp, majestic, to relate
The fall of nations, or some hero's fate:
That sceptred chiefs may by example know
The strange vicissitudes of things below:
What dangers on security attend;
How pride and cruelty in ruin end;
Hence Providence supreme to know, and own
Humanity adds glory to a throne . . .
Forgive us then, if we attempt to show,
In artless strains a tale of private woe.
A London "Prentice ruin'd is our theme;
Drawn from the fam'd old song that bears his name.
We hope your taste is not so high to scorn
A moral tale, esteem'd ere you were born;
Which, for a century of rolling years,
Has fill'd a thousand thousand eyes with tears.
If thoughtless youth to warn, and shame the age
From Vice destructive well becomes the stage-
If this example innocence secure, —--—s
Prevent Gür guilt, or Eyre ſection cure:
If Millwood's dreadful guiltàIId Sad despair
Commend the virtue of the good and fair:
Tho' art be wanting, and our numbers fail,
Indulge the attempt in justice to the tale.”

Once more the same note is struck, but
struck with a much more vigorous hand, in the
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prologue to Fatal Curiosity, which, like The
London Merchant, is a tragedy of private
life, though in blank verse. This prologue is
specially interesting because it was provided
by Fielding, and expresses the great novelist's
sympathy with the democratic principles
underlying Lillo's work.
“No fustian hero rages here to-night;
No armies fall, to fix a tyrant's right;
From lower life we draw our scene's distress—
Let not your equals move your pity less!
Virtue distrest in humble state support;
Nor think, she never lives without a court!"
Tho' to our scenes no royal robes belong,
And tho' our little stage as yet be young,
Throw both your scorn and prejudice aside;
Let us with favour not contempt be tried.
Thro' the first acts a kind attention lend;
The growing scene shall force you to attend.”
Here then we have the principles of Domestic
Tragedy as conceived by those who sought to
vindicate its claims to critical recognition, and
to make a place for it on the stage side by side
with the aristocratic tragedy of the time.
Much of Lillo's reasoning reappears, amplified
and elaborated, among the stock arguments
of the later defenders of the new type of drama
both in England and in France. But this is
a matter which need not detain us here.
1A palpable hit, in Fielding's best style.
138
GEORGE LILLO
Meanwhile it will be well to remark that the
aristocratic theory, though badly shaken,
was (as indeed we have already seen) by no
means destroyed, and that while the reception
accorded to The London Merchant was proof
of the existence of a public ready for such a
play, “the refined part of the Town” still
had their misgivings in regard to its propriety.
There is a lively scene in Sarah Fielding's
David Simple which gives us a glimpse both
of the kind of interest which Lillo's experiments
had aroused and of the position of those who,
priding themselves upon being people of taste
and culture, translated the theories of the
conservative critics into more colloquial forms
of speech. One lady in a select party remarks
that she actually knows people who had sat
with dry eyes through a performance of Cato
(the feat does not seem to be an impossibility)
and yet had shed tears at George Barnwell.
“Oh, intolerable!” exclaim a number of ladies
in chorus. “Cry for an odious Apprentice
Boy, who murdered his uncle at the instiga-
tion of a common woman, and yet be unmoved
when even Cato bled for his country!” Upon
this an old lady says: “That is no wonder,
I assure you, ladies, for I once heard my Lady
Know-all positively affirm George Barnwell
to be one of the best things ever wrote; for
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that Nature is Nature in whatever station it
is placed, and that she could be as much
affected with the distresses of a man in low
life, as if he was a Lord or a Duke.” The
significance of this revolutionary declaration—
in which we have of course the expression of
Sarah Fielding's own opinion — is unmistak-
able; it contains indeed in a nutshell the whole
theory of the new drama on the social side.
What follows shows that Lillo was by no means
without his admirers even among the devotees
of society. For another member of the party
announces that “Lady Know-all and Lady
Truewit have taken a fancy to set up the
author of George Barnwell for a writer, tho’
certainly he writes the worst language in the
world. There is a little thing of his called
The Fatal Curiosity which, for my part, I
know not what to make of, and they run about
crying it up as if Shakespeare himself might
have wrote it. Certainly, that fellow must be
something very low, for his distresses always
arise from poverty; and then he brings his
wicked wretches, who are to be tempted by
money to some monstrous action, which he
would have his audience pity them for.”
It is evident that the enormous power of
that one single monosyllable, “low”—which
was later, according to Goldsmith, to play
|40
GEORGE LILLO
havoc with humor on our stage—had already
been discovered by those who opposed the
new tragedy. In the light of this fact the
social and literary importance of Lillo's break
with aristocratic convention in the drama
becomes even more apparent. By his inno-
vation he precipitated a controversy which
forced upon public attention the long-accepted
traditions of the serious drama, and thus
ranged in two hostile camps those who abused
the new tragedy because it ventured to sub-
stitute an “odious Apprentice Boy” for the
divine Cato and sought its “distresses” in
ordinary poverty and crime, and those who
were bold enough to maintain that “Nature
is Nature in whatever state it is placed,”
and that we may properly be as much affected
by the calamities of a man in low life as by
those of a lord or a duke.
VI
We must be careful to put Lillo into his
proper historical perspective. No one, it
seems, is ever quite the first to do anything
in this world, and though, he may justly be
Ireº Jºlº ºl. Dºº-ſºll- stic Tragedy,
Jhe had his predecessors in that field. Already
in the days of the Elizabethan drama we find a
small group of tragedies—surviving specimens
G TO (tº C º
º














14|
A QUIET CORNER IN A LIBRARY
of a much larger number—the substance of
which is provided not by historical or romantic
incidents but by tales of crime in private life.
Two of these crude and violent murder-plays—
Arden of Feversham and A Yorkshire Tragedy
—have derived a certain factitious interest
from the fact that they have at times been
ascribed (though without the slightest reason)
to Shakespeare; while the former is also con-
nected with our own author, since, as I have
noted, he left behind him at his death an unfin-
ished adaptation of it. But while these so-
called Domestic Dramas are indeed domestic
in the sense that they deal with homely mate-
rials and characters taken from the middle
and lower classes, they have really very little
in common with Lillo's work. Luridly sensa-
tional in quality and coarsely realistic in
method, they represent only an accidental
development of the Elizabethan Chronicle
Play and the Tragedy of Blood, and they
depended for their popularity upon their
success in appealing to that kind of taste for
the horrible which now finds its satisfaction
in the literature of the police courts. No
theory was behind them, and certainly no
moral purpose was held in view. Only one
play of our romantic age really deserves recog-
nition as a Domestic Tragedy in the later sense
142
GEORGE LILLO
of the term, and that is Thomas Heywood's
A Woman Killed with Kindness, and save
perhaps for a passing phrase in the prologue—
“Look for no glorious state, our Muse is bent
upon a barren subject”—there is nothing
even in this to show that the author was con-
scious of writing a drama essentially different
from that romantic kind which then held
almost undisputed possession of the stage.

I have said that after the Restoration the
rigorously formulated and more strongly em-
phasized. It is significant therefore that the
protest against it now became more–distinct,
and that with this protest the guiding influence
of a set purpose also began to emerge. This
is shown in certain works of three playwrights
—Otway, Southern, and Rowe – who demand
attention as Lillo's immediate forerunners,
and whose importance as pioneers Lillo him-
self indeed recognized, for in a passage, which
I have omitted, in the prologue of The London
Merchant he specifically records the fact that
they had ventured to show the tragic muse
in “a humbler dress.” TIn Otway's Orphan
for example, we have, as Johnson put it, “a
domestic tragedy drawn from middle life”—
though as the two principal male characters
are twin sons of a Bohemian nobleman, the

143
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phrase “middle life” must be taken in a very
broad sense. The domestic quality is even
more marked in “honest.” Tom Southern's
Fatal Marriage, or the Innocent Adultery,
a play which, dealing with a story of the
familiar Enoch Arden type, was long popular
on the stage and, as readers of The Rivals
will remember, was one of the books hurriedly
hidden by Miss Lydia Languish on the ap-
proach of Sir Anthony Absolute. Even more
again may Rowe's Fair Penitent be taken as a
landmark in our history, for in the prologue
to it the very principles are enunciated upon
which, thirty-six years later, Lillo himself
was to lay stress:
“Long has the fate of Kings and Empires been
The common business of the Tragic Scene.
As if Misfortune made the Throne his seat,
And none could be unhappy but the great . . .
Stories like these with wonder we may hear:
But far remote and in a higher sphere,
We ne'er can pity what we ne'er can share . . .
Therefore an humbler theme our author chose,
A melancholy tale of private woes;
No Princes here lost Royalty bemoan;
But you shall meet with sorrows like your own.”
As a document in the history of Domestic
Tragedy, this passage has an interest which
it would not be easy to exaggerate.
But while the plays just named have
144
GEORGE LILLO
undeniable importance as marking the begin-
nings of the movement against the narrow
post-Restoration theory of tragedy, still more
importance attaches from our point of view
to a little-known work entitled The Fatal
Extravagance, which was acted and published
under the name of one James Mitchell,
though it seems certain that the irrepressible
Aaron Hill had a very large share in its com-
position. In this drama, which first appeared
in 1720 (the South Sea Bubble year) in one
act, and was afterwards “improved into five
acts,” and the plot of which is taken directly
from A Yorkshire Tragedy, a vigorous attack
is made upon the passion for gaming which
then “raged furiously” in all classes of English
society. More interesting, however, than the
author's ethical purpose is his avowed effort
to make a tragedy out of “private sorrows.”
In the prologue, which is admittedly from the
pen of Hill, this feature is boldly thrust to the
front:
“The Rants of ruin'd Kings, of Mighty Name;
For pompous Misery, small Compassion claim.
Empires o'erturned, and Heroes held in Chains;
Alarm the Mind, but give the Heart no Pains.
To Ills remote from our Domestic Fears,
We lend our Wonder, but withhold our Tears.
Not so when, from such Passion, as we own,
Some Favourite Folly's dreadful Fate is shown:
U.
/
145
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There the Soul bleeds for what it feels within;
And conscious Pity shakes at suffering Sin.”
In these lines, as will be noted, opposition to
the aristocratic theory of tragedy is not merely
conscious; it has become aggressive.
The foregoing rapid sketch, though neces-
sarily wanting in details, is still complete
enough to enable us to put Lillo into his proper
place in the history of the Domestic Drama.
Th9ugh as a didactic trag rivate life
new thing, its significance as an innovation-
fully recogni e have seen, at the time
of its production—is not therefore to be ques-
tioned. As Brunetière admirably said in
reference to another matter: “Let us be on
our guard against those who are described as
precursors; ideas in the history of literature, as
elsewhere, belong to those who have developed
their consequences, and to no one else.” This
principle may be applied to Lillo. It was he
who elaborated and defined the fund amentāt
&\ſception of the new drama. He also pushed
that conception to its logical issue. In the
tragedies of his immediate predecessors, though
the rank of the persons was lowered, there was
little change in the nature of the subjects




employed or in the feelings invoked; the plots,
while involving—private interests ...; , were
146
GEORGE LILLO
still woven out-of-romanti-materials—in the

..iii.;;
downfall Lillo made-capital out of a fresh kin
of theme, and Produced a play which was
realistic in the most commonplace sense of the
term. Moreover, in respect even of the rank
of the persons his work was notably radical;
for it was he who first ventured “to descend
& *~~~~
so low as to introduce—the-character of a mer-
chant and hi tº ” He put
the moral element of tragedy in the foreground
of his enterprise, and by his emphasis upon the
ordinary everyday virtues of decency, honesty, (`)
and thrift broke entirely with the aristocratic

traditions of gallantry and CRTVâtry-on-the-
stage-Finally, on the side of form, he made-
an experiment to which not one of his fore-ſo *
runners had dared to set his hand; for ... (3
one and all these had adhered to verse as the
only proper medium for tragic emotion, he
adopted prose for the purpose of bringing the
domestic—interest—of-his—drama—into closer.
harmony with the actual life it was intended
T-----------
to reflect.
VII
One other aspect of our subject remains to
be considered. The appearance of Domestic
Tragedy. has something more than a merely
literary interest. Like a straw on the stream,
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it indicated the force and direction of a new
current in English society. This point has
already been implied, but it is important
enough to merit a little further attention.
Writing of Richardson's Pamela—a work
which in the history of prose fiction occupies
an analogous position to that of The London
Merchant in the history of the drama–Lord
Morley many years ago laid-stress on the
social significance of that epoch-making book
and of the literary form —the modern novel—
of which it is the first true example. “It was
not mere accident that the modern novel had
its origin in England. The novel as we under-
stand it depends on the interest of the private
life of ordinary men and women. But this
interest was only possible on condition that
the feudal and aristocratic spirit”—the spirit
of which Heroic Tragedy and the Heroic
Romance alike had been expressions – “had
received its death-blow, and it was only in
England that such a revolution had taken
place, even partially. It was only in England
as yet that the middle classes had acquired
such a position of consideration, equality, and
independence. . . . It was to be expected
that the first country where princes and Prin-
cesses were shorn of their divinity and made-
creatures of an act of parliament would also .



148
GEORGE LILLO
b% the country where the imagination would
be most likely to seek for serious passion,
---rºtº -
º - C tºº -ºº-ºººº... ººlººlººlº Or
paths and gººdy ---
private lives of
common indi
It was the land-
mark of a great social no less than a great
literary transition when all England went mad
with enthusiasm over the trials, the virtues,
the triumphs of a rustic lady's maid.” This
is admirably put; and as I myself have further
said in reference to the same matter, if the
place of the appearance of the modern novel
was not accidental, neither was the moment
of its appearance, for “it arose at a time when
under Sir Robert Walpole's firm rule England
was settling down after a long period of mili-
tary excitement, and when, with the conse-
quent growth of commerce and industry, the
prestige of the old feudal nobility was on the
wane, and the middle classes were increasing
steadily in social and political power.””
Now it is evident that these considerations
regarding the novel apply with equal cogency
to the Domestic Drama, and that what Lord
Morley has said about Pamela may quite
as truly be said about The LondoñIMārāhāfit,
The forces behind the one movement were also
1 Diderot and the Encyclopoedists.
* Outline History of English Literature, p. 177.


11 149
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behind the other. “It was the landmark of a
great social no less than a great literary tran-
sition” when audiences nightly packed the
theater in Drury Lane to weep over the down-
fall of “an odious Apprentice Boy.” Like the
novel, and for precisely the same reasons,
Domestic Tragedy first took definite shape in
England. And as an interesting detail it will be
noticed that the two forms arose practically
together, Lillo's experiment in the drama actu-
ally preceding Richardson's in prose fiction by
only eight years.
Let me dwell for a moment upon the fact
that while the old aristocratic conception of
tragedy was on the faceofitamätter of literary
theory only, it really rested on social founda-T
tions. The distinction between tragedy and
comedy on the stage was simply one indirect
result of those accepted—class—distinctions.
which formed part of the accepted order.
If all higher passion in the drama was limited
to the “distresses” of the great, while the life
of ordinary private people was treated as if
it could have a comic complexion only, the
basis of this curiously narrow view is to be
sought in something deeper than artistic
convention or academic rule. The practice
of the stage followed inevitably upon the caste
system which had been transmitted from

*
150
GEORGE LILLO
feudal times and upon its accompanying
sentiments and ideals. The drama held the
mirror up to nature, as nature was then
understood. In the mimic world of the theater
the “middling” and lower classes had to be.
kept in their proper places because they had
to be kept in their proper places in the actual
world outside. The dramatic monopoly of all
serious interest by the privileged few was at
once a sonsequence and a symbol of their long
unchallenged supremacy in the community at
large.
Here, then, we have the explanation of an
important fact to which passing allusion has
already been made. English tragedy was
never so severely aristocratic as the tragedy
of France. Why not? It was not simply
because the English drama was less affected
by the doctrinaire conventions of classicism.
It was at bottom because in England the
classes were not so rigorously divided as was
the case on the Continent.
Naturally enough, the larger social bearings
of their literary theories were but seldom
realized by the critics of the time. Now and
then, however, we come upon a chance phrase
or two in their writings which show that such
larger bearings were not altogether absent
from their minds. Thus the egregious Rymer
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lays down the proposition that tragedy
requires “such thoughts as quality and court
education might inspire"—the court, let us
say, of Charles II as an example—and solemnly
discusses the question “who and who may
kill one another with decency in a tragedy?
His answer is supremely ludicrous—as we
might anticipate from “the worst critic that
ever lived.”—but it is none the less very much
to the point, for it practically reproduces
the mediaeval rule of quia conditiones impares:
“If I mistake not, in poetry no woman is to
kill a man, except her quality gives her the
advantage above him; nor is a servant to kill
his master; nor a private man, much less a
subject, to kill a king, nor the contrary. Poet-
ical decency will not suffer death to be dealt
to each other by such persons, whom the laws
of duel allow not to enter the lists together.”
In this extraordinary version of the dramatic
proprieties the connection between social
code and literary theory is very clear. Well
on in the eighteenth century Bishop Hurd
reveals his sense of the same connection in
protesting against the subjection of the aris-
tocracy to humorous treatment on the stage:
“The higher characters being rarely seen or
1 It will be remembered that in Humphry Clinker a nobleman
refuses to fight a duel with a squire on the score of their social
inequality.
152
GEORGE LILLO
contemplated by the people but with rever-
ence, hence it is that in fact the representation
of high life cannot without offence to prob-
ability be made ridiculous, or consequently be
admitted to comedy under this view.”
The rise of Domestic Tragedy then is to be
interpreted as one sign of that social transfor-
mation which went on slowly but steadily in
England from the time of the Revolution of
1688 onward, and in particular of the continual
growth of the middle classes in power and
prestige. From this point of view two or
three features of The London Merchant are
specially worthy of attention. •T
In the first place, there is the character of
the merchant himself. The growth of the
middle classes in powe restige was in
large measure due to the expansion of commerce
and its increasing importance to the realm,
and as a result, those who were the representa-
tives and custodians of English mercantile
interests began more and more to realize their
social rôle and political influence. Thus we
have the portentous Thorowgood walking
the stage in all the full-blown self-conscious
dignity of an English merchant, and expatiating
in pompous periods on the greatness and
utility of the class to which he is proudſ tº
belong, an ich it confers (




153
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upon the world. Already such ideas had
found expression in popular literature. In a
remarkable paper in The Spectator Addison
had described himself standing on the steps
of the Royal Exchange, and had told his
readers how the “grand scene of business”
beneath him had set him speculating on the
way in which, while engaged in their own pri-
vate affairs, the “masters of commerce—wer
linking the aest—distant-parts-of-the-world
together by “bonds—ef-a-commóñ interest,”
distributing “the gifts of nature,” finding
“work for the poor,” and adding “wealth to the
rich and magnificence to the great.” Steele's
account in another Spectator of the debate at
the Club between Sir Roger de Coverley,
the mouthpiece of the old landed gentry, and
Sir Andrew Freeport, the typical city merchant,
had set forth the claims of commerce in an
even more specific form. Defoe in Roxana
had eulogized the “true-bred Merchant” as
“the best gentleman in the Nation,” and
Steele in The Conscious Lovers had struck the
same note on the stage: “Sir," says his Mr.
Sealand, “as much a Cit as you take me for, I
know the town and the world; and give me
leave to say that we merchants are a species
of gentry, that have grown into the world this
last century, and are as honourable, and

154
GEORGE LILLO
almost as useful, as you landed folks, that
have always thought yourselves so much above
us.” The-prosings of Thorowgood, stilted—
and dull as they are, have therefore, as we can
now see, a specific significance which reinforces
the general significance of the play as a whole.
* Then, secondly, the moral purpose of The
London Merchant has been emphasized. Jillo's
didacticism was no accidental characteristic
of his work; it was, as his own declaration
has shown us, primary and fundamental; the
'ethical utility of tragedy being for him the
starting point and justification of his new
experiment in the drama. Now the gradual
moralization of English literature during the
eighteenth century was in the main the result
of the spreading influence of the middle classes
and their Puritan spirit. We perceive the
direct effect of this in Lillo, as we perceive it in
Richardson. To put The London Merchant
into its proper place, we have to remember
that in it, practically for the first time on the
English boards since the fat days of the
Restoration, youthful weakness and profligacy
are presented not as a theme for merrymaking
and loose Taughter, but as-iſſustrations of theº-
whirlwind for his harvest. --—º
Finally, we must take note of the peculiar


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tone and quality of Lillo's moral teaching:
It is not only Puritan; it is also in the last’
degree utilitarian. We have seen that for
years *#. Merchant was much
patronized by the “Mercantile Interest,”
whose influence was largely responsible for its
annual revival at Christmas time. We need
not wonder at this. Lillo's drama is some-
thing more than a homily on the dangers of
licentiousness. I t is a sermon on dishonmon on dishonesty
andson the virtues which are essential for s
success in a commercial career – virtues of
which aristocratic literature had never deigned
to take cognizance. A typical evangelical
writer of the early nineteenth century—Vices-
simus Knox—in his advice to “those destined
for a mercantile life,” warns his readers against
novels and plays, because “they almost
invariably represent the virtues of a trader,
such, as honesty, sebriety-punctualify-and
industry, as contemptible and ridiculous”;
but he makes an exception in favor of The
London Merchant. The reason is clear. In
The London Merchant these very qualities
are kept—te-the-freat. Hogarth, whose own
work was itself a product of the same changing
social conditions, some years later showed
the ingenuous youth of his day the contrasted
ways of virtue and vice; the one leading to
156
GEORGE LILLO
wealth, honor, and high place; the other to
poverty, misery, and the jail. Lillo had
already enforced the same sublime truth in his
own artless fashion. Honesty is the best

policy for a º be Hºnest and you
& not be hanged, but may even live- to
become “ t.” We can
well imagine the natural anxiety of the “Mer-
cantile Interest” that all youths and appren-
tices should “mind the moral,” when such
gems of wisdom as these were clearly enunciated
by the actors with an eye to the twopenny
gallery:
“Business requires our attendance; business, the
youth's best preservative from ill, as idleness his worst
of snares";
and

“Method in business is the surest guide. He who
neglects it frequently stumbles, and always wanders
rplexed, uncertain, and in danger.”
Such were the precepts which the embryo
merchant was desired to lay to heart. “Since,”
wrote the German translator of Lillo's play,
“in every great commercial city there are so
many Barnwells who are walking thoughtlessly
in a similar path of destruction, may his
picture be to all young men who devote them-
selves to commerce, an example of horror and
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detestation! And may they, on the other
hand, take the honest Trueman, that trust-
worthy and industrious clerk, for their imita-
tion.”
Take heed, young men of the twopenny
| gallery, and when you are tempted to pilfer,
to neglect your business, or to go philandering,
emember the fate of George Barnwell!

VIII
In view of the immense success of The
London Merchant it seems strange that Lillo's
direct influence on the English drama should
have been so small. The stage is always on
the lookout for fresh sensations, and one
might well have supposed that there would
be playwrights in plenty to follow his lead;
the more so, that the vein of conventional
tragedy was by this time clearly exhausted.
As a matter of fact, however, the plays pro-
duced in England during the eighteenth century
which stand in the actual line of his work may
be counted on the fingers of one hand. Of
these, two only have any importance—Edward
Moore's The Gamester, which together with
The London Merchant carried the new style of
English drama to the Continent, and, much
better as a play than either though of far less
historical interest, The Mysterious Husband of
158
GEORGE LILLO
Richard Cumberland. The further evolution
of Domestic Tragedy must be followed, not
in England, but in France and Germany, and
in the works of such writers as La Chaussée,
Landois, Diderot, Sedaine, Mercier, Beaumar-
chais, and Lessing. In England its history
ultimately became involved with that of the
influence of German melodrama at the close
of the eighteenth century.

..º.º.
º:
jº.º. Several rea-
sons may suggested. I will here confine
myself to two.
To begin with, there is the fact that no writer
of marked–genius—and-power—no one of the
caliber of Diderot or Lessing— took up the
new form. We have seen that the popularity
of The London Merchant at the time of its
production and for some years afterward is to
be explained without the slightest reference to
the inherent merits of the play, which was too
crude and poor either to survive among the
fittest things in the struggle for existence when
its temporary vogue was over, or even to fur-
nish a satisfactory model for later dramatists;
while The Gamester, though a more respect-

able performance, was similarly lacking in the
qualities necessary for permanent success. It
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is perhaps desirable that the student of the
evolution of literature should occasionally
remind himself of the truism (which as an
evolutionist he may too easily forget) that
whatever importance he is inclined to attach
to environment and general conditions, no
great work of art, after all, is possible unless
we have the great artist. I do not doubt that
Lillo's lead might have been followed by the
creation of a new and living form of drama had
the right man arisen along with the oppor-
tunity. But the right man did not arise.
If Fielding, for example, whose sympathies,
as we have learned, were largely with it, had
devoted to Domestic Drama the powers which
afterwards went to the making of Amelia,
the history of that drama would, I believe,
have been different. It would, I venture to
think, have been different if Richardson had
written Clarissa (in which he himself saw the
materials of a fine tragedy) for the stage
instead of for the reading public. As it was,
the new type remained in the hands of men of
mediocre talents, and thus, while it indirectly
influenced the theory and practice of the
drama in various ways, in itself for the time
being it came to nothing.
If we now ask why, despite their avowed
interest in it, Fielding and Richardson were
160
GEORGE LILLO
not attracted to the Domestic Drama, the
answer, of course, is that their energies were
preoccupied by other work; and this introduces
us to a second reason for the sterility of Lillo's
experiment. At the time when the new drama
arose, the creative powers which might other-
wise have found their field on the stage were
drawn off into the novel. Now the novel,
as I have been solicitous to show, was itself
the product of precisely the same influences
in life and literature as had inspired The Lon-
don Merchant and The Gamester; but apart
altogether from the fact that the general
tendencies of the time favored its growth at
the expense of the drama, it offered in com-
parison a far better channel for the rising
democratic spirit. Professor Minto has argued
that the enormous and ever-growing popu-
larity of prose fiction was a chief cause of the
decline of poetry in England during the second
half of the eighteenth century. This is highly
probable. It is certain that it was a chief
cause of the decline of the drama, and the
general decline of the drama manifestly mili-
tated powerfully in its turn against the further
development of the middle-class serious play.
Thus, so far as England is concerned, the
influence of the new spirit-in-literatureſ at the
time whem-that spirit was fast-growing-in

- 161
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volume and range, has to be sought rather in

prose ficti n on the stage.
What, then, of Lillo's permanent importance
in the history of the European drama? That
he was an interesting figure in the literature of
his own time should now, I think, be apparent;
but it may still be urged that he belonged to
his own time only. Taking the largest view
of the significance of his work, however, we
may fairly contend that it was at least ger-
minal. WIf his attempt to enlarge the scope
of trageHy and to bring it into touch with the
realities of actual life had little immediate
result in England, ithe impulse which he gave
to Continental ºil. shows that it was by no
means abortive. It is by following the devel-
opment of Domestic Tragedy through their
writings that we can best understand that,
isolated and ineffective as he seems at first
sight to be, he was in fact a forerunner both
of what to-day we loosely call melodrama and,
more 1m Il an this, of that Social play
of realistic character and serious purpose which, º


is so-prominent a feature of our modern stage. !
162
SAMUEL RICHARDSON: THE FATHER
OF THE ENGLISH NOVEL
I
HAVE insisted in the foregoing essay that
from the point of view of the social signi-
ficance of literature there is a close connection
between Lillo's abortive experiment in the
Domestic Drama and the beginnings of that
new kind of prose fiction which we specifically
call the modern novel: both, as I have shown,
being indications of the fast-rising influence of
the middle classes in the early decades of the
eighteenth century. It is natural, therefore, to
turn from the author of The London Merchant
to the author ###j
who set-tondon weeping over the downfall
of “an odious apprentice boy” to the novelist
who wrought all England up to wild enthu-
siasm with his story of the trials and triumph
of a lady's maid. Of course the contrast be-
tween these two men is very striking. Lillo
was one of the obscurest of eighteenth-century
writers; he is treated by historians with neglect
or contempt; it is difficult to-day to obtain for
him even the moderate recognition which is
really his due. Richardson, on the other hand,
was one of the most prominent figures in his

163
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age; he occupies many pages in the annals of
literature, and the actual value of his work
has been exaggerated rather than under-rated.
Yet despite the prestige of his name and the
continual repetition of the commonplaces of
criticism regarding him, it is after all doubtful
whether outside the narrow circle of professed
students of literature he is much better known
—known, I mean, at first hand—than Lillo.
We often hear people reproducing what other
people have said about the tragic power of
Clarissa; but we may well wonder how many
of these glib retailers of borrowed opinions
have ever gone steadily through that volu-
minous work, I will not say four times, like
the author's admiring correspondent, Margaret
Collier, but just once. Richardson made his
appeal to a more leisured generation than ours,
and it is not surprising that we now recoil
from the appalling prolixity of his writings.
Who was the too-outspoken critic who once
defined a classic as a book which we talk about
but do not read? To be equally candid, I
fear that Richardson's novels have long since
become classics in this melancholy sense.
They keep their place of dignity on our shelves;
we look at them with respect and wax eloquent
over their merits; but we leave them undis-
turbed and seek our amusement elsewhere.
164
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
It is not, however, to be denied that they
retain a sort of shadowy power over our imagi-
nations; we do continue to talk about them;
and this is more than can be said for the plays
of Lillo, which are thus everlastingly excluded
even from the cynic's category of the classical.
And this fact provides the motive of the present
essay. Obviously, there is not the same reason
for writing about Richardson as there is for
writing about Lillo. But there is another
reason for doing so, and one which is perhaps
quite as good. For if the oblivion into which
the dramatist has fallen may be held to justify
the modest effort which I have made to rein-
state him among the writers of his time, the
interest which still clings about the name of
the novelist may just as fittingly serve as an
excuse for a brief and informal study of the
man and his work.
II
Samuel Richardson was born in 1689, and
was thus a year younger than Pope. Like
Lillo he came of the “middling” class, his
father being a joiner and, as he tells us, a “very
honest man,” his mother “a good woman, of
family not ungenteel.” He received a common-
school education only, learning no language
but his own, and, as his style subsequently
12 165
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showed, having no very rigorous training
even in that. A shy and sensitive boy,
caring nothing for play, and grave in manner
beyond his years, he was naturally an object
of derision to his school fellows. But he had
his own way of winning their affection. He
told them stories, partly from memory of
what he had read or heard, partly of his own
invention. All these stories, he afterwards
declared, “carried with them, I am bold to
say, a useful moral.” Already the didactic
turn of his mind was pronounced; and though
he makes no reference to the fact, we may
safely surmise that long-windedness was another
characteristic of these early essays in fiction.
The elder Richardson was at first ambitious
that his son should enter the church, and it was
only want of money that compelled him to
relinquish this design. But if his hortatory
talents were thus lost to the ministry, they
were not, as the sequel showed, to be lost to
the world at large. “Charles,” said Coleridge
on one occasion, to his friend Lamb, “you
never heard me preach, did you?” “My dear
C-C-Coleridge,” stammered Lamb in reply,
“I have n-n-never heard you do anything
else.” The application of this anecdote to
Richardson's case is obvious.
All thought of the church abandoned, Samuel
166
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
at seventeen was apprenticed to a printer and
stationer named Wilde, a hard man, though of
good standing in his business. As an appren-
tice the future novelist soon showed his mettle.
He might indeed have stood as the painter's
model for the good young man in Hogarth's
famous series of sermon-plates; for according
to his own account of himself, his industry,
his honesty, his desire for self-improvement,
and at the same time his punctilious attention
to his master's interests left nothing to be
desired. “I stole from the hours of rest and
relaxation my reading times for improvement
of my mind,” he tells us; and yet, as he is
solicitous to add, “I took care that even my
candle was of my own purchasing, that I
might not, in the most trifling instance, make
my master a sufferer.” His scruples went even
further than this; he made it a rule never to
sit up so late over his studies as to impair his
strength for the proper performance of his
duties on the following day.
His apprenticeship over, he became first a
compositor and then a proofreader, and in 1719
set up in business for himself in Fleet Street,
moving thence a little later to Salisbury Court
(now Salisbury Square), where he continued
to have his town quarters to the end of his
life. In the orthodox fashion of the good
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apprentice, he took as his first wife his master's
daughter, and when he married again he still
kept loyally to the trade by choosing the
daughter of a bookseller in Bath. He throve
greatly in business, climbing the commercial
ladder rung by rung, gaining the respect of all
with whom he had dealings in the city, and
in due course becoming one of the king's
printers and Master of Stationers Hall. These
details have their value for the light which
they throw upon the character of the man and,
through that, upon his writings. His attitude
toward trade is also instructive. He was not
in the least ashamed of printer's ink or of
the snug little fortune which it enabled him
to accumulate. Yet he still recognized that
business is one thing and what his century
called the beau monde quite another. He
accepted without demur the caste divisions of
his time. For him it was part of the divinely
appointed order that Temple Bar should
represent a social as well as a geographical
line of demarkation between two sharply
divided worlds; east of it lay the city; west,
the sacred regions of fashionable life. And it
is worth while to remember that as a novelist
he was always something of a “cit,” and was
never really at home west of Temple Bar.
This was fully understood by good judges at
168
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
the time. Lady Mary Wortley Montague
declared that she cried like a milkmaid (why
milkmaid?) over Clarissa, but that Richard-
son had “no idea of the manners of high
life.” Chesterfield said that he “mistook the
modes.” Walpole made a similar criticism.
Such strictures from such authorities must be
regarded as final. Richardson in fact was lim-
ited in experience and outlook by the bound-
aries of the class to which he belonged.
He continued to live entirely at his business
premises in Salisbury Court for many years,
and then, growing prosperity warranting the
course, he took a house in what was then the
country, in order to have a quiet resting place
to which to retire for what we should now call
his “week ends.” His first choice was a sub-
stantial residence in North End Road, Fulham,
“a few paces,” as he tells a correspondent,
“from Hammersmith Turnpike.” There he
lived till 1754, when he moved a little farther
out to Parson's Green, Fulham. By this
time, it must be remembered, he was something
more than a successful printer and “warm”
man of affairs. He was a celebrated author—a
novelist whose reputation was already Euro-
pean. At Parson's Green, his work done and
the responsibilities of Salisbury Court largely
left behind him, he was free to enjoy both his
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leisure and his fame. We picture him there,
the center of a little circle of fervent admirers
(mostly feminine) luxuriating in the flattery
which was freely poured upon him, and spend-
ing his closing years, in purring contentment,
in what Mr. Gosse has called a kind of per-
petual tea party. “The great author,” says
Thackeray, “was accustomed to be adored.
A gentler wind never puffed mortal vanity.
Enraptured spinsters flung tea leaves round
him, and incensed him with the coffee pot.
Matrons kissed the slippers they had worked
for him. There was a halo of virtue round his
nightcap. All Europe had thrilled, panted,
admired, trembled, wept, over the pages of
the immortal little kind honest man with the
round paunch.”
Unfortunately, dark shadows gathered about
him in the decline of his life. He had always
suffered from indifferent health and wretched
nerves, and though he had taken the utmost
care of himself—for a long time he was a
teetotaler and a vegetarian—his sedentary
habits and aversion to fresh air and exercise
ultimately told upon him, and the hypo-
chondria and extreme irritability which made
him miserable toward the last are thus easily
explained. He died of a stroke of apoplexy
in 1761.
170
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
Richardson had all the qualities of an excel-
lent man of business, for he was industrious,
painstaking, and shrewd, absolutely straight-
forward in all his dealings, and honest to the
finger tips. No man in the city of London was
more keenly alive than he to the value of a
penny, or practiced more persistently the
homely virtues of thrift and prudence. Yet he
was kind to his workpeople—according to
tradition, it was a little trick of his to hide a
half-crown piece among the types in the com-
posing room so that the first man to arrive
might find it and thus gain a reward for his
diligence—and he was generous to struggling
authors (he once, at least, came to the rescue
of Johnson during the latter's days of poverty),
and this is a trait which in a successful printer
and writer may be held to cover a multitude of
sins. Though his home life was marked by a
good deal of formality and austerity, he was
an affectionate husband and father and he
had a happy faculty of winning the love and
confidence of children. Perhaps his least
admirable characteristic was his inordinate
vanity, which grew with his fame and was
stimulated by the adulation of his little coterie
of female worshipers. An incident recorded
by Boswell is to the point here. One day in a
large company which was assembled for dinner
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in the house in North End, “a gentleman who
had just returned from Paris, wishing to
please Mr. Richardson, mentioned to him a
very flattering circumstance—that he had
seen his Clarissa lying on the king's brother's
table. Richardson, observing that part of
the company were engaged in talking to each
other, affected then not to attend to it. But
by and by, when there was a general silence
and he thought that the flattery might be
fully heard, he addressed himself to the gentle-
man: ‘I think, sir, you were saying something
about—'pausing in a high flutter of expecta-
tion.” But the gentleman, perceiving that
his host was fishing for compliments, mis-
chievously resolved to disappoint him. “A
mere trifle, sir,” he replied, with an exquisitely
sly air of indifference. Richardson's morti-
fication, Boswell adds, “was visible, and he
did not speak ten words more the whole day.”
We can well understand Boswell's further
statement that Johnson, who was present,
hugely enjoyed the joke. Entirely self-cen-
tered and self-involved, Richardson had, as
Johnson by this time had discovered, only one
topic of conversation—his own books; and in
regard to these he could tolerate only unquali-
fied praise; the slightest hint of adverse criti-
cism upset him completely. His childish
172
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
jealousy of other successful authors, and not-
ably of his most dangerous rival, Fielding, was
of course only one phase of his consuming
vanity. Perhaps we cannot wonder that he
never forgave the writer of Joseph Andrews
for his mercilessly severe and irreverent han-
dling of Pamela. But even his natural irrita-
tion, while it may explain, certainly does not
excuse, the petty spitefulness which he exhib-
ited in all his remarks upon his great con-
temporary. He thought Fielding hopelessly
vulgar; called his work “wretchedly low and
dirty”; declared that “his brawls, his jars, his
jails, his sponging-houses, were all drawn from
what he had seen and known"; and worst of
all, roundly abused Amelia while obstinately
refusing to read it. The two men—the one
so finicky and sensitive, the other so full-
blooded and robustious—were indeed so dia-
metrically opposed in temper and character
that no common ground of understanding and
sympathy could ever have been found between
them. It is not our business here to adjust
their differences. But it is well to realize that
Fielding possessed in abundance the quality
which Richardson most conspicuously lacked
—virility. Hazlitt once described Rogers as a
very lady-like poet. Without sarcasm, we may
call Richardson a very lady-like man. tº
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III
Till he reached fifty, our fat, honest, pras-
matical little printer had pursued his quiet
and prosperous way of life without dreaming
of the greatness that was in store for him. He
had from time to time at their request pro-
vided his friends among the publishers with
prefaces and dedications for their works; but
such things of course gave no indication of his
genius either to himself or to others; and thus
far he was aware of no promptings toward the
more ambitious kinds of authorship. Had he
died at fifty, therefore, you and I would have
known nothing about him, and a great page
in the history of eighteenth-century literature
would have remained unwritten. Then by
one of the most curious flukes recorded in the
annals of letters, he accidentally “slipped,”
according to his own expression, into the pro-
duction of an epoch-making book.
To understand how this came about we must
consider in some detail the lines along which
he unconsciously advanced toward the work
which was to bring him immediate and last-
ing fame.
I have already referred to his boyish pro-
pensity for story-telling. This, manifestly, is
itself an important fact. But to this must
now be added his precocious proficiency in the
174
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
feminine accomplishment of letter writing—a
perfect mania for which continued all through
his life. “From my earliest youth,” he tells
us, “I had a love of letter writing”; and he
goes on to relate that this love on one occasion
led to an incident which he rightly regarded
as prophetic.
“I was not eleven years old when I wrote spon-
taneously, a letter to a widow of near fifty, who,
pretending to a zeal for religion, and being a constant
frequenter of church-ordinances, was continually
fomenting quarrels and disturbances, by back-biting
and scandal, among all her acquaintance. I collected
from the Scripture; texts that made against her.
Assuming the style and address of a person in years,
I exhorted her, I expostulated with her. But my
hand-writing was known. I was challenged with it,
and owned the boldness; for she complained of it to
my mother with tears. My mother chid me for the
freedom taken by such a boy with a woman of her
years; but knowing that her son was not of a pert or
forward nature, but on the contrary shy and bashful,
she commended my principles, though she censured
the liberty taken.”
Pretty good, this, for a boy “not eleven
years old”. In this little bit of autobiog-,
raphy, written, as will be seen, with character-
istic self-complacency, Richardson the child
stands revealed to us as father of Richardson
the man.
But his letter-writing faculty had results
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far more important than this. It brought him
into close relations with women, and so helped
him to acquire that extraordinary knowledge
of the mysterious thing which sentimental
novelists call “the female heart,” which is one
of the outstanding features of his work. This,
too, is a point upon which he afterwards laid
StreSS.
“As a bashful, and not forward boy, I was an early
favourite with all the young women of taste and
reading in the neighbourhood. Half-a-dozen of them,
when met to work with their needles, used, when they
got a book they liked, and thought I should, to borrow
me to read to them, and both mothers and daughters
used to be pleased with the observations they put me
upon making. . . . I was not more than thirteen
when three of these young women; unknown to each
other, having an high opinion of my taciturnity,
revealed to me their love-secrets, in order to induce me
to give them copies to write after, or correct, for
answers to their lovers' letters, nor did any of them ever
know that I was secretary of the others. I have
been directed to chide and even repulse, when an
offence was either taken or given; at the very time
that the heart of the chider or repulser was open before
me, overflowing with esteem and affection, and the fair,
repulser, dreading to be taken at her word, directing
this word or that expression to be softened or changed.
One, highly gratified with her lover's fervour and vows
of everlasting love, has said, when I asked her direction,
‘I cannot tell you what to write, but (her heart on her
lips) you cannot write too kindly’; all her fear was only
that she should incur slight for her kindness.”
176
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
That as a boy of thirteen—an age when the
ordinary human male is particularly impervious
to the attractions of the other sex—Richardson
should have been chosen and should have been
willing to act as the confidant and adviser of
three young women in love, and should have
performed his delicate functions to their
entire satisfaction, is a fact of capital impor-
tance as illustrating both his precocity and the
peculiar bias of his mind. But it is even more
significant as showing the curious way in
which, while still very young, he was being
prepared for his future work. He received
his early training, not through books or lit-
erary discipline, but by direct contact with
certain phases of life; he thus gained knowledge
which no amount of mere scholarship would
ever have given him; and what is more, his
insight was quickened and his sympathies
engaged, while in placing his pen at the serv-
ice of his fair friends and exercising it in their
behalf, he learned how to impart to his letter
writing something of a dramatic character,
and to make it the vehicle of ideas and senti-
ments other than his own.
The qualities and powers which such experi-
ences helped to develop long lay latent and
unsuspected, as we have seen. But the time
came when they were to be turned to account.
\
\
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In 1739, as he himself records, two book-
sellers of London – “my particular friends”
(their names, by the way, were Rivington and
Osborne)—entreated him “to write for them
a little volume of letters, in the common style,
on such subjects as might be of use to those
country readers, who were unable to indite
for themselves.” The two publishers were
doubtless well aware of Richardson's passion
for letter writing, and were thus led to proffer
their request. At any rate the commission
was entirely in his line, and he accepted it
with avidity. But if his passion for letter
writing was strong, so also was his passion for
edification; and it occurred to him that he
might turn the humble venture he had taken
in hand to the moral as well as to the intel-
lectual advantage of his readers. “Will it
be any harm,” he said to his friends, “in a
piece you want to be written so low, if we should
teach them how they should think and act in
common cases, as well as indite?” Rivington
and Osborne “were the more urgent with me
to begin the little volume from this hint.” So
he set about his task and soon wrote “two or
three letters to instruct handsome girls, who
were obliged to go out to service, as we phrase
it, how to avoid the snares that might be laid
against their virtue.”
178
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
While he was engaged on these, it chanced
that a true story, which had been told him
many years before by a friend, came into his
mind; and, he continues, in the letter to Aaron
Hill from which the foregoing quotations have
been made:
“I thought the story; if written in an easy and
natural manner, suitably to the simplicity of it, might
possibly introduce a new species of writing, that might
possibly turn young people into a course of reading
different from the pomp and parade of romance
writing, and dismissing the improbable and marvellous
with which novels generally abound, might tend to
promote the cause of religion and virtue. I therefore
gave way to enlargement, and so Pamela became
what you see her.”
Such was the origin of the first of our modern \
novels, in the sense in which the word novel
is now understood; that is, the first sustained
work of fiction in which the machinery of the
older romances, heroic and picaresque, is
discarded, and the interest is made to center,
not in the adventures of princes, shepherds,
vagabonds, or criminals, but in the lives and
experiences of men and women belonging to
the ordinary contemporary social world. That
such a book should have been the result of a
happy accident—a kind of by-product of a
Complete Letter Writer—is of course the one
fact in its history which is most certain to
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arrest attention. Yet we must be careful not
to make too much of the fortuitous character
of the undertaking. As Richardson's own
statement shows, he was fully conscious of
experimenting in a “new species” of composi-
tion. From the outset, therefore, he realized
the importance of his innovation."
IV
It is not, I think, generally known that the
volume of Familiar Letters out of which Pamela
sprang was itself presently finished and pub-
lished. Few readers of Richardson, in all
probability, have ever troubled themselves
to dip into its pages, for a Letter Writer is
not commonly regarded as a very attractive
kind of literature. But it has some interest
in connection with our author's peculiar
methods and principles.
In accordance with its twofold aim, this
volume contains, on the one hand, “forms to
be observed in writing familiar letters,” and
on the other, instructions “how to think and
act justly and prudently in the common con-
cerns of human life.” Its most remarkable
1 In regard to Pamela there has been the inevitable discussion as
to “sources.” It has been suggested that Richardson may have
owed something to Marivaux's Marianne, an English translation of
which was published in 1736. The story of Amanda and the
wicked young lord of the manor in the 375th Spectator is also
supposed to have i. him hints. But even if such indebtednesses
could be proved, he is still entitled to the honor which belongs to
the independent discoverer.
180
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
feature, however, is the quite surprising range
of its subject matter. We find in it, as we
might expect, applications to parents for their
daughter's hand, declarations of diffident
wooers, letters of condolence which “with
small variations may be used to a husband on
the death of his wife, and on other melancholy
occasions of the like nature.” But along with
these we have also warnings to young women
on the dangers of London; advice to appren-
tices to obey their masters; demands of cred-
itors for the payment of debts; petitions of
distressed debtors for merciful treatment.
Even in preparing his Letter Writer, therefore,
Richardson was still the moralist and the man
of business. Two features of the collection
are, however, specially important. One is,
that a very large place is given in it to questions
of love, courtship, and marriage; the other,
that the letters often expand beyond their
nominal purpose into essays-in-little in the
art of description, narrative, and character-
ization. There is one, for example, from a
villager to a friend abroad, which conveys the
news that “John Jones, the organist, is married
to Sykes' daughter, Peggy, who proves an
arrant shrew, and has broke about his head his
best Cremona fiddle, in the sight of half-a-
dozen neighbours.” Such a letter can hardly
13 181
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be meant as a “form” to be followed, for the
circumstances imagined are, it is to be hoped,
too exceptional; nor is its value as an exhibition
of the evils of ill-assorted marriages or of
shrewishness particularly evident. It is in
fact a bit of comedy which might just as well
have found its place in the pages of Pamela.
Many of these letters indeed need only proper
setting to become scenes in a regular story.
I will give one—a very amusing one—in illus-
tration. It is written by a “disdainful
damsel” with reference to her not very wel-
come suitor.
“The first time the honest man came to see me, in
the way you were pleased to put into his head, was on
Sunday after sermon time. He began by telling me,
what I found at my finger ends, that it was very cold,
and politely blowed on his. I immediately perceived
that his passion for me could not keep him warm;
and in complaisance to your recommendation, con-
ducted him to the fireside. After he had pretty
well rubbed heat into his hands, he stood up with his
back to the fire, and with his hand behind him, held
up his coat, that he might be warm all over; and,
looking about him, asked with the tranquillity of a
man a twelvemonth married, and just come off a
journey, “How all friends did in the country?' I said;
“I hoped very well, but would be glad to warm my
fingers.’ “Cry mercy, madam," and then he shuffled
a little further from the fire, and after two or three
hems and a long pause, “I have heard," said he, "a
most excellent sermon just now. Dr. Thomas is a fine
182
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
man truly. Did you ever hear him; madam?" "No,
sir, I generally go to my own parish church.” “That's
right, madam, to be sure. What was your subject
to-day?’ ‘The Pharisee and the Publican, sir.” “A
very good one truly. Dr. Thomas would have made
a fine work on that subject. His text to-day was—
Evil communications corrupt good manners.” “A good
subject, sir. I doubt not that the doctor made a
fine discourse upon it.’ ‘O, ay, madam, he can't
make a bad one on any subject.’ I ran for the tea-
kettle, for, thought I, we shall have all the heads of
the sermon immediately. At last came the happy
moment of his taking leave, for I would not ask him
to stay supper. And then, though I had an oppor-
tunity of saying little more than yes and no at the
time, for he took the vapours he had put me into for
devotion or gravity (at least, I believe), he pressed my
hand, looked frightfully kind, and gave me to under-
stand that if, upon further conversation and inquiry
into my character, he should happen to like me as well
as he did from my behaviour and person, why truly
I need not fear in time being blessed with him for my
husband.”
As an episode from the comedy of courtship
this is capital. But it is by no means clear
what purpose such an effusion is supposed to
serve in a volume designed for the use of “those
country readers who were unable to indite
for themselves.” Was it the author's aim to
sharpen their wits as well as to improve their
characters and their style? Did he intend his
“disdainful damsel” to provide encouragement
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to young ladies in like case to take care
of themselves and poke fun at their awkward
lovers? We need not doubt that he was true
to his didactic principles in framing this epistle.
But it is evident, I think, that he was carried
away by the possibilities of the situation he
had devised, and the letter in consequence has
all the qualities which characterize the work
of Richardson the novelist. It might well in-
deed have come from the lively pen of Miss
Anna Howe.
V
To return to Pamela. Once embarked upon
his undertaking, Richardson's progress was
rapid. While engaged upon it, he tells us, he
read it portion by portion to his “worthy-
hearted wife” and a young lady friend who
was then staying with them, who used to drop
into his “little closet” every evening with the
question—“Have you any more of Pamela,
Mr. R.? We are come to hear a little more
of Pamela.” Thus encouraged, he made such
headway with his task that the original two
volumes, begun, according to his memorandum,
on November 10, 1739, were finished on Jan-
uary 10 following: not a bad record for an
author who was meanwhile immersed in “other
business.”
184
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
Published early in 1740, the work scored an
instant and enormous success—a success which
must indeed have exceeded Richardson's wild-
est expectations, for he had written it for
“young people” in his own “middling” class,
and behold! it also conquered the critics and
brought the aristocratic world to his feet.
Pope—the great Pope himself—praised it; the
chaplain of St. Saviour's, Southwark, recom-
mended it from the pulpit—undoubtedly the
first time that any piece of fiction had been so
distinguished; fashionable ladies, it is said,
carried it with them to their routs and mas-
querades; not to have read Pamela, the
Gentleman's Magazine declared, was judged
by “the Town” as “great a sign of want of
curiosity” as “not to have seen the French and
Italian dancers.” One evidence of this popu-
larity was the appearance before the year was
out of a spurious continuation entitled Pamela
in High Life. This in itself has no value; but
it is indirectly important because it prompted
Richardson's own sequel, now unfortunately
to be considered an essential part of his work.
In regard to this sequel, Pope and his satellite
Warburton had advised him “to make it a
vehicle for satire upon the follies and fashions
of the great world, by representing the light
in which they would appear to the rustic
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A QUIET CORNER IN A LIBRARY
Pamela when she was introduced to them.”
Had Richardson possessed the required knowl-
edge of “the great world,” the suggestion
would have been excellent; but he did not, and
realizing his deficiencies, he wisely left the
matter alone. But he made as great a mistake
in another way. He allowed his didactic tend-
ency to have its full fling, and the second part
of Pamela is in effect a ponderous and weari-
some treatise on domestic relationships, the
upbringing of children, and kindred themes.
Let us glance at the book which suddenly
transformed the little printer into one of the
most famous authors of his day. We call it
simply Pamela, but it is well to remember its
original full title, which is not only a program
but also an advertisement and a declaration
of faith: Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded. In a
Series of Familiar Letters from a Beautiful Young
Damsel to her Parents. Published in order to
Cultivate the Principles of Virtue and Religion in
the Mind of the Youth of Both Sexes. A narrative
which has its Foundations in Truth; and at the
Same Time that it agreeably entertains by a Variety
of Curious and Affecting Incidents, is entirely
divested of all those Images which, in too many
Pieces calculated for Amusement only, tend to
inflame the Minds they should instruct. Reduced
to its bare outlines, the story introduced
186
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
by this prodigious preamble is as follows:
Pamela Andrews is the handsome daughter of
humble but God-fearing parents, who have
trained her in the strictest ways of religion
and virtue. She becomes lady's maid to a
certain Mrs. B., who has a son, a good-looking
and attractive young fellow, but unfortunately
of “free principles.” The inevitable happens;
Mr. B. becomes enamored of his mother's
pretty servant; and when Mrs. B. dies (her
death forms the actual starting point of the
narrative) he begins to pester her with his
attentions, not, as may be imagined, for what
the French call le bon motif. Pamela resists;
but her resistance only adds fuel to his flame.
Then under pretense of taking her on a visit
to her parents, he beguiles her to a lonely
house on his Lincolnshire estate, where his
housekeeper, the vile Mrs. Jewkes, does all
in her power to second his efforts. In this
part of the story there is a great deal to remind
us of the extraordinary difference in taste vº
between Richardson's time and ours. He ~f-...s'
announced in his preface, and he did so of Vº

course with absolute sincerity, that his purpose \ } ºr
was to make vice odious and virtue lovely \
“without raising a single idea throughout the
whole book that shall shock the exactest
º
purity.” Yet the language used and the
jº tº $ "
* -
#. '-3.
187 -
A QUIET CORNER IN A LIBRARY
views expressed by Mrs. Jewkes in her many
conversations with Pamela—conversations
which the girl herself reproduces faithfully and
in detail — are such as to take one's breath
away when we encounter them in a book
intended virginibus puerisque. Perhaps it will
help us to get at the right point of view in
regard to this matter if we remember that,
while we are now disgusted by Smollett's
grossness, Dean Delaney read Roderick Ran-
dom aloud to his wife and Peregrine Pickle
was one of the books borrowed by Lydia
Languish from the circulating library. An-
other and more personal aspect of Richardson's
work, suggested at this point, may also be
touched on. All his characters have a craze
for reducing everything to writing; they have
all his own business-like habits and love of
order and system. Thus Pamela in her impris-
onment keeps an elaborate journal in which
she records every incident and interview and in
which she analyzes minutely her thoughts and
feelings. Thus, too, Mr. B., not satisfied with
verbal assaults, sends her a formal statement
of his proposals, divided into “articles,” which
are numbered I to VII; while Pamela replies
to him in a similar document, taking up his
“articles” in sequence, one by one. For
example, under VI, Mr. B. defines his position:
188
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
“Now, Pamela, will you see what a value I set upon
the free-will of a person already in my power; and
who, if these proposals are not accepted, shall find
that I have not taken all these pains, and risked my
reputation, as I have done, without resolving to gratify
my passion for you at all adventures. And it will
behoove you to consider whether it is not better for
you to comply upon terms so advantageous to you,
and so beneficial to your father and mother and other
friends, than to be mine without condition or equiva-
lent.”
In answer to which Pamela defines her
position, thus:
“I know, sir, by woful experience, that I am in your
power; I know all the resistance I can make will be poor
and weak, and perhaps stand me in little stead; I dread
your will to ruin me is as great as your power; yet, sir,
will I dare to tell you that I can make no free-wiłł
offering of my virtue. All I can do, poor as that may
be, I will do, to preserve my honour; and then, if I
cannot escape the violence of man, I can safely appeal º
--,
f
to the great God my only refuge, with this consolation. t
that my will bore no part in my violation.” •
Nothing could be more regular and official
than such an exchange of views; and in the
circumstances, nothing surely could be more
amazing.
Meanwhile, the story creeps slowly on from
point to point. Pamela attempts to escape,
but is deterred by a mad bull, by her fear of
robbers, and so on. In her despair, she is
189
A QUIET CORNER IN A LIBRARY
almost driven to suicide. But at length her
constancy and her sorrows touch her master's
heart. He is moved to the pity which is akin
to love. A true affection springs up in place
of the false. He obtains by fair means what
he could not gain by foul; and in the end,
Pamela becomes the “happy, thrice happy”
Mrs. B.
There are still persons, I believe, who
profess to enjoy Pamela. For my own part
I find it dreary stuff, though I admit that as a
picture of manners—or more correctly, of
certain phases of life seen from a certain point
of view—it is not without interest. But if
poor as a story, it is far worse as a tract. Its
famous moral teaching, trumpeted abroad by
the self-complacent author himself, and re-
ceived with a general chorus of praise, will not
in fact bear a moment's examination.
The fault does not lie with the theme of the
book, or with its occasional coarseness and
pruriency. These things, as I have said,
belonged to Richardson's age, and may there-
fore be dismissed. It lies with the character
of the heroine herself and her relations with
her master. One does not want to be too hard
upon her; but she is not the sort of young
woman to provide a satisfactory text for the
author's sermon. She is too self-conscious
190
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
and calculating; too politic in her behavior
toward her humble suitor, Mr. Williams, on
the one hand, and her aristocratic persecutor
on the other. Her shrewdness and prudence
are in fact quite as much in evidence as her
*~~~~. --------, ---.
virtue; she acts correctly, it is true, but at the
same time she plays her cards remarkably well.
It is not apparent that she had any affection
for Mr. B. to start with, and the eagerness
with which she ultimately accepts him, and the
fulsome expressions of gratitude in which she
indulges, make a very unpleasant impression
upon us at the close. Putting the matter on
the lowest ground, we may question with
Scott whether her example “is not as well
calculated to encourage a spirit of rash enter-
prise as of virtuous resistance.” From a
higher standpoint we may justly complain
of the cool and narrow utilitarianism which it
would seem to be the author's main purpose
to inculcate. Virtue rewarded!... “Is... the
reward of virtue bread?” asked Pope. In
Pamela's case it is an establishment and a
coach-and-six.
Nor must the treatment of Mr. B.'s character
be overlooked. Pamela was designed for the
edification of the “youth of both sexes.”
What sort of inspiration and guidance would
Richardson's young men readers be likely to

tº 191
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find in this study of an utter profligate who,
having exhausted all his arts in the vain
- pursuit of a helpless girl, discovers that he can
'get his way by the aid of a clergyman and the
Bible, and becomes in the sequel “one of the
best and most exemplary of men?” Richard-
son's whole conception of Mr. B. is vitiated
through and through by the tradesman's
spirit of sycophancy in respect of the upper
classes. We are made to feel that there is one
standard of conduct for the “quality” and
another for ordinary folk. As Traill put it,
Mr. B. has already a couple of good “places”
on earth, and that he should desire a third in
heaven is really highly creditable to him as a
member of the aristocracy and a landowner.
As Scott pointed out, he “does not seem to
have incurred any severe censure among his
neighbours for the villainies which he practised
upon Pamela; she herself supposes them more
than atoned for by his condescension in wedding
her; and consents to receive into favour even
* the unwomanly and infamous Mrs. Jewkes
… because the old procuress had acted a part
she should have been hanged for, at the
command, forsooth, of a generous master!”
In the same way old Gaffer Andrews expresses
no indignation at the conduct of Mr. B.
toward his daughter; he is simply overwhelmed
192
SAMUEL, RICHARDSON
by the honor which the reformed rake does to
the family by making the girl his wife."
Sir James Mackintosh tried hard to turn the
edge of such adverse criticism by emphasizing
the limitations of the author's plan. Richard-
son's purpose, he insisted, was simply “to
dispose young women of low rank to good
conduct by such motives as will work. The
hope of marrying a squire, though profligate,
is a powerful instrument. This is a low and
homely morality, to be sure; but Richardson
in this place aimed no higher.” This is, I
think, the best that can be said for the ethics
of the book; but it would hardly justify us to-
day in recommending it from the pulpit.
I may add that even at the time the teachings
and tendencies of Pamela were not accepted .
without protest. Among professed moralists,
good old Isaac Watts showed his sound
common sense by raising a dissentient voice.
But a more effective criticism was passed
upon the book in a travesty entitled
1 In the churchyard of a little village in Dorsetshire I once came
across the following epitaph. It reminded me so much of Richard-
son that I transcribed it, and for the same reason I reproduce it
here: “In memory of William Forder, who died July 21st, 1817.
aged 54 years. #. honesty, fidelity, and strict attention to the
interests of his master and mistress, Francis Fane, Esq. and Mrs.
Fane, for more than 30 years, are here recorded in testimony of
their approbation and as an example to all those whom Providence
may § ace in a similar situation.” I could not help wondering, as
I read this ill.i. epitaph, whether, like the Boston cle #:
t
man in the anecdote, Francis Fane, Esq., and Mrs. Fane mig
not have to complain of the “rather mixed society” of heaven.
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An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews,
in which the mingled piety and cunning of
Richardson's heroine are pitilessly exposed.
In one place, for example, she hears her master
approaching, and upon this—
“I ran up into my room, and washed and dressed
myself as well as I could, and put on my prettiest
round-eared cap, and then I practised all my airs before
the glass, and then I sat down and read a chapter
in The Whole Duty of Man.”
This is cruel enough, in all conscience; but it
is not without justification. We do not know
who wrote this skit. Richardson chose to
think it was Fielding, and perhaps he was
right: the passage quoted is quite in the
great novelist's style. At any rate Fielding a
little later turned the batteries of his ridi-
cule upon Pamela in the opening chapters of
Joseph Andrews, which, as everybody is aware,
was in its inception a parody of Richardson's
book.
VI
Richardson was in no hurry to follow up his
first success. It was not till 1747–48 that he
published in installments—seven volumes in all
—his second novel, Clarissa, or the History
of a Young Lady.
There has been a good deal of wild talk about
194
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
Clarissa. Admiring critics in dealing with it
have thrown their superlatives about with a
lavish hand. It has been placed in the front
rank of English novels. Its heroine has been
pronounced the most living woman in the
whole range of fiction. Even its clumsy plot
has been eulogized as “a model of ingenuity
and artifice.” Such praise seems to me reckless
and absurd. Yet Clarissa is certainly a very
remarkable work. It is not only Richardson's
masterpiece, but also one of the outstanding
novels of the eighteenth century.
Clarissa Harlowe is the beautiful daughter of
an English country gentleman, and a young
lady, according to Richardson's own descrip-
tion, “of great delicacy, mistress of all the
accomplishments, natural and acquired, of
the sex, having the strictest notion of filial
duty.” Her father is a domestic tyrant, who
regards his authority over his family as
unlimited, and whose temper is stern and
unrelenting; her mother, a weak though well-
meaning woman, who is distressed by her
husband's severity, but has not strength of
mind enough to make a stand against him.
Clarissa, however, is not the only child of her
parents. She has a surly brother named James,
and a mean and disagreeable sister, Arabella,
who dislikes her because of her superior beauty,
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A QUIET CORNER IN A LIBRARY
$.
and because she [Arabella] has been passed
over in Clarissa's favor by their grandfather
Harlowe in the distribution of his little prop-
erty. This dislike is intensified into hatred
when, just before the drama opens, Robert
Lovelace, the chief male character of the
piece, and, as we soon learn, a scoundrel of the
deepest dye, transfers his suit from Arabella
to Clarissa. A duel between James Harlowe
and Lovelace, in which the former is wounded
in the arm, had been one consequence of this
action. Its more important result, however,
is to be sought in Arabella's bitter jealousy of
her sister.
One can conceive poor Clarissa's unhappiness
under such conditions and in such surroundings.
But the sum of her misery is not yet complete.
Her brutal father is determined to force her
into marriage with a wealthy suitor, a con-
temptible fellow named Solmes, and he stops
at nothing in his effort to bend her will to his
own. This is Lovelace's opportunity. He
professes to come to her rescue. The day
fixed for the hated marriage draws near. In
desperation she throws herself upon his
protection. Only when it is too late does she
discover how thoroughly she has been deceived
in him. He promises to convey her for safety
to the house of a relative—a mere trick to get
196
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
her into his power. He actually takes her to
the establishment of a certain Mrs. Sinclair,
who is simply Mrs. Jewkes over again, though
in an even more infamous form. It is indica-
tive of the poverty of Richardson's invention
that he should thus have to fall back upon
the machinery of his previous novel. The
deceived and defenseless heroine — her prof-
ligate lover—his scheme to entrap her—the
vile subordinates, his creatures, who help him
to carry it out: all these, though much strength-
ened in the presentation, are obviously repeated
from Pamela.
Clarissa is now Lovelace's prisoner, as
Pamela had been Mr. B.'s; but the persecution
which she has to undergo is a thousand times
more diabolical than that to which her pre-
decessor had been subjected. At length she
contrives to escape, and takes lodgings with a
Mrs. Moore, in Upper Flask Walk, Hamp-
stead. But Lovelace' servant, Will Summers,
tracks her out, and Lovelace himself, cleverly
disguising himself as an old and gouty man
(he is, among many other things, an accom-
plished actor), repairs to Mrs. Moore's house,
ostensibly in search of apartments, and so
surprises and recaptures his victim. He thus
describes the incident to his friend and con-
fidant, Belford:
14 197
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“I saw it was impossible to conceal myself longer
from her, any more than (from the violent impulses
of my passion) to forbear manifesting myself. I un-
buttoned therefore my cape; I pulled off my flapped
slouched hat; I threw open my great-coat, and, like the
devil in Milton (an odd comparison, though!)
I started up in my own form divine,
Touched by the beam of her celestial eye,
More potent than Ithuriel's spear.
“Now, Belford, for a similitude—now for a likeness
to illustrate the surprising scene, and the effect it had
upon my charmer and the gentlewoman! But nothing
was like it, or equal to it. The plain fact can only
describe it, or equal it. Thus then take it.
“She no sooner saw who it was than she gave three
violent screams, and before I could catch her in my
arms (as I was about to do the moment I discovered
myself) down she sunk at my feet in a fit; which made
me curse my indiscretion for so suddenly, and with so
much emotion, revealing myself.
“The gentlewoman, seeing so strange an alteration
in my person, and features, and voice, and dress, cried
out “Murder, help! murder, help!" by turns, for half
a dozen times running. This alarmed the house, and
up ran two servant-maids, and my servant after them.
I cried out for water and hartshorn, and everyone flew
a different way, one of the maids as fast down as she
came up; while the gentlewoman ran out of one room
into another, and by turns up and down the apartment
we were in, without meaning or end, wringing her
foolish hands, and not knowing what she did.
“Up then came running a gentleman and his sister;
fetched and brought in by the maid, who had run down,
and having let in a cursed crabbed old wretch, hobbling
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SAMUEL RICHARDSON
with his gout and mumbling with his hoarse, broken-
toothed voice, who was metamorphosed all at once into
a gay, lively young fellow, with a clear accent and all
his teeth, she would have it that I was neither more nor
less than the devil, and could not keep her eye from
my foot, expecting no doubt every minute to see it
discover itself to be cloven.
“For my part, I was so intent upon restoring my
angel, that I regarded nobody else. And at last, she
slowly recovering motion, with bitter sighs and sobs
(only the whites of her eyes, however, appearing for
some moments) I called upon her in the tenderest
accents, as I kneeled by her, my arm supporting her
head—“My angel! my charmer! my Clarissal look upon
me, my dearest life!—I am not angry with you.-I will
forgive you, my best beloved!”
“The gentleman and his sister knew not what to
make of all this; and the less when my fair one, recover-
ing her sight, snatched another look at me, and then
again groaned and fainted away.”
Lovelace continues to describe the scene
in the same minute fashion, but we must not
now follow him further. Enough has been
quoted to show that he has a wonderful eye
for detail and is master of a graphic and
vivacious style.
The climax of the tragedy is now reached.
More determined and reckless than Mr. B.,
Lovelace does not scruple to resort to the
vilest means to compass Clarissa's ruin. As
Clarissa herself reports: “Under pretence of
engaging me to make a visit in town,” he
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“betrayed me back again to this vile house"—
this is a fair description of Mrs. Sinclair's
establishment—“where, again made a prisoner,
I was first robbed of my senses and then of my
honour.” *
But the villain himself does not go unscathed.
Success does not bring him the satisfaction
he had expected. Smitten with remorse (or
something like it) he now offers his victim the
one reparation in his power—marriage—only
to find all his pleadings rejected with indigna-
tion. Finally Clarissa obtains her liberty.
But her heart is broken, and she slowly pines
away. After her death her persecutor reaps
his reward; he is killed in a duel by her cousin,
Colonel Morden.
Such is, in summary, the main plot of this
oppressive and harrowing story, hundreds of
pages of which are devoted to the evolution
of Lovelace' tortuous schemes, to the tricks,
deceptions, forgeries, and misrepresentations by
which he ultimately attains his ends, and to
the minute analysis of the long-drawn agony
of the heroine' martyrdom. Repulsive it cer-
tainly is, and at times absolutely nauseating;
but we cannot deny that in total effect it is
extremely powerful. Happily the horror of
the tragedy is to some extent relieved by the
presence of a regular comedy sub-plot, the
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SAMUEL RICHARDSON
principal figure of which is Clarissa's friend,
Anna Howe, a charming and vivacious girl,
whose high spirits and irrepressible humor are
like occasional bursts of sunshine amid the
prevailing gloom. -
Richardson's power depends so much on his
peculiar method—the slow and laborious
accumulation of details for the gradual creation
of the impression he wishes to produce—that
his art cannot quite fairly be represented by
selections. But I will give one extract which
will serve to illustrate his way of dealing with
his materials. The scene I choose—that of
Clarissa's death—is by the common consent
of the critics one of the great scenes of the
book. The reader may therefore feel assured
that I am presenting our author at his best.
The narrative is contained in a letter from
“Mr. Belford to Robert Lovelace, Esq.,”
dated simply “Thursday night.” It is some-
what long; but length is of the essence of
Richardson's art; and its typical quality would
therefore be destroyed by curtailment.
“I may as well try to write; since, were I to go to
bed, I shall not sleep. I never had such a weight of
grief upon my mind in my life, as upon the demise
of this admirable woman; whose soul is now rejoicing
in the regions of light. You may be glad to know the
particulars of her happy exit. I will try to proceed;
for all is hush and still; the family retired; but not one
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of them; and least of all her poor cousin, I daresay, to
rest. At four o'clock, as I mentioned in my last, I was
sent for down; and as thou usedst to like my descrip-
tions, I will give thee the woful scene that presented
itself to me as I approached the bed. The Colonel
was the first that took my attention, kneeling on the
side of the bed, the lady's right hand in both his, which
his face covered, bathing it with his tears; although she
had been comforting him, as the woman since told me,
in elevated strains, but broken accents.
“On the other side of the bed sat the good widow; her
face overwhelmed with tears, leaning her head against
the bed's head in a most disconsolate manner; and
turning her face to me, as soon as she saw me—O Mr.
Belford, cried she with folded hands—the dear lady—a
heavy sob permitted her not to say more. Mrs. Smith,
with clasped fingers and uplifted eyes, as if imploring
help from the only power which could give it, was
kneeling down at the bed's foot, tears in large drops
trickling down her cheeks. Her nurse was kneeling
between the widow and Mrs. Smith, her arms extended.
In one hand she held an ineffectual cordial which she
had just been offering her dying mistress; her face was
swollen with weeping (though used to such scenes as
this); and she turned her eyes towards me, as if she
called upon me by them to join in the helpless sor-
row, a fresh stream bursting from them as I approached
the bed.
“The maid of the house with her face upon her folded
arms, as she stood leaning against the wainscot, more
audibly expressed her grief than any of the others.
The lady had been silent a few minutes, and speechless,
as they thought, moving her lips without uttering a
word; one hand, as I said, in her cousin's. But when
Mrs. Lovick, on my approach, pronounced my name-
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SAMUEL RICHARDSON
O Mr. Belford, said she, with a faint inward voice, but
very distinct nevertheless—Now—Now—(in broken
periods she spoke). I bless God for his mercies to his
poor creature—all will soon be over—a few—a very few
moments—will end the strife—and I shall be happy.
Comfort here, sir (turning her head to the Colonel)—
comfort my cousin – see! the blameable kindness—
he would not wish me to be happy so soon! Here she
stopped for two or three minutes, earnestly looking upon
him. Then resuming—My dearest cousin, said she, be
comforted — what is dying but the common lot? The
mortal frame may seem to labour — but that is all!—
It is not so hard to die as I believed it to be.—The
preparation is the difficulty—I bless God I have had
time for that—the rest is worse to beholders than to
me! I am all blessed hope—hope itself. She looked
what she said, a sweet smile beaming over her coun-
tenance.
“After a short silence—Once more, my dear cousin;
said she, but still in broken accents, commend me most
dutifully to my father and mother.—There she stopped.
And then proceeding–To my sister, to my brother, to
my uncles—and tell them, I bless them with my parting
breath—for all their goodness to me—even for their
displeasure, I bless them—most happy has been to me
my punishment here! Happy indeed! She was silent
for a few moments, lifting up her eyes, and the hand
her cousin held not between his. Then O deathl said
she, where is thy sting! (the words I remember to have
heard in the burial-service read over my uncle and
poor Belton). And after a pause—It is good for me
that I was afflicted! Words of Scripture, I suppose.
Then turning towards us, who were lost in speechless
sorrow—O dear, dear gentlemen, said she, you know not
what foretastes, what assurances—and there she again
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stopped, and looked up as if in a thankful rapture,
sweetly smiling.
“Then turning her head towards me—Do you, sir,
tell your friend that I forgive him! And I pray to God
to forgive him! Again pausing, and lifting up her eyes,
as if praying that he would. Let him know how happily
I die:—and that, such as my own, I wish to be his last
hour. She was again silent a few moments: and then
resuming—My sight fails mel—Your voices only—(for
we both applauded her Christian, her divine frame,
though in accents as broken as her own) and the voice
of grief is alike in all. Is not this Mr. Morden's hand?
pressing one of his with that he had just let go—Which
is Mr. Belford's? holding out the other. I gave her
mine. God Almighty bless you both, said she, and
make you both—in your last hour-for you must come
to this—happy as I am.
“She paused again, her breath growing shorter; and
after a few minutes—And now, my dearest cousin, give
me your hand—nearer—still nearer—drawing it
towards her; and she pressed it with her dying lips—
God protect you, dear, dear sir, and once more receive
my best and most grateful thanks—and tell my dear
Miss Howe, and vouchsafe to see and to tell my worthy
Norton — she will be one day, I fear not, though now
lowly in her fortunes, a saint in heaven—tell them both
that I remember them with thankful blessings in my
last moments! And pray God to give them happiness
here for many, many years for the sake of their friends
and lovers; and a heavenly crown hereafter; and such
assurances of it, as I have, through the all-satisfying
merits of our blessed Redeemer.
“Her sweet voice and broken periods methinks still
fill my ears, and never will be out of my memory. And
after a short silence, in a more broken and faint accent
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SAMUEL RICHARDSON
—And you, Mr. Belford, pressing my hand, may God
preserve you, and make you sensible of all your errors-
you see, in me, how all ends—may you be—and down
sank her head upon her pillow, she fainting away and
drawing from us her hands. We thought she was then
gone; and each gave way to a violent burst of grief.
But soon showing signs of returning life, our attention
was again engaged; and I besought her, when a little
recovered, to complete in my favour her half-pro-
nounced blessing. She waved her hand to us both,
and bowed her head six times, as we have since recol-
lected, as if distinguishing every person present, not
forgetting the nurse and the maid-servant; the latter
having approached the bed, weeping, as if crowding
in for the divine lady's last blessing; and she spoke
falteringly and inwardly—Bless—bless—bless you all
—and—now—and now—(holding upher almost lifeless
hands for the last time)—Come—O come—Blessed
Lord Jesus! and with these words, the last but half-
pronounced, expired:—such a smile, such a charming
serenity overspreading her sweet face at the instant, as
seemed to manifest her eternal happiness already
begun. O Lovelacel–But I can write no more!”
The reader is of course free to form his own
judgment upon this famous and often-praised
scene. For my own part I am bound to con-
fess that, while I realize its power and its
pathos, I still feel that it lacks the crowning
merit of simplicity. The art of it is too delib-
erate and too apparent. Belford is too obvi-
ously aware of the dramatic possibilities of the
situation, and too evidently determined to
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get the maximum amount of effect out of it.
To put the matter baldly, he writes it up.
Moreover, he strikes a false note at the start:
“As thou usedst to like my descriptions, I
will give thee the woful scene that presented
itself to me as I approached the bed.” This
at once suggests artifice. And though we
must not indeed complain that poor Clarissa,
like the reprobate Merry Monarch, “takes
an unconscionable time in dying,” we may still
urge that, true to the business-like habits in
which Richardson had manifestly trained her,
and which she does not forget even at the end,
she distributes her blessings and last wishes
in far too methodical a fashion.
Regarded on the technical side, Clarissa is
marred by one fundamental defect. The
improbabilities of the plot are numerous and
glaring. It has often been pointed out that
even in the eighteenth century Lovelace could
never have carried out his nefarious schemes
unmolested. Law and justice were relatively
weak at the time, it is true; but still they ex-
isted; and when Richardson requires us to
believe that his drama of abduction could be
successfully played in the hole-and-corner
secrecy necessitated by his purposes, he makes
greater demands upon us than, with all the
willingness in the world, we are able to
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SAMUEL RICHARDSON
concede. That Lovelace, the clever and accom-
plished villain, should take all sorts of people,
some of them obviously untrustworthy, into
his confidence in respect to a crime which was
then punishable by death, is also incredible.
The consistency of Clarissa's character, more-
over, is outraged for the sake of the action.
Surely any one in her circumstances would
have seized the first opportunity of throwing
herself upon the protection of a magistrate.
Such an opportunity presents itself when she
makes her escape to Hampstead. But the
intervention of a magistrate (say, Justice
Fielding, as Scott suggests) would not only
have ruined Lovelace' plot but would also
have brought Richardson's story to a prema-
ture and unintended close. Hence the one
thing that Clarissa ought to have done and
would have done is precisely the one thing
which she never dreams of doing.
In mere construction, therefore, Clarissa,
though much more elaborate than Pamela,
is almost as defective. In ethics, on the other
hand, it is an immense advance upon that work.
The theme is substantially the same; but here
there is no question of virtue being “rewarded”
in any worldly sense. The moral power of
the narrative lies in its sympathetic delineation
of piety, patience, courage, and resignation.
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Clarissa, as Richardson himself said, is “a
truly Christian heroine,” who rises “superior
to her trials.” Noble she is throughout; but
nowhere does she show her nobility to greater
advantage than when she rejects her seducer's
proposal that by the convention of marriage
she shall connive with him in his sin. This
is immeasurably better than Pamela and her
coach-and-six.
The character of Clarissa is of course the
central element in the novel, and if we cannot
go the whole length with admirers who main-
tain that she is the most living woman in
fiction, we may admit that she is perhaps
the most carefully and the most elaborately
drawn. Richardson has spared no pains in
his determination to present her complete—
an ideal of Christian womanhood; and the
result of his efforts is a marvel of minute and
delicate portraiture. Yet if the figure of
Clarissa stands out supreme, more interest
after all attaches to that of Lovelace. Evi-
dently our author was concerned to make his
Iago dramatically worthy of his Desdemona,
and he accordingly treats him with the same
laborious solicitude. Lovelace is well edu-
cated, accomplished, witty, attractive; he has
the manners of a “fine gentleman,” and a power
of personal fascination which enables him to
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SAMUEL RICHARDSON
carry everything before him. Nor is he alto-
gether bad. He has his redeeming qualities—
among them, oddly enough (though why
Richardson should have insisted so much on
this point is a puzzle), a genuine respect for
religion! But he is a shameless and irredeem-
able profligate, and for the gratification of his
passions he is capable of acting with incredible
perfidy, brutality, and callousness. Consid-
ering the part he has to play in the plot, it
was necessary, Scott urges, that the character
of Lovelace should be highly colored. Highly
colored it certainly is. Lovelace is indeed a
“dazzling monster,” not a man. He grips
our imagination, but we never quite believe
in him. He has all the qualities requisite for a
great dramatic triumph except the one mys-
terious but indispensable quality of life.
Richardson in fact attempted in Lovelace a
task beyond his powers. He had not the
knowledge of life necessary to make such a
study in supreme villainy human and con-
vincing, nor had he the intense creative imagi-
nation which is often independent of direct
experience and a substitute for it. But the
effort was a great one, and if the result be only
a qualified success, it would be churlish to
withhold the admiration to which even such
qualified success is entitled. It must also be
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remembered to Richardson's credit that if
he failed to produce a human being he at any
rate gave to the world a permanent type.
Lovelace is still familiar as a tradition and a
symbol to people who have never read a line
of Clarissa and know nothing in detail about
the arch-scoundrel whose name they freely
use to “point a moral” or to “adorn a tale.”
Before leaving Clarissa I may just note that
the history of its composition illustrates the
profound seriousness with which his work
was treated both by Richardson himself and
by his friends. The world of his imagination
was absolutely real to him; he lived with his
characters; and he and his correspondents dis-
cussed their motives and actions as if they
had been men and women whom they had met
and known in the flesh. When the first four
volumes of Clarissa appeared, the inner circle
of the author's admirers was thrown into
consternation by the report that the catas-
trophe was to be tragic. Upon this the little
great man, who held the threads of the heroine's
1 There has been some discussion as to the possible original or
originals of Lovelace. eigh Hunt º that Richardson
might have caught “the tone” of his “manners and language”
from Colley Cibber and the notorious profligate, the Duke of
Wharton (one of the patrons of the evangelical poet of Night
Thoughts) . But the coarse, merry, loose-tongued old Cibber
could hardly have been much help to him, and it is now known
that his relations with Wharton were very slight. I incline to think
with Johnson that Lovelace is in the main an “expansion” of the
"gay Lothario” (whose name has also become proverbial) in
Rowe's Fair Penitent.
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SAMUEL RICHARDSON
destiny in his hands, was implored to set the
inevitable at naught, and in deference to the
readers' already overwrought feelings, to con-
trive a “happy ending.” But Richardson was
obdurate. He would consent neither to com-
pensate Clarissa for her sufferings nor to “save
the soul” of her betrayer. In thus steeling
his heart against the solicitations of his would-
be advisers, he showed that he had the con-
science of the true dramatic artist. He
admitted to Lady Bradshaigh that he was
himself “sensibly touched” by some of the
scenes he had evoked. But he could not
interfere with the logic of events. The fate
of his characters was of their own making, and
therefore lay beyond his control.
VII
Richardson's third and last novel, The His-
tory of Sir Charles Grandison, was published
in eight volumes, in 1754, as a pendant to
Clarissa. He had been blamed for making
Lovelace too fascinating. As an offset and
corrective he therefore undertook to depict
“the character and actions of a man of true
honour”—“a man of religion and virtue; of
liveliness of spirit; accomplished and agreeable;
happy in himself and a blessing to others.”
Grandison is in fact the male counterpart of
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Clarissa. He is the Christian hero as she is
the Christian heroine; the ideal embodiment
of all the masculine, as she had been of all the
feminine, excellences.
In introducing his new work Richardson
might have anticipated Canning's Needy
Knife Grinder, and exclaimed—“Story?
God bless you, I have none to tell, sir.” Sir
Charles Grandison has little plot and no
dramatic interest. It is simply a patient,
elaborate study of character. Sir Charles is
placed in “a variety of trying scenes”; but
these are avowedly arranged for the purpose
of showing how “all his actions are regulated
by one steady principle.” The novel is indeed
a demonstration rather than a story—a homily
with illustrations. The incidents derive their
value from the light which they throw upon
the various aspects of the hero's personality,
which is thus presented from many points of
view to the end that it may serve as a type and
an example.
As a result the purely didactic element is
even more prominent here than it had been in
Pamela and Clarissa. The narrative is choked
by moral discussion and disquisition. Every
event is made the subject of lengthy con-
versations and edifying commentary. The
drama perpetually waits till the ethical thesis
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SAMUEL RICHARDSON
suggested has been developed to the full. This
explains why a “venerable old lady” referred
to by Scott, when she “became subject to
drowsy fits,” chose to have Sir Charles Grandi-
son read to her in preference to any other work;
“because,” she used to say, “should I drop
asleep in the course of the reading, I am sure
when I awake I shall have lost none of the
story, but shall find the party where I left
them, conversing in the cedar-parlour.”
The plot, such as it is, may be thus epit-
omized: Harriett Byron is an orphan who
lives with her uncle, Mr. Selby. At the time
the narrative opens she is “just turned of
twenty, but looks not more than seventeen.”
Her beauty is remarkable—it is the beauty of
expression as well as of feature; and equally
remarkable are her intellectual gifts, the charm
of her manner, and the sweetness of her
disposition. Among her admirers—and, as
may be inferred from the premises, she has
many—is a certain Sir Hargrave Pollexfen, a
“handsomé and genteel” man of twenty-eight
or thirty, with pale complexion and “bold”
eyes (which some might call “goggling”),
vain of his person and voluble in speech. He
is the villain of the drama—a second edition
of Lovelace, but in comparison a very poor
and ineffective rascal. He has his designs
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upon Harriett, and as Richardson is apparently
unable to think of anything else, he reproduces
once again the machinery of abduction which
he had already employed in his other two
novels. By dint of trickery, Pollexfen con-
trives to carry the young lady away, and then
he attempts to force her into a marriage with
him. But he is not so successful as his prede-
cessors, Mr. B. and Lovelace; for Harriett
is rescued from his clutches by Sir Charles
Grandison, who appears in the nick of time,
and by his gallant and chivalrous conduct
makes a telling first entrance on the stage he
is henceforth to dominate. Sir Charles and
Harriett of course fall in love with each other.
But here a complication arises. Sir Charles is
already half-engaged to a noble Italian lady,
Clementina della Porretta, whom he has met
on his travels, and whom indeed he has prom-
ised to marry if difficulties about nationality
and religion can be overcome. For a time the
main interest of the story is provided by Sir
Charles' relations with these two beautiful
and charming women, and if his behavior as a
lover is open to criticism on the ground of his
want of ardor and his too marked impartiality,
he is, as will be anticipated, always punc-
tiliously correct. Poor Clementina goes mad,
but presently recovers, and comes to England
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SAMUEL RICHARDSON
to avoid an unwelcome proposal of marriage
in her own country. But in the meantime,
after much dallying and suspense, and an end-
less amount of talk, Sir Charles' decision
is made, and Harriett, who has been mainly
responsible for the active love making, becomes
Lady Grandison. Then the two rivals—the
successful and the defeated—vie with one
another (what about Richardson's boasted
knowledge of the “female heart”?) in inter-
changes of courtesy and almost superfeminine
generosity.
A number of minor incidents connected with
the doings of subordinate characters are
grouped about this central action, and help to
swell the work without however adding appre-
ciably to its interest. These may here be dis-
regarded. The reader will conclude from the
outline given that Sir Charles Grandison is
desperately dull. It is. But as I have said,
Richardson's aim was not to write an amusing
novel but to produce a full-length portrait of
the “perfect gentleman.” How far then has
he succeeded in this great design?
Well, he has painted for us in minutest detail
an absolute incarnation of all the virtues, who
ought, as one of his French critics has irrever-
ently declared, to be both stuffed and canon-
ized. Sir Charles is as much a “dazzling
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monster” as Lovelace; he is every bit as unreal;
but Lovelace is at least interesting in his
unreality, while Sir Charles — the pompous,
self-conscious, ceremonious, sententious Sir
Charles, who never once steps down from his
moral stilts, or forgets for a moment how good
a man he is, and who wants only a halo to
become a (very Protestant) saint—is a prig
and a bore. Moreover, even if we could ever
persuade ourselves to believe in him, we could
not accept him, as Richardson intended us to
accept him, as a working model. He is too
perfect. Richardson was himself obliged to
recognize the force of this objection, and urged
in reply, first, that his hero had, after all, his
little redeeming defects—such as a tendency
to passion and pride; and secondly, that even
a perfect example may be “accommodated to
particular imitation.” But his protest is
futile; Sir Charles remains a creature alto-
gether too bright and good “for human nature's
daily food.” In fact, this “glory of his sex” is
too far removed in both character and cir-
cumstances from the everyday plane of life
to serve as a pattern for conduct. His creator
endows him with transcendent qualities of
person and heart. He presents him to us as
Adonis and Solomon rolled into one. The
Admirable Crichton pales in luster beside him.
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SAMUEL RICHARDSON
He is so handsome that “were kings to be
chosen for beauty and majesty”—instead of
being selected for their intellectual and moral
superiority, as we know to have been always
the case—then “Sir Charles Grandison would
have very few competitors.” His goodness
“absolutely dazzles” his admiring friends. In
company he throws every one else in the shade
by his powers of conversation. His fascina-
tion is such that it casts a spell upon everybody
who comes in contact with him. He dresses
in faultless taste and his manners are impec-
cable. Of his innumerable accomplishments
it is enough to say that he speaks the languages,
sings well in a “mellow manly voice,” and is
reckoned “one of the finest dancers in Eng-
land.” He has his passions under absolute
control. His well-balanced nature lifts him
above the reach of those temptations to which
common mortality is subjected. His rank,
his wealth, his power give him advantages
which ordinary people like ourselves can never
hope to enjoy. Such a man is one of the
favored of the gods. The kind fairies have
lavished all their choicest gifts upon him at
his birth. The stars in their courses conspire
in his behalf. He is too much of an excep-
tion to be taken as a rule. We may admire
him at a distance; we may envy him (though
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I do not think it in the least likely that we
shall do one or the other); but to walk in his
footsteps—that is out of the question.
Dismissing this adverse criticism, however,
let me just touch upon one point of very great
interest in this study of the “perfect gentle-
man.” Dueling in Richardson's time was
part of the recognized code of honor, and
though Steele and Defoe had already attacked
it, even so sturdy a moralist as Johnson found
something to say in its defense. Now what
should the “perfect gentleman” do in respect
to this universal practice? The question was
one which naturally came within the sphere of
our author's didactic purpose, and he deserves
high praise for the boldness with which he
handled it. Sir Charles receives a challenge
from Sir Hargrave Pollexfen, and to the amaze-
ment of Sir Hargrave and his friends he declines
it; and this gives rise to an immense amount
of discussion in which the whole matter is
threshed out and the absurdity and wickedness
of dueling are made abundantly clear. But
here again it must be admitted that Sir
Charles' circumstances are so exceptional
that his solution of the problem in question
can scarcely be said to apply to the case of
the average man. He is able to act as he does
without incurring the reproach of cowardice
218
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
because, as Richardson was forced to admit,
he has “both strength and skill to repel an
affront” and at the same time to retain his
“honour.” He is, for example, an expert
fencer, and his wonderful skill with the sword,
as his engagement with the angry Mr. Fenwick
shows, enables him easily to disarm his antag-
onist without inflicting any bodily injury.
Intellectually, too, he is more than a match
for his opponents. He beats them in argu-
ment from point to point. In a long interview
on the subject which takes place between him
and the Pollexfen party, one of these, a certain
Mr. Bagenhall, who is a Roman Catholic,
reminds him that the practice of dueling had
been supported by some of the “famous
casuists” of the church. Any other man than
Sir Charles would have been silenced on this
head by such an appeal to authority. But
Sir Charles instantly rises to the occasion and
shows that, Protestant though he is, he knows
a great deal more about Roman Catholic
opinion than Mr. Bagenhall himself.
“‘Bannes and Cajetan, you mean. One a Spaniard,
the other an Italian. But the highest authority of your
church is full against them in this point. The Council
of Trent treats the combatants who fall as self-murder-
ers, and denies them Christian burial. It brands
them, and all those who by their presence countenance
and abet this shocking and unchristian practice with
219
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perpetual infamy, and condemns them to the loss
of goods and estates. And furthermore; it deprives,
ipso jure, all those sovereign princes who suffer such
acts of violence to be perpetrated with impunity in
the lands and cities which they hold of the church,
of all the territories so held. I need not add to this
that Louis XIV's edict against duelling was the greatest
glory in his reign. And permit me to conclude with
observing, that the base arts of poisoning by means
of treacherous agents, and the cowardly practice of
assassination by bravoes hired on purpose to wreak a
private revenge so frequent in Italy, are natural
branches of this old Gothic tree. And yet (as I have
before hinted) the barbarous northern nations had
pleas to make in behalf of duelling from their polity
which we have not from ours, Christianity out of the
question.’”
This of course settles the question so far as
Mr. Bagenhall and Roman Catholic authority
are concerned, and Sir Charles scores an easy
victory. We, like his hearers, are much
impressed by his erudition. But at the
same time we remember that the ordinary
English gentleman in a similar situation can
hardly be expected to have the decrees of the
Council of Trent and the edict of Louis XIV
at his finger tips; and in this case the victory
would inevitably go to Mr. Bagenhall by
default.
But whatever we may think of Sir Charles
Grandison to-day, he was in his own age taken
\
220
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
very seriously as a practical study in moral
perfection. This is amusingly shown by the
two letters which Richardson appended “by
desire” to the Collection of Maxims which he
published in 1754. One of these was addressed
“to a lady, who was solicitous for an additional
volume . . . supposing” the History “ended
abruptly, and expressing herself desirous to
see Sir Charles in the parental character.”
This good woman, whose appetite for edifica-
tion must have been insatiable, evidently
regarded Richardson's novel as incomplete as a
textbook of morality in one important respect.
Her suggestion opened up possibilities which
happily were never realized, for we might
conceivably have had yet another continuation
exhibiting Sir Charles as a grandfather. It was,
however, reserved for Victor Hugo to write an
Art d"tre grandpere. The second letter was by
way of answer to a friend “who had objected
to Sir Charles Grandison's offer to allow his
daughters by the Lady Clementina, had his mar-
riage with her taken effect, to be educated
Roman Catholics.” The marriage, as we know
did not “take effect,” and it was surely scarcely
worth while to make so much of a purely hypo-
thetical case. But at this point Richardson
was evidently regarded by zealous Protestants
as having inculcated latitudinarian views.
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VIII
I said at the outset of this essay that the
modern reader recoils from Richardson's appal-
ling prolixity, and I used the word prolixity.
advisedly. We often talk about the inordinate
length of his novels. But I do not think, after
all, that it is the mere length that we object to.
There are plenty of long novels which we read
with unflagging attention to the end and lay
down at last with regret—Don Quixote, for
example, Monte Cristo, Pendennis, David
Copperfield. But in these the interest is kept
alive by the variety and vivacity of the
narrative and by what I may call the sub-
stantial quality of the materials which go to
its composition. The enormous bulk of Cla-
rissa and Sir Charles Grandison, on the other
hand, is due to excessive elaboration—to the
remorseless accumulation of details (often
otiose), wearisome descriptions of unimportant
things, endless repetitions, digressions, moraliz-
ings. These works are, therefore, swollen to
their monstrous size not by the real mass
of their matter but by the abuse of a partic-
ular method. The actual drama of Clarissa
extends only from January 10 to December 8
—just eleven months; yet as we have seen,
Richardson required seven volumes for its
evolution.
222
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
Seven volumes for the affairs of less than a
year!—this is writing history on a scale even
more generous than that of Macaulay. One
volume of the original eight-volume edition of
Sir Charles Grandison is almost entirely occu-
pied with getting Sir Charles and Harriett
Byron married after all their difficulties have
been surmounted; and the ordinary reader—
the ordinary male reader, at any rate—can
hardly be expected to share the enthusiasm of
the two young ladies mentioned by Hazlitt,
who copied out the whole description of
Harriett's wedding clothes “for their own
private gratification.” Richardson is indeed
as dilatory as life itself, and if we cannot
quarrel with life because it is dull, we may
justly quarrel with the art which reproduces
too faithfully the dullness of life. “La
nature,” as D'Alembert admirably said, “est
bonne à imiter, mais non pas jusqu'à l'ennui.”
And Richardson, if the truth must be told, is
often ennuyeux. It is reported that one of his
admirers solemnly informed him that with
him prolixity had become a virtue. Yet
it is a relief to know that even in his own day
there were protests and complaints. “Such a
multitude of reading,” exclaimed a con-
temporary critic, “without coming at the
story.” And Johnson, with all his admiration
223
A QUIET CORNER IN A LIBRARY
for Richardson's art, was obliged to take stock
of the same objection:
“Why, sir, if you were to read Richardson for the
story, your impatience would be so fretted that you
would hang yourself. You must read him for the
sentiment, and consider the story only as giving rise
to the sentiment.”l
It must, however, be remembered that
Richardson had the qualities of his defects,
and that the special power which we are
compelled to recognize in him was bound up
with the prolixity which we deplore. His
immense structures are built up with inex-
haustible patience out of innumerable small
and often trivial things. He proceeds by the
rule of line upon line, and it is certain that he
could have achieved his effects in no other
way. His art is the art of the infinitely little.
It is also, if the paradox may be allowed, the
art of entire artlessness. He will not admit
the difference between the essential and the
non-essential. A character (like Mr. Singleton
in Sir Charles Grandison) may appear for a
moment only on the scene and then drop
out of sight; but he is described as minutely as
if he were destined to play an important part
1 Here and there, however, a modern reader may be found whose
impatience is not fretted by Richardson's longwindedness, but whº,
an the contrary, seems to enjoy it. “I like those great still bºoks,
Tennyson used to say, with regard to Clarissa; and again—'. I wis
there were a great novel in hundreds of volumes that I might go
on and on.’’-(Memoir, II, 172). *
224
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
in the story. Matters which have nothing
whatever to do with the real business in hand
are dwelt upon at length. Every conversation
has to be reported with literal accuracy.
Richardson's novels are utterly formless.
They sprawl out in every direction; the life
history of every person introduced is given
from the cradle; as in the old romances, which
he sought to displace, but from which he took
over much more than he realized, we contin-
ually get lost in labyrinths of episodes which
have little or no connection with the central
theme. We often grow weary of all this much
ado about nothing. Yet the fact remains
that by this diffuseness and by this very
disregard of all the canons of art, Richardson
does succeed in producing a curious illusion of
actèal life. “There is,” as Hazlitt put it with
his customary felicity, “an artificial reality
about his works which is nowhere else to be
met with.” And this is the more remarkable
because of the absurdity of his plots, of which
I have already spoken, and the implausibility
of his method—the method of conducting his
story entirely by means of letters which pass
among its characters.
This “epistolary” method was at first, as
we have learned, a matter of accident only.
Richardson adopted it in Pamela simply
225
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because Pamela was an offshoot from a
Complete Letter Writer. But he continued
to employ it in his later novels in part because
of his own personal fondness for letter writing,
and in part from artistic considerations.
These considerations are set forth in the
preface to Clarissa:
“Much more lively and affecting must be the style
of those who write in the height of the present distress,
the mind tortured by the pangs of uncertainty, the
events then hidden in the womb of time, than the dry
narrative unanimated style of a person relating diffi-
culties and dangers surmounted, the relater perfectly
at ease; and if himself unmoved by his own story, then
not likely greatly to affect the reader.”
This is not well put, but the point of it is
clear. Richardson claims for the novel-in-
letters this advantage over the novel in either
the ordinary third-personal or the autobio-
graphical form, that it enables the persons
of the drama themselves to relate its events,
and to give expression to the feelings evoked
by such events, at the time of their occurrence.
Much might be said in reply to his argument;
but we may still acknowledge a certain amount
of theoretical justification for his claim. By
the use of the epistolary method the novelist
keeps us in intimate touch with his characters.
We see everything from their different points
226
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
of view. The incidents are detailed again
and again, with comments and comments upon
these comments, by those who take part or
are directly interested in them; and if mean-
while the story stagnates, the motive-forces
behind the story are fully revealed. It is
indeed from the psychological side—the side
with which Richardson was chiefly concerned—
that the value of his method is most apparent.
At the same time its drawbacks are very
obvious. An interchange of letters provides
at best a cumbrous machinery for action. The
interest of the story as story is too much
scattered. That wholeness of view which
naturally results from the ordinary methods
of narration is under the conditions imposed by
the epistolary form obtainable only by repeti-
tions which become tiresome. Even on the
psychological side such conditions operate as
hindrances and limitations: as the author
does not himself appear in person, he can never
supplement the revelation of character given
by the persons themselves or by those about
them by analysis and commentary of his own.
He thus creates for himself gratuitously the
difficulties which are inherent in the drama
but are really foreign to the looser art of the
novel. But worst of all is the extreme artifi-
ciality of the device. It is impossible for us to
227
A QUIET CORNER IN A LIBRARY
accept all this everlasting letter writing. The
letters have to be written because the story
has to be carried on, and they are therefore
written in season and out of season. For the
same reason they are filled with lengthy de-
scriptions of places and people, minute reports
of incidents, verbatim records of conversations,
and all sorts of other matters which would
enter into an ordinary narrative as of course,
but which no one would dream of putting into
his correspondence. Richardson's characters,
small and great, cultured and uncultured, his
Pamela no less than his Clarissa, his Lovelace
no less than his Grandison, whatever their
stations, their business, their temperaments,
have one and all the author's own mania for
letter writing; one and all, too, they have his
own fatal facility with the pen; one and all,
be their circumstances ever so pressing, they
have likewise unlimited leisure. They write at
all times, even the most unlikely; in moments
of crisis, when their fate literally hangs in
the balance, they still have strength of mind
and self-possession enough to write; watched,
interrupted, harassed, interfered with, true to
the main purpose of their existence, they yet
contrive to write. Moreover, they keep copies
and make minutes of their letters; they draw
up documents which are submitted now to this
228
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
person now to that for criticism and ap-
proval; shorthand writers are even concealed
in closets to take full notes of conversations
which, afterwards duly transcribed, are sent
about under “covering” epistles and made the
text of further correspondence. Richardson's
world, in fact, as some one has said, resembles
nothing so much as a large, well-ordered office,
where everything is arranged, analyzed, dock-
eted, filed away for future reference. As
Hazlitt put it, “If the business of life consisted
in letter writing, and was carried on by the
post (like a Spanish game of chess) human
nature would be what Richardson represents
it.” Richardson himself on one occasion
sought to explain Pamela's itch for scribbling.
He had much better have left the matter alone.
He only drew attention to the absurdity by
trying to excuse it.
Nor is the bulk of his letters less amazing
than their number and frequency. On this
point Sir Leslie Stephen once made an interest-
ing calculation. He found that on March 22
Harriett Byron produced a letter of fourteen
pages of print and two others of six and
twelve pages respectively. These she followed
up the next day with two more of eighteen
and ten pages. On the 24th she wrote still
two more, aggregating thirty pages; at the
16 229
A QUIET CORNER IN A LIBRARY
end of one of which she remarks that she
is forced to lay down the pen, which however
she takes up again to add six further pages by
way of postscript. In three days, therefore,
this industrious and facile lady, who meanwhile
is of course occupied with the things about
which she writes, turns out ninety-six pages of
print—ninety-six pages!—a feat of which Scott
himself need not have been ashamed. Macau-
lay estimated that the entire interest of her
small fortune must have been consumed in the
postage on these incessant and voluminous
epistles.
I have often discussed this matter with warm
admirers of our novelist and their contention is,
that while it may be easy in this way to exhibit
the radical falseness of his method, we are not
really conscious of it while we are under the
spell of one of his books. Are we not? On
such a point I suppose the final appeal must be
to personal experience, and for my part I
must frankly confess that I am very conscious
of it indeed. The fact that, as I am perfectly
well aware, no human being could or would
ever write such letters as Richardson requires
us to accept as authentic, continually interferes
with my interest in the alleged writers them-
selves. There is something factitious about it
all from a sense of which I cannot escape.
230
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
IX
In the foregoing pages frequent reference
has been made to Richardson's didacticism.
The subject is, however, so important for a
proper understanding of the man and his
work that I must return to it for a moment
here.
That he regarded himself primarily as a
moralist is sufficiently clear from the whole
tenor of his writings. But lest his readers
might still be in some doubt as to his aims, he
more than once defined his position with an
emphasis which made misapprehension impos-
sible. He wished, he declared, to have his
books classed, not with ordinary fiction, but
with Taylor's Holy Living, The Practice of
Piety, and other treatises of the like character.
“They appear,” he explained, adopting the
tone of apology, “in the humble guise of a
novel only by way of accommodation to the
manners and tastes of an age overwhelmed
with luxury and abandoned to sound and
senselessness.” And again, with reference to
Sir Charles Grandison: “From what has been
premised, it may be supposed that the present
collection is not published ultimately, nor
even principally, any more than the other
two, for the sake of entertainment only. A
much nobler end is in view.” He wrote
231
A QUIET CORNER IN A LIBRARY
throughout, then, in the hope that “truth
embodied in a tale” might “enter in at lowly
doors.” His paramount object was edification,
and that object was never for a moment
allowed to drop out of sight. The story itself
is but the gilding of the pill.
It is possible of course for a writer of fiction
to be didactic without actually mounting the
pulpit and turning his work into a sermon.
The artist who is really an artist will indeed be
careful to avoid the professional pose; he will
be satisfied in the main with the indirect
inculcation of the ideas he wishes to convey
and will use the direct method with caution
and only occasionally. But Richardson knew
nothing of this kind of reticence. He never
leaves his moral to take care of itself. He
thrusts it perpetually to the front. In his
anxiety lest it should be missed, he under-
scores it heavily and loads it with emphasis.
Every incident is made the text for a homily
and every movement of the plot furnishes sub-
ject matter for commentary, warning, advice.
Hence the everlasting intrusion of ethical
discussion upon the narrative; hence the direct
exhortation; hence the many, many pages of
commonplace reflection and moralizings which,
however well-meant, often degenerate into
downright twaddle. The modern novel reader
232
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
can hardly be blamed if he takes Richard-
son at his word and does class his writings
with Holy Living and The Practice of
Piety—with results which need scarcely be
specified.
If further proof be required of our author's
constant preoccupation with his didactic aims
it will be found in his supplementary volume
to which I have already referred, though as a
matter of convenience I then cited it under
an abbreviated name. Its full title, which
must now be given, runs: A Collection of the
Moral and Instructive Sentiments, Maxims, Cau-
tions, and Reflections, contained in the Histories of
Pamela, Clarissa, and Sir Charles Grandison,
digested under their Proper Heads. Richardson's
object in preparing this compendium was, so
to speak, to reduce the scattered teachings of
the said “Histories” into a regular manual of
conduct. The matter is therefore systemat-
ically arranged; cases in point are given from
the novels to enforce the rules laid down;
and for the reader's further assistance, a very
full index is provided. Thus, s.v. Fortitude, the
following highly original precept is offered:
“It becomes a good person in distress to make
a virtue of necessity, and to try to bring real
good out of seeming evil.” Then comes the
“case” in support: “See Pamela's example in
233
A QUIET CORNER IN A LIBRARY
~gº
deep calamity for the illustration of this doc-
trine.” Richardson, it is evident, must have
been tremendously impressed by the ethical
value of his work to make it in this way the
basis of a practical handbook of morality.
His Collection is doubtless very instructive.
Unfortunately, it labors under the disadvan-
tage of being a trifle ridiculous.
But what of the character of his moral
teaching? In answering this question we
need not now go beyond generalities, and it
will therefore be enough to say that it is marked
by much the same qualities and limitations as
we have already noted in dealing with the
moral teaching of Lillo. Like Lillo, Richard-
son represents the rising power of the middle
classes in literature. Like Lillo, he voices
the protest of the middle classes against the
lingering traditions of aristocratic corruption.
At a time when, despite the excellent work
which had been done shortly before by Defoe,
Addison, and Steele, it was still “good form”
to be a rake, to treat women as playthings, and
to scoff openly at decency and the marriage
vow," he made it his chief concern to exhibit
the evils of profligacy and the sanctity of the
1 We learn on the authority of The Connoisseur that in 1755 “the
kept mistress” was still “a constant part of the retinue of the fine
gentleman” and was “indeed as indispensable :*: of his equipage
as a French valet-de-chambre or a four-wheeled post-chaise."
234
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
domestic virtues; and if there is something
oppressive and unwholesome—something too
much suggestive of a hothouse—about the
atmosphere of his books—if in Pamela in
particular his moral is developed in a way which
seems to us both crude and offensive, we must
remember that in his case, as in the parallel
case of Lillo, his work can be properly appre-
ciated only when it is put back into the setting .
of his age. All the ideals and sentiments sur-
viving in the degenerate chivalry of the upper
classes—as, for example, in their extravagant
gallantry and their so-called code of honor—
are repudiated by Richardson root and branch.
His criticism of life is dictated by sound good
sense no less than by genuine piety. His
morality rests upon the firm basis of religion,
but it is at the same time a morality of the
counting-house—sober, practical, utilitarian.
It is from this point of view that we can best
understand the fundamentally democratic char-
acter of his novels. On this matter, it is true,
an erroneous opinion may easily be formed.
We have seen that Richardson shared the
ordinary eighteenth-century tradesman's feel-
ings of respect for the aristocracy, and that
these feelings to some extent color his work.
This fact may itself mislead us. It is also
noteworthy that though he began in the most
235
A QUIET CORNER IN A LIBRARY
radical way by making a mere lady's maid the
heroine of a novel, he never repeated this daring
experiment. On the contrary, he showed a
tendency to rise in the social scale; his Cla-
rissa being a young lady of “good” though
not noble family, and his Sir Charles Grandison,
a man of position as well as fortune. Yet
directly and indirectly the tendency of his
teaching was democratic because his spirit to
the last was the spirit of the middle classes,
and because throughout he made the individual
character supreme and treated rank and all its
attendant advantages as secondary and adven-
titious. The iron barrier which social conven-
tion had set up between Pamela and her master
is at length broken down by Pamela's virtue.
Lovelace's birth and breeding, his wealth and
accomplishments, serve only to make his vices
the more conspicuous and the more appalling.
The real greatness of Sir Charles inheres in
the fact, not that he is Sir Charles, but that he
is what any one, high or low, rich or poor, may
be if he likes—a “man of true honor,” in whom
character gives dignity to position, not position
to character. Here and there, too, Richardson
strikes the distinctively democratic note.
When, for instance, Pamela hears that her
master may be made a peer, her reply is that it
would be better if he were made a virtuous man.
236
SAMUEL RICHARDSON
X
For reasons which our little study will have
made apparent, the enjoyment of Richardson
is now almost a lost taste. His plots are so
clumsy, his machinery is so absurd, his method
is so tiresome, his moralizings are so obtrusive,
his diffusiveness is so terrible, that it is ex-
tremely difficult for us to-day to do justice to
his real powers. It is well, therefore, that we
should remind ourselves in closing that, what-
ever our own private judgment may be, his
historical importance is very great. He
opened an entirely new chapter in the annals
of our prose fiction, and partly by what he
himself accomplished and partly by the inspira-
tion which he gave to others, he laid the foun-
dations of our modern novel. His enormous
vogue on the continent of Europe, moreover,
entitles him to be regarded as one of the most
influential English writers of the eighteenth
century. Pamela and Clarissa made the tour
of Europe, and Clarissa in particular was one
of the works which carried the newly awakened
spirit of the English middle classes far and wide
through many lands. In France, Diderot
went into raptures over it and placed its author
beside Moses, Homer, Sophocles, and Euripi-
des, while Rousseau pronounced it the finest
novel in the world and fashioned his own Julie
237
A QUIET CORNER IN A LIBRARY
upon it. In Germany, it powerfully affected
Lessing, Goethe, and a host of minor writers,
for whom Richardson was, in Gellert's phrase,
“the magician,” and it became a potent force
in early German romanticism. A Dutch
minister declared that parts of it, if found in
the Bible, would be quoted as proofs of divine
inspiration. Even Russia felt the subtle
spell of Salisbury Court and Fulham. Karam-
sin proclaimed Richardson as “the most
artistic painter of man's moral nature” the
world had ever seen, and took Pamela as the
model of his own once-famous Poor Louisa.
This is a wonderful record. You and I may
yawn over the little printer's countless pages.
But we must not forget that our forefathers
wept over them. We may even let the dust
gather on his books. But those same books
were once intensely alive. Tastes change,
and the glamour of Richardson is now a thing
of the past. To revive it is impossible. But
his place in literature is secure.
238
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