The Facts of Fiction (2 page)

As a bashful and forward young boy, I was an early favourite with all the young women of taste and reading in the neighbourhood. Half a dozen of them, when BF
they 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, their mothers sometimes with 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 a 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 answer to their lovers' letters; nor did any one of them ever know that I was secretary to the others. I have been directed to chide and even to repulse when an offence was either taken or given, at the very time when 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 exchanged.

There is something hauntingly repellent about the notion of this priggish and clammy infant assiduously “correcting ” and “chiding ” and “repulsing.” There is, at least, when the scene is viewed in the light of ordinarily decent human conduct. But to the literary historian the scene is one of life's more nearly golden moments. The first English psychological novelist is actually to be seen gathering his material.

It would be inopportune at this point in the book to consider at length what we mean by a psychological novelist. But it might be well to clear up one or two of the current misconceptions on the subject. In the first place it is merely the word “psychological ” and not the thing that it describes, that is young. The word entered the language in force about 1870, and from that moment it
has been used incessantly and often incorrectly by writers who have meant anything in fiction that has attempted to catch the will-o'-the-wisp of the human mind, by those who have meant something that satisfied their own theories of thought in relation to life, and by those who have meant nothing at all but “profound ” or “penetrating.”

Richardson's claim to be considered not only as the father of fiction but as the father of psychological fiction (for of course there is a difference, largely dependent on the proportion of action to attitude and so on) is considerable. In the first place he was minutely interested in sex—which has come to be an almost indisputable claim to psychological celebrity. In the second place, though he describes in vivid and sufficient detail such hair-bleaching events as befel the formidably virtuous Clarissa, he really was not interested in them at all, and was concerned only with educating the reader's mind into the necessary state of horror, remorse, penitence and good resolve. Johnson, with his uncanny gift of saying absolutely the right thing in utterly the right way, once remarked: “If you were to read Richardson for the story, your impatience would be so much fretted that you would hang yourself. But you must read him for the sentiment, and consider the story only as giving occasion to the sentiment.”

There is nevertheless something curiously misleading about this remark. With so many hungry minds all gaping for a story, it has certainly had the effect of driving readers away. And that is a pity. For Richardson's novels are not all spells to raise the spirit of sentiment. The only way to prove this is to read them. They will be found to contain innumerable passages of vivid, economical description, unmarred by manner or moral; exactly the kind of thing, indeed, that the story-reader wants.

Such a chapter as the death of the bawdy-house keeper in
Clarissa
contains writing as energetic and disgusting as the best that was done by those two writers Fielding and Smollett; whose fame has overshadowed his. The unfortunate woman spent some days in dying, thus giving Richardson ample time to say the worst of her:

Behold her, then, spreading the whole troubled bed with her huge quaggy carcass: her mill-pot arms held up, her broad hands clenched with violence: her big eyes goggling and flaming red as we may suppose those of a salamander; her matted grisly hair made irreverent by her nakedness (her clouted head-dress being half off); her livid lips parched, and working violently; her broad chin in convulsive motion; her wide mouth by reason of the contraction of her forehead (which seemed to be half lost in its own frightful furrows) splitting her face, as it were, into two parts: and her huge tongue lolling hideously in it; heaving, puffing as if for breath; her bellow-shaped and various coloured breasts ascending by turns to her chin and descending out of sight, with the violence of her gaspings.

He had, however, reserved an ample store of abuse for the others:

… seven (there were eight of her “cursed daughters ” in all) seemed to have been but just up, arisen perhaps from their customers in the forehouse, and their noctural orgies, with faces, three or four of them, that had run, the paint lying in streaky seams not half blowzed off, discovering coarse wrinkled skins, the hair of some of them in diverse colours, obliged to the
black-lead comb where black was affected, the artificial jet, however, yielding apace to the natural brindle, those of the others plastered with oil and powder; the oil predominating; but everyone's hanging about her ears and neck in broken curls or ragged ends, and each at my entrance taken with one motion, stroking their matted locks with both hands under their coifs, curls or pinners, every one of which was awry. They were all slip-shod, some stockingless, only underpetticoated all; their gowns made to cover straddling hoops, hanging trollopy, and daggling about their heels; but hastily wrappt round them as soon as I came upstairs. And half of them (unpadded, shoulder-bent, pallid-lipt, limber-jointed wretches) appearing from a blooming nineteen or twenty perhaps over night haggard well-worn strumpets of thirty-eight or forty.

Richardson, indeed, in these transports of Comstockian delight goes so far as to describe the creatures as being as revolting as the aerially incontinent harpies whose unhygienic habits above the Trojan lines provided Virgil with one of his few passages that remain in the mind of every schoolboy.

If Richardson had written in this vein throughout, he would have been popular as none but a few writers have been. But instead of allowing his mind to work like the good camera it was, he was constantly rattling it like a church poor-box to remind his hearers of another and a higher life. Thus in the letter describing the melancholy demise of Mrs. Sinclair, the wanton but still reclaimable Mr. Belford suddenly exlaims in one of those bathwaste gurgles of penitence that established Richardson's respectability beyond all reasonable doubt:

Oh, Lovelace, what lives do most of us rakes and libertines lead! What company we do keep! … What woman, nice in her person, and of purity in her mind and manners, did she know what miry wallowers the generality of men of our class are in themselves, but would detest thoughts of associating with such filthy sensualists, whose favourite taste causes them to mingle with dregs and stews, brothels and common sewers.

And six pages further on we reach this passage, which suggests that either a sudden attack of delicacy, or merely a gradual decline in his stock of ideas on the subject of the unfortunate lady's deficiencies, had affected the author.

To have done with so shocking a subject at once, we shall take notice that Mr. Belford in a future letter writes that the miserable woman to the surprise of the operators themselves [all this fuss was because she had broken a leg] (through hourly increasing torture of body and mind) held out so long as to Thursday, Sept. 21 and then died in such agonies as terrified into a transitory penitence all the wretches about her.

There is a great deal in these six dreadful but uplifting pages. And there is more even than there seems at first. It would be impossible to deny that Richardson appears to have enjoyed writing them. He enjoyed writing about a lot of things that seem pretty cheap goods at the present day. He was half-way to Shakespeare in some of his jokes, as for instance in the “whimsical scheme ” in
Pamela
when the disgruntled sister-in-law endeavours to discover whether the newly married pair are still in bed together at nine in the morning.

In the mechanical expression that is now current we should probably say that Richardson was obsessed by sex. We might with more justice say that he was obsessed by virtue. Certainly in his efforts to show what a hardy plant it was he never spared the pains of raking; or even of muck-raking. Richardson was a moralist with an almost botanical respect for the Fair Lily view of women; and a most unbotanical aversion from the Virgin Lily. Both
Pamela
and
Clarissa
are races between the Ring and the Rape, and in the better novel it is the rape that wins.

It would, however, be a mischievous view of Richardson to conclude that he enjoyed writing of the deflowering of women, except to show the perfection of the whole flower. If there had been so much as a single smear of real salacity in him it would have been detected at the time. It would be hard to imagine any man in the whole history of English letters harder to dupe on such a matter than Johnson; and Johnson was perfectly satisfied with Richardson's deepest moral credentials. It was such later critics as Coleridge, who said, “His mind is so very vile a mind, so oozy, so hypocritical, praise-mad, canting, envious, concupiscent—” who had any serious doubts.

But what did not satisfy Johnson was the genuineness of the small change of Richardson's character. Boswell reports the Doctor to have said that:

His perpetual study was to ward off petty inconveniences, and to procure petty pleasures; that his love of continual superiority was such, that he took care always to be surrounded by women, who listened to him implicitly, and did not venture to contradict his opinions; and that his desire of distinction was so great that he used to give large vails to Speaker Onslow's servants, that they might treat him with respect.

Certainly so pitiable an action as tipping a porter to get a salute could only be the product of a tiny mind. To get satisfaction from the resulting bow would seem almost incredible. Vanity of this kind is a kind of self-deceit. And this dishonesty of his towards himself may give us a hint as to why his male characters, unlike his female—a most rare and remarkable thing—are such flabby failures. Writing of women, he had only to look about him to find his Pamelas and Clarissas and Miss Byrons in full bloom on every hedgerow. And he had a very good eye for them. But when he came to write of men he would naturally turn his eyes inwards, look into his heart, and find it all moral maxims and the manners of Tun-bridge Wells; a Grandison deprived of most of his grandeur.

Fielding said that the discovery of hypocrisy and the exposure of vanity are the true source of the ridiculous, the raw material of comedy. Probably it is for some such reason that Richardson appears to us such an absurd old buffer. He was more like a character sketch of his sort of man than any man should be. And he was not only like a character but like a caricature. He stands out from history with the pompous and unprepossessing dignity of a humane employer seen against a perpetual background of testimonials from his sober, industrious and grateful staff.

Richardson's trade was that of printer, and it is said that he used to hide half-crowns among his types to encourage the early-bird type of workman. History, in recording this brief but illuminating fact, has omitted to tell us whether the ruse was successful (it may have been, for Richardson certainly was) or whether it merely resulted in a frantic and upsetting treasure-hunt every morning. No matter which; the picture of the solemn old
donkey furtively popping his florins and sixpences into his type-case is sufficient.

One thing is certain: had young Samuel in his own apprentice days been fortunate enough to find so subtle and generous a master, he would have carried off the half-crown every time, just as he carried off his master's daughter and so succeeded to the business.

All through life, his diligence, his youthful assiduity, his perseverance and overwhelming honesty were a constant source of inspiration and reward to him. He once confessed rather gloriously:

I served a diligent seven years to … a master who grudged every hour to me that tended not to his profit, even of those times of leisure and diversion which the refractoriness of my fellow servants obliged him to allow them, and were usually allowed by other masters to their apprentices. I stole from the hours of rest and relaxation my reading times for the improvement of my mind, and being engaged in correspondence with a gentleman, greatly my superior in degree, and of ample fortune, who, had he lived, intended high things for me, those were all the opportunities I had in my apprenticeship to carry on. But this little incident I may mention; 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 (and who used to call me the pillar of the house) and not to disable myself by watching or sitting up, to perform my duty to him in the daytime.

There is no record of what the “high things ” were that the superior gentleman had in store for young Samuel. But since, despite his ample fortune, the
gentleman died in the middle of a correspondence with a writer of such formidable verbosity, it is perhaps not surprising that Richardson glosses over the incident: he may even have had the superior gentleman's death on his conscience.

Even in those early days Richardson was already at his chosen task of letter-writing. Probably he was a man who could say a great many things in writing that he would not have had the spirit to say in the flesh: a great many feminine-minded men have this peculiarity. He only really became a man when he had a pen between his fingers. And then he became more than an ordinary man; rich in invention, painful in his sincerity and as untiring as a ledger-clerk.

Indeed Richardson himself is the best answer to the objection that is commonly made to his epistolary novels: that no one could have found time to write the letters. The answer is that Richardson
did
. He wrote them himself without amanuensis or mechanical aid, and still found time to manage one of the great printing houses of his day. If Pamela had been half the girl her creator was she could have tossed off those three-thousand word documents of hers and still have earned her keep helping the grimy Mrs. Jewkes. Pamela herself excused her genius by saying with a charming gesture of depreciation: “I have such a knack of writing that when I am by myself I cannot sit without a pen in my hand.”