The Sun.
London, England, 1865-09-14 00:00:00

THE SUN LONDON, THURSDAY EVENING, SEPTEMBER 14, 1865.

throughout. She is brought up to think herself the centre
of the universe—grandfather, father, mother, uncles, bro-
ther and sister, servants, every one bowing down before
her, even as a child, as the sheaves of Joseph's brethren
bowed in his dream towards his own sheaf. Her "friends
and favourers," as in the time of her adversity she
writes to Dr. Lewin, one of her principal "favourers,"
have a sort of right, she thinks, to know the history of
trials and her glorious justification. She is fully
aware of all her gifts. " Did I not," she writes to
Miss Howe, " did I not think more and deeper than
most young creatures think ; did I not weigh ; did I not
reflect ; I might perhaps have been less obstinate. Deli-
cacy (may I presume to call it?) thinking, weighing, reflec-
tion are not blessings—(l have not found them such)—in
the degree I have them. I wish I had been able in some
very nice cases to have known what indifference was ; yet
not to have my ignorance imputable to me as a fault. Oh
my dear ! the finer sensibilities, if I may suppose mine to
be such, make not happy." Yet in spite of all this didactic
egotism in Clarissa., not unmingled with a resentment to
those who do not recognise her merit which has often a
touch of spite, there runs a delicacy of fibre—(purity meant
something quite different in Richardson's day and our own)
—a sweet persuasiveness, and a high-bred feminine mettle,
which fascinates us almost against our will. In letter after
letter, volume after volume, she is represented almost in the
same attitude of half-affrighted, half-resentful feminine
pride, longing to trust and finding no one near her to trust,
thinking " deeper than most young creatures think," half
detecting falsehood by the slightest and most uncertain
signs, waging dangerous war with the most prolific and
unscrupulous scheme ever represented in Lnglish fiction,
and overwhelmed at last only to rise with keener and more
statuesque pride cut of the struggle. The moral perfection
Richardson intelligence is so inferior to his pertinacity; the
vain, spiteful sister, who almost enjoys her sister's dis-
honour, but is overwhelmed with grief at her death ; the
weak, fond mother, who dare not assert her own will to
save her daughter ; the gouty, querulous father, who is
persuaded he is doing it all himself when ho is the mere
instrument of his son ; the uncles, equally weak, but after
so different a fashion—one with all the tenderness of a soft
nature, the other with all the bustle of a vulgar "plump
soul," as Miss Howe calls the retired naval officer ; Miss
Howe, again, the piquant auburn beauty, with her lively
wit and knowledge of character, and her ingrained imper-
tinence to all who attempt any control over her except
Clarissa; then, her mother, who in spite of her own vul-
gar vanity and stinginess is really wrapt up in her daugh-
ter, whose more free and generous nature she so profoundly
admires—even Mr. Brand, the pompous curate, with his
string of classical quotations, and Joseph Leman, the semi-
hypocritical man-servant who delights to call himself a
"plain man"—all are chiselled out with wonderful fidelity
and often with a humour which ought to have gained
Richardson a place with Fielding and Smollett in Thacke-
ray's English Humaurists.

Clarissa is a book in which the lines are cut so much
deeper than any novelist cares to cut them now, the whole
treatment is so completely the size of life, without being
(after the first two volumes) in any degree dull, that
though no one character except that of Lovelace reaches to
the highest standard of originality, they form together a
group impressed with the manners of the 17th century,
which takes its place amongst those most vivid of all memo-
ries which we retain some vague impression of having de-
rived from personal experience. It is a strange and some-
what quaint result of Richardson's "didatic design that he
succeeded in making for ever memorable a wanton being
without any very distinct trace of a conscience, and gave
the artistic touch at least to his villain, instead of to the
paragon of excellence whose character he had so painfully
and minutely laboured.