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

inducing the Federal Government to consent to the
renewal of the Reciprocity Treaty. The Ministry
opposed the motion, firstly, on the ground that it
amounted to a vote of want of confidence; secondly,
that it was useless to agree to the principle without
providing money to carry it into effect ; and thirdly,
that the renewal of the Reciprocity Treaty ought
to precede the proposed canal enlargement of which
it would be the best stimulant. These arguments
prevailed, and Mr. Holton's motion was defeated by
a majority of 78 against 20. The question is as
interesting to the people of England as it is to the
Canadians and Americans. With a cattle disease in
Europe, and beef rising in price throughout the
British Isles, it becomes a matter of international
concern tat hundreds of thousands of barrels of pork,
as well as of flour, should not annually be allowed to
rot, or be wasted in lowa, Indiana, and Illinois, for
want of the means of transport, which the New
York canals, blocked up by a plethora of business,
are unable to afford, and which those of the St.
Lawrence are unfit to accommodate in default of in
essential and not very costly enlargement. Confe-
derated or unconfederated Canada and the Maritime
Provinces will never assume their proper commercial
position in the world, until they are able to take pro-
per advantage of the splendid waterway of the St.
Lawrence, and of their contiguity to the richest food-
producing States of the American continent. It is
well, no doubt, to throw open to the immigration
of Europe the vast arable lands on the Red River
and the Saskatchewan, and to extend the frontier of
Canada to the bases of the Rocky Mountains ; but
as Canada, New Brunswick, and Nova Scotia are
not one-third or one-fifth peopled, it would seem as
if enterprise had a nearer and better field for its
display than the north-western territory, and that
it would be much more advantageous, especially for
Canada, to develope her canal system than to pay
$5,000,000 to the Hudson's Bay Company for a
barren acquisition that would merely enlarge her
boundaries without incrasing her resources.

RICHARDSON'S CLARISSA HARLOWE,

Reviewed—a Century after its Publication—
by " The Spectator."

It is almost as much a change of air to turn from the
lively rattle of our railway novels to the solemn coach-
and-six of Richardson's full-dress genius, as to exchange
London for the old towns of Germany, where the outside
dress of the middle ages still abides, even within hearing
of the express trains. What a gulf, for example, between
Richardson and Mr. Trollope ! And the difference is not
exactly in the rate of their own movement as authors, for
Mr. Trollope is tranquil and minute enough, and on proper
occasion Richardson can be as lively and effervescent as
any novelist of any day. The difference is in the move-
ment of the world which they describe. A hundred
modern interests ripple the mind of to-day for every
one that swept across that of Richardson's day,
and hence he studied the breaking of a single
wave with as much care and art as a modern
artist would give to a whole storm at sea.
Richardson made men and angels lay aside their proper con-
cerns—almost brought the whole world to a standstill—to
gaze on the trial of one woman's virtue. Every one whom
he introduces, he introduces only with relation to this ono
purpose. Clarissa's own family have their meaning only in
Clarissa. They live but to persecute her into dangers from
which she cannot escape, and to mourn over their own life
as a wreck when their stupidity and obstinacy have borne
their natural fruits. Lovelace, superior as he is as a dra-
matic creation to Clarissa and every other character, exists
only to tempt and betray her; Miss Howe only to receive
her confidences and sustain her by her sympathy ;
Belford but to show what was her persuasive power
over a dissolute heart. Enormous as are the
proportions of the narrative, one centred more completely
in one figure, and almost in one attitude of that figure, is
nowhere else to be found. The long eight volumes in which
it was formerly published are wholly occupied with an ac-
count, the full size of life, of every incident which contri-
buted to or impeded and delayed the denouement. While
Mr. Trollope travels rapidly and lightly over hundreds of
little incidents which are almost independent of each other,
and related only as illustrating the various characters he
has brought together in his tales, Richardson accompanies
slowly in his state coach the slow march of the single
temptation with which he occupies his story. No doubt
there are very few even of modern writers who travel over
so much ground of miscellaneous incident as Mr. Trollope,
but even those who adhere most closely to the develop-
ment of a single story take care to give a constantly
changing attitude to the principal actors in relation to it;
they do not magnify a single moral attitude with Richard-
son's magnificent pertinacity and microscopic minuteness
till they have exhausted its significance and sculptured it,
as it were, in solid marble ; rather do they give a series of
successive sketches of the same characters in different
aspects. As we have implied, much of this fiiity of man-
ner may be duo to the time. In that loss busy age, the
leisurely classes made a great deal more of one purpose
than we do of many, and hence the characters them-
selves were less mobile than now, fell into stiffer moulds,
brooded more over a few subjects, and made more solemn
and elaborate preparations for given effects. But still if a
Richardson would be more surprising than ever in the pre-
sent age, he was a curious literary phenomenon even then,
almost as strong a contrast to Fielding as to our modern
writers. His imagination was microscopic, and required as
definite a focus to its object-glass as a microscope. If any
family nowadays could by any chance devote the time to
breaking in a refractory girl to a disagreeable alliance
which the Harlowes devoted to attempting to force Mr.
Solmes on Clarissa, certainly no other artist could repro-
duce those tedious months with the patient exactitude of
Richardson. Precisely three months given up to family
councils, voluminous letters, interviews, negotiation, diplo-
macy, protests, protocols, threats of war, and this only the
introduction to the real story ! The first two volumes of
the old edition are like the Schleswig-Holstein blue-books,
only that Mr. James Harlowe, jun., was much more peremp-
tory than Lord Russell. And this is all prelude. Clarissa
does not take up the attitude in which Richardson really
designs co sculpture her till after her flight from home,
till after the rash step when, as she pathetically wails in
her letter to Miss Howe, "your Clarissa is gone off with a
man." Then, the delicate but respectful inflexibility with
which she has resisted the mixed prayers and bullyings of
the family league, is changed into an equally keen
but more proud and suspicious resistance to Lovelace's
gay frauds and deep-scheming passion. Yet even in the
introduction she is thrown into the attitude which Richard-
son thought the most characteristic of feminine purity,—
one of perpetual guard against masculine encroachments;
but while the earlier struggle is a more test of pertinacity
under almost brutal pressure, the engagement with Love-
lace is one which calls for subtlety, skill, vigilance, and
the courage of despair.

It is easy to criticise Richardson's conception of a para-
gon of feminine excellence in Clarissa. Her notion of purity
is clearly legal, her humility is far from genuine ; she is
evidently as conscious as her biographer that she is a
spectacle for angels and for men, and her demure saintship
when she devotes herself with almost the relish of an epi
cure to dying in the way that may heap the most glowing
coals of fire on her persecutors' heads, though never
without a certain transparent beauty and sweetness, is still
full of didactic triumph. Then, in spite of the real sweet-
ness, there is a drop of feminine venom, of which
Richardson himself is scarcely aware, at the bottom of
Clarissa's character from beginning to end. In her very
first letter, before her sister Arabella has begun her ma-
lignities, Clarissa dissects the vanities and radical
vulgarity of her sister's mind to her friend
Miss Howe with the most unflinching hand. And
at the very last, though she professes to have forgiven all
her enemies, she launches little poisoned arrows at them in
her pious will and farewell letters which render the title so
often applied to her of " divine lady" not a little amusing.
This, for instance, is the red hot coal she bequeaths to
her sister's maid, Betty, who harassed her much through
the preliminary home persecution:—" To my sister's maid,
Betty Barnes, I bequeath £lO, to show that I resent not
former disobligations, which I believe were owing more to
the insolence of office and to natural pertness than to per-
sonal ill-will." That is a pretty effectual retaliation for a
saint to launch at a waiting maid from the tomb. Towards
her betrayer, Lovelace, of course something of natural
horror might fairly be mingled with her Christian forgive-
ness, but the actual state of her mind seems to us to have
in it more of lingering spite and less of Christian forgive-
ness or profound pity than the author wished to delineate.
The nice little dramatic scene in which she intends her
own corpse shall play the most impressive parts, looks to
us rather more like feminine revenge than it seemed to
Clarissa's admirers :—" I could wish, if it might be
avoided without making between Mr. Lovelace
and my executor, that the former might not be permitted
to see my corpse. But if, as he is a man very uncontrol-
lable, and I am nobody's, he insist upon viewing her
dead whom he ONCE before saw in a manner
dead, let his gay curiosity be gratified. Let him behold,
and triumph over the wretched remains of one who has
been made a victim to his barbarous perfidy, but let some
good person, as by my desire, give him a paper while he is
viewing the ghastly spectacle, containing these few words
only—' Gay, cruel heart !' Behold here the remains of the
once ruined yet now happy Clarissa Harlow° ! See what
thou thyself must quickly be, and REPENT !' Yet to show
that I die in perfect charity with all the world, I do most
sincerely forgive Mr. Lovelace the wrongs he has done
me." That is, she forgives him in the sense of reserving
to herself the complete monopoly of wounding him by
verbal taunts and stings, posthumous or otherwise.
That privilege, even though it require little theatric
arrangements over her coffin, she cannot give up.
But all this is only criticism on Richardson's conception of
feminine perfection, not on the picture of Clarissa, which is
studied with absolute consistency and wonderful nicety