CLARISSA HARLOWE. 'Clarissa Har lowe> is the novel upon which rests the fame of Samuel Richardson. As originally pub lished, it consists of seven volumes, which al), peared in instalments; the first two volumes in November 1747, the third and fourth in April 1748, and the fifth, sixth and seventh in the following December. The great length was oc casioned in part by the form of narrative which the author adopted in this as well as in his other novels. Though Richardson was not the first novelist to make a free use of letters, he was the first one to weld several groups or series of letters into a coherent whole. And yet, in the ordinary sense, Richardson has no story. He takes a simple situation, which he carefully elaborates and then works out in minute de tail. Clarissa is the daughter of a country squire, still in her teens, whom her family try to force into marriage with a man whom she loaths. In her dilemma she places herself un der the protection of Lovelace, a libertine, whose character she suspects but does not fully know, and flees with him to London. Her pro fessed lover betrays her by the basest act of treachery. Clarissa dies of a broken heart, and Lovelace expiates his crime in a mortal duel. This is all there is to 'Clarissa Harlowe> as a story.
It is the workmanship— the sure and cer tain hand manipulating a multitude of emo tional incidents—that interests the reader of the novel. Rkhardson records Clarissa's emo tions from day to day, and from hour to 'hour, in her distressful situation. One can almost hear her heart beat. There are two vol umes depicting her state before she elopes, and a volume is necessary to describe her death. The result is a wcrnderfully realistic effect. Peopk wrote and talked about Clarissa as if she really lived in the flesh, and they sought out the places associated with her name. While the novel was in progress, men and women, some of them unknown to the author, wrote to him, pleading that he should save the heroine from the fate they feared wa.s impending; but he disregarded their remonstrance and let the tragedy move on to the inevitable end. There emerges a young woman of exalted character, beautiful and amiable, who, being smudged by a villain, prefers death to life. 'Clarissa Har lowe' has become in our literature a type of pure womanhood, and Lovelace the type of the arrant villain, whose virtues—and he has many —are completely eclipsed by one shame less vice.
The novel, at once translated into several languages, created a sensation throughout western Europe. On its plan hundreds of nov els have been written in England, France and Germany. From it derive, for example, Mac kenzie's (Man of Feeling,' Rousseau's (La Nou velle Heloise,' and, through Rousseau, Goethe's (Sorrows of Werther.) To Mrs. Klopstock, over in Germany, (Clarissa) was a "heavenly book)); and Diderot, the French philosopher, placed it on his shelf by the side of Homer, Euripides, Sophocles and the Bible. A Dutch clergyman doubted not that certain parts of the novel, if found in the Bible, would be pointed out "as manifest proofs of divine in spiration.° Macaulay claimed to know it al most by heart, and Alfred de Musset pro nounced it "le premier roman du monde.° Of course many readers have not felt this enthu siasm, and the novel has been called tedious, overwrought and sentimental. It is indeed dif ficult for anyone, not psychologically inclined, to maintain an interest in an emotional study where for pages nothing may happen more ex citing than domestic incident. Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, though she admitted that Richardson described a squire's household as it was, thought the novel on the whole a strange performance; and Horace Walpole called it a picture of "high life as conceived by a book seller,° and a romance as it would be °spiritual ized by a Methodist teacher.° More recently, the late W. E. Henley denounced Richardson and all his ways as immoral. To say the truth, the fame of (Clarissa) has deservedly suffered much abatement in popular esteem. Nor is Richardson any longer the model for the nov elist. The fact, however, remains that he wrote a great book— the first complete ficti tious biography of a woman; and he was mas ter of an art so natural and perfect that he impressed her on the world as a real woman who once lived and suffered martyrdom for her sex In the fine words of Mrs. Barbauld, Richardson's first biographer, we see in the character of Clarissa °that virtue is triumph ant in every situation; that in circumstances the most painful and degrading, in a prison, in a brbthel, in grief, in distraction, in despair, it is still lovely, still cciminanding, still the ob ject of our veneration.°