Richardson

“ Yet Richardson is not content with putting into his mouth lengthy discourses tending chiefly, though expressed with mock humility, to his own glorification; but he keeps all the other characters perpetually dancing round the Baronet in a chorus of praise. “Was there ever such a man, my Harriet, so good, so just, so noble in his sentiments?” “Ah, my Lucy, dare I hope for the affection of the best of men?” Some people would have begged their friends to cease making them ridiculous, but not so Sir Charles. ”

“ Robert Richardson was a canon of the monastery of Cambuskenneth, and fled to England in 1538. Cald. MS. i. 97. I suppose he is the person who is called “Sir Robert Richardson, priest,” in Sadler’s Letters. He was sent into Scotland in 1543, by Henry VIII., with a recommendation to the regent Arran, who employed him in preaching through the kingdom, along with Guillaume and Rough. When the regent apostatized from the reformed cause, he withdrew his protection from Richardson, who was obliged to flee a second time into England, to escape the cardinal’s persecution. ”

“ What was the secret by which the stout little printer excited such enthusiasm and won such eulogy? How did he appeal to natures so different as the worldly Lord Chesterfield, the country shopkeeper, and the impassioned Diderot? Richardson was the first novelist to stir the heart and to move the passions, and his power was the more striking that it was new. His study of human nature had begun early in life. ”

“ But the British product, as it seems to me, was appreciated abroad just in so far as it was not specifically British. The thoroughly national article could not be exported. Richardson's sentimentalism inclined to twaddle; and there is nothing, I fancy, so cosmopolitan as downright twaddle. Obvious little moral commonplaces are current in every market. Twaddle pure and simple, indeed, may be a drug. Richardson's genius, his command of the pathetic and the realistic, was undoubtedly the secret of his success ”

“ The position, therefore, of Richardson in our literature is that of a great Nonconformist. He was not manufactured according to any established process. If I may employ a metaphor borrowed from his own most honourable craft, he was set up in a new kind of type. He was born in 1689 in a Derbyshire village, the name of which, for some undiscovered reason, he would never tell. The son of poor parents—his father was a joiner—he had never [Pg 8] any but a village school education, nor did he in later life worry much about learning, or seek, as so many printers have done, to acquire foreign tongues. ”

“ You are strong and she is weak. Think of her poor husband, and give me back the letters.’
STEVE. ‘On my word of honour—’ Here arrives Richardson, so anxious to come that she is propelled into the room like a ball. ‘What is it?’
RICHARDSON. ‘A gentleman downstairs, sir, wanting to see you.’
AMY, saying the right thing at once, ‘He must not find me here. My reputation—’
STEVE. ‘I can guess who it is. Let me think.’ He is really glad of the interruption. ‘See here, I’ll keep him downstairs for a moment. Richardson, take this lady to the upper landing until I have brought him in. ”

“ She died of a broken heart, and Lovelace, borne down by remorse, was killed in a duel by a cousin of Clarissa. Sir Charles Grandison, 1753, was Richardson's portrait of an ideal fine gentleman, whose stately doings fill eight volumes, but who seems to the modern reader a bore and a prig. All of these novels were written in the form of letters passing between the characters, a method which fitted Richardson's subjective cast of mind. He knew little of life, but he identified himself intensely with his principal character and produced a strong effect by minute, accumulated touches. ”

“ Alas, the printer would have none of this sentiment—hence ‘William Allen Richardson.’”
I cannot say that this narrative satisfied me; but there was nothing in it to make one violently sceptical. Why should not William and Ellen have lived this idyllic rose-growing life? Why should not their names have been thus intertwined for ever, even if a little ungallantly? I had seen barges on the Thames called “William and Ellen,” I was sure; why not roses? I therefore went about saying that I now knew the whole history of William Allen Richardson, and the story was not doubted. ”

“ There had been Richardsonians before Richardson. Clarissa is nevertheless a pioneer work, and we have it on the high authority of M. Jusserand that the English have contributed more than any other people to the formation of the contemporary novel. Of the long-winded, typical and rather chaotic English novel of love analysis and moral sentiment (as opposed to the romance of adventure) Richardson is the first successful charioteer.
The novel in England gained prodigiously by the shock of opposition between the ideals of Richardson and Henry Fielding (1707-1754) , his rival and parodist. ”

“ On the kerbstone, a knot of the latter, tittering among themselves, shot furtive glances at Dove and Maurice as they passed. Here, a pretty, laughing face was the centre of a little circle; there, a bevy of girls clustered about a young man, who, his hands in his pockets, leaned carelessly against the door-arch; and again, another, plump and much befeathered, with a string of large pearlbeads round her fat, white neck, had isolated herself from the rest, to take up, on the steps, a more favourable stand. ”

“ Men, on the other hand, those beyond his own particular circle, Richardson understood only from the outside. Annoyed by criticisms to this effect, he attempted in the hero of his last book to present a true gentleman, but the result is only a mechanical ideal figure of perfection whose wooden joints creak painfully as he moves slowly about under the heavy load of his sternly self-conscious goodness and dignity. ”

“ Most permanently important, perhaps, of all Richardson's contributions, was his creation of complex characters, such as had thitherto appeared not in English novels but only in the drama. In characterization Richardson's great strength lay with his women—he knew the feminine mind and spirit through and through. His first heroine, Pamela, is a plebeian serving-maid, and his second, Clarissa, a fine-spirited young lady of the wealthy class, but both are perfectly and completely true and living, throughout all their terribly complex and trying experiences. ”

“ It may safely be said of Richardson that, after attaining to independence, he did more good every week of his life—for he was a wise and most charitable man—than Fielding was ever able to do throughout the whole of his; but this cannot alter the case or excuse a violated tradition. ”

“ She felt she could have walked through him. She was quite near him now, her face lifted towards the strange radiance of the thin white face, the glow of the flaming beard; a man’s face, yielded up to her, and free from the least flicker of reminder.
“What do you think? What do you see?” she heard herself ask. Words made no break in the tide holding her there at rest.
His words followed hers like a continuation of her phrase:
“Mademoiselle, I see the People.” His eyes were on hers, an intense blue light; not concentrated on her; going through her and beyond in a widening radiance. ”

“ He will, I am sure, say that Richardson's novels are among the most valuable, among the most original works in our language. No writings have done more to raise the fame of English genius in foreign countries. No writings are more deeply pathetic. No writings, those of Shakspeare excepted, show more profound knowledge of the human heart. As to their moral tendency, I can cite the most respectable testimony. Dr Johnson describes Richardson as one who had taught the passions to move at the command of virtue. ”

“ She was married to her cousin, Gilbert Geddes Richardson, on the 29th of April 1799, at Fort George, Madras; where she was then living with her uncle, General, afterwards Lord Harris; and the connexion proved, in all respects, a suitable and happy one. Her husband, at that time captain of an Indiaman, was one of a number of brothers, natives of the south of Scotland, who all sought their fortunes in India, and one of whom, Lieutenant-Colonel Richardson, became known in literature as an able translator of Sanscrit poetry, and contributor to the "Asiatic Researches." ”

“ The Greek class was taught by Professor Young, a character of the Christopher North and John Stuart Blackie type, ‘a strangely beautiful and radiant figure in the then grave and solemn group of Glasgow professors.’ William Richardson filled the Humanity—in other words the Latin—Chair, and filled it with some distinction too, in his curled wig, lace ruffles, knee breeches and silk stockings. Richardson was not of those who combine plain living with high thinking. ”

“ Richardson were averse to his returning her call, and she did not urge it; but in her pretty, imperious way she insisted that he must help her out into the sitting-room or she should get "awfully homesick" staying in the parlor all the time. ”

“ Samuel Richardson.
Novels, at the end of the last century, had been included in the general proscription. Richardson [277] slept forgotten: his fellow-countrymen discovered in his style traces of the inferior society in which he had spent his life. Fielding [278] maintained his success; Sterne [279] , the purveyor of eccentricity, was out of date. The Vicar of Wakefield was still read [280] .
If Richardson has no style, a question of which we foreigners are unable to judge, he will not live, because one lives only by style. ”

“ A man in a heavy ulster—notwithstanding the mildness of the day—stalked on ahead, unconcerned about the fate of his family, which dragged, a woman and two children, in the rear: like savages, thought Louise, where the male goes first, to scent danger. But the crackling of paper recalled her attention; Maurice was folding the sheet, and replacing it in the envelope, with a ludicrous precision. His face had taken on a pinched expression, and he handed the letter back to her without a word. ”

“ In the meantime a vacancy occurred at Pearl Harbour and Richardson received an appointment. After swearing that he would support the Constitution of the United States, the laws of the territory of Hawaii, the Ten Commandments and what not, he was duly authorised to exercise the duties of sub-inspector of dredging. Richardson's one per cent. better mark in the examination put him on the dredging job three weeks in advance of myself and during this period he earned seventy-five dollars—a costly one per cent. for me. ”

“ The people who trod the broad, clean roads and the paths of the wood walked with a spring in their steps; voices were light and high, and each breath that was drawn increased the sense of buoyancy, of undiluted satisfaction. With these bursts of golden sunshine, so other than the pallid gleamings of the winter, came a fresh impulse to life; and the most insensible was dimly conscious how much had to be made up for, how much lived into such a day.
Maurice Guest walked among the mossgreen tree-trunks, each of which vied with the other in the brilliancy of its coating. ”

“ Richardson died at Emmanuel College, Cambridge, on 15 March 1775, after a lingering decay, and was buried in the college chapel by the side of his wife, who had died on 21 March 1759. A portrait of him is in the picture-gallery at Cambridge. He is depicted in old age, of a somewhat stern and forbidding aspect, seated, and with a pen in his hand. ”

“ The caravan was Richardson's world; and he might well have applied to that vehicle the eastern apologue, "the place which changes its occupants so often is not a palace, but a 'caravan'-serai." But we are giving way to sorrow, though "away with melancholy" is our motto. A wide-mouthed [Pg 185] musician—we forget whether clarionet or trombone—applied to Richardson at Easter for an engagement at Greenwich fair: "You won't do any thing till Christmas," said he: "you must wait, as you are only fit for a Wait: you are one to play from ear to ear." ”

“ Thus while we find traces of weakness in our ancestors, a principle seems to have been involved which made New England a hot-bed for vags and tramps. No wonder we sigh for the good old days when respectable citizens did not have to lock their doors on Sunday, for all the thieves were in church.
[12]
TRADITIONS Through the first appearance of the Richardsons in Charlestown we have an unbroken line of nine generations through Ezekiel of Woburn 1630 to Marvin of Chicago 1917. ”

“ And then her skin was so fine, her eyes were so bright, the straight lashes so black and so long!—she put her head back, looked at herself through half-closed lids, turned her face this way and that, even smiling, wet though her cheeks were, in order that she might see the even line of teeth, with their slightly notched edges. The smile was still on her lips when the tears welled up again, ran over, trickled down and dropped with a splash, she watching them, until a big, unexpected sob rose in her throat, and almost choked her. ”

“ In casuistry this author is quite at home; and, with a boldness greater even than his puritanical severity, has exhausted every topic on virtue and vice. There is another peculiarity in Richardson, not perhaps so uncommon, which is, his systematically preferring his most insipid characters to his finest, though both were equally his own invention, and he must be supposed to have understood something of their qualities. Thus he preferred the little, selfish, affected, insignificant Miss Byron, to the divine Clementina; and again, Sir Charles Grandison, to the nobler Lovelace. ”