29, Jul, 2010

The Sentimental Novel

Meanwhile, the novelists of sensibility and sentiment were beginning to soften up the calloused heart of society. They brought delicacy and tears and a hyper-sensitivity to love-making, along with a good deal of hypocrisy and mawkishness. The year 1740 had seen the birth of the first 'psychological' novel, Samuel Richardson's Pamela. In its interminable and, as some say, prurient pages young women could read how, be they ever so humble, they could use their virtue as a weapon to wear down a would-be seducer to the point where, in desperation, he was prepared to make an honourable proposal of marriage. Before fame overtook him, Richardson had lent his pen to the task of writing love letters for servant girls. Pamela owed its origin to a series of model letters designed to teach country people how to write; instead, it developed into one of a series of sentimental works which (as Dr Johnson said) 'taught the passions to move at the command of virtue'. The story of Pamela did not emerge in one volume; the fate of the heroine kept the citizens off their sleep for weeks. When the minx's virtue was finally rewarded, the villagers of Slough rang the church bells for joy. Lord Lytton called Richardson 'the first of our great novelists who set the fashion of concentrating all the interest of human life upon the war between men and women'. Cynics mocked the rage for Pamela, but there was a considerable mass of the population only too ready to welcome, and shed tears over, novels of sensibility and virtue. From the same year as Pamela dates the word sentimental, as used by Laurence Sterne to describe his courtship of Elizabeth Lumley. No one had used the word before; everyone soon began to use it, without worrying overmuch what it meant. A sentimental courtship was all very well for young Sterne, but to Elizabeth Lumley, twenty-seven years old and no beauty, it did not seem to be getting her anywhere. One of Sterne's biographers, Thomas Yoseloff, suggests that she took advantage of a serious illness to show Sterne her will, in which he was left all her money. 'Nothing could have been better calculated to work on the young clergyman's sympathies than the practical demonstration of her love contained in her will,' says Yoseloff. Overcome, Sterne married her, and soon afterwards she recovered.
Twenty-seven years afterwards, Sterne borrowed the fine phrases he employed in writing to Miss Lumley and used them in his courtship of Mrs Draper. It is a mysterious business.

Writing other people's love letters gave useful practice to several literary men. Thomas de Quincey performed this service for two young servant girls in Merionethshire. 'It did not require any great penetration to discover that what they wished was that their letters should be as kind as was consistent with proper maidenly pride ... on all such occasions I gave great satisfaction to my humble friends and was generally treated with hospitality.'

Even in recent times the tradition has been honoured. Mr Somerset Maugham has revealed that he once wrote a letter to a girl in France, on behalf of a waiter in Morocco, proposing marriage.

Did he keep copies of the letters when he wrote them, or did he recover them at a later stage? It has been suggested that he used old flowers of speech not through idleness but because he felt he could not do any better. It has also been suggested, charitably, that his papers were badly confused when edited. However, there is Steele's example to show that a literary man does not like to waste good love letters. If he did plagiarize from his own works, Sterne stands a step or two above those who have not hesitated to lift whole passages from the love letters of better men.

Dr Samuel Johnson's view that marriages would be just as successful if arranged by the Lord Chancellor has already been noticed (see Introduction), Not all the doctor's pronouncements on marriage are consistent, but more than once he shakes his head over the follies which come in the wake of love's young dream. In Rasselas he says;

A youth and maiden, meeting by chance, or brought together by artifice, exchange glances; reciprocate civilities, go home and dream of one another. Having little to divert attention or diversify thought, they find themselves uneasy when they are apart and therefore conclude they shall be happy together. They marry and discover what nothing but voluntary blindness before had concealed; they wear out life in altercations and charge nature with cruelty.

However, he assured Boswell that a father had no right to control the inclinations of his daughter in marriage.
Dr Johnson appears to have held the view that persons about to marry ought not to keep disreputable secrets from each other. Before marrying Mrs Porter he confessed to her that one of his uncles had been hanged. Mrs Porter received the news most magnanimously and assured him that she, for her part, had at least fifty relatives who should have been strung up.
The doctor proved an affectionate husband, though the wedding day was marred by an ominous incident-a singular beginning of connubial felicity', as Boswell says. Boswell heard the story at second or third hand, but he quotes the doctor as saying:

Sir, she had read the old romances and had got into her head the fantastical notion that a woman of spirit should use her lover like a dog. So, Sir, at first she told me that I rode too fast and she could not keep up with me; and when I rode a little slower she passed me and complained that I lagged behind. I was not to be made the slave of caprice; and I resolved to begin as I meant to end. I therefore pushed on briskly till I was fairly out of her sight. The road lay between two hedges so I was sure she could not miss it; and I contrived that she should come up with me. When she did I observed her to be in tears.

Boswell's courtships have received ample publicity in recent years. In one of his essays he complains that too exquisite a standard of imagination and sensibility has been set by certain impassioned individuals, who have expressed themselves 'with perhaps some additional force beyond what was actually felt'. In consequence a fashion in love had been set up, and persons with only one-tenth the sensibility now felt it necessary 'to represent themselves as undergoing every species of anguish which they suppose has been experienced by illustrious prototypes of love'. As the Romantic movement developed, Boswell's criticism gained in validity.

The complaint that young women were stuffing their heads with romantic nonsense was heard more and more in the latter part of the century. In Isaac BickerstaiPs Love in a Village (first performed in 1763) an elderly lady says to a younger one:

Tliis is mighty pretty romantic stuff! but you learn it out of your playbills and novels. Girls in my time had other employments ; we worked hard at our needles and kept ourselves from idle thoughts; before I was your age I had finished with my own fingers a complete set of chairs, and a line screen in ten-stitch. ... I never looked into a book but when I said my prayers, except it was the Complete Housewife or the great family receipt book. . . . Ah, I never knew a woman come to good that was fond of reading!

Just as the plays which vexed the Puritans had shown the outwitting of parents by lovers and their allies, so the theme of popular literature now became the rebellion of young love against elders who strove to make matches for sordid ends. The young lady of the day had to balance what she read in romances against the advice of her well-intentioned parents. How (one wonders) did the daughters of Dr Gregory of Edinburgh marry-if they married? After his death the doctor's private counsel to his family was published as A Father's Legacy to His Daughters (1774). He held out little hope of a love match, 'Without an unusual share cf natural sensibility and very peculiar good fortune a woman in this country has very little probability of marrying for love,' he wrote. This was his conception of marriage:

A man of taste and delicacy marries a woman because he loves her more than any other. A woman of equal taste and delicacy marries him because she esteems him and because he gives her that preference.

Marriage, he warned, would 'at once dispel the enchantment raised by extraordinary beauty', but if the couple had other necessary virtues, their union would be supportable. Dr Gregory did not believe that women should sit back and wait to be discovered. He was all for 'an easy intercourse between the sexes, which occasions an emulation and exertion in each to excel and be agreeable, hence their respective excellencies are mutually communicated and blended'. But the impression gained from Dr Gregory is that if a girl was lucky enough to receive an offer from a man of good sense, morals, temper, fortune and family, 'free from any loathsome hereditary disease', she ought to be well content.

The 'choosiness' of young ladies in face of what seemed first-class offers continued to be the despair of their elders. Fanny Burney's father, recommending a well-favoured suitor, entreated her to remember the fate of an unprotected, unprovided woman.

Observe how far I go; I don't urge you, hand over head, to have this man at all events; but for God's sake and your own sake give himself and yourself fair play. Don't decide so positively against it. If you do, you are ridiculous to a high degree.

The cry of the father, in this century, was no less poignant than the cry of the daughter.