rse _Clarissa_ has its faults. Miss Harlowe, for instance, is not
always herself--is not always the complete creation she affects to be:
there are touches of moral pedantry--anticipations of George Eliot--in
her; the scenes in which she is brought to shame are scarcely real,
living, moving, all the rest of it. But on the other hand is there
anything better than Lovelace in the whole range of fiction? Take
Lovelace in all or any of his moods--suppliant, intriguing, repentant,
triumphant, above all triumphant--and find his parallel if you can.
Where, you ask, did the little printer of Salisbury Court--who suggests
to Mr. Stephen 'a plump white mouse in a wig'--where did Richardson
discover so much gallantry and humanity, so much romance and so much
fact, such an abundance of the heroic qualities and the baser veracities
of mortal nature? Lovelace is, if you except Don Quixote, the completest
hero in fiction. He has wit, humour, grace, brilliance, charm; he is a
scoundrel and a ruffian, and he is a gentleman and a man; of his kind and
in his degree he has the right Shakespearean quality. Almost as perfect
in her way is the enchanting Miss Howe--an incarnation of womanliness and
wit and fun, after Lovelace the most brilliant of Richardson's creations.
Or take the Harlowe family: the severe and stupid father, the angry and
selfish uncles, the cub James, the vixen Arabella, a very fiend of envy
and hatred and malice--what a gallery of portraits is here! And Solmes
and Tomlinson, Belford and Brand and Hickman; and the infinite complexity
of the intrigue; the wit, the pathos, the invention; the knowledge of
human nature; the faculty of dialogue--where save in _Clarissa_ shall we
find all these? As for Miss Harlowe herself, all incomplete as she is
she remains the Eve of fiction, the prototype of the modern heroine, the
common mother of all the self-contained, self-suffering, self-satisfied
young persons whose delicacies and repugnances, whose independence of
mind and body, whose airs and ideas and imaginings, are the stuff of the
modern novel. With her begins a new ideal of womanhood; from her
proceeds a type unknown in fact and fiction until she came. When after
outrage she declines to marry her destroyer, and prefers death to the
condonation of her dishonour, she strikes a note and assumes a position
till then not merely unrecognised but absolutely undiscovered. It has
been said of her half in jest and half in earnest