ABSTRACT
Milton is a crucial presence in that debate between the merits of modern and ancient writers which repeatedly occupied the eighteenth century. In Sir Charles Grandison Harriet Byron engages in argument with the pedantic Oxford man, Mr Walden: A little encouraged; Pray, Sir, said I, let me ask one question - Whether you do not think, that our Milton, in his Paradise Lost, shews himself to be a very learned man? And yet that work is written wholly in the language of his own country, as the works of Homer and Virgil were in the language of theirs: - And they, I presume, will be allowed to be learned men. (I, 13, p. 76)1
Mr Walden replies that Milton is ‘infinitely obliged to the great antients’; Harriet counters that his use of their mythology is ‘a condescension . . . to the taste of persons of more reading than genius’ and that Paradise Lost is the type of modern achievement built on the progressive learning of the past: Milton as much excels Homer ‘in the grandeur of his sentiments, as his subject, founded on the Christian system, surpasses the pagan’ (p. 77). Harriet is here clearly acting as the mouthpiece of her author, and indeed Richardson’s social and literary circumstances made it inescapable that he should defend the position of the ‘moderns’. He was not a man of classical learning and, as his acutely sensitive social consciousness forever reminded him, he was not a member of the ‘world’. But the debate had in any case particular force for the novelists, since the form they were evolving found no sanction among the ancient literary kinds.Fielding confidently and half humorously approximated Tom Jones to the kinds in which he had been educated by calling it a ‘comic epic poem in prose’. Richardson, having claimed that Pamela was
based on fact, changed his ground in Clarissa and declared that his new novel was less a history than a dramatic narrative, less a romance than a tragedy. He may have been seeking to remove Clarissa from the charges of vulgarity levelled against Pamela, but he was also analysing the special quality of Clarissa when he wrote in the Postscript that it was a tragedy of a new kind: [The author] considered that the tragic poets have as seldom made their heroes true objects of pity, as the comic theirs laudable ones of imitation: and still more rarely have made them in their deaths look forward to a future hope. And thus, when they die, they seem totally to perish. Death, in such instances, must appear terrible. It must be considered as the greatest evil. But why is death set in such shocking lights, when it is the universal lot? (IX, 309) Richardson implies in the Postscript to Clarissa that he is writing Christian tragedy - whose cosmology must include heaven and hell as well as earth, and where acts and their consequences unroll far beyond the bounds of human society. The spirit, if not the machinery, of such a work would seem to have some kinship with epic. And, as religious tragedy, it will necessarily be both exemplary and introspective. Richardson seeks to ‘investigate the great doctrines of Christianity under the fashionable guise of an amusement’ (Postscript, p. 309). At first sight it may look as if there is something merely retrospective about Richardson’s attempt to relate Clarissa to the august mode of religious tragedy. But, although the formulation postdates the novel, the novel itself is instinct with the struggle to express intensely realized human experience in terms of values which transcend the human. On the level of myth, the book may be read as the reversal of the Fall: Eve is again tempted by the devil and this time rejects temptation; her integrity cannot be penetrated even by violence. But the poignant significance of the book depends on the recognition that Clarissa is both an example and herself she is particular - not every woman raised to perfection. Lovelace categorizes her coarsely (‘Is she not a woman?’) instead of acknowledging her adamantine identity, and it is this which destroys the lives of them both.In his attempt to infuse Christian experience into a literary form Richardson had constantly before him the pre-eminent ‘modern’, John Milton. Roughly a hundred years before Richardson wrote, Milton had set out to ‘justifie the wayes of God’ through a transformed epic and had used the once-fashionable amusement of the masque to
express ‘the sage / And serious doctrine of Virginity5 in terms akin to those Richardson was to employ in Clarissa.It is not unexpected that Richardson, who shared Milton’s Puritan background, should have Comus in his mind when he came to write a book in which the central ethic of chastity is treated as absolute and unassailable. Most of the keywords in Richardson are morally ambivalent and his books explore and play upon the ambiguities of words like ‘honour5, ‘freedom5, and ‘person5. But chastity - both the state itself and, by moral extension, as the type of integrity - was an absolute for Richardson. The form of his work - an extended prose study centred in psychological and social analysis - makes it a far more compellingly difficult idea than it was in the allegorical, essentially playful form of the masque. The parallels between Comus and Clarissa are clear and interesting, and they lead us on to understand the moral and artistic problems which Richardson set himself by attempting religious art in a form centred upon minutely examined human experience.The parallels are both narrative and verbal: Comus, surrounded by his rout of transformed beings, tempts the lost and imprisoned Lady not only through the senses but through the splendour of language, through argument and intelligence. The Lady, protected by the power of her virtue, perceives the disparity between the glory of his words and the meanness of his deeds. Lovelace is characterized by the exuberance of his language, which is set against the intelligent sobriety of Clarissa’s; Lovelace has his own delusive rout - more horribly animal than that of Comus because more clearly human:
The old dragon straddled up to her, with her arms kemboed again - her eyebrows erect, like the bristles upon a hog’s back, and, scouling over her shortened nose, more than half-hid her ferret eyes. Her mouth was distorted. She pouted out her blubber-lips, as if to bellows up wind and sputter into her horse-nostrils; and her chin was curdled, and more than usually prominent with passion. (VI, n, p. 74) Milton’s imagery of light, ‘the Sun-clad power of Chastity5 is taken up by Richardson and repeatedly used:
Vertue could see to do what Vertue would By her own radiant light. (Comus, 11. 373-4) Clarissa’s beauty and virtue blaze upon Lovelace ‘as it were, in a
flood of light, like what one might imagine would strike a man, who bora blind had by some propitious power been blessed with his sight all at once, in a meridian sun’ (V, 24, p. 196).Like Comus, Lovelace finds himself repeatedly baulked by the power of virtue. Comus says:
I feel that I do fearHer words set off by som superior power;And though not mortal, yet a cold shuddring dewDips me all o’re. (11. 800-3) Lovelace writes:
upon the point of making a violent attempt . . . I was checked at the very moment, by the awe I was struck with on again castingmy eye upon her terrified but lovely face__ O virtue! virtue! . . .what is there in thee, that can thus against his will affect the heart of a Lovelace! - Whence these involuntary tremors, and fear of giving mortal offence? (IV, 33, p. 178) But the parallels do not carry right through. Richardson is attempting something more intransigent than a masque where the characters may become their innocent selves again at the end. For Clarissa, there are no brothers to save her - indeed, her brother is her enemy. There is no rescue. She is raped. Her freedom is the freedom of her mind, her chastity is her inviolate will, and her deliverance, death and salvation.Richardson assumes that his readers, like himself, are closely familiar with Milton’s work, so that he can rely on verbal echoings which reverberate at a half-conscious level in the reader’s mind and affect his or her judgement. In Clarissa Richardson appropriates Comus and Paradise Lost to his own complicated purposes. It is far more than a question of simple borrowing: it is something closer to Milton’s own way of transforming whatever mode he worked in. Milton works through poetic religious allegory: Adam and Eve are fully, or merely, human only after the Fall. Satan’s motivation and self are explored with a psychological complexity which brings out his kinship with tortuous, fallen man. But he remains always a superhuman figure. His degeneration and fall are expressed in terms of emblem and allegory: he ends, like a failed actor, to the hisses of his serpentine angels. The element of fairy-tale remains. We cannot be shown his destruction in terms of action, for he remains part of the moral cycle of the world.
