Richardson and the Philosophes

James Fowler

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781351550802
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Languages
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

In mid-eighteenth-century Europe, a taste for sentiment accompanied the 'rise of the novel', and the success of Samuel Richardson (1689-1761) played a vital role in this. James Fowler's new study is the first to compare the response of the most famous philosophes to the Richardson phenomenon. Voltaire, who claims to despise the novel, writes four 'Richardsonian' fictions; Diderot's fascination with the English author is expressed in La Religieuse, Rousseau's in Julie - the century's bestseller. Yet the philosophes' response remains ambivalent. On the one hand they admire Richardson's ability to make the reader weep. On the other, they champion a range of Enlightenment beliefs which he, an enthusiast of Milton, vehemently opposed. In death as in life, the English author exacerbates the philosophes' rivalry. The eulogy which Diderot writes in 1761 implicitly asks: who can write a new Clarissa? But also: whose social, philosophical or political ideas will triumph as a result?

Chapter 1
Richardson's 'Religious' Novels

As he embarked on writing Pamela at the age of fifty, Richardson asserted that his novel would help to defend Christianity against deism and other forms of freethinking, which bear their (forbidden?) fruit well into the eighteenth century. Richardson was an enthusiast of Milton, who aspired, in Paradise Lost, to 'justify the ways of God to men' (I, 26).¹ Another great poet, Alexander Pope, claimed to 'vindicate the ways of God to Man'.² But not all theodicies are Christian ones. Richardson saw his contemporary Pope as being at the forefront of literary attacks on the true faith; and it is on the literary front that Richardson responds. For this reason, it will be helpful to examine several extracts from An Essay on Man before examining Richardson's 'religious novels'.

These extracts from Pope will perform a double function, however; for they will also serve to accentuate the metaphysical thread that runs through the whole of the present study. In a European perspective, the threat of atheism was countered by the theodicies, not only of Milton and Pope, but also by those of Leibniz and (arguably) Shaftesbury. But because all these writers except Milton could be, and often were, perceived as subordinating faith to reason, they were capable of nourishing freethinking and deism. The philosophes knew the works of such authors, and in some cases knew them extremely well.³ The following extracts from An Essay on Man, therefore, will help us to understand, not only the metaphysical gulf between Pope and Richardson, but that between Richardson and the philosophes — not to mention other, more subtle divisions between Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot.

An Essay on Man

A deistic reading is permitted, and arguably invited, in every part of An Essay on Man.⁴ Already in the preface, Pope boasts of the universality (and not necessarily, therefore, the Christianity) of his message. The matter of his poem will be 'of Importance to all in general, and of Offence to none in particular'; and the Essay steers 'betwixt the extremes of doctrines seemingly opposite'.⁵ As for the poem itself, when Pope writes: 'If to be perfect in a certain sphere, | What matter, soon or late, or here or there?' (I, 73—74), he keeps the question of Heaven in suspense, when using 'since' rather than 'if' would have done the opposite.⁶ This is hardly a Christian position. And other passages tend towards the same effect. Consider, for instance, the following treatment of the afterlife:

Hope humbly, then; with trembling pinions soar;
Wait the great teacher Death; and God adore.
What future bliss, He gives not thee to know,
But gives that hope to be thy blessing now.
Man never is, but always to be blest:
The soul, uneasy and confined from home,
Rests and expatiates in a life to come, (I, 91—98)

There is no mention of damnation here. Does Pope believe there can be Heaven without Hell? On the evidence of these lines, perhaps so.⁷ Moreover, as mentioned above, Pope's Essay even fails to assert the existence of Heaven. After all, God's justice has no need of such a place if 'Whatever is, is RIGHT' (I, 294) in this life. Admittedly, the poet explicitly invokes 'a life to come' in the passage cited above (I, 98); but the soul 'rests and expatiates' there by anticipation. And immediately before this passage, humanity is compared to the lamb that gambols because it does not know that it is about to die, and die (presumably) for good. This suggests that man can be happy only because he cannot truly know his future. Logically, then, that future is not necessarily one of eternal bliss, and may, indeed, consist in obliteration:

The lamb thy riot dooms to bleed to-day,
Had he thy reason, would he skip and play?
Pleased to the last, he crops the flowery food,
And licks the hand just raised to shed his blood.
Oh, blindness to the future! kindly given,
That each may fill the circle, marked by Heaven:
Who sees with equal eye, as God of all,
A hero perish, or a sparrow fall,
Atoms or systems into ruin hurled,
And now a bubble burst, and now a world, (I, 81—90)

There is much to worry the Christian Richardson in these lines. 'Fate' can (but does not need to) have pagan connotations. But 'blindness to the future' is complete blindness, unrelieved by divine illumination. (It is not a case of seeing through a glass, darkly.) Moreover, the 'equal eye' through which God views heroes, sparrows, atoms, systems, bubbles, and worlds can be interpreted as an equally indifferent one; at least, it makes no special place for humanity in the cosmos. But worse is to come:

Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutored mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears Him in the wind;
His soul, proud science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk, or milky way;
Yet simple Nature to his hope has given,
Behind the cloud-topped hill, an humbler heaven;
Some safer world in depth of woods embraced,
Some happier island in the watery waste,
Where slaves once more their native land behold,
No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold, (I, 99—112)

In the poor Indian's imagined afterlife, there will be no fiends to torment him (as in the Christian conception of Hell), and he will have escaped from the travails of this world, which are mainly represented by ... Christians.

As he keeps his distance from Christian Heaven, Pope opposes the Christian doctrine of the Fall. This emerges most clearly through his treatment of hierarchy. The following lines assert that all subsidiary systems are subsumed in one, perfect, and unchangeable hierarchy, which is the chain of being dear to Optimists:

Vast chain of being which from God began,
Natures ethereal, human, angel, man,
Beast, bird, fish, insect, what no eye can see,
No glass can reach; from Infinite to thee,
From thee to Nothing! (I, 237-41)

There can be only one version of this chain; it is, after all, a plenum formamm: 'Where, one step broken, the great scale's destroyed: | From Nature's chain whatever link you strike, | Tenth or ten thousandth, breaks the chain alike' (I, 244—46).⁸ Each link in the sublunary hierarchy is part of that same chain: 'The rich is happy in the plenty given | The poor contents him with the care of Heaven' (I, 265—66). The corollary of Pope's perfect hierarchy is that there has been no Fall, and so there is no need for a Redeemer. The afore-mentioned, resonant line that closes Epistle 1, 'Whatever is, is right', excludes the existence of evil in this world, and with it our need of a Saviour.⁹ And so whilst Pope undertakes to 'vindicate the ways of God to man' (I, 16), as stated above, it is not by celebrating the salvation made possible by the crucifixion. Instead he argues that our present state is an intrinsically blessed one, though we may become wretched if we blind ourselves to this truth.

In this and other ways (as Richardson must have noticed), the Essay calls its readers not to repentance but to joyful submission: 'Know thy own point: this kind, this due degree | Of blindness, weakness, Heaven bestows on thee, | Submit' (I, 283—85). This is deistic optimism at its most resigned, and its least Christian. To achieve 'our proper bliss' (I. 282), we apparently need two qualities. One of these may sound Christian, but the other emphatically does not:

Mean-while Opinion gilds with varying rays
Those painted clouds that beautify our days;
Each want of Happiness by Hope supplied,
And each vacuity of sense by Pride, (I, 284—85)

There is a note of social satire in this passage, but this does little to conceal the deistic theme. Letting hope and pride take their effect is the only act of will we need to perform to ensure that 'in Folly's cup still laughs the bubble, joy' (II, 288). It is as if earthly happiness is the only kind we can ever know, and the only kind we ever need to know.

Richardson versus Pope

There exists a useful study of providence in Richardson's novels by Louis Fortuna, who emphasizes the importance of the 'religious world view on which [Richardson's novels] are patterned'. For Fortuna, this involves recalling 'a body of doctrine and thought stretching from Saint Paul to Edward Young, an ideology manifesting itself in England not just on the theological level but also on the literary level from Chaucer to Alexander Pope.'¹⁰ But Pope does not fit easily into the filiation that stretches 'from Saint Paul to Edward Young'. For some in Richardson's circle suspected that Pope was a freethinker in the mould of Bolingbroke.

Richardson did not initially deny his respect to this Englishman of Catholic profession. In a letter to Aaron Hill of 1743 or 1744, he comments: '[Pope's] Essay on Man convinces one he can stand upon his own Legs' (p. 60). Still, this praise is less than fulsome; and Richardson also mentions that Pope lets himself down in his choice of subject matter, as in the 'Dunciad, and his Scriblerus-Prolegomena-Stuff' (p. 60). But there is a deeper concern: quite simply, Pope is insufficiently Christian. As mentioned in the Introduction, Richardson's suspicions are inflamed when he learns that Pope had spoken to Dr Cheyne of translating the Psalms, which would have 'put admirable Sense and admirable Poetry into the Mouths of Millions, who would praise their God in his Version, who gave him Talents which adorn and distinguish him above all his Cotemporaries.' But this was not to be: 'it seems, Mr P. never had such an Intention.' And so to the charge to be answered: 'Why then did the Poet tell the Doctor he had such a Design?' (pp. 57—58).

Why indeed? Was Pope the worst kind of wolf in sheep's clothing: was he a deist? Richardson went so far as to claim that the entire scheme for An Essay on Man had been created by Bolingbroke, that deistic ally of Shaftesbury and one-time protector of Voltaire.¹¹ Many pious individuals of Richardson's generation (and before) saw deism as a greater, because more insidious, threat to Christianity than outright atheism, which it was dangerous to own. Rivers cites a particularly telling passage of Berkeley's The Theory of Vision Vindicated (1733), in which the Bishop portrays freethinking and deistic writers as atheists in disguise:

If I see [atheism] in their writings, if they own it in their conversation, if their ideas imply it, if their ends are not answered but by supposing it, if their leading author [Collins] hath pretended to demonstrate atheism, but thought fit to conceal his demonstration from the public; if this was known in their clubs, and yet that author was nevertheless followed, and represented to the world as a believer of natural religion; if these things are so (and I know them to be so), surely what the favourers of their schemes would palliate, it is the duty of others to display and refute.¹²

Although he did not think that deists are generally atheists in disguise, Richardson shared the conviction that deism was a siren's song, drawing its victims towards a form of belief so vague and unbinding that it did the fatal work of disbelief. Richardson hoped that Thomas Edwards could expose the deistic Pope hiding behind his Christian mask. On 27 January 1755, he writes to Edwards: 'How just are your Remarks on St. John's [Bolingbroke's] works; on Pope, & his Tinkering Editor, as you call him! Do you still wish to have St. John's Works by you? — Would you, at Leisure, compare them with the Poem [An Essay on Man]?' (p. 318). Two years later, when Edward Young consulted him on a draft of his Conjectures on Original Composition, in which he was intending to pay tribute to Pope, Richardson seized his opportunity. In a letter dated 14 January 1757, he argued that the author of An Essay on Man fails to achieve greatness, for greatness is the preserve of Christian poets, and that category excludes Pope: 'Pope's, sir, I venture to say, was not the genius to lift our souls to Heaven, had it soared every so freely, since it soared not in the Christian beam; [Pope] wishes to have his name swim down the stream of time on the wreck of Bolingbroke' (p. 333).

To the profane, the metaphysical gap that separates Pope from Richardson may seem narrow; but to an eighteenth-century orthodox Christian it is a chasm into which the unbeliever can fall for all eternity. We have seen that, in consequence of Pope's lurking deism, Richardson develops an anima against him so strong that he writes to Edwards urging him not to describe the author of An Essay on Man as 'great'. In Richardson's view, by aping Christianity Bolingbroke and his ilk serve Satan's ends. It is revealing that several ye...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Dedication
• Acknowledgements
• Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1 Richardson's 'Religious' Novels
• 2 Voltaire: Nanine and Paméla
• 3 Voltaire: L'Ingénu and Lettres d'Amabed
• 4 Rousseau: Julie ou la Nouvelle Héloïse
• 5 Diderot: Éloge de Richardson and La Religieuse
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index