A look at Gissing, Ruskin, Stephenson, and finally, Richardson

In a nice little package, for your reading pleasure . . .

English novelist George Gissing (1857-1903) started out writing about "the hideous injustice of our whole system of society” but later changed course, deciding that “the ravings of fanaticists - justifiable or not - pass away; but the works of the artist . . . remain sources of health to the world.” So he chose “artistic perfection” as “the only thing known to us of absolute value.”

Literarily, such works come to us largely from books. John Ruskin advised to mark one’s own books up and keep them handy, “as a soldier can seize weapons in his armory."

On his deathbed in Samoa, Robert Louis Stephenson begged a visitor, "My God, man, have you a Horace?" He meant the Roman poet, for solace in his final hours.

My periodontist spotted Clarissa in my lap - I was finding solace in it while waiting for him - and asked how I kept track of the plot in so big a book. It’s 1,500 pages in Penguin paperback. Subtitled The History of a Young Lady, it’s mostly about Clarissa's seducer-rapist, the terrible Lovelace. He’s the more memorable character. Samuel Richardson, a London printer by trade, was the author. The book appeared in 1747. Richardson made it hold together so that the reader remembers. He also provided a list of characters in the front. Angus Ross, the Penguin editor, provided notes and tables at the end.

It’s a book you work at, returning to it for the riches of language and plot. It’s not popular today. You have to wonder what concentration was assumed in 18th-century book buyers, who were prepared to move slowly but surely through tightly woven sentence structure and elaborate character delineations.

Clarissa delivers a putdown of a roomful of libertines in which she found herself on the way to her tragic end. In the middle of word-bandying, one of them asked how she defined wit. She quoted a 1656 poem of Abraham Cowley:

"A thousand different shapes [wit] bears . . . / 'Tis not a tale, 'tis not a jest,/ Admired with laughter at a feast,/ Nor florid talk . . . "

It's not for shock effect. Rather, "like a luxuriant vine," it is tied to "Virtue, firm and erect, toward heaven bound." Otherwise, "it lies deformed and rotting on the ground."

The gay blades gawked at that, we are told by Lovelace's friend, who in a letter is trying to talk him out of doing Clarissa in. "What? Do that to such a woman?" Etc. The novel is told entirely in letters. As Lovelace's friend said of Clarissa quoting her poet at the soiree, Richardson does it all "prettily."