CHAPTER XLVII
VIRTUE REWARDED
Prose fiction up to this time had dealt for the most part with men; its most popular variety was the “picaresque,” telling the adventures of vagabonds and rascals. But now in this bourgeois England the fiction writer settles down, and becomes respectable, and discovers the theme which is to occupy him for the next two hundred years--the feminine heart, and what goes on in it during the mating season.
Watch the gentleman-turkey, stirred by erotic excitement; he struts up and down, swells out his comb, spreads his feathers, scrapes the ground with his stiff wings. And there stands the humble and retiring lady-turkey, observing him with modest but attentive eye; she takes a step or two away, but does not run far. What is going on in her mind? What does she think of the blood-flushed comb and the spread feathers, the heroic pose and the awe-inspiring gobble? We are not permitted to enter into the psychology of a lady-turkey; but through the magic of fiction we are permitted to watch the mind of the lady-human, and note every detail of the process whereby she gets her mate. We share her emotions, we analyze the devices she employs--and thus, if we belong to her sex, we perfect our technique, or, if we belong to the male sex, we learn how to write novels.
In this bourgeois world, the emotions of mating are dominated by those of money. Society has become settled, property relations are fixed, and you live a routine life, without great change or adventure--except once, which is at this mating period. Here is your great chance to rise above your own class in a world of money classification. A beautiful and charming maiden may catch the eye of some wealthy man; a handsome, dashing youth may stumble upon an heiress. Such is the significance of the heavenly smiles and the coy glances of bourgeois romance. Cupid travels about, armed with a golden arrow, and in the love-glints from the eyes of youth and beauty we see fortunes flying to and fro--diamonds and rubies, manor-houses, estates, orders and offices, titles to nobility. And always in the background sit the chaperons, keeping watch--old women, whose function it is to know the grim facts of greed, and to pass on such “worldly wisdom” to the young.
The first old woman to take up this task in English fiction was Samuel Richardson. He himself was a hero for any bourgeois novel--a printer who had married his master’s daughter, and become publisher to the king. He knew what money costs, and believed in it with all his heart and soul; in his mature years he set out to warn young women of the value of their virtue, and point out to them the importance of a life contract in love. He wrote a novel called “Pamela; or Virtue Rewarded,” telling the story of an innocent fifteen-year-old servant girl in the household of a great gentleman who makes love to her. In a series of letters to her parents she exposes to us the details of this love-making, and all her bewilderments, agonies and fears.
Pamela Andrews is the very soul of humility; but young as she is, she knows the business facts concerning the life contract--“with all my worldly goods I thee endow.” She knows that her master is a rake and scoundrel--he gives her in the course of the story all possible evidence of that; nevertheless, she stands firm, and in the end her virtue is rewarded--by marriage with this rake and scoundrel. If that seems to you a strange reward of virtue, it will be only because you do not understand this eighteenth century world. What a man is personally counts for little compared with the class he belongs to. He is a gentleman, he owns houses and lands, and Pamela’s children will be ladies and gentlemen, and will own houses and lands. This novel became the sensation of the day, not merely in England, but all over Europe. There were two large volumes, and a sequel with two more, but no one was bored; great ladies sat up half the night, weeping their eyes red over Pamela’s trials, and welcoming her--in imagination--into the class of ladies. The writers learned how to make money, and a new profession, that of the love-describers, came into being.
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