The Criminal History of Mankind by Colin Wilson

Three years after Robinson Crusoe there appeared his novel of ‘low life’, Moll Flanders. It was certainly read by a London printer and publisher named Samuel Richardson, who had been apprenticed to the trade since he was seventeen. Now in his early thirties, Richardson enjoyed doing a little scribbling in his spare time; but he was too busy making himself a fortune to take it seriously. Like many others, he must have been impressed, perhaps a little shocked, by Moll’s frank description of her seduction. The seed lay dormant for almost twenty years; then, when he had reached the age of fifty and had more spare time, a publisher asked him to write a Teach Yourself book on the art of correspondence. Richardson decided to give his ‘familiar letters’ a moral flavour: he composed letters from deserted women to their unfaithful lovers, from anxious fathers to daughters living in London, and letters of advice to pretty girls who were engaged as maidservants. Suddenly, he found himself carried away by a flood of creation: the letters began to pour out from him. At this point, he recalled a story he had once heard of a virtuous servant girl who had resisted her master’s attempts at seduction and ended by marrying him. It was too good an idea to waste on a few familiar letters; he turned it into a separate novel called Pamela. It poured out so fast that he had written two hundred thousand words – twice the length of the average novel – in two months.

Pamela came out in November 1740. It was an instantaneous success, sweeping across England and to the Continent in a matter of months. It tells the story of an attractive servant girl whose mistress dies; her master, Mr B, tells Pamela she can remain in the house in charge of the linen. Then he begins his attempts to seduce her. In one scene he leaps out of a cupboard just as she has got undressed and throws her on the bed – here the debt to Defoe seems evident. Pamela is saved by the entrance of the housekeeper. Then Mr B sends her to a country house and places her in charge of a procuress; next time he tries to rape her, the procuress holds her hands; but Pamela goes into convulsions and he gives up again. Nothing like this had ever appeared before. Under the guise of a moral tale, Richardson was writing something very like pornography. But pornography itself was quite unknown in 1740; it was invented five years later when a poverty-stricken young man named John Cleland dashed off a novel of seduction called Fanny Hill to get himself out of debt. It was true that Pamela moved at a snail’s pace – Dr Johnson remarked that ‘If you were to read Richardson for the story your impatience would be so fretted that you would hang yourself.’ But people were not reading it for the story. They were reading it to enter the world of a girl who is in constant danger of being raped. (And in parts of England they rang the church bells when the last part appeared and it became clear that Pamela had retained her virtue to the altar.) Like Robinson Crusoe, the novel had the effect of transforming the reader’s time scale, so that he left behind the world of everyday necessities and entered the world of imagination. It would hardly be an exaggeration to say that Richardson had invented the literary equivalent of the religious experience, a kind of secular nirvana. In fact, before Pamela, the most popular literary fare was volumes of sermons, and this was because a sermon can have this effect of suspending the reader above his own life to contemplate the business of living from a bird’s eye view. Pamela did it far more efficiently and dramatically, and volumes of sermons quickly became a drug on the market.

Richardson followed up Pamela with Clarissa, and revealed his insight into the reasons for Pamela’s success by making the new novel another long-drawn-out study in seduction; this time the heroine is raped, and dies of shame and humiliation. It was twice as long as Pamela, and became even more popular. Once again, clergymen praised the novel from the pulpit for its moral perception, while readers experienced strangely mixed sensations of pity, indignation and erotic excitement.

In 1760 there appeared in Paris a novel called Julie, or the New Héloise that achieved a success that made even that of Pamela seem trifling by comparison. Public lending libraries – which had sprung up in the past twenty years – hired it out by the hour. The philosopher Kant, who took the same walk every day so punctually that local residents could set their watches by him, forgot to go out on the day he read The New Héloise.

The author was a Swiss vagabond named Jean Jacques Rousseau, who had fallen in love with a countess who rejected him, and who sublimated his misery in the novel. The New Héloise is the story of a handsome young man named Saint-Preux, who is hired as a tutor to two young girls. He falls in love with one of them – Julie – and goes away to place himself beyond temptation. But Julie’s father is so pleased with her progress that he recalls him. One night, Julie admits him to her bedroom, and they become lovers. But the ending is moral; Julie dies in an accident, after marrying the man of her father’s choice, and Saint-Preux devotes his life to becoming the tutor of her children.

What made the book a sensation, of course, was the episode of the seduction – and Rousseau’s argument that if a couple are in love, they have a right to consummate it in defiance of social conventions. In fact, The New Héloise, like Pamela and Clarissa, was taking advantage of the enormous sexual frustration that existed everywhere in the eighteenth century. How did this frustration come about? It is true, of course, that sexual frustration is inherent in the nature of society, since social beings are obliged to restrain their desires. But in the age of Boccaccio or Malory, it was taken as natural that a couple should have sexual intercourse if they fell in love. Shakespeare and his contemporaries also took it for granted. Then came the change in the ‘rules of the game’. Society became more stable because it had to become more stable. The old chaos could no longer be tolerated in this world of increasingly powerful nations: the England of Cromwell, the France of Louis XIV, the Spain of Charles II, the Prussia of Frederick William – and later of Frederick the Great – the Russia of Peter the Great, the Sweden of Charles XII. These changes were reflected in English Puritanism, in German Lutheranism, in French Protestantism – with its roots in Calvinism. The foundation of the Bow Street Runners in 1750 is symbolic; society had to learn to become more orderly.

The result of increased restraint is an increase in the left-brain’s power of veto. Automatic controls inhibit natural responses, and sex develops an increasing aura of ‘forbiddenness’. If Rousseau had been writing about a French Moll Flanders, no one would have been shocked; Moll is a throwback to the Elizabethan age. But he was writing about a baron’s daughter who lives in a mansion and takes a bath every day. So what Saint-Preux was seducing was not simply a girl; it was a social symbol. By 1760 it was taken for granted that an upper-class girl preserves her virginity as a valuable part of her dowry. Rousseau, with his arguments for free love, was undermining the fabric of society as much as Luther undermined it when he challenged the Catholic Church. Yet, like Samuel Richardson, Rousseau did it all with a demure air of morality. He was, in fact, appealing to another morality that had remained dormant just below the surface since the publication of Pamela: the morality of sentiment, the morality of Tristan and Isolde, Aucassin and Nicolette and Romeo and Juliet. What was so shocking – and piquant – was to bring it up to date. Even the celibate Immanuel Kant must have enjoyed identifying himself with Saint-Preux, and relished the sensation of vicariously seducing Julie. Kant’s philosophy was achieving new depths of perception into the human mind; Rousseau was achieving new depths of perception into the human heart. They had as much right to call themselves explorers as Columbus and Drake; and their readers accompanied them on their travels and shared their sensation of discovery.

In 1774, another frustrated lover poured his miseries into a novel about an unhappy love affair, and the book made his name famous all over Europe. Goethe’s Sorrows of Young Werther was about an artist who falls in love at first sight and commits suicide when the girl marries another man. There is no rape or seduction: not even the satisfaction of kisses. Then why did Werther become a literary sensation – as well as causing an epidemic of suicide? Because it is about a man whose love becomes a fever, an obsession. It was a blast of intense feeling, like hot air from a furnace. In effect, it convinced the intelligentsia of Europe that they were not feeling enough. It encouraged people to pour out their emotions and to burst into tears. When we read the letters written during the next few decades, we feel a little bewildered to read phrases like ‘My friend, I watered your letter with my tears’, or ‘I could not restrain the sobs that rose in me as I recalled our farewell’ – particularly when the correspondents are men. But Goethe had convinced people that they ought to let their feelings go. He also convinced them that they ought to feel ecstasy as they looked at mountains and forests – something that had been almost forgotten since Petrarch startled his friends by climbing a hill to look at the view. The result was that poets suddenly noticed that nature was beautiful – something no one would have guessed from the poetry of Pope and Dryden. Novels of unhappy love affairs poured from the presses, and Europe sobbed convulsively. One of the most popular was Henry Mackenzie’s The Man of Feeling, whose sole purpose is to harrow the emotions with a series of sad tales and hard-luck stories; beggars, madwomen, prostitutes, all tell their stories of the hard-hearted world. The hero himself is shattered by the news that his lady-love is to marry another, and there is an affecting scene in which she tells him she loves him just before he dies. He is, says the narrator, the victim of ‘too keen a sensibility’, and this was regarded as being entirely to his credit. Groups of people used to read The Man of Feeling aloud to have the satisfaction of shedding tears in public. Fifty years later, a correspondent of Sir Walter Scott describes how she recently attended a reading of The Man of Feeling and everyone roared with laughter. Yet this was not a sign that people were becoming more callous: only that they had become inured to Mackenzie’s pathos. A little more than ten years later, they were crying just as uninhibitedly over the death of Little Nell.