To conclude—The worthy widow Lovick continues to live with Mr. Belford; and, by her prudent behaviour, piety, and usefulness, has endeared herself to her lady, and to the whole family.
Postscript Referred to in the Preface
In which several objections that have been made, as well to the catastrophe, as to different parts of the preceding history, are briefly considered.
The foregoing work having been published at three different periods of time, the author, in the course of its publication, was favoured with many anonymous letters, in which the writers differently expressed their wishes with regard to the apprehended catastrophe.
Most of those directed to him by the gentler sex, turned in favour of what they called a fortunate ending
. Some of the fair writers, enamoured, as they declared, with the character of the heroine, were warmly solicitous to have her made happy; and others, likewise of their mind, insisted that poetical justice
required that it should be so. And when, says one ingenious lady, whose undoubted motive was good-nature and humanity, it must be concluded that it is in an author’s power to make his piece end as he pleases, why should he not give pleasure rather than pain to the reader whom he has interested in favour of his principal characters?
Others, and some gentlemen, declared against tragedies in general, and in favour of comedies, almost in the words of Lovelace, who was supported in his taste by all the women at Mrs. Sinclair’s and by Sinclair herself. “I have too much feeling, said he.433 There is enough in the world to make our hearts sad, without carrying grief into our diversions, and making the distresses of others our own.”
And how was this happy ending to be brought about? Why, by this very easy and trite expedient; to wit, by reforming Lovelace, and marrying him to Clarissa—not, however, abating her one of her trials, nor any of her sufferings, (for the sake of the sport her distresses would give to the tenderhearted reader, as she went along), the last outrage excepted: that, indeed, partly in compliment to Lovelace himself, and partly for her delicacy-sake, they were willing to spare her.
But whatever were the fate of his work, the author was resolved to take a different method. He always thought that sudden conversions, such, especially, as were left to the candour of the reader to suppose and make out, has neither art, nor nature, nor even probability, in them; and that they were moreover of a very bad example. To have a Lovelace, for a series of years, glory in his wickedness, and think that he had nothing to do, but as an act of grace and favour to hold out his hand to receive that of the best of women, whenever he pleased, and to have it thought that marriage would be a sufficient amends for all his enormities to others as well as to her—he could not bear that. Nor is reformation, as he has shown in another piece, to be secured by a fine face; by a passion that has sense for its object; nor by the goodness of a wife’s heart, nor even example, if the heart of the husband be not graciously touched by the Divine finger.
It will be seen, by this time, that the author had a great end in view. He had lived to see the scepticism and infidelity openly avowed, and even endeavoured to be propagated from the press; the greatest doctrines of the Gospel brought into question; those of self-denial and mortification blotted out of the catalogue of Christian virtues; and a taste even to wantonness for outdoor pleasure and luxury, to the general exclusion of domestic as well as public virtue, industriously promoted among all ranks and degrees of people.
In this general depravity, when even the pulpit has lost great part of its weight, and the clergy are considered as a body of interested men, the author thought he should be able to answer it to his own heart, be the success what it would, if he threw in his mite towards introducing a reformation so much wanted: and he imagined, that if in an age given up to diversion and entertainment, he could steal in, as may be said, and investigate the great doctrines of Christianity under the fashionable guise of an amusement; he should be most likely to serve his purpose, remembering that of the Poet:—
A verse may find him who a sermon flies,
And turn delight into a sacrifice.
He was resolved, therefore, to attempt something that never yet had been done. He considered that the tragic poets have as seldom made their heroes true objects of pity, as the comics 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?
He has, indeed, thought fit to paint the death of the wicked, as terrible as he could paint it. But he has endeavoured to draw that of the good in such an amiable manner, that the very Balaams of the world should not forbear to wish that their latter end might be like that of the heroine.
And after all, what is the poetical justice so much contended for by some, as the
