Clarissa Harlowe Samuel Richardson (most important books to read TXT) 📖

averse as they are to writing; since the pen, next to the needle, of all employments, is the most proper, and best adapted to their geniuses; and this, as well for improvement as amusement: “Who sees not,” would she say, “that those women who take delight in writing excel the men in all the graces of the familiar style? The gentleness of their minds, the delicacy of their sentiments, (improved by the manner of their education, and the liveliness of their imaginations, qualify them to a high degree of preference for this employment); while men of learning, as they are called, (that is to say, of mere learning), aiming to get above that natural ease and freedom which distinguish this, (and indeed every other kind of writing), when they think they have best succeeded, are got above, or rather beneath, all natural beauty.”

Then, stiffened and starched (let me add) into dry and indelectable affectation, one sort of these scholars assume a style as rough as frequently are their manners; they spangle over their productions with metaphors; they tumble into bombast: the sublime, with them, lying in words, and not in sentiment, they fancy themselves most exalted when least understood; and down they sit, fully satisfied with their own performances, and call them masculine. While a second sort, aiming at wit, that wicked misleader, forfeit all title to judgment. And a third, sinking into the classical pits, there poke and scramble about, never seeking to show genius of their own; all their lives spent in commonplace quotation; fit only to write notes and comments upon other people’s texts; all their pride, that they know those beauties of two thousand years old in another tongue, which they can only admire, but not imitate, in their own.

And these, truly, must be learned men, and despisers of our insipid sex!

But I need not mention the exceptions which my beloved friend always made (and to which I subscribe) in favour of men of sound learning, true taste, and extensive abilities; nor, in particular, her respect even to reverence for gentlemen of the cloth; which, I dare say, will appear in every paragraph of her letters wherever any of the clergy are mentioned. Indeed the pious Dr. Lewen, the worthy Dr. Blome, the ingenious Mr. Arnold, and Mr. Tompkins, gentlemen whom she names, in one article of her will, as learned divines with whom she held an early correspondence, well deserved her respect; since to their conversation and correspondence she owed many of her valuable acquirements.

Nor were the little slights she would now-and-then (following, as I must own, my lead) put upon such mere scholars (and her stupid and pedantic brother was one of those who deserved those slights) as despised not only our sex, but all such as had not had their opportunities of being acquainted with the parts of speech, (I cannot speak low enough of such), and with the dead languages, owing to that contempt which some affect for what they have not been able to master; for she had an admirable facility for learning languages, and read with great ease both in Italian and French. She had begun to apply herself to Latin; and having such a critical knowledge of her own tongue, and such a foundation from the two others, would soon have made herself an adept in it.

But, notwithstanding all her acquirements, she was an excellent economist and housewife. And those qualifications, you must take notice, she was particularly fond of inculcating upon all her reading and writing companions of the sex: for it was a maxim with her, “That a woman who neglects the useful and the elegant, which distinguish her own sex, for the sake of obtaining the learning which is supposed more peculiar to the other, incurs more contempt by what she foregoes, than she gains credit by what she acquires.”

“All that a woman can learn,” she used to say, (expatiating on this maxim), “above the useful knowledge proper to her sex, let her learn. This will show that she is a good housewife of her time, and that she has not a narrow or confined genius. But then let her not give up for these those more necessary, and, therefore, not meaner, employments, which will qualify her to be a good mistress of a family, a good wife, and a good mother; for what can be more disgraceful to a woman than either, through negligence of dress, to be found a learned slattern; or, through ignorance of household-management, to be known to be a stranger to domestic economy?”

Then would she instance to me two particular ladies; one of which, while she was fond of giving her opinion, in the company of her husband and of his learned friends, upon difficult passages in Virgil or Horace, knew not how to put on her clothes with that necessary grace and propriety which should preserve to her the love of her husband and the respect of every other person; while the other, affecting to be thought as learned as men, could find no better way to assert her pretensions than by despising her own sex, and by dismissing that characteristic delicacy, the loss of which no attainment can supply.

She would have it indeed, sometimes, from the frequent ill use learned women make of that respectable acquirement, that it was no great matter whether the sex aimed at anything but excelling in the knowledge of the beauties and graces of their mother-tongue; and once she said, that this was field enough for a woman; and an ampler was but endangering her family usefulness. But I, who think our sex inferior in nothing to the other, but in want of opportunities, of which the narrow-minded mortals industriously seek to deprive us, lest we should surpass them as much in what they chiefly value themselves upon, as we do in all the graces of a fine imagination, could never agree with her in that. And yet I was entirely of her opinion, that those women, who