Lovelace's Unconscious in Distress

EDWARD GREEN COMPOSER, MUSIC EDUCATOR / NEW YORK CITY

IS GOOD WILL OUR GREATEST POWER?

BY EDWARD GREEN Part 5

V) Lovelace's Unconscious in Distress

Clarissa, needing Lovelace's assistance to escape her family, desperately hopes she can trust him. When she learns of a generous act of his as landlord--so different from her family's insatiable greed--she is affected. She believes she sees some good in him; but her care for truth is too strong to put aside her critical judgement. She tells Anna she also sees a "temper...haughty and violent....He seem[s]," she writes, "to have too good an opinion of both his person and parts to have any great regard to [a] wife."

Then the night before she will be forced to marry the hated Solmes, Clarissa has no choice but to flee with Lovelace.

Lovelace has outwardly triumphed--Clarissa's family disowns her and she is in his power. Yet within himself there is the terrific distress Aesthetic Realism shows inevitably accompanies power built on the hope for contempt. "Did I say my joy was perfect?" Lovelace writes Belford. "Oh, no!":

It receives...abatement from my disgusted pride. For how can I endure to think that I owe more to her relations' persecutions than to her favor for me? For the next two months he is in torment. He respects Clarissa enormously for her dignity and courage, so much so that though he wants to "take liberties" with Clarissa, he cannot bring himself to do it. She eventually makes an escape. Lovelace pursues her, but as he finds her he also finds he has to meet her passionate criticism. For a brief moment--perhaps his finest in the book--he struggles to meet that criticism manfully, with honest remorse. But he cannot bear the picture of himself learning from her, seeing strength in a woman. He tells Belford:

How the God within her exalted her, not only above me, but above herself....By my soul, I cannot forgive her for her virtues! What Lovelace is doing--resenting beauty in another human being--I know, with the intense regret of my own life, is the cheapest and most hurtful thing possible. Like other competetive and snobbish persons in the academic world, I was angry at Eli Siegel for his magnificent integrity. I felt the sheer size of his thought made me less. I was utterly wrong. I have seen, as Aesthetic Realism shows: it takes power to appreciate power. As we see beauty in another person it is a tremendous opportunity for self-esteem.

As Lovelace's ill will grows, he cripples himself. His mind becomes a hideous thing. He has Clarissa drugged and taken back to London. In her weakened state he forces himself on her. "How much we can do in the field of annulling...consideration of another," Eli Siegel writes in issue no. 160 of The Right Of, "has not been measured yet. There is no limit to how rigid, fixed, uncompassionate, merciless we can be. There is no limit, this means, to the suppression of good will." In utter coldness, Lovelace writes:

Your humble servant,
R. Lovelace

VI) But the Force of Good Will Has the Final Word

Lovelace is wrong. The affair is not over. In himself there is a tremendous, persistent objection to what he has done. Said Eli Siegel in a class of December 6, l948: "[Lovelace] has a big fight on his hands as to what he is doing, and although he schemes and plots there is a strong internal battle which is deep and intense."

He can not rest. Aesthetic Realism taught me that reality always objects in some way to being seen wrongly, and fights back, including when a person outrages it by having ill will for another person. If we hope to do others harm, reality sees to it we are unable to be at ease under our own skin.

Richardson courageously shows: this is true for Lovelace. Lovelace imagines his assault has broken Clarissa's spirit. But when he next he sees her, her power and eloquence utterly unnerve him. He writes Belford:

It is now near six. The sun, for two hours past, has been illuminating everything about me...but nothing within me can it illuminate....See the difference in our cases, thought I! She, the charming injured, can sweetly sleep while the varlet injurer cannot close his eyes; and has been trying to no purpose the whole night to divert his melancholy, and to fly from himself. Due to its great length--Clarissa consists of over 500 letters back and forth between its various characters--the novel was published over a span of eleven months, in three large installments. After the second installment, Richardson received many letters--including from literary colleagues--asking him to give the story a "happy ending"--one in which Lovelace repents so utterly that Clarissa is able in good conscience to marry him.

But Richardson resisted. And the novel ends with Clarissa, so weakened by her ordeal, dying. But as she does, bodily weakness is at one with tremendous strength of mind. "Power," Eli Siegel writes in his definition, "is the ability to change things." Clarissa's strength has had a good effect on Lovelace's friend, Belford, who uses his own searing regret at having stood by as Lovelace did what he did to be a better person. Clarissa tells Belford:

world

Because she has had good will, Clarissa sincerely feels that her life has had good meaning. Meanwhile, Lovelace, who has fled to Europe to escape his conscience, is killed in a duel with Clarissa's cousin, Colonel Morden, one of the few kind people in the novel.

"To feel for others," Richardson wrote in July, l750 in a letter to his friend, Susannah Highmore, "is greatness of mind, if the feeling be carried to the utmost of our power into deeds." The power Richardson is describing here is the power of good will; that ability to "feel for others" is what every man, every person most longs for, and the study of Aesthetic Realism can make it possible in every person's life.

Return to Part 1

To Home Page

Manhattan School of Music Aesthetic Realism Foundation