Twin Stars: The Anxiety of Sibling Rivalry between Literary Titans

Papers on Language and Literature, Spring 2004 by Weidhorn, Manfred

If each man at first esteemed the other's mind but derogated the other's heart, the differences between them grew increasingly personal and acrimonious. One of Rousseau's later letters to Voltaire was filled with hate, contempt, and self pity. "I dislike you very much, monsieur, for you have inflicted wrongs on me of the most painful kind." After a series of "I hate you" ejaculations, he concluded, "Lastly I hate you because you want me to hate you." Voltaire understandably did not reply but remarked to a friend that Rousseau, alas!, had gone mad (Guehenno 2: 47-48; Green 176; Orieux 340). We are obviously a long way from Sophoclean equanimity in the assessment of self and rival.

Rousseau's hatred of Voltaire was reaching its zenith. Though at first Rousseau, while conceding Voltaire his genius, wit, and style, had accused him only of a malice that brought misfortune on self and others, he now came to see Voltaire as the exemplar of the depravity and hypocrisy of civilization itself. he proceeded to attribute to Voltaire a pamphlet containing an attack on the Bible and Christianity. Since Voltaire had written the work anonymously in order to avoid imprisonment, Rousseau's revealing the identity of the author caused Voltaire to explode with righteous indignation. he called Rousseau at once mad and dishonorable: it was high treason in times of persecution to betray a fellow writer and philosophe. he had so far respected Rousseau but now would attack him at every opportunity as a false brother to be destroyed, as nothing less than "an enemy of the human race" (Orieux 406).

The essential difference between the Enlightenment sage and the new Romantic individualist was brought out when Voltaire remarked about his rival, "True merit does not consist in singularity but in being reasonable" (Guehenno 2: 177), and again when he complained that Rousseau "issues decrees like the Parlement, without giving reasons" (Orieux 443)-criticisms that express the rationalist's distaste for Romantic irrationalism (as well as, of course, a commonsensical man's dislike of an authoritarian personality).

ENLIGHTENMENT ENGLAND

While this feud was taking place in France, across the channel a similar altercation was going on between two major literary figures. Samuel Richardson and Henry Fielding are the founding fathers of the realistic novel, i.e. the prose narrative tracing the pursuit of amatory and vocational fulfillment in the world of the middle class. Both men were conscious of being literary innovators, as Richardson in 1741 claimed to introduce a "new species of writing," and Fielding a year later made a similar claim about his "comic epic in prose" (Watt 208). Both turned to fiction writing at virtually the same time after trying their hand at other ventures. Both wrote three ambitious novels, of which one is a classic. And, to top it off, their careers began with a collision with each other.

There the resemblances end. The two men were the proponents of radically different visions of life and the inventors of radically different ways of writing. Richardson, a printer by trade and thoroughly middle class in origins and mentality, was puritanical, pessimistic, humorless, moralizing, didactic, vain, and insecure. Fielding, aristocratic and classically educated, was worldly, tolerant, self assured, and witty. Richardson's notion of virtue is mechanical and (in Clarissa) otherworldly, while Fielding's is flexible, mingling earthiness with open-mindedness, and seeing people, whether good or bad, as complex (McKillop 127). Richardson wrote epistolary novels that probed the consciousness of his heroines in a confined domestic sphere, while Fielding wrote, with detachment, of adventure on the open road, involving all classes, all sorts of people and locales, and varied experiences. The narrator is non-existent in the one and omnipresent and all important in the other. For Richardson, character is central and individualized, an approach that results in psychological development and emotional intensity; for Fielding, plot is central, scenes are brief, and character is generalized. Richardson's identification with the emotions of the main character and with the details of the vulnerable feminine sensibility contrasts with Fielding's comic distance, hyperbole, and masculine extroverted robustness. Richardson overwhelms the reader with details; Fielding preaches and practices selectivity and succinctness. Naturally the two men could not understand each other any more than could Voltaire and Rousseau. But they were, in Fielding's pithy words (which apply to all these twin stars), "Rivals for that Coy Mistress Fame" (Thomas 275).