pleasure.[9] The
greatest of Richardson's successors in the history of English fiction
adds to this explanation. "Those," says Sir Walter Scott, "who with
patience had studied rant and bombast in the folios of Scuderi, could
not readily tire of nature, sense, and genius in the octavos of
Richardson." The old French romances in which Europe had found a dreary
amusement, were stories of princes and princesses. It was to be expected
that the first country where princes and princesses were shorn of
divinity and made creatures of an Act of Parliament, would also be the
country where imagination would be most likely to seek for serious
passion, realistic interest, and all the material for pathos and tragedy
in the private lives of common individuals. It is true that Marivaux,
the author of _Marianne_, was of the school of Richardson before
Richardson wrote a word. But this was an almost isolated appearance, and
not the beginning of a movement. Richardson's popularity stamped the
opening of a new epoch. It was the landmark of a great social, no less
than a great literary transition, when all England went mad with
enthusiasm over the trials, the virtue, the triumph of a rustic
ladies'-maid.

[9] Hettner's _Literaturgeschichte_, i. 462.

In the literary circles of France the enthusiasm for Richardson was
quite as great as it was in England. There it was one of the signs of
the certain approach of that transformation which had already taken
place in England; the transformation from feudalism to industrial
democracy. It may sound a paradox to say that a passion for Richardson
was a symbol that a man was truly possessed by the spirit of political
revolution. Yet it is true. Voltaire was a revolter against superstition
and the tyranny of the church, but he never threw off the monarchic
traditions of his younger days; he was always a friend of great nobles;
he had no eye and no inclination for social overthrow. And this is what
Voltaire said of _Clarissa Harlowe_: "It is cruel for a man like me to
read nine whole volumes in which you find nothing at all. I said--Even
if all these people were my relations and friends, I could take no
interest in them. I can see nothing in the writer but a clever man who
knows the curiosity of the human race, and is always promising something
from volume to volume, in order to go on selling them." In the same way,
and for exactly the same reasons, he could never understand the
enthusiasm for the