a much more important part: and may be
brought into parallel with that in the _Polite Conversation_, referred
to above and published just before _Pamela_. It is "reported" of course,
instead of being directly delivered, in accordance with the
letter-scheme of which more presently, but that makes very little
difference; to the first readers it probably made no difference at all.
Here again that process of "vivification," which has been so often dwelt
on, makes an astonishing progress--the blood and colour of the novel,
which distinguish it from the more statuesque narrative, are supplied,
if indirectly yet sufficiently and, in comparison with previous
examples, amply. Here you get, almost or quite for the first time in the
English novel, those spurts and sparks of animation which only the
living voice can supply. Richardson is a humorist but indirectly; yet
only the greatest humorists have strokes much better than that admirable
touch in which, when the "reconciliations and forgivenesses of injuries"
are being arranged, and Mr. B. (quite in the manner of the time)
suggests marrying Mrs. Jewkes to the treacherous footman John and giving
them an inn to keep--Pamela, the mild and semi-angelic but exceedingly
feminine Pamela, timidly inquires whether, "This would not look like
very heavy punishment to poor John?" She forgives Mrs. Jewkes of course,
but only "as a Christian"--as a greater than Richardson put it
afterwards and commented on it in the mouth of a personage whom
Richardson could never have drawn, though Fielding most certainly could.

The original admirers of _Pamela_, then, were certainly justified: and
even the rather fatuous eulogies which the author prefixed to it from
his own and (let us hope) other pens (and which probably provoked
Fielding himself more than even the substance of the piece) could be
transposed into a reasonable key. But we ought nowadays to consider this
first complete English novel from a rather higher point of view, and ask
ourselves, not merely what its comparative merits were in regard to its
predecessors, and as presented to its first readers, but what its
positive character is and what, as far as it goes, are the positive
merits or defects which it shows in its author.

The first thing to strike one in this connection is, almost of course,
the letter-form. More agreement has been reached about this, perhaps,
than about some other points in the inquiry. The initial difficulty of
fictio