ntation. We know, that is, of Man Friday
only what Crusoe could, according to realistic appropriateness, tell us
about him. We do not know what he thought or felt within himself. On
the other hand the method of invisible narration had not at his time
acquired the faculty which it possesses now of doing Friday's thinking
aloud or exposing fully the workings of his mind. So that Richardson,
whose interests were psychological, whose strength and talent lay in the
presentation of the states of mind appropriate to situations of passion
or intrigue, had to look about him for a new form, and that form he
found in the novel of letters. In a way, if the end of a novel be the
presentation not of action, but of the springs of action; if the
external event is in it always of less importance than the emotions
which conditioned it, and the emotions which it set working, the novel
of letters is the supreme manner for fiction. Consider the possibilities
of it; there is a series of events in which A, B, and C are concerned.
Not only can the outward events be narrated as they appeared to all
three separately by means of letters from each to another, or to a
fourth party, but the motives of each and the emotions which each
experiences as a result of the actions of the others or them all, can be
laid bare. No other method can wind itself so completely into the
psychological intricacies and recesses which lie behind every event. Yet
the form, as everybody knows, has not been popular; even an expert
novel-reader could hardly name off-hand more than two or three examples
of it since Richardson's day. Why is this? Well, chiefly it is because
the mass of novelists have not had Richardson's knowledge of, or
interest in, the psychological under side of life, and those who have,
as, amongst the moderns, Henry James, have devised out of the convention
of the invisible narrator a method by which they can with greater
economy attain in practice fairly good results. For the mere narration
of action in which the study of character plays a subsidiary part, it
was, of course, from the beginning impossible. Scott turned aside at the
height of his power to try it in "Redgauntlet"; he never made a second
attempt.

For Richardson's purpose, it answered admirably, and he used it with
supreme effect. Particularly he excelled in that side of the novelist's
craft which has ever since (whether because he started it or not) proved
the subtlest and most attractive,