the presentation of women. Richardson
was one of those men who are not at their ease in other men's society,
and whom other men, to put it plainly, are apt to regard as coxcombs and
fools. But he had a genius for the friendship and confidence of women.
In his youth he wrote love-letters for them. His first novel grew out of
a plan to exhibit in a series of letters the quality of feminine virtue,
and in its essence (though with a ludicrous, and so to speak
"kitchen-maidish" misunderstanding of his own sex) adheres to the plan.
His second novel, which designs to set up a model man against the
monster of iniquity in _Pamela_, is successful only so far as it
exhibits the thoughts and feelings of the heroine whom he ultimately
marries. His last, _Clarissa Harlowe_ is a masterpiece of sympathetic
divination into the feminine mind. _Clarissa_ is, as has been well said,
the "Eve of fiction, the prototype of the modern heroine"; feminine
psychology as good as unknown before (Shakespeare's women being the
"Fridays" of a highly intelligent Crusoe) has hardly been brought
further since. But _Clarissa_ is more than mere psychology; whether she
represents a contemporary tendency or whether Richardson made her so,
she starts a new epoch. "This," says Henley, "is perhaps her finest
virtue as it is certainly her greatest charm; that until she set the
example, woman in literature as a self-suffering individuality, as an
existence endowed with equal rights to independence--of choice,
volition, action--with man had not begun to be." She had not begun to be
it in life either.

What Richardson did for the subtlest part of a novelist's business, his
dealings with psychology, Fielding did for the most necessary part of
it, the telling of the story. Before him hardly any story had been told
well; even if it had been plain and clear as in Bunyan and Defoe it had
lacked the emphasis, the light and shade of skilful grouping. On the
"picaresque" (so the autobiographical form was called abroad) convention
of a journey he grafted a structure based in its outline on the form of
the ancient epic. It proved extraordinarily suitable for his purpose.
Not only did it make it easy for him to lighten his narrative with
excursions in a heightened style, burlesquing his origins, but it gave
him at once the right attitude to his material. He told his story as
one who knew everything; could tell conversations and incidents as he
conceived them happening, with n