Novel in the hands of these eighteenth century writers also
struck a note of the democratic,--a note that has sounded ever
louder until the present day, when fiction is by far the most
democratic of the literary forms (unless we now must include the
drama in such a designation). The democratic ideal has become at
once an instinct, a principle and a fashion. Richardson in his
"Pamela" did a revolutionary thing in making a kitchen wench his
heroine; English fiction had previously assumed that for its
polite audience only the fortunes of Algernon and Angelina could
be followed decorously and give fit pleasure. His innovation,
symptomatic of the time, by no means pleased an aristocratic
on-looker like Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, who wrote to a friend:
"The confounding of all ranks and making a jest of order has
long been growing in England; and I perceive by the books you
sent me, has made a very considerable progress. The heroes and
heroines of the age are cobblers and kitchen wenches. Perhaps
you will say, I should not take my ideas of the manners of the
times from such trifling authors; but it is more truly to be
found among them, than from any historian; as they write merely
to get money, they always fall into the notions that are most
acceptable to the present taste. It has long been the endeavor
of our English writers to represent people of quality as the
vilest and silliest part of the nation, being (generally) very
low-born themselves"--a quotation deliciously commingled of
prejudice and worldly wisdom.

But Richardson, who began his career by writing amatory epistles
for serving maids, realized (and showed his genius thereby),
that if the hard fortunes and eventful triumph of the humble
Pamela could but be sympathetically portrayed, the interest on
the part of his aristocratic audience was certain to follow,--as
the sequel proved.

He knew that because Pamela was a human being she might
therefore be made interesting; he adopted, albeit unconsciously,
the Terentian motto that nothing human should be alien from the
interests of his readers. And as the Novel developed, this
interest not only increased in intensity, but ever spread until
it depicted with truth and sympathy all sorts and conditions of
men. The typical novelist to-day prefers to leave the beaten
highway and go into the by-ways for his characters; his interest
is with the humble of the earth, the outcast and alien, the
under dog in the social struggle