hrew his fiction into a
mold cast by earlier writers; moreover, he received his direct
impulse away from the drama and towards the novel from
Richardson himself.

The author of "Pamela" demonstrated once and for all the
interest that lies in a sympathetic and truthful representation
of character in contrast with that interest in incident for its
own sake which means the subordination of character, so that the
persons become mere subsidiary counters in the game. And he
exhibited such a knowledge of the subtler phases of the nooks
and crannies of woman's heart, as to be hailed as past-master
down to the present day by a whole school of analysts and
psychologues; for may it not be said that it is the popular
distinction of the nineteenth century fiction to place woman in
the pivotal position in that social complex which it is the
business of the Novel to represent? Do not our fiction and drama
to-day--the drama a belated ally of the Novel in this and other
regards--find in the delineation of the eternal feminine under
new conditions of our time, its chief, its most significant
motif? If so, a special gratitude is due the placid little Mr.
Richardson with his Pamelas, Clarissas and Harriets. He found
fiction unwritten so far as the chronicles of contemporary
society were concerned, and left it in such shape that it was
recognized as the natural quarry of all who would paint manners;
a field to be worked by Jane Austen, Dickens and Thackeray,
Trollope and George Eliot, and a modern army of latter and
lesser students of life. His faults were in part merely a
reflection of his time; its low-pitched morality, its etiquette
which often seems so absurd. Partly it was his own, too; for he
utterly lacked humor (save where unconscious) and never grasped
the great truth, that in literary art the half is often more
than the whole; The Terentian ne quid nimis had evidently not
been taken to heart by Samuel Richardson, Esquire, of
Hammersmith, author of "Clarissa Harlowe" in eight volumes, and
Printer to the Queen. Again and again one of Clarissa's bursts
of emotion under the tantalizing treatment of her seducer loses
its effect because another burst succeeds before we (and she)
have recovered from the first one. He strives to give us the
broken rhythm of life (therein showing his affinity with the
latter day realists) instead of that higher and harder thing--the
more perfect rhythm of art; not so much the truth (which
cannot be li