book as Clarissa Harlowe--I well understand that in reading it I was
unconsciously making a selection of my own, choosing a little of the
story here and there, to form a durable image, and that my selection
only included such things as I could easily work into shape. The girl
herself, first of all--if she, though so much of her story has faded
away, is still visibly present, it is because nothing is simpler than
to create for oneself the idea of a human being, a figure and a
character, from a series of glimpses and anecdotes. Creation of this
kind we practise every day; we are continually piecing together our
fragmentary evidence about the people around us and moulding their
images in thought. It is the way in which we make our world;
partially, imperfectly, very much at haphazard, but still perpetually,
everybody deals with his experience like an artist. And his talent,
such as it may be, for rounding and detaching his experience of a man
or a woman, so that the thing stands clear in his thought and takes
the light on every side--this can never lie idle, it is exercised
every hour of the day.

As soon as he begins to hear of Clarissa, therefore, on the first page
of Richardson's book, the shaping, objectifying mind of the reader is
at work on familiar material. It is so easy to construct the idea of
the exquisite creature, that she seems to step from the pages of her
own accord; I, as I read, am aware of nothing but that a new
acquaintance is gradually becoming better and better known to me. No
conscious effort is needed to make a recognizable woman of her, though
in fact I am fitting a multitude of small details together, as I
proceed to give her the body and mind that she presently possesses.
And so, too, with the lesser people in the book, and with their
surroundings; so, too, with the incidents that pass; a succession of
moments are visualized, are wrought into form by the reader, though
perhaps very few of them are so well made that they will last in
memory. If they soon disappear, the fault may be the writer's or the
reader's, Richardson's if he failed to describe them adequately, mine
if my manner of reading has not been sufficiently creative. In any
case the page that has been well read has the best chance of survival;
it was soundly fashioned, to start with, out of the material given me
by the writer, and at least it will resist the treachery of a poor
memory more resolutely than a page that I did not thoroug