o get into the closest touch
with Clarissa's life, and to set the reader in the midst of it; and
this is a possible expedient, though it certainly has its drawbacks.

He wishes to avoid throwing Clarissa's agitations into the past and
treating them as a historical matter. If they were to become the
subject of a record, compiled by her biographer, something would be
lost; there would be no longer the same sense of meeting Clarissa
afresh, every morning, and of witnessing the new development of her
wrongs and woes, already a little more poignant than they were last
night. Even if he set Clarissa to write the story in after days,
preserving her life for the purpose, she could not quite give us this
recurring suspense and shock of sympathy; the lesson of her fortitude
would be weakened. Reading her letters, you hear the cry that was
wrung from her at the moment; you look forward with her in dismay to
the ominous morrow; the spectacle of her bearing under such terrible
trials is immediate and urgent. You accompany her step by step, the
end still in the future, knowing no more than she how the next corner
is to be turned. This is truly to share her life, to lead it by her
side, to profit by her example; at any rate her example is eloquently
present. Richardson or another, whoever first thought of making her
tell her story while she is still in the thick of it, invented a
fashion of dramatizing her sensibility that is found to be serviceable
occasionally, even now, though scarcely for an enterprise on
Clarissa's scale.

Her emotion, like Strether's, is caught in passing; like him she
dispenses with the need of a seer, a reflector, some one who will form
an impression of her state of mind and reproduce it. The struggles of
her heart are not made the material of a chronicle. She reports them,
indeed, but at such brief and punctual intervals that her report is
like a wheel of life, it reveals her heart in its very pulsation. The
queer and perverse idea of keeping her continually bent over her
pen--she must have written for many hours every day--has at least this
advantage, that for the spectator it keeps her long ordeal always in
the foreground. Clarissa's troubles fall within the book, as I have
expressed it; they are contemporaneous, they are happening while she
writes, this latest agony is a new one since she wrote last, which was
only yesterday. Much that is denied to autobiography is thus gained by
Clarissa's method, and f