or her story the advantage is valuable. The
subject of her story is not in the distressing events, but in her
emotion and her comportment under the strain; how a young gentlewoman
suffers and conducts herself in such a situation--that was what
Richardson had to show, and the action of the tale is shaped round
this question. Lovelace hatches his villainies in order that the
subject of the book may be exhaustively illustrated. It is therefore
necessary that the conflict within Clarissa should hold the centre,
and for this the epistolary method does indeed provide.

Richardson makes the most of it, without doubt; he has strained it to
its utmost capacity before he has done with it. A writer who thinks of
constructing a novel out of somebody's correspondence may surely
consult Clarissa upon all the details of the craft. And Clarissa, and
Grandison still more, will also give the fullest warning of the
impracticability of the method, after all; for Richardson is forced to
pay heavily for its single benefit. He pays with the desperate shifts
to which he is driven in order to maintain any kind of verisimilitude.
The visible effort of keeping all Clarissa's friends at a distance all
the time, so that she may be enabled to communicate only by letter,
seems always on the point of bearing him down; while in the case of
Grandison it may be said to do so finally, when Miss Byron is reduced
to reporting to her friend what another friend has reported concerning
Sir Charles's report of his past life among the Italians. I only speak
of these wonderful books, however, for the other aspect of their
method--because it shows a stage in the natural struggle of the mere
record to become something more, to develop independent life and to
appear as action. Where the record is one of emotions and sentiments,
delicately traced and disentangled, it is not so easy to see how they
may be exposed to an immediate view; and here is a manner, not very
handy indeed, but effective in its degree, of meeting the difficulty.

XI

And now for the method by which the picture of a mind is fully
dramatized, the method which is to be seen consistently applied in The
Ambassadors and the other later novels of Henry James. How is the
author to withdraw, to stand aside, and to let Strether's thought tell
its own story? The thing must be seen from our own point of view and
no other. Author and hero, Thackeray and Esmond, Meredith and Harry
Richmond, have giv