unfortunate; there is not a superlative villain brought upon the stage, but either he is brought to an unhappy end, or brought to be a penitent; there is not an ill thing mentioned, but it is condemned, even in the relation, nor a virtuous, just thing but it carries its praise along with it. What can more exactly answer the rule laid down, to recommend even those representations of things which have so many other just objections lying against them? namely, of example, of bad company, obscene language, and the like.

"Upon this foundation this book is recommended to the reader, as a work from every part of which something may be learned and some just and religious inference is drawn, by which the reader will have something of instruction, if he please to make use of it."

We have quoted so bountifully from this Preface to Moll Flanders because it is so excellently illustrative of the new moral attitude of the bourgeoisie which now predominated in literature. In the times of Dryden and Wycherly a preface such as this would have been stultifying and absurd. The morals of a different class were in the ascendant.

In Richardson this same tendency is carried to a point of extremity that is at once unconvincing and preposterous. In his effort to moralize, to teach the yokels the value of virtue and the viciousness of vice, he made his heroes angels instead of men and his vil

lains demons instead of blunderers and miscreants. Fielding in satirizing the Richardsonian characters in Tom Jones correctly observed that

"to say the truth, I as little question whether mere man ever arrived at this consummate degree of excellence, as well as whether there hath ever existed a monster bad enough to verify that in Juvenal. Nor do I, indeed, conceive the good purposes served by inserting characters of such angelic perfection or such diabolical depravity, in any work of invention; since from contemplating either, the mind of man is more likely to be overwhelmed with sorrow and shame than to draw any good uses from such patterns."

It is valuable to note, too, that with all of Fielding's satire there is implicit in his strictures the importance of having patterns that will serve to good moral use.

Richardson, proclaiming the ethical purpose of Pamela, declared that the novel might "introduce a new species of writing that might possibly turn young people into a course of reading different from the pomp and parade of romance writing, and promote the cause of religion and virtue." In his Preface to Clarissa Harlowe he announced that the aim of the book would be

"above all to investigate the highest and most important doctrines not only of morality, but of

Christianity, by showing them thrown into action in the conduct of the worthy characters, while the unworthy, who set those doctrines at defiance, are condignly, and, as may be said, consequently punished.

"From what has been said, considerate readers will not enter upon the perusal of the piece before them as if it were designed only to divert and amuse. It will probably be thought tedious to all such as dip into it, expecting a light novel, or transitory romance, and look upon the story in it (interesting as that is generally allowed to be) as its sole end, rather than as a vehicle to the instruction."

In his preface to Sir Charles Grandison Richardson gives utterance to precisely the same opinion, couched in language little variant from the earlier prefaces.

Richardson was squeamishly careful in his dealing with sex. As can be judged from his prefaces, virtue was never unrequited and vice never unpunished. The rake was reformed, the incorrigible villain died in agony. Abduction was the most daring and sensational episode hazarded. The gaudy trappings of the romance were avoided. A more prosaic type of life was now centered and sentimentalized. Pamela was the "sentimental comedy," Clarissa Harlowe, the bourgeois tragedy, in the novel. The newly-acquired artistic sensitivity of the English bourgeoisie was smoothed

and pampered by the Richardsonian novel. His novels were read aloud in family circles, and whenever a pathetic situation arose, the family would retreat to their respective rooms and shed their sympathetic tears! Sir John Lubbock tells an interesting story about Pamela, related to him by Sir John Herschel, which evidences how widespread a public devoured the fiction and how enthusiastic was its response:

2

"In a certain village the blacksmith had got hold of Richardson's novel, Pamela, and used to sit on his anvil in the long summer evenings and read it aloud to a large and attentive audience. It is by no means a short book, but they fairly listened to it all. At length, when the happy turn of fortune arrived, which brings the hero and heroine together, and sets them living long and happily according to the most approved rules, the congregation so delighted as to raise a great shout and procuring the church keys, actually set the parish bells ringing."

In France the bourgeoisie received the novel with not less eagerness and zeal. About Clarissa Harlowe Prévost confessed that "of all imaginative works I have read... conceit does not lead me to except my own, none have given me greater pleasure than the one

2 The English Novel-Wilbur Cross.

now submitted to the public." Marmontel exclamatorily maintained that he did not think the age could show "a more faithful, more delicate, more spirited touch. We do not read, we see what he describes. . . Antiquity can show nothing more exquisite." Diderot was scarcely more restrained in his panegyric. "I yet remember," he wrote in 1761, "with delight the first time it (Clarissa Harlowe) came into my hand. I was in the country. How deliciously I was affected. I then experienced the same sensations those feel who have long lived with one they love, and are now on the point of separation." Rousseau, whom we quoted in reference to Robinson Crusoe, esteemed Richardson little less worshipfully than Defoe. In a letter to Mirabeau, he wrote: "You admire Richardson, Monsieur le Marquis, how much greater would be your admiration if like me, you were in a position to compare the pictures of this great artist with nature, to see how natural his situations are, however seemingly romantic, and how true his portraits, for all their apparent exaggeneration." So powerful was Richardson's influence in France, as the bourgeoisie rose in power toward the latter part of the eighteenth century, and as the classical tragedy in France gradually surrendered to the new genre, the tragedie bourgeoise, fostered by Nivelle la Chaussee and Diderot, that Horace Walpole, still ensnared by the gothic romance, asserted sneeringly