room for development. Now, however, society was moving in a direction which was as unpropitious to the old drama as it was favourable to the modern novel. The world had lost its earlier faith in ideal heroes, who fashioned their own fate by energy of will, determined their destiny by their own choice of action, and, whether it led to victory or defeat, asserted their individual freedom. Society was veering towards the view that men, so far from being masters of their fate, were creatures of their environment. Neither Le Sage nor Defoe assigns to his actors any definite characters. Gil Blas is a chameleon who takes his colour from his surroundings. But no contemporary dramatist attempted to weave the web of circumstances in which men are caught and held. They still worked on the old aristocratic conception which no longer expressed any national sentiment. The theme had lost its inspiration. The thrill could not be recaptured by rant and fustian. The serious drama showed little sign of life; for some years social comedy had taken its place. Even at its zenith the comic stage had never represented any wide range of national life, and the social world, which once applauded its cynical licence, had changed. Always shallow in its presentation of human nature, it had behind it no permanent solidity of substance. A great genius like Molière might conquer restrictions of space, create characters, and round them off into individual human beings. Inferior artists evaded their difficulties by labelling each figure with some distinctive quality. Congreve might conceal the poverty of his human material by the dazzling wit of his dialogue. But his successors and imitators failed more and more to keep touch with social changes. Their plays were still cast in the post-Restoration mould; their figures were wrinkled types, who had lost the vivid freshness of colour that they once possessed, and whose familiar parts rang false to realities. Social comedy had become a survival of the past, rather than a living organ of the present. Like tragedy, it was in decay. Freed from the rivalry of the stage, novelists had their opportunity to create a new form of imaginative literature. They were also favoured by the direction in which public curiosity was turning. Intellectual and social tendencies, which accompanied the rise of the middle classes, converged on the study of human nature and the problems of human existence. Here was a field to which the novel might be so adapted as to develop to the full the advantages which it possessed over every other form of representative art, for the dissection of the heart and the analysis of springs of conduct. Philosophical speculations or controversies on free will and predestination may not have greatly exercised the conscious mind of society; but they filled the air and quickened the growing interest in character and personality. Social changes contributed to similar results. Increased leisure, the spread of education, improved communications, new facilities for travel, combined to stimulate a desire to know how other people lived, what they thought and felt as well as what they did. For the moment the public was only curious as to the present; but, as the century advanced, the interest extended to the past. Even if the stage had still represented contemporary society, something wider and deeper would have been required to satisfy the new curiosity. A demand had been created for a representation of life which was true, not only to its external features, but to the mental and moral phenomena of the human heart and brain. If the novel could meet this need-if, that is, it could treat life subjectively as well as objectively-its welcome and its position in literature were assured. The opportunity for novelists of real life and character had come, and with it came the men. For centuries before the reign of George II, fictitious narratives in prose had fascinated their listeners or their readers. Yet, though Richardson and Fielding had hundreds of predecessors, they were, in a true if limited sense, the founders of the modern novel. The heroes and heroines of the older romances were shadowy figures, paragons of beauty or courage, moving through a panorama of disconnected adventures at the caprice of their creator, in surroundings as vague and indistinct as themselves. Richardson and Fielding completed the picture of real life which Defoe had left unfinished. To the faithful presentation of external facts they added the revelation of the inner workings of mind and character, which interpret action and intensify the interest of incident. They also, for the first time in long works of fiction, recognised that stories must have a beginning and an end. They brought together groups of human beings in plots which were unravelled by the play of character in the grip of circumstance. The actors live because the parts which they enact follow from their own individualities. Both writers believed, and were justified in believing, that they were creating a new species of literature. When the novel left their hands, it was still in the experimental stage; but it had become a novel, just as a play is a play or a poem a poem. Novelists had found themselves. The search was over; the goal and the means of reaching it were ascertained. Henceforward the interest of the history lies in the perfection of the instrument and its application to new fields. Those who, familiar with the triumphs of modern novelists, read for the first time the work of Richardson are so struck with his imperfections that they think him hopelessly obsolete. Those who come to him, as his own generation came, conversant only with the prose fiction of his predecessors and contemporaries, are impressed with his freshness and novelty. To read " Pamela," the first of his three novels (1740), is to enter a new world of literature. He had created "a new species of writing," and was conscious that he had done so. Eight years later he produced his masterpiece. "Clarissa Harlowe " is an intimate portrait of a true woman, painted by a man. How came it that, in the prosiest of periods, this new tragic ideal was created by a plodding, humdrum printer when he was nearly sixty? Nothing that is known of the domestic and literary life of the elderly citizen fully answers the question. But something is explained. The external facts of his prosperous career are few and simple. Born (1689) and bred in a Derbyshire village, he was intended to take Orders; but his father, by trade a joiner, became too impoverished to afford him the necessary education. In 1706 he was "bound apprentice to Mr. John Wilde of Stationers' Hall." Hard-working and conscientious in his master's service, he used his scanty leisure in self-education, taking care, as he himself notes, "that even my candle was of my own purchasing." His seven years ended, he worked in a printing office, took up his freedom and finally set up for himself as a printer. He married, as his first wife, his master's daughter, Allington Wilde, prospered in Salisbury Court, printed (among other works) the " Journals of the House of Commons," and eventually (1754) became Master of the Stationers' Company. His commercial career was as uneventful as it was successful. He bore its burdens alone. Even when drinking the waters at Tunbridge Wells he conducted his affairs. by coach-borne correspondence. His constitutional bashfulness did not prevent him from building up a considerable business. Yet his shyness grew upon him to such an extent that, latterly, he all his orders in written notes. gave of 72. He died in 1761 at the age In most of his opinions, Richardson was little in advance of his own day. But, both as a boy and as a man, he stood apart from his male contemporaries in something of the mental and moral isolation which often characterises genius. Never "fond of play" the child was nicknamed by his schoolfellows" Serious and "Gravity." But as a teller of stories he was popular. Some of his tales were taken from books, others were his own invention. Fifty years later, he remembered that he had had the power to move his audiences, and that all his stories "carried with them a useful moral." Shy with boys, he was, like Cowper, more at his ease with the opposite sex. The girls of the neighbourhood gave him their confidences, asked him to write their love-letters, and liked him to read aloud to them over their needlework, and to comment on what he read. Male society was uncongenial to him. Even in mature years he remained, in habits, tastes, or interests, as unlike other men as he had been unlike his schoolfellows in boyhood. Abstemious in food and drink, he abstained for many years from wine, meat and fish. He never swore; his most lurid oath was "What! the duce is in it." He was never, to his knowledge, in the company of a loose woman. He never gambled and enjoyed no form of sport. He never rode anything more exciting than a wooden "chamber-horse," which he used for exercise. He disapproved of duelling, though Clarissa is avenged in a duel which he describes with plenty of spirit. Throughout his life he preferred the society of women to that of men. From women he learned to know human nature and to regard it with a feminine eye. At his country home at North End, Hammersmith, or, later, at Parson's Green, he spent his week-ends in a "flower-garden of ladies" of all ages. Among his elder guests was a sprinkling of younger women, more vivacious than his own four daughters, whom he describes as shy little fools," and who alone survived out of a family of six sons and six daughters. Surrounded by a company of female worshippers, he breathed an atmosphere of incense, which for most men, however elderly, must have been unwholesome. To his natural temperament the peculiar training was congenial and VOL. 243. NO. 495. J under it he expanded. Contact with female delicacy of perception sharpened his own acute observation of subtle gradations of feeling. His inventive faculty was stimulated by finding that his own interest in minute details was shared by his audience, and that he gratified their wishes as well as his own inclinations by telling us all about it." To the party of ladies as they sat round a table, drawing, flowering muslin, or making ruffles and borders, Richardson read aloud, between tea and supper, the last pages which he had finished of " Clarissa Harlowe "or of " Sir Charles Grandison." They applauded, discussed, commented; more rarely they criticised. In this feminine school he learned to accomplish a feat which no man has attempted with greater success. With rare insight into her nature he painted a true woman, and his picture is none the less valuable because it is drawn with that genuine admiration which female novelists rarely display towards their own sex. Richardson's correspondence gives little indication of the studies that he pursued, and of the books that he read, at the formative period of his life, when he was educating himself. He learnt no language but his own. He could not have read "Marianne" in the original French, though he might have read the translation which began to appear four years before the publication of "Pamela." Of Latin or Greek he was equally ignorant. The scholarship of the pedant Brand in "Clarissa Harlowe seems to have been supplied to him by a friend in Brazenose College, Oxford. On the other hand, his taste in poetry is significant of literary independence. "Who now reads Cowley?" asked Pope, and of Spenser, Addison had written the lines: But now the mystic vale, that pleased of yore, Yet Cowley, and more especially Spenser, were Richardson's favourite poets. Just as he revolted from the unemotional coldness of his contemporaries, so he rebelled against their narrow standard of classical correctness. Fond of "sentimentising," to use his own word, and warming his imagination in the glow and colour of the " Faerie Queene," he seems, on one side of his nature, a pioneer of the romantic reaction; on the other and larger side he belonged essentially to his own generation. It was on the everyday life of his contemporaries that his short-sighted Ca |