must be allowed to be graver disadvantages than ever to-day, when, with the headlong hurry of life, the language of literature seems to tend less towards expansion and leisurely expression than towards the cultus of the short-cut and the snap-shot. And besides these drawbacks of manner and method, there is the further difficulty that the author, who has been handed down to posterity as the first of our domestic novelists, persisted in regarding himself primarily as a moralist and preacher, and, to this end, burdened his text with a mass of matter didactic and hortatory, which, despite Johnson's dictum, it is hard to believe the bulk of his readers, unless they were widely different from the average humanity of all ages, really prized above the progress of the story. Mrs. Elizabeth Carter, who had strong views upon duelling, may have cared for the discussion upon that topic; and Miss Hester Mulso may have been interested in the pages dealing with parental authority; but we suspect that Mrs. Townly, the toast, and Mrs. Lutestring, the seamstress, were much more concerned to learn how Clarissa Harlowe would escape from Lovelace, and whether Clementina or Harriet Byron would ultimately succeed in marrying Sir Charles. And if these things were felt by the author's first unjaded readers, they must be felt more than ever by the readers of to-day, who, having come into a not inconsiderable inheritance of fiction in the interim,' are by no means bound to burden themselves with the defects and superfluities of the pioneers in the art. It may be, as it is sometimes asserted, that there is a growing reaction in favour of the Richardsonian

1 At present about 1500 novels per annum (Times Supplement, 25th July 1902).

method, and that the readers of our time, wearied with snippets and summaries, are about to turn once more to the copious and pedestrian pages of the Father of the English Novel. We doubt it. That there is an extraordinary quality about that nerveless, ambling, redundant style of his which, to those who persevere, gradually absorbs and fascinates, may readily be granted. Nevertheless, the conditions of modern life would appear to be hopelessly averse from the perusal of novels in seven or eight volumes, which novels, moreover, in spite of their admitted longueurs et langueurs, appear to defy compression.

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But if, as we think, Richardson's popularity with the public of the circulating library is never likely to revive again, his popularity is certain with the few-with those who, like Horace Walpole, either read what nobody else does, or, like Edward FitzGerald and Dr. Jowett, read only what takes their fancy. must always find readers, too, with the students of literature. He was the pioneer of a new movement; the first certificated practitioner of sentiment; the English Columbus of the analytical novel of ordinary life. Before him, no one had essayed in this field to describe the birth and growth of a new impression, to show the ebb and flow of emotion in a mind distraught, to follow the progress of a passion, to dive so deeply into the human heart as to leave-in Scott's expressive words- “neither head, bay, nor inlet behind him until he had traced its soundings, and laid it down in his chart, with all its minute sinuosities, its depths and shallows." Added to this, there was a something in his nervous, high-strung constitution a feminine streak as it were-which made him an unrivalled

anatomist of female character. He seems to have known women more intimately and instinctively than any deceased author we can recall, and he has written of them with an interest, a patience, a discrimination, and a sustained power of microscopic inquiry which no author has surpassed. And they deserved it, for he was also deeply indebted to them. "Knowing something of the female heart," he tells Pastor Stinstra, "I could not be an utter stranger to that of man." The phrase betrays more than he intended. He knew women; and through women he got his knowledge of men with its concomitant defects. What Hazlitt calls his "strong matter-of-fact imagination" did all the rest.

With the unprecedented vogue of Richardson during the literary years of his life, it might be supposed that he would be succeeded by a host of imitators. In his own country, however, his influence is not so markedly perceptible as it might have been, had his genius been less individual, and his artistic method more worthy of emulation. With him, no doubt, the stream of sentiment has its original fount and origin; but its course was modified by other tendencies, and diverted into different channels. Hence, it is not entirely easy to point to this or that writer, and especially to this or that great writer who follows, and to say that he was largely energised by the author of Sir Charles Grandison and Clarissa. Sterne no doubt came after him, and Sterne, too, dealt, among other things, with sentiment. But, at its best, Sterne's sentiment is sentiment with a difference a sentiment of an essence far subtler than anything in Richardson, and smiling, with a queer contortion, through its tears. Of Brooke's Fool of Quality -that inconceivably tiresome book which Kingsley

1

praises for its "grand ethics," and its "absence of sentimentalism" [?] — it may indeed be affirmed that it shows the influence of Richardson, since it abounds both in weeping and moralities; 1 and something of the same kind may be advanced of Henry Mackenzie's Man of Feeling, except that if Mackenzie is the disciple of Richardson, he has absorbed him through Sterne.2 Both the Man of Feeling and the Fool of Quality have, however, as pointed out by Miss Thomson, one affinity with Richardson, they are preoccupied with questions of education, although this, as she is also careful to note, they may owe to Rousseau. But neither Mackenzie (in the Man of Feeling), nor Brooke, chose the epistolary style for their performances, as did that avowed Richardsonian, Miss Burney. Richardson's novels had been the passion of her (Miss Burney's) girlhood, and her first book, Evelina, is written in letters. But although Johnson protested that there were passages in it which might do honour to the author of Clarissa, he also, by comparing her Holborn beau to Fielding, indicated sufficiently that Richardson's influence was intermixed with other influences which

1 Brooke is occasionally almost reminiscent of Richardson. Of his hero, Harry Clinton, a character says:-"Let me go, let me go from this place. The boy will absolutely kill me if I stay any longer. He overpowers, he suffocates me with the weight of his sentiments." This is quite in the Harriet Byron vein: "O my Aunt! be so good as to let the servants prepare my apartments at Selby House. There is no living within the blazing glory of this man.'

2 The introduction nevertheless seems intended to suggest kinship with Richardson:-"Had the name of a Marmontel or a Richardson been on the title-page, 'tis odds that I should have wept." Mackenzie's Julia de Roubigné, it may be added, is in letters.

saved her from succumbing entirely to sensibility. In Miss Burney's successor, Miss Austen, we are again confronted with that writer's admiration for the author of her youth. She had him by heart, we are told. "Her knowledge of Richardson's works "-wrote her nephew and biographer, the Rev. S. E. Austen-Leigh, in 1870-"was such as no one is likely again to acquire, now that the multitude and the merits of our light literature have called off the attention of readers from that great master." But, although Miss Austen too chose the "epistolary style" for the first form of Sense and Sensibility, the connection between her delicate craftsmanship and that of Richardson is not very manifest. Whatever she got from him must have been sublimed into something rarer and more refined, leaving nothing appreciable except the common attributes of minute imagination and mental analysis.

One of the causes which no doubt tended to diminish or modify the influence of Richardson in his own country, was the fact that Fielding and Smollett were also exerting considerable influence in a different direction. But in France, where Fielding (in spite of Mr. Defreval) was imperfectly understood, and Smollett almost unknown, and where Marivaux had already prepared the ground for the novel of analysis, Richardson's welcome was immediate and unmistakable. Aided, in some measure, by that gentle Gallicising to which his "parts of speech" had been subjected, he at once obtained a currency which was absolutely unexampled, especially when it is remembered that France and England were, for the moment, politically opposed, and that Richardson's preface to