Richardson with his Pamelas, Clarissas and Harriets. He found
fiction unwritten so far as the chronicles of contemporary
society were concerned, and left it in such shape that it was
recognized as the natural quarry of all who would paint manners;
a field to be worked by Jane Austen, Dickens and Thackeray,
Trollope and George Eliot, and a modern army of latter and
lesser students of life. His faults were in part merely a
reflection of his time; its low-pitched morality, its etiquette
which often seems so absurd. Partly it was his own, too; for he
utterly lacked humor (save where unconscious) and never grasped
the great truth, that in literary art the half is often more
than the whole; The Terentian ne quid nimis had evidently not
been taken to heart by Samuel Richardson, Esquire, of
Hammersmith, author of "Clarissa Harlowe" in eight volumes, and
Printer to the Queen. Again and again one of Clarissa's bursts
of emotion under the tantalizing treatment of her seducer loses
its effect because another burst succeeds before we (and she)
have recovered from the first one. He strives to give us the
broken rhythm of life (therein showing his affinity with the
latter day realists) instead of that higher and harder thing--the
more perfect rhythm of art; not so much the truth (which
cannot be literally given) as that seeming-true which is the aim
and object of the artistic representation. Hence the necessity
of what Brunetiere calls in an admirable phrase, the true
function of the novel--"to be an abridged representation of
life." Construction in the modern sense Richardson had not
studied, naturally enough, and was innocent of the fineness of
method and the sure-handed touches of later technique. And there
is a kind of drawing-room atmosphere in his books, a lack of
ozone which makes Fielding with all his open-air coarseness a