Masters of the English Novel | Page 8

the purpose alike in time past or present being to fix
the attention upon a human being whose fate is sensitively, subtly
operative for good or ill upon a society at large. It is no accident then,
that woman is so often the central figure of fiction: it means more than
that, love being the solar passion of the race, she naturally is involved.
Rather does it mean fiction's recognition of her as the creature of the
social biologist, exercising her ancient function amidst all the changes
and shifting ideas of successive generations. Whatever her superficial
changes under the urge of the time-spirit, Woman, to a thoughtful eye,
sits like the Sphinx above the drifting sands, silent, secret, powerful and
obscure, bent only on her great purposive errand whose end is the
bringing forth of that Overman who shall rule the world. With her
immense biologic mission, seemingly at war with her individual career,
and destructive apparently of that emancipation which is the present
dream of her champions, what a type, what a motive this for fiction,
and in what a manifold and stimulating way is the Novel awakening to
its high privilege to deal with such material. In this view, having these
wider implications in mind, the role of woman in fiction, so far from
waning, is but just begun.
This survey of historical facts and marshaling of a few important
principles has prepared us, it may be hoped, for a clearer
comprehension of the developmental details that follow. It is a complex

growth, but one vastly interesting and, after all, explained by a few,
great substructural principles: the belief in personality, democratic
feeling, a love for truth in art, and a realization of the power of modern
Woman. The Novel is thus an expression and epitome of the society
which gave it birth.
CHAPTER II
EIGHTEENTH CENTURY BEGINNINGS: RICHARDSON
There is some significance in the fact that Samuel Richardson, founder
of the modern novel, was so squarely a middle-class citizen of London
town. Since the form, he founded was, as we have seen, democratic in
its original motive and subsequent development, it was fitting that the
first shaper of the form should have sympathies not too exclusively
aristocratic: should have been willing to draw upon the backstairs
history of the servants' hall for his first heroine.
To be sure, Mr. Richardson had the not uncommon failing of the
humble-born: he desired above all, and attempted too much, to depict
the manners of the great; he had naive aristocratical leanings which
account for his uncertain tread when he would move with ease among
the boudoirs of Mayfair. Nevertheless, in the honest heart of him, as his
earliest novel forever proves, he felt for the woes of those social
underlings who, as we have long since learned, have their microcosm
faithfully reflecting the greater world they serve, and he did his best
work in that intimate portrayal of the feminine heart, which is not of a
class but typically human; he knew Clarissa Harlowe quite as well as
he did Pamela; both were of interest because they were women. That
acute contemporary, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, severely
reprimands Richardson for his vulgar lapses in painting polite society
and the high life he so imperfectly knew; yet in the very breath that she
condemns "Clarissa Harlowe" as "most miserable stuff," confesses that
"she was such an old fool as to weep over" it "like any milkmaid of
sixteen over the ballad of the Lady's Fall"--the handsomest kind of a
compliment under the circumstances. And with the same charming
inconsistency, she declares on the appearance of "Sir Charles

Grandison" that she heartily despises Richardson, yet eagerly reads
him--"nay, sobs over his works in the most scandalous manner."
Richardson was the son of a carpenter and himself a respected printer,
who by cannily marrying the daughter of the man to whom he was
apprenticed, and by diligence in his vocation, rose to prosperity, so that
by 1754 he became Master of The Stationers' Company and King's
Printer, doing besides an excellent printing business.
As a boy he had relieved the dumb anguish of serving maids by the
penning of their love letters; he seemed to have a knack at this
vicarious manner of love-making and when in the full maturity of fifty
years, certain London publishers requested him to write for them a
narrative which might stand as a model letter writer from which
country readers should know the right tone, his early practice stood him
in good stead. Using the epistolary form into which he was to throw all
his fiction, he produced "Pamela," the first novel of analysis, in contrast
with the tale of adventure, of the English tongue. It is worth remarking
that Richardson wrote this story at an age when many