he honours of cheap reprints; the modern reader
shudders at a novel in eight volumes, and declines to dig for amusement
in so profound a mine; when some bold inquirer dips into their pages he
generally fancies that the sleep of years has been somehow absorbed into
the paper; a certain soporific aroma exhales from the endless files of
fictitious correspondence. This contrast, however, between popularity
and celebrity is not so rare as to deserve special notice. Richardson's
slumber may be deeper than that of most men of equal fame, but it is not
quite unprecedented. The string of paradoxes, which it would be easy to
apply to Richardson, would turn upon a different point. The odd thing
is, not that so many people should have forgotten him, but that he
should have been remembered by people at first sight so unlike him. Here
is a man, we might say, whose special characteristic it was to be a
milksop--who provoked Fielding to a coarse hearty burst of ridicule--who
was steeped in the incense of useless adulation from a throng of
middle-aged lady worshippers--who wrote his novels expressly to
recommend little unimpeachable moral maxims, as that evil courses lead
to unhappy deaths, that ladies ought to observe the laws of propriety,
and generally that it is an excellent thing to be thoroughly
respectable; who lived an obscure life in a petty coterie in fourth-rate
London society, and was in no respect at a point of view more exalted
than that of his companions. What greater contrast can be imagined in
its way than that between Richardson, with his second-rate
eighteenth-century priggishness and his twopenny-tract morality, and the
modern school of French novelists, who are certainly not prigs, and
whose morality is by no means that of tracts? We might have expected _a
priori_ that they would have summarily put him down, as a hopeless
Philistine. Yet Richardson was idolised by some of their best writers;
Balzac, for example, and George Sand, speak of him with reverence; and a
writer who is, perhaps, as odd a contrast to Richardson as could well be
imagined--Alfred de Musset--calls 'Clarissa' _le premier roman du
monde_. What is the secret which enables the steady old printer, with
his singular limitation to his own career of time and space, to impose
upon the Byronic Parisian of the next century? Amongst his
contemporaries Diderot expresses an almost fanatical admiration of
Richardson for his purity and power, and declares charact