imately land them. He was a sound
Tory, and an accepter of all established creeds. Sentimentalism with him
was merely a delight in cultivating the emotions, without any thought of
consequences; or, later, of cultivating them with the assumption that
they would continue to move, as he bade them, 'at the command of
virtue.' Once set in motion, they chose to take paths of their own; they
revolted against conventions, even those which he held most sacred; and
by degrees set up 'Nature' as an idol, and admired the ingenuous savage
instead of the respectable Clarissa, and denounced all corruption,
including, alas, the British constitution, and even the Thirty-nine
Articles, and put themselves at the disposal of all manner of
revolutionary audacities. But the little printer was safe in his grave,
and knew not of what strange developments he had been the ignorant
accomplice.

To return, however, it must be granted that Richardson's sympathy with
women gives a remarkable power to his works. Nothing is more rare than
to find a great novelist who can satisfactorily describe the opposite
sex. Women's heroes are women in disguise, or mere lay-figures, walking
gentlemen who parade tolerably through their parts, but have no real
vitality. On the other hand, the heroines of male writers are for the
most part unnaturally strained or quite colourless; male hands are too
heavy for the delicate work required. Milton could draw a majestic
Satan, but his Eve is no better than a good-managing housekeeper who
knows her place. It is, therefore, remarkable that Richardson's greatest
triumph should be in describing a woman, and that most of his feminine
characters are more life-like and more delicately discriminated than his
men. Unluckily, his conspicuous faults result from the same cause. His
moral prosings savour of the endless gossip over a dish of chocolate in
which his heroines delight; we can imagine the applause with which his
admiring feminine circle would receive his demonstration of the fact,
that adversity is harder to bear than prosperity, or the sentiment that
'a man of principle, whose love is founded in reason, and whose object
is mind rather than person, must make a worthy woman happy.' These are
admirable sentiments, but they savour of the serious tea-party. If 'Tom
Jones' has about it an occasional suspicion of beer and pipes at the
bar, 'Sir Charles Grandison' recalls an indefinite consumption of tea
and small-talk. In short,