the feminine part of Richardson's character
has a little too much affinity to Mrs. Gamp--not that he would ever be
guilty of putting gin in his cup, but that he would have the same
capacity for spinning out indefinite twaddle of a superior kind. And, of
course, he fell into the faults which beset the members of mutual
admiration societies in general, but especially those which consist
chiefly of women. Men who meet for purposes of mutual flattery become
unnaturally solemn and priggish; they never free themselves from the
suspicion that the older members of the coterie may be laughing at them
behind their backs. But the flattery of women is so much more delicate,
and so much more sincere, that it is far more dangerous. It is a
poultice which in time softens the hardest outside. Richardson yielded
as entirely as any curate exposed to a shower of slippers. He evidently
wrote under the impression that he was not merely an imaginative writer
of the highest order, but also a great moralist. He was reforming the
world, putting down vice, sending duelling out of fashion, and
inculcating the lessons of the pulpit in a far more attractive form. A
modern novelist is half-ashamed of his art; he disclaims earnestly any
serious purpose; his highest aim is to amuse his readers, and his
greatest boast that he amuses them by honourable or at least by harmless
means. There are, indeed, novelists who write to inculcate High-Church
or Low-Church principles, or to prove that society at large is out of
joint; but a direct intention to prove that men ought not to steal or
get drunk, or commit any other atrocities, is generally considered to be
beside the novelist's function, and its introduction to be a fault of
art. Indeed, there is much to be said against it. In our youth we used
to read a poem about a cruel little boy who went out to fish and was
punished by somehow becoming suspended by his chin from a hook in the
larder. It never produced much effect upon us, because we felt that the
accident was, to say the least, rather exceptional; at most, we fished
on, and were careful about the larder. The same principle applies to the
poetic justice distributed by most novelists. When Richardson kills off
his villains by violent deaths, we know too well that many villains live
to a good old age, leave handsome fortunes, and are buried under the
handsomest of tombstones, with the most elegant of epitaphs. This very
rough device for inculcating morali