resented in novel at her date. This
is a great thing to say for Marivaux, and it can be said without the
slightest fear of inability to support the saying.[334]

[Sidenote: Marivaux and Richardson--"Marivaudage."]

Although, therefore, we may not care much to enter into calculations as
to the details of the indebtedness of Richardson to Marivaux, some
approximations of the two, for critical purposes, may be useful. One may
even see, without too much folly of the Thaumast kind, an explanation,
beyond that of mere idleness, in the Frenchman's inveterate habit of not
completing. He did not want you to read him "for the story"; and
therefore he cared little for the story itself, and nothing at all for
the technical finishing of it. The stories of both his characteristic
novels are, as has been fairly shown, of the very thinnest. What he did
want to do was to analyse and "display," in a half-technical sense of
that word, his characters; and he did this as no man had done before
him, and as few have done since, though many, quite ignorant of their
indebtedness, have taken the method from him indirectly. In the second
place, his combination of method and phrase is for infinite thoughts.
This combination is not necessary; there is, to take up the comparative
line, nothing of it in Richardson, nothing in Fielding, nothing in
Thackeray. A few French eighteenth-century writers have it in direct
imitation of Marivaux himself; but it dies out in France, and in the
greatest novel-period there is nothing of it. It revives in the later
nineteenth century, especially with us, and, curiously enough, if we
look back to the beginnings of Romance in Greek, there is a good deal
there, the crown and flower being, as has been before remarked, in
Eustathius Macrembolita, but something being noticeable in earlier folk,
especially Achilles Tatius, and the trick having evidently come from
those rhetoricians[335] of whose class the romancers were a kind of
offshoot. It is, however, only fair to say that, if Marivaux thought in
intricate and sometimes startling ways, his actual expression is never
obscure. It is a maze, but a maze with an unbroken clue of speech
guiding you through it.[336]

[Sidenote: Examples:--Marianne on the _physique_ and _moral_ of
Prioresses and Nuns.]

A few examples of method and style may now be given. Here is Marianne's
criticism--rather uncannily shrewd and very characteristic both of her
subject and of herself--of t