That Richardson succeeds in making Mr. B. tolerable, not to say likable, is a proof of his power; that the reader really grows fond of his heroine—­especially perhaps in her daughterly devotion to her humble family—­speaks volumes for his grasp of human nature and helps us to understand the effect of the story upon contemporaneous readers.  That effect was indeed remarkable.  Lady Mary, to quote her again, testifies that the book “met with very extraordinary (and I think undeserved) success.  It has been translated into French and Italian; it was all the fashion at Paris and Versailles and is still the joy of the chambermaids of all nations.”  Again she writes, “it has been translated into more languages than any modern performances I ever heard of.”  A French dramatic version of it under the same title appeared three years after the publication of the novel and a little later Voltaire in his “Nanine” used the same motif.  Lady Mary’s reference to chambermaids is significant; it points to the new sympathy on the part of the novelist and the consequent new audience which the modern Novel was to command; literally, all classes and conditions of mankind were to become its patrons; and as one result, the author, gaining his hundreds of thousands of readers, was to free himself forever of the aristocratic Patron, at whose door once on a time, he very humbly and hungrily knelt for favor.  To-day, the Patron is hydra-headed; demos rules in literature as in life.

The sentimentality of this pioneer novel which now seems old-fashioned and even absurd, expressed Queen Anne’s day.  “Sensibility,” as it was called, was a favorite idea in letters, much affected, and later a kind of cult.  A generation after Pamela, in Mackenzie’s “Man of Feeling,” weeping is unrestrained in English fiction; the hero of that lachrymose tale incurred all the dangers of influenza because of his inveterate tendency toward damp emotional effects; he was perpetually dissolving in “showers of tears.”  In fact, our novelists down to the memory of living man gave way to their feelings with far more abandon than is true of the present repressive period.  One who reads Dickens’ “Nicholas Nickleby” with this in mind, will perhaps be surprised to find how often the hero frankly indulges his grief; he cries with a freedom that suggests a trait inherited from his mother of moist memory.  No doubt, there was abuse of this “sensibility” in earlier fiction:  but Richardson was comparatively innocuous in his practice, and Coleridge, having the whole sentimental tendency in view, seems rather too severe when he declared that “all the evil achieved by Hobbes and the whole school of materialists will appear inconsiderable if it be compared with the mischief effected and occasioned by the sentimental philosophy of Sterne and his numerous imitators.”  The same tendency had its vogue on both the English and French stage—­the Comedie larmoyante of the latter being vastly affected in London and receiving in the next generation the good-natured satiric shafts of Goldsmith.  It may be possible that at the present time, when the stoicism of the Red Indian in inhibiting expression seems to be an Anglo-Saxon ideal, we have reacted too far from the gush and the fervor of our forefathers.  In any case, to Richardson belongs whatever of merit there may be in first sounding the new sentimental note.