One of the things Richardson had triumphantly demonstrated by his first story was that a very slight texture of plot can suffice for a long, not to say too long, piece of fiction, if only a free hand be given the story-teller in the way of depicting the intuitions and emotions of human beings; dealing with their mind states rather than, or quite as much as, their actions.  This was the modern note, and very speedily was the lesson learned; the time was apt for it.  From 1742, the date of “Pamela,” to 1765 is but a quarter century; yet within those narrow time-limits the English Novel, through the labors of Richardson and Fielding, Smollett, Sterne and Goldsmith, can be said to have had its birth and growth to a lusty manhood and to have defined once and for all the mold of this new and potent form of prose art.  By 1773 a critic speaks of the “novel-writing age”; and a dozen years later, in 1785, novels are so common that we hear of the press “groaning beneath their weight,”—­which sounds like the twentieth century.  And it was all started by the little printer; to him the praise.  He received it in full measure; here and there, of course, a dissident voice was heard, one, that of Fielding, to be very vocal later; but mostly they were drowned in the chorus of adulation.  Richardson had done a new thing and reaped an immediate reward; and—­as seldom happens, with quick recognition—­it was to be a permanent reward as well, for he changed the history of English literature.

One would have expected him to produce another novel post-haste, following up his maiden victory before it could be forgotten, after the modern manner.  But those were leisured days and it was half a dozen years before “Clarissa Harlowe” was given to the public.  Richardson had begun by taking a heroine out of low life; he now drew one from genteel middle class life; as he was in “Sir Charles Grandison,” the third and last of his fictions, to depict a hero in the upper class life of England.  In Clarissa again, plot was secondary, analysis, sentiment, the exhibition of the female heart under stress of sorrow, this was everything.  Clarissa’s hand is sought by an unattractive suitor; she rebels—­a social crime in the eighteenth century; whereat, her whole family turn against her—­father, mother, sister, brothers, uncles and aunts—­and, wooed by Lovelace, a dashing rake who is in love with her according to his lights, but by no means intends honorable matrimony, she flies with him in a chariot and four, to find herself in a most anomalous position, and so dies broken-hearted; to be followed in her fate by Lovelace, who is represented as a man whose loose principles are in conflict with a nature which is far from being utterly bad.  The narrative is mainly developed through letters exchanged between Clarissa and her friend, Miss Howe.  There can hardly be a more striking testimony to the leisure enjoyed by the eighteenth-century than that society was not bored by a story the length of which seems