Novel in Richardson’s day can easily be understood, and through all the stiffness, the stilted effect of manner and speech, and the stifling conventions of the entourage, a sweet and charming young woman in very piteous distress emerges to live in affectionate memory.  After all, no poor ideal of womanhood is pictured in Clarissa.  She is one of the heroines who are unforgettable, dear.  Mr. Howells, with his stern insistence on truth in characterization, declares that she is “as freshly modern as any girl of yesterday or to-morrow.  ’Clarissa Harlowe,’ in spite of her eighteenth century costume and keeping, remains a masterpiece in the portraiture of that ever-womanly which is of all times and places.”

Lovelace, too, whose name has become a synonym for the fine gentleman betrayer, is drawn in a way to make him sympathetic and creditable; he is far from being a stock figure of villainy.  And the minor figures are often enjoyable; the friendship of Clarissa with Miss Howe, a young woman of excellent good sense and seemingly quite devoid of the ultra-sentiment of her time, preludes that between Diana and her “Tony” in Meredith’s great novel.  As a general picture of the society of the period, the book is full of illuminations and sidelights; of course, the whole action is set on a stage that bespeaks Richardson’s narrow, middle class morality, his worship of rank, his belief that worldly goods are the reward of well-doing.

As for the contemporaneous public, it wept and praised and went with fevered blood because of this fiction.  We have heard how women of sentiment in London town welcomed the book and the opportunity it offered for unrestrained tears.  But it was the same abroad; as Ike Marvel has it, Rousseau and Diderot over in France, philosophers as they professed to be, “blubbered their admiring thanks for ‘Clarissa Harlowe."’ Similarly, at a later day we find caustic critics like Jeffrey and Macaulay writing to Dickens to tell how they had cried over the death of Little Nell—­a scene the critical to-day are likely to stigmatize as one of the few examples of pathos overdone to be found in the works of that master.  It is scarcely too much to say that the outcome of no novel in the English tongue was watched with such bated breath as was that of “Clarissa Harlowe” while the eight successive books were being issued.

Richardson chose to bask for another half dozen years in the fame of his second novel, before turning in 1754 to his final attempt, “Sir Charles Grandison,” wherein it was his purpose to depict the perfect pattern of a gentleman, “armed at all points” of social and moral behavior.  We must bear in mind that when “Clarissa” was published he was sixty years of age and to be pardoned if he did not emulate so many novel-makers of these brisker mercantile times and turn off a story or so a year.

By common confession, this is the poorest of his three fictions.  In the first place, we are asked to move more steadily in the aristocratic atmosphere where the novelist did not breathe to best advantage.  Again, Richardson was an adept in drawing women rather than men and hence was self-doomed in electing a masculine protagonist.  He is also off his proper ground in laying part of the action in Italy.