Lovelace, it is true, is a most astonishingly “succeeded” blend of a snob’s fine gentleman and of the fine gentleman of a silly and rather unhealthy-minded schoolgirl.  He is—­it is difficult to resist the temptation of dropping and inserting the h’s—­handsome, haughty, arbitrary, as well as rich, generous after a fashion, well descended, well dressed, well mannered—­except when he is insolent.  He is also—­which certainly stands to his credit in the bank which is not that of the snob or the schoolgirl—­no fool in a general way.  But he is not in the least a gentleman except in externals:  and there is nothing really “great” about him at all.  Even his scoundrelism is mostly, if not wholly, pose—­which abominable thing indeed distinguishes him throughout, in every speech and every act, from the time when he sighs as he kisses Miss Arabella Harlowe’s hand to the time when he says, “Let this expiate!” as that hallowed sword of Colonel Morden’s passes through his rotten heart.  Now if Richardson had meant this, it might be granted at once that Lovelace is one of the greatest characters of fiction:  and I do not deny that taken as this, meant or not meant, he is great.  But Richardson obviously did not mean it; and Hazlitt did not mean it; and none of the admirers mean it. They all thought and think that Lovelace is something like what Milton’s Satan was, and what my Lord Byron would have liked to be.  This is very unfair to the Prince of Darkness:  and it is even not quite just to “the noble poet.”

At the same time, the acute reader will have noticed, the acknowledgment that the fact that Richardson—­even not knowing it and intending to do something else—­did hit off perfectly and consummately the ideal of such a “prevailing party” (to quote Lord Foppington) as snobs and schoolgirls, is a serious and splendid tribute to his merits:  as is also the fact that his two chief characters are characters still interesting and worth arguing about.  Those merits, indeed, are absolutely incontestable.  His immediate and immense popularity, abroad as well as at home, would not necessarily prove much, though it must not be neglected, and historically, at least, is of the first importance.  But he does not need it.

For, as should have been sufficiently shown, he did very great things—­first by gathering up the scattered means and methods which had been half ignorantly hit on by others, and co-ordinating them into the production of the finished and complete novel; secondly (though less) by that infusion of elaborate “minor psychology” as it may be called, which is his great characteristic; and, thirdly, by means of it and of other things, in raising the pitch of interest in his readers to an infinitely higher degree than had ever been known before.  The dithyrambs of Diderot are, though not ridiculously, amusingly excessive:  but they are only an exaggeration of the truth.  On the comic side he was weak:  and he made a most unfortunate mistake by throwing