Of course, there are obvious disadvantages to the tale which is told in letters.  Scott reverted to it in “Guy Mannering,” and there are other conspicuous successes, but vividness is always gained at the expense of a strain upon the reader’s good-nature and credulity.  One feels that these constant details, these long conversations, could not possibly have been recorded in such a fashion.  The indignant and dishevelled heroine could not sit down and record her escape with such cool minuteness of description.  Richardson does it as well as it could be done, but it remains intrinsically faulty.  Fielding, using the third person, broke all the fetters which bound his rival, and gave a freedom and personal authority to the novel which it had never before enjoyed.  There at least he is the master.

And yet, on the whole, my balance inclines towards Richardson, though I dare say I am one in a hundred in thinking so.  First of all, beyond anything I may have already urged, he had the supreme credit of having been the first.  Surely the originator should have a higher place than the imitator, even if in imitating he should also improve and amplify.  It is Richardson and not Fielding who is the father of the English novel, the man who first saw that without romantic gallantry, and without bizarre imaginings, enthralling stories may be made from everyday life, told in everyday language.  This was his great new departure.  So entirely was Fielding his imitator, or rather perhaps his parodist, that with supreme audacity (some would say brazen impudence) he used poor Richardson’s own characters, taken from “Pamela,” in his own first novel, “Joseph Andrews,” and used them too for the unkind purpose of ridiculing them.  As a matter of literary ethics, it is as if Thackeray wrote a novel bringing in Pickwick and Sam Weller in order to show what faulty characters these were.  It is no wonder that even the gentle little printer grew wroth, and alluded to his rival as a somewhat unscrupulous man.

And then there is the vexed question of morals.  Surely in talking of this also there is a good deal of inverted cant among a certain class of critics.  The inference appears to be that there is some subtle connection between immorality and art, as if the handling of the lewd, or the depicting of it, were in some sort the hallmark of the true artist.  It is not difficult to handle or depict.  On the contrary, it is so easy, and so essentially dramatic in many of its forms, that the temptation to employ it is ever present.  It is the easiest and cheapest of all methods of creating a spurious effect.  The difficulty does not lie in doing it.  The difficulty lies in avoiding it.  But one tries to avoid it because on the face of it there is no reason why a writer should cease to be a gentleman, or that he should write for a woman’s eyes that which he would be justly knocked down for having said in a woman’s ears.  But “you must draw the world as it is.”  Why must you?  Surely it is just in selection and restraint that the artist is shown.  It is true that in a coarser age great writers heeded no restrictions, but life itself had fewer restrictions then.  We are of our own age, and must live up to it.