support came by the pen. In short, literary professionalism reflected on gentility. We have changed all that with a vengeance and can hardly understand the earlier sentiment; but this change of attitude has carried with it inevitably the artistic advancement of modern fiction. For if anything is certain it is that only professional skill can be relied upon to perfect an art form. The amateur may possess gift, even genius; but we must look to the professional for technique.

One other influence, hardly less effective in molding the Novel than those already touched upon, is found in the increasing importance of woman as a central) factor in society; indeed, holding the key to the social situation. The drama of our time, in so frequently making woman the protagonist of the piece, testifies, as does fiction, to this significant fact: woman, in the social and economic readjustment that has come to her, or better, which she is still undergoing, has become so much more dominant in her social relations, that any form of literature truthfully mirroring the society of the modern world must regard her as of potent efficiency. And this is so quite apart from the consideration that women make up to-day the novelist's largest audience, and that, moreover, the woman writer of fiction is in numbers and popularity a rival of men.

It would scarcely be too much to see a unifying principle in the evolution of the modern Novel, in the fact that the first example in the literature was Pamela, the study of a woman, while in representative latter-day studies like "Tess of the D'Urbervilles," "The House of Mirth," "Trilby" and "The Testing of Diana Mallory" we again have studies of women; the purpose alike in time past or present being to fix the attention upon a human being whose fate is sensitively, subtly operative for good or ill upon a society at large. It is no accident then, that woman is so often the central figure of fiction: it means more than that, love being the solar passion of the race, she naturally is involved. Rather does it mean fiction's recognition of her as the creature of the social biologist, exercising her ancient function amidst all the changes and shifting ideas of successive generations. Whatever her superficial changes under the urge of the time-spirit, Woman, to a thoughtful eye, sits like the Sphinx above the drifting sands, silent, secret, powerful and obscure, bent only on her great purposive errand whose end is the bringing forth of that Overman who shall rule the world. With her immense biologic mission, seemingly at war with her individual career, and destructive apparently of that emancipation which is the present dream of her champions, what a type, what a motive this for fiction, and in what a manifold and stimulating way is the Novel awakening to its high privilege to deal with such material. In this view, having these wider implications in mind, the role of woman in fiction, so far from waning, is but just begun.

This survey of historical facts and marshaling of a few important principles has prepared us, it may be hoped, for a clearer comprehension of the developmental details that follow. It is a complex growth, but one vastly interesting and, after all, explained by a few, great substructural principles: the belief in personality, democratic feeling, a love for truth in art, and a realization of the power of modern Woman. The Novel is thus an expression and epitome of the society which gave it birth.

CHAPTER II

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY BEGINNINGS: RICHARDSON

There is some significance in the fact that Samuel Richardson, founder of the modern novel, was so squarely a middle-class citizen of London town. Since the form, he founded was, as we have seen, democratic in its original motive and subsequent development, it was fitting that the first shaper of the form should have sympathies not too exclusively aristocratic: should have been willing to draw upon the backstairs history of the servants' hall for his first heroine.

To be sure, Mr. Richardson had the not uncommon failing of the humble-born: he desired above all, and attempted too much, to depict the manners of the great; he had naive aristocratical leanings which account for his uncertain tread when he would move with ease among the boudoirs of Mayfair. Nevertheless, in the honest heart of him, as his earliest novel forever proves, he felt for the woes of those social underlings who, as we have long since learned, have their microcosm faithfully reflecting the greater world they serve, and he did his best work in that intimate portrayal of the feminine heart, which is not of a class but typically human; he knew Clarissa Harlowe quite as well as he did Pamela; both were of interest because they were women. That acute contemporary, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, severely reprimands Richardson for his vulgar lapses in painting polite society and the high life he so imperfectly knew; yet in the very breath that she condemns "Clarissa Harlowe" as "most miserable stuff," confesses that "she was such an old fool as to weep over" it "like any milkmaid of sixteen over the ballad of the Lady's Fall"—the handsomest kind of a compliment under the circumstances. And with the same charming inconsistency, she declares on the appearance of "Sir Charles Grandison" that she heartily despises Richardson, yet eagerly reads him—"nay, sobs over his works in the most scandalous manner."

Richardson was the son of a carpenter and himself a respected printer, who by cannily marrying the daughter of the man to whom he was apprenticed, and by diligence in his vocation, rose to prosperity, so that by 1754 he became Master of The Stationers' Company and King's Printer, doing besides an excellent printing business.

As a boy he had relieved the dumb anguish of serving maids by the penning of their love letters; he seemed to have a knack at this vicarious manner of love-making and when in the full maturity of fifty years, certain London publishers requested him to write for them a narrative which might stand as a model letter writer from which country readers should know the right tone, his early practice stood him in good stead. Using the epistolary form into which he was to throw all his fiction, he produced "Pamela," the first novel of analysis, in contrast with the tale of adventure, of the English tongue. It is worth remarking that Richardson wrote this story at an age when many novelists have well-nigh completed their work; even as Defoe published his masterpiece, "Robinson Crusoe," at fifty-eight. But such forms as drama and fiction are the very ones where ripe maturity, a long and varied experience with the world and a trained hand in the technique of the craft, go for their full value. A study of the chronology of novel-making will show that more acknowledged masterpieces were written after forty than before. Beside the eighteenth century examples one places George Eliot, who wrote no fiction until she had nearly reached the alleged dead-line of mental activity: Browning with his greatest poem, "The Ring and the Book," published in his forty-eighth year; Du Maurier turning to fiction at sixty, and De Morgan still later. Fame came to Richardson then late in life, and never man enjoyed it more. Ladies with literary leanings (and the kind is independent of periods) used to drop into his place beyond Temple Bar—for he was a bookseller as well as printer, and printed and sold his own wares—to finger his volumes and have a chat about poor Pamela or the naughty Lovelace or impeccable Grandison. For how, in sooth, could they keep away or avoid talking shop when they were bursting with the books just read?

And much, too, did Richardson enjoy the prosperity his stories, as well as other ventures, brought him, so that he might move out Hammersmith way where William Mortis and Cobden Sanderson have lived in our day, and have a fine house wherein