Page:Studies of a Biographer 4.djvu/276

 Rousseau learn his sentimentalism from Richardson? Would he not have been as sentimental if Richardson had never existed? And was the 'sentimentalism' a specially Northern product transplanted from the Germanic to the Latin races, or a product of conditions common to both? It was in some respects even opposed to the English character. The true founder of the English novel was not Richardson so much as Fielding. To most modern readers, to me certainly, Fielding is incomparably the more readable of the two. I can put myself by an effort into the proper attitude about Clarissa; but I can adopt it spontaneously for Amelia. Fielding, however, achieved no such popularity abroad as Richardson. One obvious reason is precisely that he was too thorough a John Bull. The great coarse vigorous animal, the 'good buffalo,' as Taine calls him, disgusted our more refined neighbours. He began by a hearty guffaw at Richardson's 'sentimentalism,' and embodies the really British view of that product. It is, he held, substantially an unmanly, mawkish affectation, fit only for tea-drinking, effeminate, molly-coddling tradesmen and Frenchified dandies. So far from being specially English, it was every-