Note 388 — Chapter XI

One expects something of value from the part-contemporary, part-successor of the novelists from Lesage to Rousseau. But where it is not mere blether about virtue and vice, and le cœur humain and so on, it has some of the worst faults of eighteenth-century criticism. He thinks it would have been more "moral" if Mme. de Clèves had actually succumbed as a punishment for her self-reliance (certainly one of the most remarkable topsyturvifications of morality ever crotcheted); is, of course, infinitely shocked at being asked and induced to "interest himself in a prostitute and a card-sharper" by Manon Lescaut; and, equally of course, extols Richardson, though it is fair to say that he speaks well of Tom Jones.