And
these eulogiums were not the immature judgements of youth, but the
convictions of his riper age. As will be seen later, the influence
remained with him. In all he wrote there enters some of the material,
native and foreign, out of which Romanticism was made.
To the true masters of English fiction his indebtedness was equally
large, exception made perhaps for Fielding and Smollett; and one
American author should be included in the acknowledgment. Goldsmith,
Sterne, Walter Scott, and Fenimore Cooper were his delight. The first
and last of Richardson's productions he read only when his own talent
was formed. _Pamela_ and _Sir Charles Grandison_ he chanced upon in a
library at Ajaccio; and, after running them through, pronounced them
to be horribly stupid and boring. But _Clarissa Harlowe_, on the
contrary, he highly esteemed. Already in 1821 he had studied it; and,
when composing his _Pierrette_, towards the end of the thirties, he
spoke of it as a magnificent poem, in a passage which brands the
procedure of certain hypocrites, their oratorical precautions, and
their involved conversations, wherein the mind obscures the light it
throws and honeyed speech dilutes the venom of intentions.
Pages:
8
9
10
11
12
13
14
15
16
17
18
19
20
21
22
23
24
25
26
27
28
29
30
31
32