of the more prominent writers have said with regard to their reasons for practicing the art. The more selfishly personal motives may be passed over quickly. Money and fame have been desired and welcomed by most authors, as by most men, but they help us little to an understanding of the purpose of literature. Yet there are some who have written with neither of these in view, like Jane Austen, who died leaving a considerable part of her work unpublished, and apparently without having sought to publish it. Since the motives of men are more usually complex than simple, it is a safe assumption that even those who have frankly written for a living, or who have acknowledged the lure of ambition, have had other things in view as well, and have not found profit or honor incompatible with deeper and more altruistic aims.
Of these last, the most commonly claimed is the moral improvement of the reader. No one has been more explicit about this than Richardson, whose preface to "Pamela" is characteristic enough to quote at length :
- "If to divert and entertain, and at the same time to instruct and improve the minds of the youth of both sexes;
- "If to inculcate religion and morality in so easy and agreeable a manner as shall render them equally delightful and profitable;
- "If to set forth, in the most exemplary lights, the parental, the filial, and the social duties;
- "If to paint vice in its proper colours, to make it deservedly odious; and to set virtue in its own amiable light, and to make it look lovely;
- "If to draw characters with justness and to support them distinctly;
- "If to effect all these good ends in so probable, so natural, so lively, a manner, as shall engage the passions of every sensible reader, and attach their regard to the story;
- "If these be laudable or worthy recommendations, the editor of the following letters ventures to assert that all these ends are obtained here, together."
In similar vein his "Clarissa" is "proposed as an exemplar to her sex," and is made as perfect as is "consistent with human frailty."
