At any rate, Diderot wrote _Rameau’s Nephew_ as a direct imitation of that work of Richardson and a whole school of the contemporaries of Diderot imitated _Rameau’s Nephew_. The influence, again, of Richardson is plainly visible in Chateaubriand--for without Richardson how could he have written long passages like: “How sad it is to think that eyes that are too old to see have not yet outlived the ability to shed tears,” and the like. And if the Richardsonian influence upon Stendhal does not so immediately spring to the eye, we know from Stendhal’s letters that it was extremely profound. It was to Diderot--and still more to Stendhal--that the Novel owes its next great step forward. That consisted in the discovery that words put into the mouth of a character need not be considered as having the personal backing of the author. At that point it became suddenly evident that the Novel as such was capable of being regarded as a means of profoundly serious and many-sided discussion and therefore a medium of profoundly serious investigation into the human case. It came into its own. It is obvious of course that before the day of Diderot authors had put into the mouths of their characters sentiments with which they themselves could not be imagined to sympathize. But that was done only by characters marked “villain,” all the sympathetic characters having to utter sentiments which were either those of the author or those with which the author imagined the solid middle classes would agree. Young Mr. Blifil, Mrs. Slipslop, and the rest might say very wicked things, but they were so obviously wicked and absurd that no one could take them with any seriousness either as pronouncements or as worthy to be taken as the author’s opinion: Mr. Allworthy or Amelia Dobbin, on the other hand, could never utter anything without the reader having to exclaim: “_How_ virtuous!”... And consider the material success that always awaited the good! By the time the thirty years or so that stretched between 1790 and 1820 had impinged on the world it had gradually become evident, on the Continent at least, that so many differing codes of morality could synchronize in the same era, in the same nation and even in the same small community--it had become so evident that if Simeon Stylites and Oliver Cromwell were saints, Jesus Christ and Gautama Buddha and several Chinese philosophers were very good men, that the Novel, if it was at all to express its day, must express itself through figures less amateurishly blacked than Uriah Heep and less sedulously whited than the Cherryble brothers.