No other method can wind itself so completely into the psychological intricacies and recesses which lie behind every event.

Yet the form, as everybody knows, has not been popular; even an expert novel-reader could hardly name off-hand more than two or three examples of it since Richardson's day.

Why is this?
Well, chiefly it is because the mass of novelists have not had Richardson's knowledge of, or interest in, the psychological under side of life, and those who have, as, amongst the moderns, Henry James, have devised out of the convention of the invisible narrator a method by which they can with greater economy attain in practice fairly good results.

For the mere narration of action in which the study of character plays a subsidiary part, it was, of course, from the beginning impossible.

Scott turned aside at the height of his power to try it in "Redgauntlet"; he never made a second attempt.
For Richardson's purpose, it answered admirably, and he used it with supreme effect.