Read it through once

There are many reasons for this supremacy. One is the enormous influence of Richardson and Fielding. Another is the English habit — of taking for granted that people are the products of the society they live in. In a society where money counts for so much, where social position is everything, it is natural that writers should be chiefly interested in the external facts of life. There is also the newspaper — the daily habit of recording events as 'news' in terms of time, place, circumstance. The novelist, trained in the same school, habitually describes. He tells us what people wore, where they lived, how they moved. Yet life, as experienced by each individual, is not a sequence of external events. It is rather a succession of mental states, impressions, feelings, moods, fleeting glimpses.