one of the most humanly attractive personalities in the biographical history of literature. Many great names and figures impress us without appealing to our sense of personal esteem or our faculty for friendship and affection. They stand, it may be, too far from us in isolated purity and greatness, or strongly marked idiosyncrasies of temperament and character repel us. But Fielding is pre-eminently an ordinary human being as well as a great genius. He falls into his natural place with some of the great creative minds of the world's history, Chaucer, Shakespeare, Cervantes, and Scott, for whom we instinctively conceive a feeling of personal friendship, and know that we should feel at our ease with them if they were to appear suddenly in the room. In every case we are conscious that they speak from the fullness of the heart; that in their work the heart plays as large a part as the intellect; that they are not merely artists or men of genius set apart from the laity of the world; but that their work is the outpouring of supreme vitality, of a broad humanitarian sympathy. Such a man was Henry Fielding.

Several factors mark the greatness of Fielding's work. It is unnecessary to point to the vitality and power of enjoying life which forces itself into every line that he wrought. We read Fielding with a consciousness of unspent forces lying

beneath the surface of his work; he is not, like some writers, racked and temporarily debilitated by the effort of production, And we are impressed, at the same time, with the catholicity of his sympathy with life. He is not limited by prejudices, nor bound by any convention in his estimate of men and women: he draws them as they are, and if there is any judgment to be made, the invidious task is left to us who read. Thackeray's distress at what he took to be Fielding's sympathy with so disreputable a hero as Tom Jones only shows that, for the time, he kept his eyes fixed on one corner of the canvas and forgot the rest of the picture. Fielding's figures are drawn into the plain of a wide landscape; to cut them out of their position and hold them up to analysis, is to violate composition and perspective. Fielding understood that character can only be known, and then uncertainly, in perspective and distant proportion; and he lacked Thackeray's fondness for acting the censor morum in minimis. At the same time, his work as a Justice of the Peace for Westminster, and the cumulative impression of his novels, show that he was possessed with a true and impatient enthusiasm for righteousness. "To take him up after Richardson," says Coleridge, "is like emerging from a sick-room heated by stoves into an open lawn on a breezy day of May."

In the theory of his art Fielding marked a great advance, of which insufficient notice has been taken, in his clear enunciation of the primary essential of comedy-that it must be veracious and truth-loving. Throughout his work he hardly loses sight of his theory and the necessity of adherence to it. No other novelist saw as clearly what the delineation of life in the spirit of comedy meant, for at least another century. If there is any single factor in the work of Fielding to which we can point as marking distinctively a stage in the evolution of the novel, it is the knowledge he shows of the true nature of comedy and comic humour.

And Fielding was the first English novelist to write a fine natural style. Dryden, Addison, and Steele knocked off the gilded fetters of Elizabethan prose. Fielding's gift of a clear, racy, and vigorous style coulant, which ran easily off the pen, is a virtue which the novel is called upon to cultivate more than other prose forms. And in this faculty Fielding's reach has only been touched by Thackeray.

THE NOVELS OF FIELDING.

The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews, 1742; A Journey from this World to the Next; The History of the Life of the Late Mr. Jonathan Wild the Great, 1743 (both probably written at an earlier date); The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling, 1749; The History of Amelia, 1751.

CHAPTER V

TOBIAS SMOLLETT (1721-71).

THE middle of the eighteenth century saw a change in the standing of literature and men of letters. We are accustomed to the idea of an author drawing his income from the sale of his books, but hardly any writer of the earlier half of the eighteenth century could hope to make a living merely from his sales. Pope, it is true, cleared £8000 by his translation of Homer, and Young received £3000 for the Universal Passion, but these were exceptions. Few could depend on the pen and nothing else, or, if they did, they betook themselves to the low trade of pamphleteering and political scribbling to eke, out a starved life in the garrets of Grub Street, or they compiled and translated for the booksellers, receiving as their wages the halfshare of a bed and "good milk-porridge, very often twice a day." But, if the booksellers gave little (and the sales could hardly be more than insignificant when the whole reading public of the country was limited to a few thousands), the patronage of the great and of the Crown was impartial and generous. The splendid outburst of genius

which graced the reign of Queen Anne was in a great degree due to ministerial encouragement. Whigs and Tories, Somers and Montague, Harley and St. John, vied with each other in distributing literary patronage. Among those who received help in the days of William III., Queen Anne, and George I. were Newton, Locke, Addison, Steele, Congreve, Prior, Gay, Swift, and Thomson. Even Pope, who was legally disqualified by his religion, was offered a secret pension. Literature, as a pursuit, was at this time honoured and distinguished. But these happier days for men of letters declined into a bleak and starving winter with the accession to power of Walpole. Walpole's relaxations from the business of State were hard riding and hard drinking; he was impeccably guiltless of literary tastes, and he complacently disregarded literary talent. The reading public was not yet large enough to support the struggling author, and to trust for daily bread and butter to the slender reed of literary work was at this time more rash than it has been at any period of our history.

But literature is a vocation, not a profession, and, even at this worst of times, a few, who had the audacity to come up to London seeking their fortune with the pen, succeeded in winning their way through the fearful odds opposed to them. Johnson, who came in 1737, was one of these.