AM,

HENRY FIELDING

(1707-1754)

BY LESLIE STEPHEN

says Fielding incidentally, in his most famous novel, "the founder of a new province of writing." The claim, though bold, is certainly not groundless. The English novel, as we know it, has in the main been developed upon the lines laid down by Fielding. It is true that Fielding, like every leader of a new literary dynasty, inherited much from earlier rulers. He looked back with reverence to Cervantes; and critics have shown that he was influenced by Le Sage, and more distinctly by Marivaux. In English literature, Defoe and Richardson in some respects anticipated him; but with differences which show his originality. 'Robinson Crusoe' is simply a narrative of facts, though the facts did not happen to take place. The author expects us to be interested in a strange series of adventures, and is not consciously aiming at the portrayal of life and character. Richardson, on the contrary, began by composing edifying moral epistles, into which a story was introduced by way of connecting thread. To his own mind the didactic element always represented the ultimate aim; though his readers become a good deal more interested in Clarissa than in the moral which she was intended to point.

But Fielding as he again tells us means deliberately to describe "human nature." Like Shakespeare before him or Scott after him, he is to set before us impartially the world as it presented itself to him; to give us living and moving types of the real human beings whom he had seen acting under the ordinary conditions of contemporary society. The novel, thus understood, has grown and flourished and taken many different forms. We wonder at times what our ancestors did to amuse themselves in the days before it was invented. Contemporary moralists denounced the habit of frivolous reading as they do now. What was the seduction to which these frivolous readers yielded? They had novels in the old sense of the word, stories such as had been once told by Boccaccio and had lately been furbished up by Mrs. Behn. Or they might seek for more prolonged enjoyment in the voluminous romances of the 'Grand Cyrus' kind, which, hopelessly unreadable as they appear to us, were still intensely fascinating to many readers; to Fielding's cousin Lady Mary Wortley