s
present. In _Pamela_ the settings are frequent, but they are "still
life" and rather shadowy: we do not _see_ the Bedfordshire and
Lincolnshire mansions, the summer houses where (as she observes with
demure relish when the danger is over) Mr. B. was "very naughty;" even
the pond where, if she had been another sort of girl, the _drame_ might
have become real tragedy. Fielding does not take very much more trouble
and yet somehow we _do_ see it all, with a little help from our own
imaginations perhaps, but on his suggestion and start. Especially the
outdoor life and scenes--the inn-yards and the high roads and the downs
by night or day; the pig-sty where poor Adams is the victim of live
pigs and the public-house kitchen where he succumbs to a by-product of
dead ones--these are all real for us.

But most of all is the regular progress of vivification visible in the
dialogue. This, as we have seen, had been the very weakest point of the
weakness of almost all (we might say of all) English novels up to the
close of the first quarter of the eighteenth century. Richardson had
done a great deal for it: but it was impossible that, on his method, it
should not, for the most part, be languid, or at any rate long-winded.
Here again Fielding spirits the thing up--oxygenates and ozonises the
atmosphere: while, in even fuller measure than his predecessor and
victim, he recognises the efficacy of dialogue as the revealer of
character. He has, assisted no doubt by Shakespeare and his own dramatic
practice, discovered that you do not want volumes of it to do the
business--that single moments and single sentences will do that business
at times, if they are used in the proper way.

In short, Fielding here used his reluctant and indignant forerunner as a
spring-board, whence to attain heights which that forerunner could never
have reached: he "stood upon his shoulders" in the most cavalier but
also the most successful fashion. In the novel as Richardson knew it and
was thinking of it, when he began _Pamela_, you were, as a rule, in an
artificial world altogether--a world artificial with an artificiality
only faintly and occasionally touched with any reality at all. In
_Pamela_ itself there is perhaps nothing, and certainly not much, that
is _wholly_ unreal: but the reality is treated and rendered in an
artificial way. In _Joseph Andrews_, though its professed genesis and
procedure are artificial too, you break away at once from serious
a