Novel lies in his failure, in his greatest story, to center
the interest in man as part of the social order and as human
soul, is shown by the fact that his less known, but remarkable,
story "Moll Flanders," picaresque as it is and depicting the
life of a female criminal, has yet considerable character study
and gets no small part of its appeal for a present-day reader
from the minute description of the fall and final reform of the
degenerate woman. It is comparatively crude in characterization,
but psychological value is not entirely lacking. However, with
Richardson it is almost all. It was of the nature of his genius
to make psychology paramount: just there is found his modernity.
Defoe and Swift may be said to have added some slight interest
in analysis pointing towards the psychologic method, which was
to find full expression in Samuel Richardson.

CHAPTER III

EIGHTEENTH CENTURY BEGINNINGS: FIELDING

It is interesting to ask if Henry Fielding, barrister,
journalist, tinker of plays and man-about-town, would ever have
turned novelist, had it not been for Richardson, his
predecessor. So slight, so seemingly accidental, are the
incidents which make or mar careers and change the course of
literary history. Certain it is that the immediate cause of
Fielding's first story was the effect upon him of the fortunes
of the virtuous Pamela. A satirist and humorist where Richardson
was a somewhat solemn sentimentalist, Fielding was quick to see
the weakness, and--more important,--the opportunity for
caricature, in such a tale, whose folk harangued about morality
and whose avowed motive was a kind of hard-surfaced, carefully
calculated honor, for sale to the highest bidder. It was easy to
recognize that Pamela was not only good but goody-goody. So
Fielding, being thirty-five years of age and of uncertain
income--he had before he was thirty squandered his mother's
estate,--turned himself, two years after "Pamela" had appeared,
to a new field and concocted the story known to the world of
letters as: "The Adventures of Joseph Andrews and His Friend
Abraham Adams."

This Joseph purports to be the brother of Pamela (though the
denouement reveals him as more gently born) and is as virtuous
in his character of serving-man as the sister herself; indeed,
he outvirtues her. Fielding waggishly exhibits him in the full
exercise of a highly-starched decorum rebuffing the amatory
attempts of sundry ladies whose assault upon t