ppeared to write modern _Hamlets_ and _Othellos_; Johnson tried to
supply his place with the ponderous _Irene_, and John Home followed with
_Douglas_ of 'My name is Norval' fame. The tragedies were becoming more
dreary. Characteristic of Fielding was his admiration of Lillo, whose
_George Barnwell_ (1730) and _Fatal Curiosity_ (about 1736), the last of
them brought out under Fielding's own management, were remarkable
attempts to revive tragedies by going to real life. It is plain,
however, that the theatre is no longer the appropriate organ of the
reading classes. The licensing act seems to have expressed the general
feeling which, if we call it Puritan, must be Puritan in a sense which
described the general middle-class prejudices. The problem which
Fielding had to solve was to find a literary form which should meet the
tastes of the new public, who could not be drawn to the theatre, and
which yet should have some of the characteristics which had hitherto
been confined to the dramatic form. That was the problem which was
triumphantly solved by _Tom Jones_. The story is no longer a mere series
of adventures, such as that which happened to Crusoe or Gil Blas,
connected by the fact that they happen to the same person; nor a
prolonged religious or moral tract, showing how evil will be punished
and virtue rewarded. It implies a dramatic situation which can be
developed without being hampered by the necessities of
stage-representation; and which can give full scope to a realistic
portrait of nature as it is under all the familiar circumstances of time
and place. This novel, which fulfilled those conditions, has ever since
continued to flourish; although a long time was to elapse before any one
could approach the merits of the first inventor. In all ages, I suppose,
the great artist, whether dramatist or epic poet or novelist, has more
or less consciously had the aim which Fielding implicitly claims for
himself; that is, to portray human nature. Every great artist, again,
must, in one sense, be thoroughly 'realistic.' The word has acquired an
irrelevant connotation: but I mean that his vision of the world must
correspond to the genuine living convictions of his time. He only ceases
to be a realist in that wide sense of the word when he deliberately
affects beliefs which have lost their vitality and uses the old
mythology, for example, as convenient machinery, when it has ceased to
have any real hold upon the minds of their cont