varied experience, of searching and sustained observation, of unwearying
intellectual endeavour. The sound and lusty types he created have an
intellectual flavour peculiar to themselves. His novels teem with ripe
wisdom and generous conclusions and beneficent examples. As Mr. Stephen
tells you, 'he has the undeniable merit of representing certain aspects
of contemporary society with a force and accuracy not even rivalled by
any other writer'; and it is a fact that not to have studied him 'is to
be without a knowledge of the most important documents of contemporary
history.' More: to contrast those fair, large parchments in which he has
stated his results with those tattered and filthy papers which the latter-
day literary rag-picker exists but to grope out from kennel and sewer is
to know the difference between the artist in health and the artist
possessed by an idiosyncrasy as by a devil.

The Worst of It.

But the present is an age of sentiment: its ideals and ambitions are
mainly emotional; what it chiefly loves is romance or the affectation of
romance, passion, self-conscious solemnity, and a certain straining after
picturesque effects. In Fielding's time there was doubtless a good deal
of sentimentalism, for his generation delighted not only in Western and
Trunnion and Mrs. Slipslop but in Pamela and Clarissa and the pathetic Le
Fevre. But for all that it was--at all events in so far as it was
interesting to Fielding and in so far as Fielding has pictured it--a
generation that knew nothing of romance but was keenly interested in
common sense, and took a vast deal of honest pleasure in humour and wit
and a rather truculent and full-blooded type of satire. It is plain that
such possibilities of sympathy and understanding as exist between a past
of this sort and such a present as our own must of necessity be few and
small. Their importance, too, is greatly diminished when you reflect on
the nature and tendency of certain essential elements in Fielding's art
and mind. The most vigorous and the most individual of these is probably
his irony; the next is that abundant vein of purely intellectual comedy
by whose presence his work is exalted to a place not greatly inferior to
that of the _Misantrope_ and the _Ecole des Femmes_. These rare and
shining qualities are distinguishing features in the best and soundest
part of Fielding. Of irony he is probably the greatest English master;
of pure comedy--the int