artist, in
realistic fiction; and the advanced student who reads him will probably
concur in the judgment of a modern critic that, by giving us genuine
pictures of men and women of his own age, without moralizing over their
vices and virtues, he became the real founder of the modern novel.

SMOLLETT AND STERNE

Tobias Smollett (1721-1771) apparently tried to carry on Fielding's work;
but he lacked Fielding's genius, as well as his humor and inherent
kindness, and so crowded his pages with the horrors and brutalities which
are sometimes mistaken for realism. Smollett was a physician, of eccentric
manners and ferocious instincts, who developed his unnatural peculiarities
by going as a surgeon on a battleship, where he seems to have picked up all
the evils of the navy and of the medical profession to use later in his
novels.

His three best known works are _Roderick Random_ (1748), a series of
adventures related by the hero; _Peregrine Pickle_ (1751) in which he
reflects with brutal directness the worst of his experiences at sea; and
_Humphrey Clinker_ (1771), his last work, recounting the mild adventures of
a Welsh family in a journey through England and Scotland. This last alone
can be generally read without arousing the readers profound disgust.
Without any particular ability, he models his novels on _Don Quixote_, and
the result is simply a series of coarse adventures which are characteristic
of the picaresque novel of his age. Were it not for the fact that he
unconsciously imitates Jonson's _Every Man in His Humour_, he would hardly
be named among our writers of fiction; but in seizing upon some grotesque
habit or peculiarity and making a character out of it--such as Commodore
Trunnion in _Peregrine Pickle_, Matthew Bramble in _Humphrey Clinker_, and
Bowling in _Roderick Random_--he laid the foundation for that exaggeration
in portraying human eccentricities which finds a climax in Dickens's
caricatures.

Lawrence Sterne (1713-1768) has been compared to a "little bronze satyr of
antiquity in whose hollow body exquisite odors were stored." That is true,
so far as the satyr is concerned; for a more weazened, unlovely personality
would be hard to find. The only question in the comparison is in regard to
the character of the odors, and that is a matter of taste. In his work he
is the reverse of Smollett, the latter being given over to coarse
vulgarities, which are often mistaken for realism; the former to whims and