tire on false ideas of greatness, historical and political. The
invention and the art of the writer are not even yet allowed frank and
free course.

But though criticism will allow this, it will, if it be competent and
courageous, allow no deduction to be made from the other greatness of
this little masterpiece. It has never been popular; it is never likely
to be popular; and one may almost say that it is sincerely to be hoped
that it never will be popular. For if it were, either all the world
would be scoundrels, which would be a pity: or all the world would be
philosophers and persons of taste, in which case it would be impossible,
as the famous story has it, to "look down on one's fellow-creatures from
a proper elevation." It really is a novel and a remarkable one--superior
even to _Vanity Fair_, according to Thackeray's own definition, as a
delineation of "a set of people living without God in the world." But it
is even more (and here its only parallel is _A Tale of a Tub_, which is
more desultory and much more of a _fatrasie_ or salmagundy of odds and
ends) a masterpiece and quintessential example of irony. Irony had come
in with the plain prose style, without which it is almost impossible:
and not merely Swift but others had done great things with it. It is,
however, only here that it reaches the quintessence just spoken of with
a coherent and substantive purpose to serve as vehicle for it. It is
possibly too strong for most people's taste: and one may admit that, for
anything like frequent enjoyment, it wants a certain admixture of the
fantastic in its various senses--after the method of Voltaire in one
way, of Beckford in another, of Peacock in a third, of Disraeli in a
fourth--to make it acceptable to more than a very few. But it shows,
even from our present limited point of view, of what immense and exalted
application the novel-method was capable: and it shows also the
astonishing powers of its author. "Genial," in the usual sense, it
certainly cannot be called; in the proper sense as equalling "what is
the production of genius" there are few books which deserve the term
better. But it is an exercise in a by-way of the novel road-system,
though an early proof of the fact that such by-ways are endlessly open.

But the time was coming, though it did not (and could hardly) come very
quickly, when Fielding was to discard all kinds of adventitious aids and
suggestions--all crutches, spring-boards, go-carts, tugs,