tween the late eighteenth and the middle nineteenth centuries,
as well as that between a great novelist, Balzac, and a great
English writer, Goldsmith, who yet is not a novelist at all. It
should detract no whit from one's delight in such a work as "The
Vicar of Wakefield" to acknowledge that its aim is not to depict
society as it then existed, but to give a pleasurable abstract
of human nature for the purpose of reconciling us through art
with life, when lived so sanely, simply and sweetly as by
Primrose of gentle memory. Seldom has the divine quality of the
forgiveness of sins been portrayed with more salutary effect
than in the scene where the erring and errant Olivia is taken
back to the heart of her father--just as the hard-headed
landlady would drive her forth with the words:

"'Out I say! Pack out this moment! tramp, thou impudent
strumpet, or I'll give thee a mark that won't be better for
this three months. What! you trumpery, to come and take up
an honest house without cross or coin to bless yourself
with! Come along, I say.'

"I flew to her rescue while the woman was dragging her along
by her hair, and I caught the dear forlorn wretch in my
arms. 'Welcome, anyway welcome, my dearest lost one, my
treasure, to your poor old father's bosom. Though the
vicious forsake thee, there is yet one in the world who
will never forsake thee; though thou hadst ten thousand
crimes to answer for, he will forget them all!'"

Set beside this father the fathers of Clarissa and Sophia
Western, and you have the difference between the romance and
realism that express opposite moods; the mood that shows the
average and the mood that shows the best. For portraiture, then,
rather than plot, for felicity of manner and sweetness of
interpretation we praise such a work;--qualities no less
precious though not so distinctively appertaining to the Novel.

It may be added, for a minor point, that the Novel type as
already developed had assumed a conventional length which would
preclude "The Vicar of Wakefield" from its category, making it a
sketch or novelette. The fiction-makers rapidly came to realize
that for their particular purpose--to portray a complicated
piece of contemporary life--more leisurely movement and hence
greater space are necessary to the best result. To-day any
fiction under fifty thousand words would hardly be called a
novel in the proper sense,--except