dial-plate, whilst Richardson knew how the
clock was made.[9] It is tempting to set this down as a Johnsonian
prejudice, and to deny or retort the comparison. Fielding, we might say,
paints flesh and blood; whereas Richardson consciously constructs his
puppets out of frigid abstractions. Lovelace is a bit of mechanism; Tom
Jones a human being. In fact, however, such comparisons are misleading.
Nothing is easier than to find an appropriate ticket for the objects of
our criticism, and summarily pigeon-hole Richardson as an idealist and
Fielding as a realist; Richardson as subjective and morbid, Fielding as
objective and full of coarse health; or to attribute to either of them
the deepest knowledge of the human heart. These are the mere banalities
of criticism; and I can never hear them without a suspicion that a
professor of aesthetics is trying to hoodwink me by a bit of technical
platitude. The cant phrases which have been used so often by panegyrists
too lazy to define their terms, have become almost as meaningless as the
complimentary formulae of society.

Knowledge of the human heart in particular is a phrase which covers very
different states of mind. It may mean that power by which the novelist
or dramatist identifies himself with his characters; sees through their
eyes and feels with their senses; it is the product of a rich nature, a
vivid imagination, and great powers of sympathy, and draws a
comparatively small part of its resources from external experience. The
novelist knows how his characters would feel under given conditions,
because he feels it himself; he sees from within, not from without; and
is almost undergoing an actual experience instead of condensing his
observations on life. This is the power in which Shakespeare is supreme;
which Richardson proved himself, in his most powerful passages, to
possess in no small degree; and which in Balzac seems to have generated
fits of absolute hallucination.

Fielding's novels are not without proof of this power, as no great
imaginative work can be possible without it; but the knowledge for which
he is specially conspicuous differs almost in kind. This knowledge is
drawn from observation rather than intuitive sympathy. It consists in
great part of those weighty maxims which a man of keen powers of
observation stores up in his passage through a varied experience. It is
the knowledge of Ulysses, who has known

Cities of men
And man