emporaries. So far Defoe
and Richardson and Fielding were perfectly right and deservedly
successful because they described the actual human beings whom they saw
before them, instead of regarding a setting forth of plain facts as
something below the dignity of the artist. Every new departure in
literature thrives in proportion as it abandons the old conventions
which have become mere survivals. Each of them, in his way, felt the
need of appealing to the new class of readers by direct portraiture of
the readers themselves, Fielding's merit is his thorough appreciation of
this necessity. He will give you men as he sees them, with perfect
impartiality and photographic accuracy. His hearty appreciation of
genuine work is characteristic. He admires Lillo, as I have said, for
giving George Barnwell instead of the conventional stage hero; and his
friend Hogarth, who was in pictorial art what he was in fiction, and
paints the 'Rake's Progress' without bothering about old masters or the
grand style; and he is enthusiastic about Garrick because he makes
Hamlet's fear of the ghost so natural that Partridge takes it for a
mere matter of course. Downright, forcible appeals to fact--contempt for
the artificial and conventional--are his strength, though they also
imply his weakness. Fielding, in fact, is the ideal John Bull; the 'good
buffalo,' as Taine calls him, the big, full-blooded, vigorous mass of
roast-beef who will stand no nonsense, and whose contempt for the
fanciful and arbitrary tends towards the coarse and materialistic. That
corresponds to the contrast between Richardson and Fielding; and may
help to explain why the sentimentalism which Fielding despised yet
corresponded to a vague feeling after a real element of interest. But,
in truth, our criticism, I think, applies as much to Richardson as to
Fielding. Realism, taken in what I should call the right sense, is not
properly opposed to 'idealism'; it points to one of the two poles
towards which all literary art should be directed. The artist is a
realist so far as he deals with the actual life and the genuine beliefs
of his time; but he is an idealist so far as he sees the most essential
facts and utters the deepest and most permanent truths in his own
dialect. His work should be true to life and give the essence of actual
human nature, and also express emotions and thoughts common to the men
of all times. Now that is the weak side of the fiction of this period.
We may rea