triumphantly solved by _Tom Jones_. The story is no longer a mere series of adventures, such as that which happened to Crusoe or Gil Blas, connected by the fact that they happen to the same person; nor a prolonged religious or moral tract, showing how evil will be punished and virtue rewarded. It implies a dramatic situation which can be developed without being hampered by the necessities of stage-representation; and which can give full scope to a realistic portrait of nature as it is under all the familiar circumstances of time and place. This novel, which fulfilled those conditions, has ever since continued to flourish; although a long time was to elapse before any one could approach the merits of the first inventor. In all ages, I suppose, the great artist, whether dramatist or epic poet or novelist, has more or less consciously had the aim which Fielding implicitly claims for himself; that is, to portray human nature. Every great artist, again, must, in one sense, be thoroughly 'realistic.' The word has acquired an irrelevant connotation: but I mean that his vision of the world must correspond to the genuine living convictions of his time. He only ceases to be a realist in that wide sense of the word when he deliberately affects beliefs which have lost their vitality and uses the old mythology, for example, as convenient machinery, when it has ceased to have any real hold upon the minds of their contemporaries. 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