Let us be as good and simple as Adams, without his vanity and his oddity, as brave and generous as Jones, without Jones's faults, and what a world of men and women it will become! Fielding did not paint that unborn world, he sketched the world he knew very well. He found that respectable people were often perfectly blind to the duties of charity in every sense of the word. He found that the only man in a whole company who pitied Joseph Andrews, when stripped and beaten by robbers was a postilion with defects in his moral character. In short, he knew that respectability often practised none but the strictly self-regarding virtues, and that poverty and recklessness did not always extinguish a native goodness of heart. Perhaps this discovery made him leniently disposed to "characters and situations so wretchedly low and dirty, that I," say the author of "Pamela," "could not be interested for any one of them." How amusing Richardson always was about Fielding! How jealousy, spite, and the confusion of mind that befogs a prig when he is not taken seriously, do darken the eyes of the author of "those deplorably tedious lamentations, 'Clarissa' and 'Sir Charles Grandison,'" as Horace Walpole calls them! Fielding asks his Muse to give him "humour and good humour." What novelist was ever so rich in both? Who ever laughed at mankind with so much affection for mankind in his heart? This love shines in every book of his. The poor have all his good-will, and in him an untired advocate and friend. What a life the poor led in the England of 1742! There never before was such tyranny without a servile insurrection. I remember a dreadful passage in "Joseph Andrews," where Lady Booby is trying to have Fanny, Joseph's sweetheart, locked up in prison:-- "It would do a Man good," says her accomplice, Scout, "to see his Worship, our Justice, commit a Fellow to _Bridewell_; he takes so much pleasure in it. And when once we ha' 'um there, we seldom hear any more o' 'um. He's either starved or eat up by Vermin in a Month's Time." This England, with its dominant Squires, who behaved much like robber barons on the Rhine, was the merry England Fielding tried to turn from some of its ways. I seriously do believe that, with all its faults, it was a better place, with a better breed of men, than our England of to- day. But Fielding satirized intolerable injustice. He would be a Reformer, a didactic writer. If we are to have nothing but "Art for Art's sake," that burly body of Harry Fielding's must even go to the wall. The first Beau Didapper of a critic that passes can shove him aside. He preaches like Thackeray; he writes "with a purpose" like Dickens--obsolete old authors. His cause is judged, and into Bridewell he goes, if _l'Art pour l'Art_ is all the literary law and the prophets.