FIELDING FOR AMERICA.—It is very doubtful whether anybody reads Fielding nowadays. Nevertheless, like all the eighteenth century writers, he is more than worth all the time we waste on certain contemporaries. There is nothing of the “damned literary” about Fielding; but also there is nothing of what usually goes with the absence of letters, sentimentality. Fielding’s letters, one feels, were absorbed into his blood; they did not remain like crumbs on the lips after a barbarian repast. Fielding could carry his letters as his contemporaries boasted they could carry their port—without showing it. And it was no less the case that he carried his feelings with the same well-bred ease, without displaying them, and, even more, without permitting them to rule his intelligence. Richardson seems born to have provoked Fielding to write. He incarnated everything that Fielding thought worth a negative. But for Richardson, Fielding would possibly have never found his true _métier_; Richardson was his twin opposite. Fielding, however, must always pay the penalty of being a reactionary, of requiring a stimulant; he is no creator, for the stuff of creation was not native to him. He is an amusing _causeur_ with his eye always upon Richardson; a man of the world telling a story _à la_ Richardson, but with the explanations common to the class of English gentlemen. He is put among the English _Men of Letters_ in the series edited by Lord Morley, and now he is receiving attention in America. America needs Fielding; for what is America in danger of becoming but a kind of Richardson continent? Our eighteenth century writers are a school to which American literature must go as a means of escape from the Roundhead tradition which otherwise America will scarcely succeed in overpassing. I cannot conceive, however, that _Tom Jones_ will be popular in America yet awhile. He has more resistance to encounter there than in any other civilised nation. But until _Tom Jones_ can be read in America without a blush, American literature will remain several centuries behind English and European literature.