the pond where, if she had been another sort of girl, the _drame_ might have become real tragedy. Fielding does not take very much more trouble and yet somehow we _do_ see it all, with a little help from our own imaginations perhaps, but on his suggestion and start. Especially the outdoor life and scenes--the inn-yards and the high roads and the downs by night or day; the pig-sty where poor Adams is the victim of live pigs and the public-house kitchen where he succumbs to a by-product of dead ones--these are all real for us. But most of all is the regular progress of vivification visible in the dialogue. This, as we have seen, had been the very weakest point of the weakness of almost all (we might say of all) English novels up to the close of the first quarter of the eighteenth century. Richardson had done a great deal for it: but it was impossible that, on his method, it should not, for the most part, be languid, or at any rate long-winded. Here again Fielding spirits the thing up--oxygenates and ozonises the atmosphere: while, in even fuller measure than his predecessor and victim, he recognises the efficacy of dialogue as the revealer of character. He has, assisted no doubt by Shakespeare and his own dramatic practice, discovered that you do not want volumes of it to do the business--that single moments and single sentences will do that business at times, if they are used in the proper way. In short, Fielding here used his reluctant and indignant forerunner as a spring-board, whence to attain heights which that forerunner could never have reached: he "stood upon his shoulders" in the most cavalier but also the most successful fashion. In the novel as Richardson knew it and was thinking of it, when he began _Pamela_, you were, as a rule, in an artificial world altogether--a world artificial with an artificiality only faintly and occasionally touched with any reality at all. In _Pamela_ itself there is perhaps nothing, and certainly not much, that is _wholly_ unreal: but the reality is treated and rendered in an artificial way. In _Joseph Andrews_, though its professed genesis and procedure are artificial too, you break away at once from serious artifice. These are all real people who do real things in a real way now, as they did nearly two hundred years ago: however much dress, and speech, and manners may have changed. And we are told of their doings in a real way, too. Exactly how the teller knew it we do not know: but we do not think of this at all. And on the other hand there is no perpetual reminder of art, like the letter-ending and beginning, to disturb or alloy the once and gladly accepted "suspension of disbelief."