Before, however, considering Diderot, Stendhal, Chateaubriand, and Flaubert, all avowed followers of the author of _Clarissa_, it might be as well to think a little about Fielding--as at once a dreadful example of how not to do things and as the begetter of Thackeray and the product that it is convenient to call the nuvvle as opposed to the novel. For at about the date of the births of Napoleon, Wellington, Ney, and many others who began the modern world, and just a little after the death of Richardson, and just a little before the birth of the North American Republic, and still a little more before the Cæsarian operation that produced the French Republic, distinct cleavages began to make themselves observed in the fields of writing, these eventually hardening themselves into the three main streams of the Literature of Escape from the everyday world; into the commercial product that Mamma selected for your reading, that it is convenient to call the nuvvle and that formed the immense bulk of the reading matter, and finally into the modern novel which does not avoid the problems of the day and is written with some literary skill. This last Richardson begat. And it is convenient to say that Defoe, in spite of his moralizations, was the first writer of the Literature of Escape, just as Smollett and Marryat may be described as carrying it on and the young H. G. Wells and the young Rudyard Kipling as bringing it--at any rate temporarily--to a triumphant close. Were it not that they were avowed moralizers of a middle-to-lower-middle-class type, the Fielding-to-Thackeray lineage of writers might also be regarded as purveyors of the Literature of Escape, but their continually brought-in passages of moralizations are such a nuisance that they cannot be ignored. Though they were both amateurs in the sense that neither knew how to write or cared anything about it, Thackeray at times projected his scenes so wonderfully that now and then he trembles dreadfully excitingly on the point of passing from the stage of purveyor of the nuvvle to that of the real novelist. And it is to be said for Fielding that although _Tom Jones_ contains an immense amount of rather nauseous special-pleading, the author does pack most of it away into solid wads of hypocrisy at the headings of Parts or Chapters. These can in consequence be skipped and the picaresque story with its mildly salacious details can without difficulty be followed. One might indeed almost say that Fielding was a natural story-teller, whereas Thackeray was none at all. Fielding at least, like a story-teller in a school dormitory, does manage to lose himself in details of people running into and out of each others’ bedrooms in hotel corridors at night--something like that. But Thackeray never could: the dread spectre of the Athenæum Club was for ever in his background.