sister, of inordinate virtue, which successfully repels the advances of an immoral suitor. Fielding, once interested in his story, forgot his purpose in beginning it, burlesqued various kinds of writing, ancient and modern, and created in Parson Adams a figure ranking high among the characters of fiction. Fielding wrote three other novels: Jonathan Wild, the story of an utterly depraved criminal; Amelia, a social satire FIELDING. dealing with the shady side of London life and the inadequacy of English criminal laws; and Tom Jones: the History of a Foundling, written on a large scale, and equally great on the side of plot, character, and philosophy of life set forth by the author in his own person. 66 Tom Jones: Plot and Method. Coleridge once said that the three greatest plots he knew were Eschylus's Edipus Tyrannus, Ben Jonson's The Alchemist, and Fielding's Tom Jones. Great as is Tom Jones on the side of plot, a fact which cannot be adequately set forth in small space, it is even more remarkable considered from other points of view. To each "book," or main division of the novel, there is an introductory chapter, which is, in Thackeray's words, "a sort of confidential talk between writer and reader." Here Fielding discusses in the first person and at considerable length his methods and aims, a procedure followed with great success regularly by his pro fessed disciple Thackeray, and occasionally by George Eliot.1 Influence of Fielding's Character-drawing. - Another respect in which Tom Jones is remarkable is the fulness and faithfulness with which the hero is presented. The “unvarnished truthfulness" of the picture did not prove altogether acceptable to the next generation; and Thackeray in the preface to Pendennis (1850) says: "Since the author of Tom Jones was buried, no writer of fiction among us has been permitted to depict to his utmost power a MAN." Fielding's example, however, in throwing aside conventional modes of characterization, and presenting a hero just as he would have been and acted in real life, was of immense value to the master-writers of fiction of the next century. Smollett. Of Smollett and Sterne not so much need be said. The former admitted his indebtedness to Spanish and French models, wrote several "picaresque "2 novels in each of which the hero is a clever rascal, and the incidents are told with savage realism. A second point to be observed in Smollett is that in his three best novels, Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, and Humphrey Clinker, he introduced a new interest in fiction the sea, drawing at length on five years' experience as a surgeon's mate. Defoe had laid scenes on an imaginary sea: Smollett laid them on a real sea, and brought real English seamen into the action. Still another notable feature of Smollett's works is his characterization by peculiarities of speech or manner, a method familiar in the work of his most famous disciple, Charles Dickens. 1 See, e.g., Adam Bede, Chap. XVII. 2 Word derived from Spanish picaro, rogue. Sterne. Sterne's two fictions, Tristram Shandy and A Sentimental Journey, are marred by an excess of sentimentality. He was notoriously and purposely careless of form. What he contributed to the English novel was some admirable character-drawing, including one figure - Tristram's Uncle Toby - universally admitted to be unsurpassed in eighteenth-century fiction. "As the author of Tristram Shandy, he remains," says Sidney Lee, "a delineator of the comedy of human life before whom only three or four humorous writers can justly claim precedence." Admitting the truth of even this encomium, we cannot place a writer so regardless of form as was Sterne on a plane with his great contemporaries, Richardson and Fielding. Other Novelists before 1800. The popularity of the new literary type produced a host of novelists between 1750 and 1800. New sub-types arose. In the so-called "Gothic romance," of which Horace Walpole's The Castle of Otranto and Mrs. Ann Radcliffe's The Mysteries of Udolpho are the best representatives, emphasis is laid on the supernatural and the terrible. There was the "novel of purpose," of which Johnson's Rasselas and Thomas Day's Sandford and Merton are excellent examples. Then there was Goldsmith's Vicar, a charming volume, in which, probably for the first time in English literature, an author used experiences of his own as material for fiction. None of these added anything of value in the defining of the type, which, as has been said, was due to Richardson, Fielding, Smollett, and Sterne. CHAPTER VIII FROM THE PUBLICATION OF THE LYRICAL BALLADS TO THE DEATH OF RUSKIN (1798-1900) Two Divisions of the Century. — English literature of the nineteenth century, like that of the eighteenth, falls into two plainly marked divisions. In the first, usually regarded as ending about the time of Scott's death (1832), the tendencies already mentioned as present to some extent in the verse of Thomson, Gray, and a few others, found their full expression. In the second, though this initiative was not lost, the growth of the modern scientific spirit affected every form of expression, gave a new direction to the forces of the preceding period, and brought many new ones into exist ence. No one person dominates either portion of nineteenthcentury literature; no figure stands out with sufficient prominence to give his name to the period. The time from 1798 to 1832 is known as the Age of Romanticism; that from 1832 to the end of the century, since it nearly coincides with the reign of Queen Victoria (1837-1901), is called the Victorian Age. THE AGE OF ROMANTICISM Difficulty of Definition. Now that, after several hints of the "Romantic " movement, we have arrived at the necessity of a definition, we face a great difficulty. To charac |