What Richardson did for the subtlest part of a novelist’s business, his dealings with psychology, Fielding did for the most necessary part of it, the telling of the story.  Before him hardly any story had been told well; even if it had been plain and clear as in Bunyan and Defoe it had lacked the emphasis, the light and shade of skilful grouping.  On the “picaresque” (so the autobiographical form was called abroad) convention of a journey he grafted a structure based in its outline on the form of the ancient epic.  It proved extraordinarily suitable for his purpose.  Not only did it make it easy for him to lighten his narrative with excursions in a heightened style, burlesquing his origins, but it gave him at once the right attitude to his material.  He told his story as one who knew everything; could tell conversations and incidents as he conceived them happening, with no violation of credibility, nor any strain on his reader’s imagination, and without any impropriety could interpose in his own person, pointing things to the reader which might have escaped his attention, pointing at parallels he might have missed, laying bare the irony or humour beneath a situation.  He allowed himself digressions and episodes, told separate tales in the middle of the action, introduced, as in Partridge’s visit to the theatre, the added piquancy of topical allusion; in fact he did anything he chose.  And he laid down that free form of the novel which is characteristically English, and from which, in its essence, no one till the modern realists has made a serious departure.

In the matter of his novels, he excels by reason of a Shakespearean sense of character and by the richness and rightness of his faculty of humour.  He had a quick eye for contemporary types, and an amazing power of building out of them men and women whose individuality is full and rounded.  You do not feel as you do with Richardson that his fabric is spun silk-worm-wise out of himself; on the contrary you know it to be the fruit of a gentle and observant nature, and a stock of fundamental human sympathy.  His gallery of portraits, Joseph Andrews, Parson Adams, Parson Trulliber, Jones, Blifil, Partridge, Sophia and her father and all the rest are each of them minute studies of separate people; they live and move according to their proper natures; they are conceived not from without but from within.  Both Richardson and Fielding were conscious of a moral intention; but where Richardson is sentimental, vulgar, and moral only so far as it is moral (as in Pamela), to inculcate selling at the highest price or (as in Grandison) to avoid temptations which never come in your way, Fielding’s morality is fresh and healthy, and (though not quite free from the sentimentality of scoundrelism) at bottom sane and true.  His knowledge of the world kept him right.  His acquaintance with life is wide, and his insight is keen and deep.  His taste is almost as catholic as Shakespeare’s own, and the life he knew, and which other men knew, he handles for the first time with the freedom and imagination of an artist.