large enough nor sufficiently eager for an attractive new form of literature, to justify a man of many trades like Fielding in devoting his days steadily to the writing of fiction.  There is to the last an effect of the gifted amateur about him; Taine tells the anecdote of his refusal to trouble himself to change a scene in one of his plays, which Garrick begged him to do:  “Let them find it out,” he said, referring to the audience.  And when the scene was hissed, he said to the disconsolate player:  “I did not:  give them credit for it:  they have found it out, have they?” In other words, he was knowing to his own poor art, content if only it escaped the public eye.  This is some removes from the agonizing over a phrase of a Flaubert.

Like the preceding story, “Tom Jones” has its center of plot in a life history of the foundling who grows into a young manhood that is full of high spirits and escapades:  likable always, even if, judged by the straight-laced standards of Richardson, one may not approve.  Jones loves Sophia Western, daughter of a typical three-bottle, hunting squire:  of course he prefers the little cad Blifil, with his money and position, where poor Tom has neither:  equally of course Sophia (whom the reader heartily likes, in spite of her name) prefers the handsome Jones with his blooming complexion and many amatory adventures.  And, since we are in the simple-minded days of fiction when it was the business of the sensible novelist to make us happy at the close, the low-born lover, assisted by Squire Allworthy, who is a deus ex machina a trifle too good for human nature’s daily food, gets his girl (in imitation of Joseph Andrews) and is shown to be close kin to Allworthy—­tra-la-la, tra-la-lee, it is all charmingly simple and easy!  The beginners of the English novel had only a few little tricks in their box in the way of incident and are for the most part innocent of plot in the Wilkie Collins sense of the word.  The opinion of Coleridge that the “Oedipus Tyrannus,” “The Alchemist” and “Tom Jones” are “the three most perfect plots ever planned” is a curious comment upon his conception of fiction, since few stories have been more plotless than Fielding’s best book.  The fact is, biographical fiction like this is to be judged by itself, it has its own laws of technique.

The glory of “Tom Jones” is in its episodes, its crowded canvas, the unfailing verve and variety of its action:  in the fine open-air atmosphere of the scenes, the sense of the stir of life they convey:  most of all, in an indescribable manliness or humanness which bespeaks the true comic force—­something of that same comic view that one detects in Shakspere and Moliere and Cervantes.  It means an open-eyed acceptance of life, a realization of its seriousness yet with the will to take it with a smile:  a large tolerancy which forbids the view conventional or parochial or aristocratic—­in brief, the view limited.  There is this in the book, along