there is yet one in the world who will never forsake thee; though thou hadst ten thousand crimes to answer for, he will forget them all!’”

Set beside this father the fathers of Clarissa and Sophia Western, and you have the difference between the romance and realism that express opposite moods; the mood that shows the average and the mood that shows the best.  For portraiture, then, rather than plot, for felicity of manner and sweetness of interpretation we praise such a work;—­qualities no less precious though not so distinctively appertaining to the Novel.

It may be added, for a minor point, that the Novel type as already developed had assumed a conventional length which would preclude “The Vicar of Wakefield” from its category, making it a sketch or novelette.  The fiction-makers rapidly came to realize that for their particular purpose—­to portray a complicated piece of contemporary life—­more leisurely movement and hence greater space are necessary to the best result.  To-day any fiction under fifty thousand words would hardly be called a novel in the proper sense,—­except in publishers’ advertisements.  Goldsmith’s story does not exceed such limits.

Therefore, although we may like it all the more because it is a romantic sketch rather than a novel proper, we must grant that its share in the eighteenth century shaping of the form is but ancillary.  The fact that the book upon its appearance awakened no such interest as waited upon the fiction of Richardson or Fielding a few years before, may be taken to mean that the taste was still towards the more photographic portrayals of average contemporary humanity.  Several editions, to be sure, were issued the year of its publication, but without much financial success, and contemporary criticism found little remarkable in this permanent contribution to English literature.  Later, it was beloved both of the elect and the general.  Goethe’s testimony to the strong and wholesome effect of the book upon him in his formative period, is remembered.  Dear old Dr. Johnson too believed in the story, for, summoned to Goldsmith’s lodging by his friend’s piteous appeal for help, he sends a guinea in advance and on arrival there, finds his colleague in high choler because, forsooth, his landlady has arrested him for his rent:  whereupon Goldsmith (who had already expended part of the guinea in a bottle of Madeira) displays a manuscript,—­“a novel ready for the press,” as we read in Boswell; and Johnson—­“I looked into it and saw its merit,” says he—­goes out and sells it for sixty pounds, whereupon Goldsmith paid off his obligation, and with his mercurial Irish nature had a happy evening, no doubt, with his chosen cronies!  It is a sordid, humorous-tragic Grub Street beginning for one of the little immortals of letters—­so many of which, alack! have a similar birth.