Fielding asks his Muse to give him “humour and good humour.”  What novelist was ever so rich in both?  Who ever laughed at mankind with so much affection for mankind in his heart?  This love shines in every book of his.  The poor have all his good-will, and in him an untired advocate and friend.  What a life the poor led in the England of 1742!  There never before was such tyranny without a servile insurrection.  I remember a dreadful passage in “Joseph Andrews,” where Lady Booby is trying to have Fanny, Joseph’s sweetheart, locked up in prison:—­

“It would do a Man good,” says her accomplice, Scout, “to see his Worship, our Justice, commit a Fellow to Bridewell; he takes so much pleasure in it.  And when once we ha’ ’um there, we seldom hear any more o’ ’um.  He’s either starved or eat up by Vermin in a Month’s Time.”

This England, with its dominant Squires, who behaved much like robber barons on the Rhine, was the merry England Fielding tried to turn from some of its ways.  I seriously do believe that, with all its faults, it was a better place, with a better breed of men, than our England of to-day.  But Fielding satirized intolerable injustice.

He would be a Reformer, a didactic writer.  If we are to have nothing but “Art for Art’s sake,” that burly body of Harry Fielding’s must even go to the wall.  The first Beau Didapper of a critic that passes can shove him aside.  He preaches like Thackeray; he writes “with a purpose” like Dickens—­obsolete old authors.  His cause is judged, and into Bridewell he goes, if l’Art pour l’Art is all the literary law and the prophets.

But Fielding cannot be kept in prison long.  His noble English, his sonorous voice must be heard.  There is somewhat inexpressibly heartening, to me, in the style of Fielding.  One seems to be carried along, like a swimmer in a strong, clear stream, trusting one’s self to every whirl and eddy, with a feeling of safety, of comfort, of delightful ease in the motion of the elastic water.  He is a scholar, nay more, as Adams had his innocent vanity, Fielding has his innocent pedantry.  He likes to quote Greek (fancy quoting Greek in a novel of to-day!) and to make the rogues of printers set it up correctly.  He likes to air his ideas on Homer, to bring in a piece of Aristotle—­not hackneyed—­to show you that if he is writing about “characters and situations so wretchedly low and dirty,” he is yet a student and a critic.

Mr. Samuel Richardson, a man of little reading, according to Johnson, was, I doubt, sadly put to it to understand Booth’s conversations with the author who remarked that “Perhaps Mr. Pope followed the French Translations.  I observe, indeed, he talks much in the Notes of Madame Dacier and Monsieur Eustathius.”  What knew Samuel of Eustathius?  I not only can forgive Fielding his pedantry; I like it!  I like a man of letters to be a scholar, and his little pardonable display and ostentation of his Greek only brings him nearer to us, who have none of his genius, and do not approach him but in his faults.  They make him more human; one loves him for them as he loves Squire Western, with all his failings.  Delightful, immortal Squire!