But this matters little:  and we have no room for it.  Suffice it as agreed and out of controversy that Joseph Andrews started as a parody of Pamela and that, whether in addition or in substitution, it turned to something very different.  It is not quite so uncontroversial, but will be asserted here as capable of all but demonstration, that the “something different” is also something much greater.  There is still not very much plot—­the parody did not necessitate and indeed rather discouraged that, and what there is is arrived at chiefly by the old and seldom very satisfactory system of anagnorisis—­the long-lost-child business.  But, under the three other heads, Joseph distances his sister hopelessly and can afford her much more than weight for sex.  It has been said that there are doubtfully in Richardson anywhere, and certainly not in Pamela, those startling creations of personality which are almost more real to us than the persons we know in the flesh.  It is not that Pamela and her meyney are unreal; for they are not:  but that they are not personal.  The Reverend Abraham Adams is a good deal more real than half the parsons who preached last Sunday, and a good deal more personal:  and the quality is not confined to him, though he has most of it.  So, too, with the description.  The time was not yet for any minute or elaborate picture-setting.  But here again also that extra dose of life and action—­almost of bustle—­which Fielding knows how to instil is present.  In Pamela the settings are frequent, but they are “still life” and rather shadowy:  we do not see the Bedfordshire and Lincolnshire mansions, the summer houses where (as she observes with demure relish when the danger is over) Mr. B. was “very naughty;” even the pond where, if she had been another sort of girl, the drame might have become real tragedy.  Fielding does not take very much more trouble and yet somehow we do see it all, with a little help from our own imaginations perhaps, but on his suggestion and start.  Especially the outdoor life and scenes—­the inn-yards and the high roads and the downs by night or day; the pig-sty where poor Adams is the victim of live pigs and the public-house kitchen where he succumbs to a by-product of dead ones—­these are all real for us.

But most of all is the regular progress of vivification visible in the dialogue.  This, as we have seen, had been the very weakest point of the weakness of almost all (we might say of all) English novels up to the close of the first quarter of the eighteenth century.  Richardson had done a great deal for it:  but it was impossible that, on his method, it should not, for the most part, be languid, or at any rate long-winded.  Here again Fielding spirits the thing up—­oxygenates and ozonises the atmosphere:  while, in even fuller measure than his predecessor and victim, he recognises the efficacy of dialogue as the revealer of character.  He has, assisted no doubt by Shakespeare and his own dramatic practice, discovered that you do not want volumes of it to do the business—­that single moments and single sentences will do that business at times, if they are used in the proper way.