In short, Fielding here used his reluctant and indignant forerunner as a spring-board, whence to attain heights which that forerunner could never have reached:  he “stood upon his shoulders” in the most cavalier but also the most successful fashion.  In the novel as Richardson knew it and was thinking of it, when he began Pamela, you were, as a rule, in an artificial world altogether—­a world artificial with an artificiality only faintly and occasionally touched with any reality at all.  In Pamela itself there is perhaps nothing, and certainly not much, that is wholly unreal:  but the reality is treated and rendered in an artificial way.  In Joseph Andrews, though its professed genesis and procedure are artificial too, you break away at once from serious artifice.  These are all real people who do real things in a real way now, as they did nearly two hundred years ago:  however much dress, and speech, and manners may have changed.  And we are told of their doings in a real way, too.  Exactly how the teller knew it we do not know:  but we do not think of this at all.  And on the other hand there is no perpetual reminder of art, like the letter-ending and beginning, to disturb or alloy the once and gladly accepted “suspension of disbelief.”

A slight digression may not be improper here.  Even in their own days, when the gros mot was much less shocking than it is now, there was a general notion—­which has more or less persisted, in spite of all changes of fashion in this respect, and exists even now when licence of subject as distinguished from phrase has to a great extent returned—­that Fielding is more “coarse,” more “improper,” and so forth than Richardson.  As a matter of fact, neither admits positively indecent language—­that had gone out, except in the outskirts and fringes of English literature, generations earlier.  But I am much mistaken if there are not in Richardson more than a few scenes and situations the “impropriety” of which positively exceeds anything in Fielding.  Naturally one does not give indications:  but readers may be pretty confident about the fact.  The comparative “bloodlessness,” however—­the absence of life and colour in the earlier and older writer—­acts as a sort of veil to them.

Yet (to return to larger and purer air), however much one may admire Joseph Andrews, the kind of parasitic representation which it allows itself, and the absence of any attempt to give an original story tells against it.  And it may, in any case, be regarded as showing that the novelist, even yet, was hugging the shore or allowing himself to be taken in tow—­that he did not dare to launch out into the deep and trust to his own sails and the wind of nature to propel him—­to his own wits and soul to guide.  Even Fielding’s next venture—­the wonderful and almost unique venture of Jonathan Wild—­leaves some objection of this sort possible, though, for myself, I should never dream of admitting it.  Jonathan