was (so much the worse for human nature) a real person:  and the outlines of his story—­if not the actual details—­are given partly by his actual life, partly by Gay’s Beggar’s Opera and its sequel.  Moreover, the whole marvellous little book has a purpose—­the purpose of satire on false ideas of greatness, historical and political.  The invention and the art of the writer are not even yet allowed frank and free course.

But though criticism will allow this, it will, if it be competent and courageous, allow no deduction to be made from the other greatness of this little masterpiece.  It has never been popular; it is never likely to be popular; and one may almost say that it is sincerely to be hoped that it never will be popular.  For if it were, either all the world would be scoundrels, which would be a pity:  or all the world would be philosophers and persons of taste, in which case it would be impossible, as the famous story has it, to “look down on one’s fellow-creatures from a proper elevation.”  It really is a novel and a remarkable one—­superior even to Vanity Fair, according to Thackeray’s own definition, as a delineation of “a set of people living without God in the world.”  But it is even more (and here its only parallel is A Tale of a Tub, which is more desultory and much more of a fatrasie or salmagundy of odds and ends) a masterpiece and quintessential example of irony.  Irony had come in with the plain prose style, without which it is almost impossible:  and not merely Swift but others had done great things with it.  It is, however, only here that it reaches the quintessence just spoken of with a coherent and substantive purpose to serve as vehicle for it.  It is possibly too strong for most people’s taste:  and one may admit that, for anything like frequent enjoyment, it wants a certain admixture of the fantastic in its various senses—­after the method of Voltaire in one way, of Beckford in another, of Peacock in a third, of Disraeli in a fourth—­to make it acceptable to more than a very few.  But it shows, even from our present limited point of view, of what immense and exalted application the novel-method was capable:  and it shows also the astonishing powers of its author.  “Genial,” in the usual sense, it certainly cannot be called; in the proper sense as equalling “what is the production of genius” there are few books which deserve the term better.  But it is an exercise in a by-way of the novel road-system, though an early proof of the fact that such by-ways are endlessly open.

But the time was coming, though it did not (and could hardly) come very quickly, when Fielding was to discard all kinds of adventitious aids and suggestions—­all crutches, spring-boards, go-carts, tugs, patterns, tracings—­and go his own way—­and the Way of the Novel—­with no guidance but something of the example of Cervantes directly and Shakespeare indirectly among the moderns, and of the poetic fiction-writers of old.  It is perfectly