both in the ancients and in Cervantes, while it is to be found as long after Fielding as in the early novel-work of Dickens.  The digression-openings are at least as satisfactory to some as they are unsatisfactory to others; it is even doubtful whether they annoy anybody half so much as they have delighted some excellent judges.  The other point is well worn:  but the wearing has not taken off its awkwardness and unsavouriness.  Difference of habit and manners at the time will account for much:  but the wiser apologists will simply say that Fielding’s attitude to certain deviations from the strict moral law was undoubtedly very indulgent, provided that such deviations were unaccompanied by the graver and more detestable vices of cruelty, treachery, and fraud—­that to vice which was accompanied by these blacker crimes he was utterly merciless; and that if he is thus rather exposed to the charge of “compounding by damning”—­in the famous phrase—­the things that he damned admit of no excuse and those that he compounded for have been leniently dealt with by all but the sternest moralists.

Such things are, however (in the admirable French sense), miseres—­wretched petty cavils and shallows of criticism.  The only sensible thing to do is to launch out with Fielding into that deep and open sea of human character and fate which he dared so gloriously.  During the curious phase of literary opinion which the last twenty years or so have seen, it has apparently been discovered by some people that his scheme of human thought and feeling is too simple—­“toylike” I think they call it—­in comparison with that, say, of Count Tolstoi or of Mr. Meredith, that modern practice has reached a finer technique than his or even than that of his greatest follower, Thackeray.  Far be it from the present writer to say, or to insinuate, anything disrespectful of the great moderns who have lately left us.  Yet it may be said without the slightest disrespect to them that the unfavourable comparison is mainly a revival of Johnson’s mistake as to Fielding and Richardson.  It is, however, something more—­for it comes also from a failure to estimate aright the parabasis-openings which have been more than once referred to.  These passages do not perhaps exhibit the by-work and the process in the conspicuous skeleton-clock fashion which their critics admire and desire, but they contain an amount of acute and profound exploration of human nature which it would be difficult to match and impossible to surpass elsewhere:  while the results of Fielding’s working, of his “toylike” scheme, are remarkable toys indeed—­toys which, if we regard them as such, must surely strike us as rather uncanny.  One is sometimes constrained to think that it is perhaps not much more difficult to make than to recognise a thoroughly live character.  It certainly must be very difficult to do the latter if there is any considerable number of persons who are unable to do it in the case of almost every one