But must these sides of life be absolutely excluded?  By no means.  Our decency need not weaken into prudery.  It all lies in the spirit in which it is done.  No one who wished to lecture on these various spirits could preach on a better text than these three great rivals, Richardson, Fielding, and Smollett.  It is possible to draw vice with some freedom for the purpose of condemning it.  Such a writer is a moralist, and there is no better example than Richardson.  Again, it is possible to draw vice with neither sympathy nor disapprobation, but simply as a fact which is there.  Such a writer is a realist, and such was Fielding.  Once more, it is possible to draw vice in order to extract amusement from it.  Such a man is a coarse humorist, and such was Smollett.  Lastly, it is possible to draw vice in order to show sympathy with it.  Such a man is a wicked man, and there were many among the writers of the Restoration.  But of all reasons that exist for treating this side of life, Richardson’s were the best, and nowhere do we find it more deftly done.

Apart from his writings, there must have been something very noble about Fielding as a man.  He was a better hero than any that he drew.  Alone he accepted the task of cleansing London, at that time the most dangerous and lawless of European capitals.  Hogarth’s pictures give some notion of it in the pre-Fielding days, the low roughs, the high-born bullies, the drunkenness, the villainies, the thieves’ kitchens with their riverside trapdoors, down which the body is thrust.  This was the Augean stable which had to be cleaned, and poor Hercules was weak and frail and physically more fitted for a sick-room than for such a task.  It cost him his life, for he died at 47, worn out with his own exertions.  It might well have cost him his life in more dramatic fashion, for he had become a marked man to the criminal classes, and he headed his own search-parties when, on the information of some bribed rascal, a new den of villainy was exposed.  But he carried his point.  In little more than a year the thing was done, and London turned from the most rowdy to what it has ever since remained, the most law-abiding of European capitals.  Has any man ever left a finer monument behind him?

If you want the real human Fielding you will find him not in the novels, where his real kindliness is too often veiled by a mock cynicism, but in his “Diary of his Voyage to Lisbon.”  He knew that his health was irretrievably ruined and that his years were numbered.  Those are the days when one sees a man as he is, when he has no longer a motive for affectation or pretence in the immediate presence of the most tremendous of all realities.  Yet, sitting in the shadow of death, Fielding displayed a quiet, gentle courage and constancy of mind, which show how splendid a nature had been shrouded by his earlier frailties.