pret the soul of a place, the peculiar, the essential charm which resides in it alone and makes it lovely or dear, which makes it, in most cases, home. There is some pride involved, perhaps, as when William Allen White is so delightfully boastful of his Kansas town, or Meredith Nicholson of his Indiana. If I may presume to be personal, there are four places with which I am familiar in America that have always peculiarly moved me to try to put their appeal into words, to try to record with what skill I may the charm they exert over my spirit; and in each one of them I have always felt that indescribable, almost mystic, yet unmistakable sensation of homelikeness, of familiarity, of comfort and content, though but one of them is actually my home.

These four places are the exquisite upland "parks" which lie like jeweled gardens amid the naked tremendousness of the Continental Divide in northwestern Montana; the rich, wooded "coves" and rocky headlands of the Tennessee Cumberlands where the mountaineers live in little gray cabins under geyser jets of pink peach trees; the Landaff valley leading south from Franconia to the great, benignant blue dome of Moosilauke; and, finally, the sweet Berkshire country where I dwell, where the Housatonic wanders through willow-bordered meadows fair as any English stream, and the mountains lay their long, wavelike horizontals against the dreaming sky. If your love for such places is strong enough, your knowledge of their endless variety of moods and their infinite byways deep enough, no other impulse will so move you to write as the impulse to be their interpreter. You write with a fine freedom from any thought of a public, too, because the only public

you expect is a public of fellow-lovers, and they, you know, will ask only for truth and devotion. So you watch the hills when the greens of April creep up their sides, or the tapestries of autumn are woven in a frosty night, or the shrapnel of the winter storms comes puffing over their summits, you wander afield for the orchis spectabilis, you listen for the hermit thrush at twilight in some deep ravine, and you try to tell why it is that your small corner of the world is so fair to see, so intimate, so dear, so like a human spirit ever brooding by your side.

I live now under a mountain, my pastures running up its first steep shoulder into the deep woods where the hermits sing and the deer browse. The shape of this mountain is benignant and splendid a great dome rising serene from a long, wooded rampart which plunges down sharply for a thousand feet to the green fields and forests and lakes and winding river on the plain. In sunlight and starlight it broods above my home, ever the same, yet never the same. It has days of mistiness, when it seems remote and aloof; it has days when it wraps its summit in the privacy of cloud; it has days of crystal clarity when it invites you to walk to its peak and you are almost deceived into thinking you could do it between four o'clock and supper; it has blue days, gray days, green days; it lies serene under salmon sunsets and piles up with menacing power against a gunmetal thunder-head. And daily unto it I lift up mine eyes, and on its great, wild shoulders I find many things to fascinate, from the sweet arbutus and the fringed polygala to herds of deer and wildcat tracks. It has its legends, too, and its human history dating back almost two hundred years. I

know that some day I shall write an entire book about it-about it, and me, and the life we mortals all live in relation to the spot we call home. Those who also have lived in sight of my benignant old mountain will read my book, and understand. I shall hope, of course, that others will, too. But that is in the lap of the gods. I shall not write it for them, but only for my neighbors and myself. Per

haps, indeed, it were better to say I shall write it only for my mountain, who compels me. There must always be this compulsion about the literature of place, this loving home-cry in it, or it is worth no more than the stuff the professional travelers write. It may be, of course, that no one will read my book, not even the publishers who refuse it! But I shall write it, just the same.

Anyone asked to name two or three of the greatest novels ever written, would have to consider and eventually include "Tom Jones" among them. If he did not particularly like the novel, he would have to admit that it is, because of the question it raises, the "Hamlet" of English fiction. No other English novel has been so long and so persistently read; it has been reprinted several hundred times and been translated into nearly every language of Europe-into Russian, Bohemian and Polish, as well as into French, Dutch and German; it has been dramatized, and turned into musical comedy for the English, the French and the German stage. No other novel has been so highly extolled for its art, and no other has been so completely damned for its morality. It has had, too, the honor of being expurgated by a collateral descendant of its author, and it has been incinerated in the interest of the public welfare. It is not permitted, I am told, to rest in peace on the shelf of any Carnegie library in the land of Mr. Carnegie's birth.

By virtue of this one book, Scott

called Fielding "the father of the English novel"; he likened its easy narrative to the flow of a beautiful river, and despaired of ever attaining in his own work its perfect art. To Gibbon "Tom Jones" was "the first of ancient and modern romances"-nothing less than "the history of human nature itself". Coleridge could discover in no literature a plot more logically and consistently developed, and after profound meditation he defended the hero on most of the debatable questions concerning that young man's conduct. Thackeray thought it marvelous that any brain could build up through six volumes so superb a structure as "Tom Jones"; and though he dealt rather severely with Tom, he wished he might himself depict a young man of his own time so completely; he made the attempt, and his genius failed him. Mrs. Craigie, the novelist, would have given, could she have had her will, a copy of "Tom Jones" to every girl on her eighteenth birthday in order that she might know by what she would be confronted during the next few years; and the late W. E. Henley exaggerated and

dwelt upon Tom's follies (perhaps they were vices), and approved of them all as an easy means of shocking British Philistinism.

On the other hand, Samuel Richardson, the author of "Clarissa Harlowe", resented Fielding's invasion of his own domain, and declared "Tom Jones" to be without invention-to be, as he had heard, "a rambling collection of waking dreams"-and so inexpressibly low that he would not contaminate his mind by reading it. Accordingly he asked the young daughters of his friend Aaron Hill-they bore the names of Astraea and Minerva-to read it for him and give him their candid im-pressions. When they told him that they had received pleasure and instruction from the perusal he became furious, and made the poor girls weep for having innocently enjoyed a book which the great man told them had "an evil tendency". Likewise, Dr. Johnson frightened Hannah More, a mature spinster of thirty-five, by his fierce denunciation of "a vicious book" which she casually praised in his presence, and which he himself had never read. And his biographer, Sir John Hawkins, denounced the virtues with which Fielding endowed his hero as only the virtues of a horse or a dog. Even so recently as the twentieth century we have been told that "the world has hardly derived either profit or benefit" from "Tom Jones" or any other of Fielding's works, none of which are longer much read although they may be talked about.

The denunciations are more amusing than significant, though it would be interesting to trace the motives, moral and personal, behind them. The laudations, extravagant as they often are in phrasing, are more discriminating than they appear at first sight. Probably no one would now write, if he

could, a novel on the plan of "Tom Jones". He would never think of inserting within the body of his novel a story like the one told by the Old Man of the Hill. The incidents in that tale, if he wished to incorporate them, he would bring in quite differently, so as to avoid a halt in the main narrative. He would have no introductory chapters on his art, the critics, and his fame; any words he might have for critics and readers he would reserve for a magazine, and he would be uncertain about his fame. He would put less stress upon a plot involving a sober or merry secret to be explained in the last chapters. But he would have to acknowledge that Fielding did all these things supremely well. would see that the episode of the Old Man of the Hill prepares Tom for his entrance into the world of London; that those introductory chapters, fine in themselves, have a direct bearing on the moral and literary principles underlying a new species of fiction; and that the plot, based even in its mystery on very common incidents in life, is developed and brought to a close with perfect ease. Whatever in "Tom Jones" a novelist to-day might avoid for himself, he must wish nothing removed from the first master in his art.

He

George

It is an old question whether a novelist should draw upon his own life for his narrative, or whether he should project himself into a different milieu. There is no invariable rule. Eliot succeeded in both endeavors. "Mr. Gilfils's Love Story", with its Italian heroine, is as true to the primal emotions as is "Amos Barton", which is reminiscent of what the author saw and heard in her own girlhood. fact, however, remains that in her very greatest successes George Eliot shunned legend, history, and tradition, and kept close to English life as she

The

knew it. "Middlemarch" (not "Romola") is her masterpiece. Fielding never swerved from the one principle which became his guide when he first entered upon his literary career. In his innumerable plays and essays, as well as in his four novels, he never let his imagination play with a world he did not know. Many times he said in varying phrase that he took his incidents as well as his characters from observations and experience. However much he might alter the details, he wrote with men and things as they came to him in memory, or as he saw them directly before his eyes. This, as I have said, is not the only way to compose a great novel, but it was Fielding's way. This is his distinction and his glory.

A direct descendant of an Earl of Denbigh, Fielding grew up in the households of a Somerset judge and of an army officer who turned country squire. He was educated at Eton and at Leyden; and soon after reaching his majority he went up to London to win money and fame by writing for the stage. Success was immediate. For seven years he clung to the drama, and then an end was put to this career by the Licensing Act of 1737, which was aimed at the political satire with which he was then entertaining the town. Thereupon, at the age of thirty, he began the study of the law, and was duly admitted to the bar. wrote his first novels and conducted in the course of a few years three newspapers in the interest of those Whigs who disapproved of the policies of Sir Robert Walpole.

He

The career of this young man, convivial though not dissipated in temper and habit, brought him into touch with all classes. First of all, he knew his own Somersetshire, where he associated with country squires and their

families and with the motley companies which gather at village inns and alehouses by the roadside. The London where Fielding afterward lived and did his work was really Westminster, stretching from Covent Garden to the West, through Leicester Square and the Haymarket to the Mall and St. James's Park. Here was the center of all the fashionable amusements, follies and vices. Here were the theatres, the masquerades, the coffee houses and the brothels. It was a city without shame. Wonderfully observant, the boy fresh from the country worked into comedy and farce what he was seeing every day. He took life as he found it, and depicted it with perfect frankness and candor, but always with humor. Later he lived with the lawyers, of whom hundreds subscribed for his books. His aid was sought by politicians and statesmen, whose measures he explained to the public. His birth gave him access to men of the very highest rank, and he liked to stop and talk with the tradespeople along the Strand. In short, no phase of the life of his time was unknown to Fielding. A man with these antecedents could not have written, had he tried, a romance, for his imagination was filled with real incidents and with the men and women of actual experience.

Friends who had watched Fielding's career were so impressed by the extraordinary talents displayed in "Joseph Andrews" that they often urged him to write a novel which should be, as nearly as he could make it, a summary of the age. This was likewise his own personal ambition; but his profession and ill health-he suffered from the gout-and the necessity of doing literary hack work in order to support his family, interfered with and delayed his plans for several years.

At length came a period of comparative leisure, though he was still editing a newspaper and writing political pamphlets. "Tom Jones" was begun in the summer of 1746 and completed by the end of 1748. On this book the author expended, in his own words, "some thousands of hours", and put into it all the wit and humor of which he was master. From his allusions to contemporary events one may follow him rather closely in the composition, month by month, until advance copies of the first volumes were in the hands of his friends.

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Most of the novel was written while Fielding dwelt among lawyers in Old Boswell Court, near the Strand. Certain parts of it may have been composed in a house on the Avon, below Bath, where Fielding seems to have gone for one or more summers, in order to be near Ralph Allen of Prior Park, who is immortalized in the novel as Squire Allworthy. It was pleted in a little house at Twickenham, not far from the villa where Pope had lived on the Thames. Old Boswell Court is no more. The house at Twickenham has been displaced by another; but "Fielding's Lodge" by the Avon is still standing. In its "little parlour" by an ancient fireplace Fielding probably wrote that eloquent chapter, at the opening of the thirteenth book of his novel, in which he invokes experience and learning and genius to come to his aid. And when the manuscript was finished, he took it down to Radway Grange, the seat of Sanderson Miller, in Warwickshire, to read it to the young squire and other intimate friends. It was a notable company. The host, an Oxford man, skilled in Gothic architecture, was famous for his generous hospitality. In addition to Fielding he had as guests on this memorable occasion, William Pitt,

afterwards the Earl of Chatham, and Lord Lyttelton, and perhaps the Earl of Denbigh. "The great novelist", it is said, read his manuscript day after day for a fortnight to "the distinguished audience" seated about him in the dining-room, and invited their comment. Pitt, we know, approved and everywhere recommended the forthcoming novel to his friends. Lyttelton accepted the dedication and said that Fielding surpassed in wit and humor all other men of the ageeven Pope and Swift. No book, they saw, much like "Tom Jones" had ever been written. At one stroke Fielding had created the novel of contemporary

manners.

His procedure was clearly quite different from that which many later novelists have professed to follow. Being a dramatist, Fielding must have a clever plot, which should be in itself a source of delight for the reader. But he did not lay out his novel by compass and rule. Apparently he drew no outline of his plot in advance, nor is it probable that he made any notes on his scenes and characters before sitting down to actual composition. He knew, of course, how his novel was to begin and how it was to end; but he carried everything in his head. Through all the intermediate stages he let his story develop as it might under his hand. This is what Thackeray, who divined so much of the secret, meant when he expressed wonder that Fielding could have kept under control all the incidents of his long novel without ever falling into mistakes or inconsistencies. (If Thackeray overlooked a few slips in the narrative, they are as nothing when compared with the main result.) But the great Victorian, whose art, despite certain resemblances, was in detail not much like Fielding's, did not