divine the whole secret of his predecessor. As soon as Fielding had his plot, many salient incidents which had been a part of his life, and many men and women whom he had known, naturally fell, by the selective process of his imagination, into his scheme without conscious effort. He had but to remember, and his novel wrote itself; or in the figurative language of Scott, the narrative flowed on leisurely like a broad stream to the sea.

It is not to be inferred that "Tom Jones" is autobiography in the sense that "David Copperfield" is autobiography. Under the guise of fiction Dickens related the incidents of his own youth and depicted his own character in a manner designed to evoke interest, sympathy, and tears. Tom Jones is not Harry Fielding. Certain incidents in his own life Fielding may have transferred here and there to Tom, but they are of minor importance. Nor do Fielding and his young gentleman in any large way resemble each other in personal appearance or in character. Tom was but of medium height; Fielding rose above six feet. Tom was of weak will; while Fielding possessed the driving power necessary to carry him through disappointments, illnesses, and bereavements to a triumphant issue.

Fielding, however, almost always began character-drawing with some definite model in his mind, but he veiled his model so completely that in the end there could rarely be seen the distinct portrait of anyone whom he had ever actually known. The frankness of his own temper and the impetuous passion of his own youth went into "Tom Jones"; and much more of his first wife went into Sophia Western -her constancy and devotion, her good sense and her beauty, even the style in which she wore her hair, curling in

the neck. And yet Sophia Western is not Charlotte Fielding. Again the idea for Thwackum, Fielding took from a schoolmaster at Salisbury, whose zeal for learning involved a free use of the birch on the boys, and whose zeal for the established church led him to declare in all religious disputes: "When I mention religion, I mean the Christian religion; and not only the Christian religion, but the Protestant religion; and not only the Protestant religion, but the Church of England". Likewise was derived from a deist living at Salisbury the moral formula of Square, who judged of all conduct by "the unalterable rule of right and the eternal fitness of things". Nevertheless, the theologian and the philosopher cannot be identified with Fielding's characters in the essentials which make them men with human infirmities quite outside of speculative thought.

Fielding came the nearest to a real portrait in Squire Allworthy, whose original was Ralph Allen, the author's friend living at Prior Park, on the hills which overlook Bath. Fielding put enough of him into the novel to make him recognizable, but stopped there, and proceeded to endow Allworthy with qualities which the Bath gentleman did not possess. On the other hand, no original at all can be discovered for Squire Western, who appears to be the composite portrait of several Jacobite squires with whom Fielding had associated in Somersetshire. And this man who went to bed drunk and got up before light to follow the hounds, so that he never saw his wife during the hunting-season, is Fielding's supreme creation. Nor have the stormy scenes between Squire Western and his sister Diana ever been equaled for humor in this language of ours. For these quarrels

Fielding doubtless took hints from what he had often seen down in the West; but he could never have witnessed a quarrel just like any one of the glorious encounters described in his novel.

Likewise the background of the novel, always reminiscent, is rarely definite enough for complete identification. The estates of Allworthy and Western are somewhere in Somersetshire. The journey of Tom up to London is a loop from the West through Warwickshire. Only such places are mentioned as are necessary to give the reader the general course. The result is that, despite the occasional real name of a hamlet or inn or town, Tom cannot be followed in the same way as one follows the members of the Pickwick Club in their excursions into the country.

Still, Fielding always laid his background with his eye upon real scenes, which he generalized in varying degrees. The roads traversed by Tom he himself had traversed in his own journeys, though not all of them at any one time. If he remembered the name of a village or an inn, he sometimes mentioned it; if it had slipped from his memory, he gave it a fictitious name or left it nameless. So with landladies, chambermaids, ostlers, and all minor characters, for whom Betty or Susan or Robin or no name at all was deemed sufficient. It has often been repeated that the seat of Squire Allworthy was drawn from Prior Park. The statement, however, is only partially true. Allen's mansion was Corinthian in style, whereas Allworthy's is Gothic; the view from Prior Park is cut off by hills to the west of Bath, whereas the view from Allworthy's terrace commands a river winding its way to the sea. The fact is that Fielding made up a composite picture of

Prior Park and Radway Grange (which was Gothic), and then placed the mansion on the slope of Tor Hill by Glastonbury, where as a boy he had often enjoyed the extensive prospect westward towards the Bristol Channel.

It is precisely the same when Fielding brings Tom up to London. Most of the scenes lie near Covent Garden and to the west as far as Hyde Park. Tom's lodgings, whence he set out with Mrs. Miller and Partridge to see Garrick's Hamlet, were in Old Bond Street. The site of Lady Bellaston's house, where Sophia lay concealed, was somewhere in that fashionable quarter. The masquerade was in the Haymarket, and the private rooms where Lady Bellaston unmasked for Jones that night were in a street near Hanover Square. Squire Western put up his horses at the Hercules Pillars at Hyde Park corner, and afterwards migrated to an inn in Piccadilly; while his sister took more genteel lodgings not far away. Squire Allworthy, following them with Master Blifil, went directly to rooms in the neighborhood always kept ready for him by Mrs. Miller. The gatehouse in which Tom was confined after his duel with Fitzpatrick must have been the one to which Justice Fielding was committing young gentlemen at the very time his novel appeared. The marriage of Tom and Sophia, which was private like both of Fielding's own marriages, took place in the chapel at Doctors' Commons. Though this part of the novel is not completely localized, it is everywhere pervaded with the atmosphere of the town.

Thus always, when we can penetrate to the secret of Fielding's art, we arrive at real scenes and real men and women, but we can discover little or nothing crudely taken over into fiction after the fashion of numberless novel

ists now flourishing. What Fielding saw, heard, and experienced was transformed by his imagination into something new, which nevertheless remains perfectly real. There is not, remarked the late Samuel Butler, a village of five hundred inhabitants in England, but has its Tom Jones. Fielding saw him, and made him stand forth and show himself with all his follies. This power to see what others do not see and to recombine the elements of observation into a living personality, is the prime characteristic of Fielding's art. All our fiction aiming at a faithful portrayal of life as it is, derives either directly or indirectly from Fielding, and there have been several very great novels since "Tom Jones" startled the world. Yet in the one quality which renders the realistic novel of lasting interest, English literature is strewn with failures. Consider, for example, our American novel. Every few months some novel is proclaimed the American novel. If we read it, what do we find? It is likely to be a very entertaining story (for our novelists write well) of some phase of the varied life in these many United States. It may be a mere strip of autobiography, in which persons still living are disguised under fictitious names. It is often the real thing; but we read it only once, and ten years hence it is dead. This has been the history of the general run of the American novels. There are but few exceptions. Mark Twain's sketches are kept alive by their humor, which is thoroughly American, though certainly of a period which is now passing. Mr. Howells approached the American novel two or three times-most nearly in "The Rise of Silas Lapham". Silas Lapham was an American type of a period which lingers with us yet. He is not, however, so conspicuous as he was twenty

five or thirty years ago, and it is not probable that he will survive beyond another generation. The one American novel the author called it a romance—which has stood the test of time is "The Scarlet Letter". In that masterpiece Hawthorne not only gave us Puritan New England as it was, but its motivation is sound and true to human nature of all times.

In England the Fielding tradition has been more potent. But even there few or no novelists have been able to match Fielding. Mr. Wells, Mr. Bennett, and Mr. Galsworthy, all intensely modern, can interest us in the things of the present year; they can, however, do no more. Mr. Hardy's art, admirable as it is in many respects, is bound up with scientific determinism, and must eventually accept the fate that awaits the modern doctrine. George Eliot's novels rest upon a broader and more human philosophy such as has always been recognized as essentially sound and true. Nevertheless, her novels have suffered, and will suffer more and more as time goes on, from their formal and over philosophical framework always visible through the thin narrative. Meredith's novels, like Ibsen's plays, have already become little more than historical documents in the progress of women towards freedom. Thackeray is the only British novelist for whom a seat may be claimed by the side of Fielding. When the Victorian sought to depict a new Tom Jones, it is generally agreed that Arthur Pendennis did not step into the shoes of Tom Jones. If "The Newcomes" is pervaded with the spirit of the age, it does not get beyond the age. The case is different with "Vanity Fair". There is a novel, which, though thoroughly of the age, is yet of the twentieth century also; it is of all centuries.

I do not wish to appear unappreciative of the fiction which has been produced since Fielding's time. I am not unappreciative of it. I have read many novels. I would not lose Jane Austen and Scott and Dickens and Trollope and numerous others, including those who are now writing in England and the United States. I am here only trying to show why "Tom Jones" still stands at the head of the list after nearly two centuries of effort. There are other considerations besides those which I have brought forward. There can be no great novel without style; and Fielding had style. Though there may be a great novel without humor, the achievement without humor is difficult; Fielding had humor and every other quality necessary to his art. But the prime secret lies where I have placed it-in the manner in which he trained his imagination to work, in his own phrase, from the individual to the species, always keeping his mind upon things as they are and yet generalizing them all to the proper extent. His characters never become abstractions like some of George Eliot's; nor do they quite become types like the characters in Molière's comedies, which he closely 'studied. So we say, when we have read "Tom Jones": "There is the age of George the Second fully displayed as it was in town and country. Every man and every woman in that novel is a human being and yet every one of them is representative of a class."

And we say more. Everywhere the coloring belongs to a past century. We may smile when we see Tom Jones tumbling upon his knees before Sophia or Allworthy; and we may be shocked by the behavior of Squire Western. But manners are only the exteriors of conduct. Fielding got at the heart of life. His motivation never rests upon

the transient; or if in any case it appears to rest upon the transient, he treats the particular character with humor or irony, unmasking the affectation in the end. When the novel is finished, the reader understands Thwackum and Square and Allworthy and Western and all the rest, though these men did not understand themselves and gave all sorts of wrong reasons for what they did.

To illustrate further, there are four lewd women in "Tom Jones". Each one can satisfy her conscience for the life she lives. A novelist of to-day, in depicting one of these women, would be tempted to explain her on the score of an insufficient wage, and to take the occasion to hammer the employer who pays her but ten dollars a week for labor worth two or three times that amount. In the popular literature of the eighteenth century, she was usually a girl who disobeyed her parents or would not go to church. Now, a scant wage or a refusal to listen to the vicar's sermons may have disastrous consequences; but it never occurred to Fielding to bring in either reason to account for his queans. Of his four lewd women Molly Seagrim is in rags, Jenny Jones possesses some learning, Mrs. Fitzpatrick has lived in the world, and Lady Bellaston belongs to the highest rank. All these women know what they are about. Fielding relates the circumstances of their lives, and lets it go at that, leaving the reader with the inference, undoubtedly the correct one, that in all four instances it was a matter of temperament. By this procedure he probably did not satisfy the formalists of his own day any more than he can satisfy the reformers of the twentieth century. But he kept his art free from sentimentalism.

And so it was always. "Tom Jones"

has become, as Fielding willed it, an epic of human nature. The passions of mankind do not change; it is only the modes of their manifestation that change. Fielding knew this and addressed his shrewd and humorous comment on life to all time.

Because it deals fearlessly with human nature as it is, "Tom Jones" will always be the crux of English fiction. No one cares much what men and women may do in French or Russian novels, for these novels describe peoples who belong to races which are somehow, we believe, far removed from our own in their predominant characteristics. But the case is quite different when a novelist of our own race, in undertaking to tell us what men and women really are, derives his knowledge from the men and women whom he meets, converses with, does business with, and lives with. Unlike Richardson, Fielding rarely discovered perfections; he discovered imperfections in every walk of life. Even Allworthy has his weak or blind side. Nor did Fielding find unadulterated villainy anywhere. Even Blifil has his good points. Almost always Field'ing's characters are "mixed characters". In "Tom Jones" are compounded most of the ingredients that go to the composition of a young man of easy temper. This and many other portraits in the famous novel are naturally resented by readers who do not know themselves, or who do not like to have their follies (and perhaps vices) exposed to view and ridiculed along with a sober presentation of their many admirable qualities. Fielding can never hope to gain the favor of these readers. They may praise his art, but they are certain to denounce the novel, in Richardson's phrase, as "inexpressibly low", and to add that Fielding himself lived

the kind of life which he usually described.

These charges Fielding often heard all through his career, and he many times protested with scathing irony against the unfair treatment. One incident he must have particularly enjoyed. It is still a good story worth retelling. The year following the publication of "Tom Jones", London and Westminster were visited by two rather severe earthquakes just a month apart. The earthquakes, which rocked houses and knocked down chimneys, were preceded and followed by terrific storms of wind and rain and hail, while at night the heavens illumined with the Aurora Borealis, and meteors exploded with terrific detonations. In these strange occurrences many people saw the direct hand of the Almighty, who would take vengeance upon the sinful cities for their infidelity and debauchery. One of the newspapers hostile to Fielding, declared that what, more than all else, had reduced London to a sink of abominations, was the reading of a lewd book called "Tom Jones", which had been greedily devoured by everybody; and the editor appealed to Parliament for an act prohibiting its further sale. Then a mad astrologer came out with the prediction of a third and worse earthquake on a certain day. The Thames was to wash away London bridge; Westminster Abbey was to be leveled with the ground; and numberless houses and people were to be swallowed up in gigantic openings of the earth. As the day for the earthquake was approaching and the inhabitants were leaving their homes and wandering in the fields, Fielding, as the principal justice of the peace for Middlesex, summoned the astrologer into court and committed him to Newgate, with strict orders that he be