You do not feel as you do with Richardson that his fabric is
spun silk-worm-wise out of himself; on the contrary you know it to be
the fruit of a gentle and observant nature, and a stock of fundamental
human sympathy. His gallery of portraits, Joseph Andrews, Parson Adams,
Parson Trulliber, Jones, Blifil, Partridge, Sophia and her father and
all the rest are each of them minute studies of separate people; they
live and move according to their proper natures; they are conceived not
from without but from within. Both Richardson and Fielding were
conscious of a moral intention; but where Richardson is sentimental,
vulgar, and moral only so far as it is moral (as in _Pamela_), to
inculcate selling at the highest price or (as in _Grandison_) to avoid
temptations which never come in your way, Fielding's morality is fresh
and healthy, and (though not quite free from the sentimentality of
scoundrelism) at bottom sane and true. His knowledge of the world kept
him right. His acquaintance with life is wide, and his insight is keen
and deep. His taste is almost as catholic as Shakespeare's own, and the
life he knew, and which other men knew, he handles for the first time
with the freedom and imagination of an artist.
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