Page:The Harvard Classics Vol. 51; Lectures.djvu/215

Rh young master, and Fielding planned the story of Pamela's brother Joseph, placed in a corresponding position toward his mistress, to ridicule the absurdities of his predecessor's method. But he soon became interested in his hero for his own sake, and in this novel, and still more in his masterpiece, "Tom Jones," he treated human nature with a robust frankness that earned for him the famous compliment of his disciple, Thackeray, that he was the last English novelist who dared to draw a man. Some of Fielding and perhaps more of Defoe is to be found in the sordid tales of Tobias Smollett; and in Laurence Sterne we have the sentimental tendencies of Richardson carried to the last extreme, but mingled in extraordinary fashion with a conscious humor that doubles back on the sentiment, the whole related in a style of remarkable individuality and brilliant wit. In the same period, Oliver Goldsmith produced his one novel, "The Vicar of Wakefield," a delicately drawn picture of a phase of contemporary society enriched with a group of characters, broadly typical, but delineated with an abundance of tender sympathy and gentle humor.

Meantime, there had begun in England, as elsewhere, that complex reaction against the intellectualism of the eighteenth century known as the Romantic Movement. Among its more obvious phases was the revival of interest in remote places and periods, and especially in the Middle Ages. The extent to which this interest was ill-informed and merely sentimental is nowhere better illustrated than in the rise of the so-called "Gothic Romance." This variety of fiction is usually regarded as beginning with "The Castle of Otranto" of Horace Walpole, the son of the great Whig minister, Sir Robert Walpole, and the type of the fashionable dilettante of the London of his day. Walpole had no real understanding or sympathy for the spirit of the Middle Ages, but one of his fads was mediæval armor, furniture, and architecture, and out of this arose his curious half-sincere experiment in fiction. The real leader in the production of this sort of "thriller," however, was Mrs. Radcliffe, who was followed by Clara Reeves and scores of minor imitators. The novels