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The artist of fiction should not aim at exact photography, for it is impossible; no fiction-maker since time began has placed on the printed pages half the irrelevance and foolishness or one-fifth the filth which are in life itself. Reasons of art and ethics forbid. The aim, therefore, should rather be at an effect of life through selection and re-shaping.

Fielding is a master of that colloquial manner afterwards handled with such success by Thackeray: a manner "good alike for grave or gay," and making this early fiction-maker enjoyable. Quite apart from our relish of his vivid portrayals of life, we like his wayside chatting. For another difference: there is no moral motto or announcement: the lesson takes care of itself.

The question will intrude: would a genuine fiction-maker need to be thus prodded by a friend, and refrain from any independent attempt up to a period so late? Yet it will not do to answer glibly in the negative. Too many examples of late beginning and fine fiction as a consequence are furnished by English literature to make denial safe.

She found this manner of dialogue with comparative parsimony of description and narration, to be her true method as she grew as a fiction-maker: the early unpublished story "Susan," and the first draught of "Sense and Sensibility," had the epistolary form of Richardson, the more undramatic nature of which is self-evident.

In striking contrast, too, with Fielding is the interpretation of life one gets from his books; with the author of "Tom Jones" we feel, what we do in greater degree with Shakespeare and Balzac, that the personality of the fiction-maker is healthily merged in his characters, in the picture of life. But in the case of Dr.