He has, assisted no doubt by Shakespeare and his own dramatic practice, discovered that you do not want volumes of it to do the business--that single moments and single sentences will do that business at times, if they are used in the proper way.
In short, Fielding here used his reluctant and indignant forerunner as a spring-board, whence to attain heights which that forerunner could never have reached: he "stood upon his shoulders" in the most cavalier but also the most successful fashion.

In the novel as Richardson knew it and was thinking of it, when he began _Pamela_, you were, as a rule, in an artificial world altogether--a world artificial with an artificiality only faintly and occasionally touched with any reality at all.

In _Pamela_ itself there is perhaps nothing, and certainly not much, that is _wholly_ unreal: but the reality is treated and rendered in an artificial way.

In _Joseph Andrews_, though its professed genesis and procedure are artificial too, you break away at once from serious artifice.

These are all real people who do real things in a real way now, as they did nearly two hundred years ago: however much dress, and speech, and manners may have changed.