FIELDING'S NOVELS.
A double parallel has often been pointed out between the two pairs of novelists who were most popular in the middle of our own and of the preceding century. The intellectual affinity which made Smollett the favorite author of Dickens is scarcely so close as that which commended Fielding to Thackeray. The resemblance between "Pickwick" and "Humphrey Clinker," or between "David Copperfield" and "Roderick Random," consists chiefly in the exuberance of animal spirits, the keen eye for external oddity, the consequent tendency to substitute caricature for portrait, and the vivid transformation of autobiography into ostensible fiction which are characteristic of both authors. Between Fielding and Thackeray the resemblance is closer. The peculiar irony of "Jonathan Wild" has its closest English parallel in "Barry Lyndon." The burlesque in "Tom Thumb" of the Lee and Dryden school of tragedy may remind us of Thackeray's burlesques of Scott and Dumas. The characters of the two authors belong to the same family. "Vanity Fair" has grown more decent since the days of Lady Bellaston, but the costume of the actors has changed more than their nature. Rawdon Crawley would not have been surprised to meet Captain Booth in a sponging-house; Shandon and his friends preserved the old traditions of Fielding's Grub Street; Lord Steyne and Major Pendennis were survivals from the more congenial period of Lord Fellamar and Colonel James; and the two Amelias represent cognate ideals of female excellence. Or, to take an instance of similarity in detail, might not this anecdote from the Covent Garden Journal have rounded off a paragraph in the "Snob Papers"? A friend of Fielding saw a dirty fellow in a mudcart lash another with his whip, saying, with an oath, "I will teach you manners to your betters." Fielding's friend wondered what could be the condition of this social inferior of a mudcart-driver, till he found him to be the owner of a dustcart driven by asses. The great butt of Fielding's satire is, as he tells us, affectation; the affectation which he specially hates is that of straitlaced morality; Thackeray's satire is more generally directed against the particular affectation called snobbishness; but the evil principle attacked by either writer is merely one avatar of the demon assailed by the other.
The resemblance, which extends in some degree to style, might perhaps be shown to imply a very close intellectual affinity. I am content, however, to notice the literary genealogy as illustrative of the fact that Fielding was the ancestor of one great race of novelists. "I am," he says expressly in "Tom Jones," "the founder of a new province of writing." Richardson's "Clarissa"[1] and Smollett's "Roderick Random" were indeed published before "Tom Jones;" but the provinces over which Richardson and Smollett reigned were distinct from the contiguous province of which Fielding claimed to be the first legislator. Smollett (who comes nearest) professed to imitate "Gil Bias" as Fielding professed to imitate Cervantes. Smollett's story inherits from its ancestry a reckless looseness of construction. It is a series of anecdotes strung together by the accident that they all happen to the same person. "Tom Jones," on the contrary, has a carefully constructed plot, if not, as Coleridge asserts, one of the three best plots in existence (its rivals being "Ædipus Tyrannus" and "The Alchemist). Its excellence depends upon the skill with which it is made subservient to the development of character and the thoroughness with which the working motives of the persons involved have been thought out. Fielding claims—even ostentatiously—that he is writing a history, not a romance; a history not the less true because all the facts are imaginary; for the fictitious incidents serve to exhibit the most general truths of human character. It is by this seriousness of purpose that his work is distinguished from the old type of novel, developed by Smollett, which is but a collection of
- ↑ Richardson wrote the first part of "Pamela" between November 10, 1739, and January 10, 1740. "Joseph Andrews" appeared in 1742. The first four volumes of "Clarissa Harlowe" and "Roderick Random" appeared in the beginning of 1748; "Tom Jones" in 1749.
