joseph andrew
The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his
friend Mr Abraham Adams was, as has been said above, published in February
1742. A facsimile of the agreement between author and publisher will be given
in the second volume of this series; and it is not uninteresting to observe
that the witness, William Young, is none other than the asserted original of
the immortal Mr Adams himself. He might, on Balzac's plea in a tolerably
well-known anecdote, have demanded half of the L183, 11s. Of the other origins
of the book we have a pretty full account, partly documentary. That it is
"writ in the manner of Cervantes," and is intended as a kind of comic
epic, is the author's own statement—no doubt as near the actual truth as is
consistent with comic-epic theory. That there are resemblances to Scarron, to
Le Sage, and to other practitioners of the Picaresque novel is certain; and it
was inevitable that there should be. Of directer and more immediate models or
starting-points one is undoubted; the other, though less generally admitted,
not much less indubitable to my mind. The parody of Richardson's Pamela, which
was little more than a year earlier (Nov. 1740), is avowed, open, flagrant; nor
do I think that the author was so soon carried away by the greater and larger
tide of his own invention as some critics seem to hold. He is always more or
less returning to the ironic charge; and the multiplicity of the assailants of
Joseph's virtue only disguises the resemblance to the long-drawn dangers of
Pamela from a single ravisher. But Fielding was also well acquainted with
Marivaux's Paysan Parvenu, and the resemblances between that book and Joseph
Andrews are much stronger than Fielding's admirers have always been willing to
admit. This recalcitrance has, I think, been mainly due to the erroneous
conception of Marivaux as, if not a mere fribble, yet a Dresden-Shepherdess
kind of writer, good at "preciousness" and patch-and-powder manners,
but nothing more.
There was, in fact, a very strong satiric and ironic touch
in the author of Marianne, and I do not think that I was too rash when some
years ago I ventured to speak of him as "playing Fielding to his own
Richardson" in the Paysan Parvenu.
Origins, however, and indebtedness and the like, are, when
great work is concerned, questions for the study and the lecture-room, for the
literary historian and the professional critic, rather than for the reader,
however intelligent and alert, who wishes to enjoy a masterpiece, and is
content simply to enjoy it. It does not really matter how close to anything
else something which possesses independent goodness is; the very utmost
technical originality, the most spotless purity from the faintest taint of
suggestion, will not suffice to confer merit on what does not otherwise possess
it. Whether, as I rather think, Fielding pursued the plan he had formed ab
incepto, or whether he cavalierly neglected it, or whether the current of his
own genius carried him off his legs and landed him, half against his will, on
the shore of originality, are questions for the Schools, and, as I venture to
think, not for the higher forms in them. We have Joseph Andrews as it is; and
we may be abundantly thankful for it. The contents of it, as of all Fielding's
work in this kind, include certain things for which the moderns are scantly
grateful. Of late years, and not of late years only, there has grown up a
singular and perhaps an ignorant impatience of digressions, of episodes, of
tales within a tale. The example of this which has been most maltreated is the
"Man of the Hill" episode in Tom Jones; but the stories of the
"Unfortunate Jilt" and of Mr Wilson in our present subject, do not
appear to me to be much less obnoxious to the censure; and Amelia contains more
than one or two things of the same kind. Me they do not greatly disturb; and I
see many defences for them besides the obvious, and at a pinch sufficient one,
that divagations of this kind existed in all Fielding's Spanish and French
models, that the public of the day expected them, and so forth. This defence is
enough, but it is easy to amplify and reintrench it. It is not by any means the
fact that the Picaresque novel of adventure is the only or the chief form of
fiction which prescribes or admits these episodic excursions. All the classical
epics have them; many eastern and other stories present them; they are common,
if not invariable, in the abundant mediaeval literature of prose and verse romance;
they are not unknown by any means in the modern novel; and you will very rarely
hear a story told orally at the dinner-table or in the smoking-room without
something of the kind. There must, therefore, be something in them
corresponding to an inseparable accident of that most unchanging of all things,
human nature. And I do not think the special form with which we are here
concerned by any means the worst that they have taken. It has the grand and
prominent virtue of being at once and easily skippable. There is about
Cervantes and Le Sage, about Fielding and Smollett, none of the treachery of
the modern novelist, who induces the conscientious reader to drag through
pages, chapters, and sometimes volumes which have nothing to do with the
action, for fear he should miss something that has to do with it. These great
men have a fearless frankness, and almost tell you in so many words when and
what you may skip. Therefore, if the "Curious Impertinent," and the
"Baneful Marriage," and the "Man of the Hill," and the
"Lady of Quality," get in the way, when you desire to "read for
the story," you have nothing to do but turn the page till finis comes. The
defence has already been made by an illustrious hand for Fielding's
inter-chapters and exordiums. It appears to me to be almost more applicable to
his insertions.