GENERAL INTRODUCTION.
And so we need not trouble ourselves any more either about
the insertions or about the exordiums. They both please me; the second class
has pleased persons much better worth pleasing than I can pretend to be; but
the making or marring of the book lies elsewhere. I do not think that it lies
in the construction, though Fielding's following of the ancients, both sincere
and satiric, has imposed a false air of regularity upon that. The Odyssey of
Joseph, of Fanny, and of their ghostly mentor and bodily guard is, in truth, a
little haphazard, and might have been longer or shorter without any discreet
man approving it the more or the less therefor. The real merits lie partly in
the abounding humour and satire of the artist's criticism, but even more in the
marvellous vivacity and fertility of his creation. For the very first time in
English prose fiction every character is alive, every incident is capable of
having happened. There are lively touches in the Elizabethan romances; but they
are buried in verbiage, swathed in stage costume, choked and fettered by their
authors' want of art. The quality of Bunyan's knowledge of men was not much
inferior to Shakespeare's, or at least to Fielding's; but the range and the
results of it were cramped by his single theological purpose, and his unvaried
allegoric or typical form. Why Defoe did not discover the New World of Fiction,
I at least have never been able to put into any brief critical formula that
satisfies me, and I have never seen it put by any one else. He had not only
seen it afar off, he had made landings and descents on it; he had carried off
and exhibited in triumph natives such as Robinson Crusoe, as Man Friday, as
Moll Flanders, as William the Quaker; but he had conquered, subdued, and
settled no province therein. I like Pamela; I like it better than some persons
who admire Richardson on the whole more than I do, seem to like it. But, as in
all its author's work, the handling seems to me academic—the working out on
paper of an ingeniously conceived problem rather than the observation or
evolution of actual or possible life. I should not greatly fear to push the
comparison even into foreign countries; but it is well to observe limits. Let
us be content with holding that in England at least, without prejudice to anything
further, Fielding was the first to display the qualities of the perfect
novelist as distinguished from the romancer.
What are those qualities, as shown in Joseph Andrews? The
faculty of arranging a probable and interesting course of action is one, of
course, and Fielding showed it here. But I do not think that it is at any time
the greatest one; and nobody denies that he made great advances in this
direction later. The faculty of lively dialogue is another; and that he has not
often been refused; but much the same may be said of it. The interspersing of
appropriate description is another; but here also we shall not find him exactly
a paragon. It is in character—the chief differentia of the novel as
distinguished not merely from its elder sister the romance, and its cousin the
drama, but still more from every other kind of literature—that Fielding stands
even here pre-eminent. No one that I can think of, except his greatest
successor in the present century, has the same unfailing gift of breathing life
into every character he creates or borrows; and even Thackeray draws, if I may
use the phrase, his characters more in the flat and less in the round than
Fielding. Whether in Blifil he once failed, we must discuss hereafter; he has
failed nowhere in Joseph Andrews. Some of his sketches may require the caution
that they are eighteenth-century men and women; some the warning that they are
obviously caricatured, or set in designed profile, or merely sketched. But they
are all alive. The finical estimate of Gray (it is a horrid joy to think how
perfectly capable Fielding was of having joined in that practical joke of the
young gentlemen of Cambridge, which made Gray change his college), while
dismissing these light things with patronage, had to admit that "parson
Adams is perfectly well, so is Mrs Slipslop." "They were, Mr
Gray," said some one once, "they were more perfectly well, and in a
higher kind, than anything you ever did; though you were a pretty workman
too."
Punam verma
08-Jun-2023 08:42 AM
Nice
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