Joseph Andrews, vol 1 | Page 8

certain sense modest, in another
ostentatious, in which he seems to confine himself to the presentation
of things English. They might have added to the presentation of things
English--as they appear in London, and on the Western Circuit, and on
the Bath Road.
But this apparent parochialism has never deceived good judges. It did
not deceive Lady Mary, who had seen the men and manners of very
many climes; it did not deceive Gibbon, who was not especially prone
to overvalue things English, and who could look down from twenty
centuries on things ephemeral. It deceives, indeed, I am told, some
excellent persons at the present day, who think Fielding's microcosm a

"toylike world," and imagine that Russian Nihilists and French
Naturalists have gone beyond it. It will deceive no one who has lived
for some competent space of time a life during which he has tried to
regard his fellow-creatures and himself, as nearly as a mortal may, sub
specie aeternitatis.
As this is in the main an introduction to a complete reprint of Fielding's
four great novels, the justification in detail of the estimate just made or
hinted of the novelist's genius will be best and most fitly made by a
brief successive discussion of the four as they are here presented, with
some subsequent remarks on the Miscellanies here selected. And,
indeed, it is not fanciful to perceive in each book a somewhat different
presentment of the author's genius; though in no one of the four is any
one of his masterly qualities absent. There is tenderness even in
_Jonathan Wild_; there are touches in Joseph Andrews of that irony of
the Preacher, the last echo of which is heard amid the kindly
resignation of the Journey to Lisbon, in the sentence, "Whereas envy of
all things most exposes us to danger from others, so contempt of all
things best secures us from them." But on the whole it is safe to say that
Joseph Andrews best presents Fielding's mischievous and playful wit;
Jonathan Wild his half-Lucianic half-Swiftian irony; Tom Jones his
unerring knowledge of human nature, and his constructive faculty;
Amelia his tenderness, his mitis sapientia, his observation of the details
of life. And first of the first.
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.