Joseph Andrews, vol 1 | Page 9

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.
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