This intuitive perception of the hidden analogies of things, or, as it may be called, this instinct of imagination, is what stamps the character of genius on the productions of art, more than any other circumstance: for it works unconsciously, like nature, and receives its impressions from a kind of inspiration. There is more of this unconscious power in Cervantes, than in any other author, except Shakespeare. Something of the same kind extends itself to all the subordinate parts and characters of the work. Thus we find the curate confidentially informing Don Quixote, that if he could get the ear of the government, he has something of considerable importance to propose for the good of the state; and the knight afterwards meets with a young gentleman, who is a candidate for poetical honours, with a mad lover, a forsaken damsel, &c.—all delineated with the same inimitable force, freedom, and fancy. The whole work breathes that air of romance,—that aspiration after imaginary good,—that longing after something more than we possess, that in all places, and in all conditions of life,
——‘still prompts the eternal sigh,
For which we wish to live, or dare to die!’
The characters in Don Quixote are strictly individuals; that is, they do not belong to, but form a class of themselves. In other words, the actions and manners of the chief dramatis personæ do not arise out of the actions and manners of those around them, or the condition of life in which they are placed, but out of the peculiar dispositions of the persons themselves, operated upon by certain impulses of imagination and accident: Yet these impulses are so true to nature, and their operation so truly described, that we not only recognize the fidelity of the representation, but recognize it with all the advantages of novelty superadded. They are unlike any thing we have actually seen—may be said to be purely ideal—and yet familiarize themselves more readily with our imagination, and are retained more strongly in memory, than perhaps any others:—they are never lost in the crowd. One test of the truth of this ideal painting, is the number of allusions which Don Quixote has furnished to the whole of civilized Europe—that is to say of appropriate cases, and striking illustrations of the universal principles of our nature. The common incidents and descriptions of human life are, however, quite familiar and natural; and we have nearly the same insight given us here, into the characters of inn-keepers, bar-maids, ostlers, and puppet-show men, as in Fielding himself. There is a much greater mixture, however, of sentiment with naïveté, of the pathetic with the quaint and humorous, than there ever is in Fielding. We might instance the story of the country man, whom Don Quixote and Sancho met in their search after Dulcinea, driving his mules to plough at break of day, and ‘singing the ancient ballad of Roncesvalles!’ The episodes which are introduced, are excellent; but have, upon the whole, been overrated. Compared with the serious tales in Boccacio, they are trifling. That of Marcella, the fair shepherdess, is the best. We will only add, that Don Quixote is an entirely original work in its kind, and that the author has the highest honour which can belong to one, that of being the founder of a new style of writing.
There is another Spanish novel, Gusman d’Alfarache, nearly of the same age as Don Quixote, and of great genius, though it can hardly be ranked as a novel, or a work of imagination. It is a series of strange adventures, rather drily told, but accompanied by the most severe and sarcastic commentary. The satire, the wit, the eloquence, and reasoning, are of the most powerful kind; but they are didactic, rather than dramatic. They would suit a sermon or a pasquinade better than a romance. Still there are in this extraordinary book, occasional sketches of character, and humorous descriptions, to which it would be difficult to produce any thing superior. This work, which is hardly known in this country except by name, has the credit, without any reason, of being the original of Gil Blas. There is only one incident the same, that of the supper at the inn. In all other respects, these two works are the very reverse of each other, both in their excellencies and defects.
Gil Blas is, next to Don Quixote, more generally read and admired than any other novel—and, in one sense, deservedly so: for it is at the head of its class, though that class is very different from, and inferior to the other. There is very little individual character in Gil Blas. The author is a describer of manners, and not of character. He does not take the elements of human nature, and work them up into new combinations, (which is the excellence of Don Quixote); nor trace the peculiar and striking combinations of folly and knavery as they are to be found in real life, (like Fielding); but he takes off, as it were, the general, habitual impression, which circumstances make on certain conditions of life, and moulds all his characters accordingly. All the persons whom he introduces, carry about with them the badge of their profession; and you see little more of them than their costume. He describes men as belonging to certain classes in society—the highest, generally, and the lowest, and such as are found in great cities—not as they are in themselves, or with the individual differences which are always to be found in nature. His hero, in particular, has no character but that of the accidental circumstances in which he is placed. His priests are only described as priests: his valets, his players, his women, his courtiers and his sharpers, are all the same. Nothing can well exceed the monotony of the work in this respect;—at the same time that nothing can exceed the truth and precision with which the general manners of these different characters are preserved, nor the felicity of the particular traits by which their leading foibles are brought out to notice. Thus, the Archbishop of Grenada will remain an everlasting memento of the weakness of human vanity; and the account of Gil Blas’s legacy, of the uncertainty of human expectations. This novel is as deficient in the fable as in the characters. It is not a regularly constructed story; but a series of adventures told with equal gaiety and good sense, and in the most graceful style possible.
It has been usual to class our great novelists as imitators of one or other of these two writers. Fielding, no doubt, is more like Don Quixote than Gil Blas; Smollett is more like Gil Blas than Don Quixote: but there is not much resemblance in either case. Sterne’s Tristram Shandy is a more direct instance of imitation. Richardson can scarcely be called an imitator of any one; or, if he is, it is of the sentimental refinement of Marivaux, or the verbose gallantry of the writers of the seventeenth century.
There is very little to warrant the common idea, that Fielding was an imitator of Cervantes,—except his own declaration of such an intention, in the title-page of Joseph Andrews,—the romantic turn of the character of Parson Adams (the only romantic character in his works),—and the proverbial humour of Partridge, which is kept up only for a few pages. Fielding’s novels are, in general, thoroughly his own; and they are thoroughly English. What they are most remarkable for, is neither sentiment, nor imagination, nor wit, nor humour, though there is a great deal of this last quality; but profound knowledge of human nature—at least of English nature—and masterly pictures of the characters of men as he saw them existing. This quality distinguishes all his works, and is shown almost equally in all of them. As a painter of real life, he was equal to Hogarth: As a mere observer of human nature, he was little inferior to Shakespeare, though without any of the genius and poetical qualities of his mind.—His humour is less rich and laughable than Smollett’s; his wit as often misses as hits;—he has none of the fine pathos of Richardson or Sterne:—But he has brought together a greater variety of characters in common life,—marked with more distinct peculiarities, and without an atom of caricature, than any other novel writer whatever. The extreme subtility of observation on the springs of human conduct in ordinary characters, is only equalled by the ingenuity of contrivance in bringing those springs into play in such a manner as to lay open their smallest irregularity. The detection is always complete—and made with the certainty and skill of a philosophical experiment, and the ease and simplicity of a casual observation. The truth of the imitation is indeed so great, that it has been argued that Fielding must have had his materials ready-made to his hands, and was merely a transcriber of local manners and individual habits. For this conjecture, however, there seems to be no foundation. His representations, it is true, are local and individual; but they are not the less profound and natural. The feeling of the general principles of human nature operating in particular circumstances, is always intense, and uppermost in his mind: and he makes use of incident and situation, only to bring out character.
It is perhaps scarcely necessary to give any illustration of these remarks. Tom Jones is full of them. The moral of this book has been objected to, and not altogether without reason—but a more serious objection has been made to the want of refinement and elegance in the two principal characters. We never feel this objection, indeed, while we are reading the book: but at other times, we have something like a lurking suspicion that Jones was but an awkward fellow, and Sophia a pretty simpleton. We do not know how to account for this effect, unless it is that Fielding’s constantly assuring us of the beauty of his hero, and the good sense of his heroine, at last produces a distrust of both. The story of Tom Jones is allowed to be unrivalled: and it is this circumstance, together with the vast variety of characters, that has given the history of a Foundling so decided a preference over Fielding’s other novels. The characters themselves, both in Amelia and Joseph Andrews, are quite equal to any of those in Tom Jones. The account of Miss Mathews and Ensign Hibbert—the way in which that lady reconciles herself to the death of her father—the inflexible Colonel Bath, the insipid Mrs. James, the complaisant Colonel Trent—the demure, sly, intriguing, equivocal Mrs. Bennet—the lord who is her seducer, and who attempts afterwards to seduce Amelia by the same mechanical process of a concert-ticket, a book, and the disguise of a great-coat—his little fat short-nosed, red-faced, good-humoured accomplice the keeper of the lodging-house, who having no pretensions to gallantry herself, has a disinterested delight in forwarding the intrigues and pleasures of others, (to say nothing of honest Atkinson, the story of the miniature-picture of Amelia, and the hashed mutton, which are in a different style), are masterpieces of description. The whole scene at the lodging-house, the masquerade, &c. in Amelia, is equal in interest to the parallel scenes in Tom Jones, and even more refined in the knowledge of character. For instance, Mrs. Bennet is superior to Mrs. Fitzpatrick in her own way. The uncertainty in which the event of her interview with her former seducer is left, is admirable. Fielding was a master of what may be called the double entendre of character, and surprises you no less by what he leaves in the dark, (hardly known to the persons themselves), than by the unexpected discoveries he makes of the real traits and circumstances in a character with which, till then, you find you were unacquainted. There is nothing at all heroic, however, in the style of any of his delineations. He never draws lofty characters or strong passions;—all his persons are of the ordinary stature as to intellect; and none of them trespass on the angelic nature, by elevation of fancy, or energy of purpose. Perhaps, after all, Parson Adams is his finest character. It is equally true to nature, and more ideal than any of the others. Its unsuspecting simplicity makes it not only more amiable, but doubly amusing, by gratifying the sense of superior sagacity in the reader. Our laughing at him does not once lessen our respect for him. His declaring that he would willingly walk ten miles to fetch his sermon on vanity, merely to convince Wilson of his thorough contempt of this vice, and his consoling himself for the loss of his Æschylus, by suddenly recollecting that he could not read it if he had it, because it is dark, are among the finest touches of naïveté. The night-adventures at Lady Booby’s with Beau Didapper, and the amiable Slipslop, are the most ludicrous; and that with the huntsman, who draws off the hounds from the poor Parson, because they would be spoiled by following vermin, the most profound. Fielding did not often repeat himself: but Dr. Harrison, in Amelia, may be considered as a variation of the character of Adams: so also is Goldsmith’s Vicar of Wakefield; and the latter part of that work, which sets out so delightfully, an almost entire plagiarism from Wilson’s account of himself, and Adams’s domestic history.
Smollett’s first novel, Roderick Random, which is also his best, appeared about the same time as Fielding’s Tom Jones; and yet it has a much more modern air with it: But this may be accounted for, from the circumstance that Smollett was quite a young man at the time, whereas Fielding’s manner must have been formed long before. The style of Roderick Random, though more scholastic and elaborate, is stronger and more pointed than that of Tom Jones; the incidents follow one another more rapidly, (though it must be confessed they never come in such a throng, or are brought out with the same dramatic facility); the humour is broader, and as effectual; and there is very nearly, if not quite, an equal interest excited by the story. What then is it that gives the superiority to Fielding? It is the superior insight into the springs of human character, and the constant development of that character through every change of circumstance. Smollett’s humour often arises from the situation of the persons, or the peculiarity of their external appearance, as, from Roderick Random’s carrotty locks, which hung down over his shoulders like a pound of candles, or Strap’s ignorance of London, and the blunders that follow from it. There is a tone of vulgarity about all his productions. The incidents frequently resemble detached anecdotes taken from a newspaper or magazine; and, like those in Gil Blas, might happen to a hundred other characters. He exhibits only the external accidents and reverses to which human life is liable—not ‘the stuff’ of which it is composed. He seldom probes to the quick, or penetrates beyond the surface of his characters: and therefore he leaves no stings in the minds of his readers, and in this respect is far less interesting than Fielding. His novels always enliven, and never tire us: we take them up with pleasure, and lay them down without any strong feeling of regret. We look on and laugh, as spectators of an amusing though inelegant scene, without closing in with the combatants, or being made parties in the event. We read Roderick Random as an entertaining story; for the particular accidents and modes of life which it describes, have ceased to exist: but we regard Tom Jones as a real history; because the author never stops short of those essential principles which lie at the bottom of all our actions, and in which we feel an immediate interest;—intus et in cute.—Smollett excels most as the lively caricaturist: Fielding as the exact painter and profound metaphysician. We are far from maintaining, that this account applies uniformly to the productions of these two writers; but we think that, as far as they essentially differ, what we have stated is the general distinction between them. Roderick Random is the purest of Smollett’s novels; we mean in point of style and description. Most of the incidents and characters are supposed to have been taken from the events of his own life; and are therefore truer to nature. There is a rude conception of generosity in some of his characters, of which Fielding seems to have been incapable; his amiable persons being merely good-natured. It is owing to this, we think, that Strap is superior to Partridge; and there is a heartiness and warmth of feeling in some of the scenes between Lieutenant Bowling and his nephew, which is beyond Fielding’s power of impassioned writing. The whole of the scene on ship-board is a most admirable and striking picture, and, we imagine, very little, if at all exaggerated, though the interest it excites is of a very unpleasant kind. The picture of the little profligate French friar, who was Roderick’s travelling companion, and of whom he always kept to the windward, is one of Smollett’s most masterly sketches. Peregrine Pickle is no great favourite of ours, and Launcelot Greaves was not worthy of the genius of the author.