GEORGE ODGER. 1820-1877. THE first rough month that ends the flowerless time Has come, and in this worldly city of ours But to the mourners these are leaden hours, No priest hath bent above this coverlid, In some far western orchard where the dead For he, too, who lies worn on that dim bed, He, too, was once, like us, a lover true of flowers and verse and the spring's wonders Temperate he was and calm, whom the world Most violent; loving the people best, Early he learned, by bitter ways of toil In such a school Time sowed a hardy seed, That, heavy with all the burden of all the That wept around him, and the great wrongs By men and women in the social strain, He less than others of soft words was fain, And knew the scathing power of sudden scorn. Yet was he true and good, fed by desires Pure as the dreams of some Utopian sage, By his tomb let us part. But hush! he is waking! With the woe of want is aching. Feign we no more Sweet Love lies breathless; All we forswore Be as before! Death may die, but Love is deathless. ALFRED AUSTIN. From The Cornhill Magazine. cially hates is that of straitlaced morality; Thackeray's satire is more generally directed against the particular affectation called snobbishness; but the evil principle attacked by either writer is merely one avatar of the demon assailed by the other. 66 A DOUBLE parallel has often been pointed out between the two pairs of novelists who were most popular in the middle of our own and of the preceding century. The intellectual affinity which made Smol- The resemblance, which extends in lett the favorite author of Dickens is some degree to style, might perhaps be scarcely so close as that which commended shown to imply a very close intellectual Fielding to Thackeray. The resemblance affinity. I am content, however, to notice between "Pickwick and " Humphrey the literary genealogy as illustrative of the Clinker," or between " David Copperfield" fact that Fielding was the ancestor of one and "Roderick Random," consists chiefly great race of novelists. "I am," he says in the exuberance of animal spirits, the expressly in "Tom Jones," "the founder keen eye for external oddity, the conse- of a new province of writing." Richardquent tendency to substitute caricature son's Clarissa" and Smollett's "Roderfor portrait, and the vivid transformation ick Random" were indeed published beof autobiography into ostensible fiction fore "Tom Jones;" but the provinces which are characteristic of both authors. over which Richardson and Smollett Between Fielding and Thackeray the re- reigned were distinct from the contiguous semblance is closer. The peculiar irony province of which Fielding claimed to be of "Jonathan Wild" has its closest English the first legislator. Smollett (who comes parallel in "Barry Lyndon." The burlesque nearest) professed to imitate "Gil Blas " in "Tom Thumb " of the Lee and Dryden as Fielding professed to imitate Cervantes. school of tragedy may remind us of Thack- Smollett's story inherits from its ancestry eray's burlesques of Scott and Dumas. a reckless looseness of construction. It The characters of the two authors belong to the same family. "Vanity Fair" has grown more decent since the days of Lady Bellaston, but the costume of the actors has changed more than their nature. Rawdon Crawley would not have been surprised to meet Captain Booth in a sponging-house; Shandon and his friends preserved the old traditions of Fielding's Grub Street; Lord Steyne and Major Pendennis were survivals from the more congenial period of Lord Fellamar and Colonel James; and the two Amelias represent cognate ideals of female excellence. Or, to take an instance of similarity in detail, might not this anecdote from the Covent Garden Journal have rounded off a paragraph in the "Snob Papers"? A friend of Fielding saw a dirty fellow in a mudcart lash another with his whip, saying, with an oath, "I will teach you manners to your betters." Fielding's friend wondered what could be the condition of this social inferior of a mudcartdriver, till he found him to be the owner of a dustcart driven by asses. The great butt of Fielding's satire is, as he tells us, affectation; the affectation which he spe is a series of anecdotes strung together by the accident that they all happen to the same person. "Tom Jones," on the contrary, has a carefully constructed plot, if not, as Coleridge asserts, one of the three best plots in existence (its rivals being "Edipus Tyrannus" and "The Alchemist). Its excellence depends upon the skill with which it is made subservient to the development of character and the thoroughness with which the working motives of the persons involved have been thought out. Fielding claims — even ostentatiously—that he is writing a history, not a romance; a history not the less true because all the facts are imaginary; for the fictitious incidents serve to exhibit the most general truths of human character. It is by this seriousness of purpose that his work is distinguished from the old type of novel, developed by Smollett, which is but a collection of Richardson wrote the first part of "Pamela" between November 10, 1739, and January 10, 1740. "Joseph Andrews" appeared in 1742. The first four volumes of "Clarissa Harlowe" and "Roderick Ran dom" appeared in the beginning of 1748; “Tom Jones" in 1749. amusing anecdotes; or from such work as | powers of sympathy, and draws a comparaDe Foe's, in which the external facts are tively small part of its resources from exgiven with an almost provoking indiffer-ternal experience. The novelist knows ence to display of character and passion. Fielding's great novels have a true organic unity as well as a consecutive story, and are intended in our modern jargon as genuine studies in physiological analysis.* how his characters would feel under given conditions, because he feels it himself; he sees from within, not from without; and is almost undergoing an actual experience instead of condensing his observations on life. This is the power in which Shakespeare is supreme; which Richardson proved himself, in his most powerful passages, to possess in no small degree; and which in Balzac seems to have generated fits of absolute hallucination. Johnson, no mean authority when in his own sphere and free from personal bias, expressly traversed this claim; he declared that there was more knowledge of the human heart in a letter of "Clarissa" than in the whole of "Tom Jones;" and said more picturesquely, that Fielding Fielding is not devoid of this power, as could tell the hour by looking at the dial- no great imaginative work can be possible plate, whilst Richardson knew how the without it; but the knowledge for which clock was made. It is tempting to set he is specially conspicuous differs almost this down as a Johnsonian prejudice, and in kind. This knowledge is drawn from to deny or retort the comparison. Field- observation rather than intuitive syming, we might say, paints flesh and blood; pathy. It consists in great part of those whereas Richardson consciously con- weighty maxims which a man of keen structs his puppets out of frigid abstrac-powers of observation stores up in his tions. Lovelace is a bit of mechanism; passage through a varied experience. It Tom Jones a human being. In fact, how is the knowledge of Ulysses, who has ever, such comparisons are misleading. known Nothing is easier than to find an appropriate ticket for the objects of our criticism, and summarily pigeon-hole Richardson as an idealist and Fielding as a realist; Richardson as subjective and morbid; Fielding as objective and full of coarse health; or to attribute to either of them the deepest knowledge of the human heart. These are the mere banalities of criticism; and I can never hear them without a suspicion that a professor of æsthetics is trying to hoodwink me by a bit of technical platitude. The cant phrases which have been used so often by panegyrists too lazy to define their terms, have become almost as meaningless as the complimentary formulæ of society. Knowledge of the human heart in particular is a phrase which covers very different states of mind. It may mean that power by which the novelist or dramatist identifies himself with his characters; sees through their eyes and feels with their senses: it is the product of a rich nature, a vivid imagination, and great cities of men And manners, climates, councils, governments; the knowledge of a Machiavelli, who has looked behind the screen of political hypocrisies; the knowledge of which the essence is distilled in Bacon's "Essays; " or the knowledge of which Polonius seems to have retained many shrewd scraps even when he had fallen into his dotage. In reading "Clarissa" or "Eugénie Grandet " we are aware that the soul of Richardson or Balzac has transmigrated into another shape; that the author is projected into his character, and is really giving us one phase of his own sentiments. In reading Fielding we are listening to remarks made by a spectator instead of an actor; we are receiving the pithy recollections of the man about town; the prodigal who has been with scamps in gambling-houses, and drunk beer in pothouses and punch with country squires; the keen observer who has judged all characters, from Sir Robert Walpole down to Betsy Canning; who * Fielding blundered rather strangely in the celebrated Betsy Canning case, as Balzac did in the affaire * See some appreciative remarks upon this in Scott's Peytel; but the story is too long for repetition in this preface to "The Monastery." place. has fought the hard battle of life with un- to explain one problem, over which Scott flagging spirit, though with many falls; puzzles himself, namely, why, Fielding's and who, in spite of serious stains, has plays are so inferior to his novels. There preserved the goodness of his heart and are other reasons, external and internal; the soundness of his head. The experi- but it is at least clear that a man who can ence is generally given in the shape of never retire behind his puppets is not in the typical anecdotes rather than in explicit dramatic frame of mind. He is always lecmaxims; but it is not the less distinctly turing where a dramatist must be content the concentrated essence of observation, to pull the wires. Shakespeare is really as rather than the spontaneous play of a much present in his plays as Fielding in vivid imagination. Like Balzac, Field- his novels; but he does not let us know ing has portrayed the comédie humaine; it; whereas the excellent Fielding seems but his imagination has never overpow- to be quite incapable of hiding his broad ered the coolness of his judgment. He shoulders and lofty stature behind his little shows a superiority to his successor in puppet-show. fidelity almost as marked as his inferiority in vividness. And, therefore, it may be said in passing, it is refreshing to read Fielding at a time when this element of masculine observation is the one thing most clearly wanting in modern literature. Our novels give us the emotions of young ladies, which, in their way, are very good things; they reflect the sentimental view of life, and the sensational view, and the commonplace view, and the high philosophical view. One thing they do not tell us. What does the world look like to a shrewd police-magistrate, with a keen eye in his head and a sound heart in his bosom? It might be worth knowing. Perhaps (who can tell?) it would still look rather like Fielding's world. There are, of course, actors in Fielding's world who can be trusted to speak for themselves. Tom Jones, at any rate, who is Fielding in his youth, or Captain Booth, who is the Fielding of later years, are drawn from within. Their creator's sympathy is so close and spontaneous that he had no need of his formulæ and precedents. But elsewhere he betrays his method by his desire to produce his authority. You will find the explanation of a certain line of conduct, he says, in "human nature, page almost the last." He is a little too fond of taking down that volume with a flourish; of exhibiting his familiarity with its pages, and referring to the passages which justify his assertions. Fielding has an odd touch of the pedant. He is fond of airing his classical knowledge; and he is equally fond of quoting this imaginary code which he has had to study so thoroughly and painfully. The effect, however, is to give an air of arti ficiality to some of his minor characters. They show the traces of deliberate composition too distinctly, though the blemish may be forgiven in consideration of the genuine force and freshness of his thinking. If manfactured articles, they are not second-hand manufactures. His knowledge, unlike that of the good Parson Adams, comes from life, not books. The peculiarity is indicated by Fielding's method. Scott, who, like Fielding, generally describes from the outside, is content to keep himself in the background. "Here," he says to his readers, "are the facts; make what you can of them." Fielding will not efface himself; he is always present as chorus; he tells us what moral we ought to draw; he overflows with shrewd remarks, given in their most downright shape, instead of obliquely suggested through the medium of anecdote; he likes to stop us as we pass through his portrait-gallery; to take' us by the button-hole and expound his views of The worldly wisdom for which Fielding life and his criticisms on things in general. is so conspicuous had indeed been gathHis remarks are often so admirable that ered in doubtful places, and shows traces we prefer the interpolations to the main of its origin. He had been forced, as he current of narrative. Whether this plan is said, to choose between the positions of a the best must depend upon the idiosyn- hackney coachman and of a hackney crasy of the author; but it goes some way writer. "His genius," said Lady M. W. |