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But what after all does our author mean by useful literature'? Is that a literature without use, which makes men and women better acquainted with human nature? Are the characters and the passions of our species less useful objects of study than the external events of any time, or the phenomena of material nature in any of her departments? We venture to be of opinion, that there is as much useful knowledge in Gil Blas, if the reader be one of those who would have understood the Epitaph of the Licentiate Pedro Garcias, as in any dozen volumes of real history the country of Le Sage has yet produced; and we have a considerable suspicion that the great novelist of our own age has taught more truths about the working of the human mind, than any professional metaphysician of his nation, from Dr. Hutchinson to Dr. Brown, both included; and is it really so, that knowledge loses value merely because it has been attained through a pleasant medium? Is Sir Walter Scott for absolutely banishing the Muses from his Republic?—

The Novelists' Library, to which these essays were originally appended, is, as we have already said, obviously incomplete. We must add that the various authors it embraces are not made to follow each other chronologically, or upon any principle of arrangement that we can discover-a particular in which M. Galignani might have had the wit to eschew the example of his original, when he was printing the Lives as a separate book.

As a fair specimen of the literary criticism which these Memoirs contain, we may take the passage in which Smollett and Fielding are contrasted.

'The history, accomplishments, talents, pursuits, and, unfortunately, the fates of these two great authors, are so closely allied, that it is scarcely possible to name the one without exciting recollections of the other. Fielding and Smollett were both born in the highest rank of society, both educated to learned professions, yet both obliged to follow miscelIaneous literature as the means of subsistence. Both were confined, during their lives, by the narrowness of their circumstances,—both united a humorous cynicism with generosity and good-nature-both died of the diseases incident to a sedentary life, and to literary labour,—and both drew their last breath in a foreign land, to which they retreated under the adverse circumstances of a decayed constitution, and an exhausted fortune.

'Their studies were no less similar than their lives. They both wrote for the stage, and neither of them successfully. They both meddled in politics; they both wrote travels, in which they showed that their good-humour was wasted under the sufferings of their disease and, to conclude, they were both so eminently successful as novelists, that no other English author of that class has a right to be mentioned in the same breath with Fielding and Smollett.

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If we compare the works of these two great masters yet more closely,

closely, we may assign to Fielding, with little hesitation, the praise of a higher and purer taste than was shown by his rival; more elegance of composition and expression; a nearer approach to the grave irony of Swift and Cervantes; a great deal more address or felicity in the conduct of his story; and, finally, a power of describing virtuous and amiable characters, and of placing before us heroes, and especially heroines, of much higher as well as more pleasing character than Smollett was able to present.

Thus the art and felicity with which the story of Tom Jones evolves itself, is no where found in Smollett's novels, where the heroes pass from one situation in life, and from one stage of society to another totally unconnected, except that, as in ordinary life, the adventures recorded, though not bearing upon each other, or on the catastrophe, befall he same personage. Characters are introduced and dropped without scruple, and, at the end of the work, the hero is found surrounded by a very different set of associates from those with whom his fortune seemed at first indissolubly connected. Neither are the characters which Smollett designed should be interesting, half so amiable as his readers could desire. The low-minded Roderick Random, who borrows Strap's money, wears his clothes, and, rescued from starving by the attachment of that simple and kind-hearted adherent, rewards him by squandering his substance, receiving his attendance as a servant, and beating him when the dice ran against him, is not to be named in one day with the open-hearted, good-humoured, and noble-minded Tom Jones, whose libertinism (one particular omitted) is perhaps rendered but too amiable by his good qualities. We believe there are few readers who are not disgusted with the miserable reward assigned to Strap in the closing chapter of the novel. Five hundred pounds, (scarce the value of the goods he had presented to his master,) and the hand of a reclaimed street-walker, even when added to a Highland farm, seem but a poor recompense for his faithful and disinterested attachment. We should do Jones equal injustice by weighing him in the balance with the savage and ferocious Pickle, who, besides his gross and base brutality towards Amelia; besides his ingratitude to his uncle, and the savage propensity which he shows in the pleasure he takes to torment others by practical jokes resembling those of a fiend in glee,-exhibits a low and ungentlemanlike tone of thinking, only one degree higher than that of Roderick Random. The blackguard frolic of introducing a prostitute in a false character to his sister, is a sufficient instance of that want of taste and feeling which Smollett's admirers are compelled to acknowledge, may be detected in his writings. It is yet more impossible to compare Sophia or Amelia to the females of Smollett, who (excepting Aurelia Darnel) are drawn as the objects rather of appetite than of affection, and excite no higher or more noble interest than might be created by the houris of the Mahomedan paradise.

'It follows from this superiority on the side of Fielding, that his novels exhibit more frequently than those of Smollett, scenes of distress which excite the sympathy and pity of the reader. No one can refusé his compassion to Jones, when, by a train of practices upon his generous

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and open character, he is expelled from his benefactor's house under the foulest and most heart-rending accusations; but we certainly sympathize very little in the distress of Pickle, brought on by his own profligate profusion, and enhanced by his insolent misanthropy. We are only surprized that his predominating arrogance does not weary out the benevolence of Hatchway and Pipes, and scarce think the ruined spendthrift deserves their persevering and faithful attachment.

'But the deep and fertile genius of Smollett afforded resources sufficient to balance these deficiences; and when the full weight has been allowed to Fielding's superiority of taste and expression, his northern contemporary will still be found fit to balance the scale with his great rival. If Fielding had superior taste, the palm of more brilliancy of genius, more inexhaustible richness of invention, must in justice be awarded to Smollett. In comparison of his sphere, that in which Fielding walked was limited; and, compared with the wealthy profusion of varied character and incident which Smollett has scattered through his works, there is a poverty of composition about his rival. Fielding's fame rests on a single chef d'œuvre; and the art and industry which produced Tom Jones was unable to rise to equal excellence in Amelia. Though therefore we may justly prefer Tom Jones as the most masterly example of an artful and well-told novel, to any individual work of Smollett ; yet Roderick Random, Peregrine Pickle, and Humphrey Clinker, do each of them far excel Joseph Andrews or Amelia; and, to descend still Jower, Jonathan Wild, or The Journey to the Next World, cannot be put into momentary comparison with Sir Lancelot Greaves, or Ferdinand Count Fathom.

Every successful novelist must be more or less a poet, even although he may never have written a line of verse. The quality of imagination is absolutely indispensable to him; his accurate power of examining and embodying human character and human passion, as well as the external face of nature, is not less essential; and the talent of describing well what he feels with acuteness, added to the above requisites, goes far to complete the poetic character. Smollett was, even in the ordinary sense, which limits the name to those who write verses, a poet of distinction; and, in this particular, superior to Fielding, who seldom aims at more than a slight translation from the classics. Accordingly, if he is surpassed by Fielding in moving pity, the northern novelist soars far above him in his powers of exciting terror. Fielding has no passages which approach in sublimity to the robber scene in Count Fathom; or to the terrible description of a sea-engagement, in which Roderick Random sits chained and exposed upon the poop, without the power of motion or exertion, during the carnage of a tremendous engagement. Upon many other occasions Smollett's descriptions ascend to the sublime; and in general there is an air of romance in his writings, which raises his narratives above the level and easy course of ordinary life. He was, like a pre-eminent poet of our own day, a searcher of dark bosoms, and loved to paint characters under the strong agitation of fierce and stormy passions. Hence, misanthropes, gamblers, and duellists, are as common in his works as in those of Salvator Rosa, and are drawn in most cases with the same

terrible

terrible truth and effect. To compare Ferdinand Count Fathom to the Jonathan Wild of Fielding would be perhaps unfair to the latter author; yet, the works being composed on the same plan, (a very bad one as we think,) we cannot help placing them by the side of each other, when it becomes at once obvious that the detestable Fathom is a living and existing miscreant, at whom we shrink as from the presence of an incarnate fiend, while the villain of Fielding seems rather a cold personification of the abstract principle of evil, so far from being terrible, that, notwithstanding the knowledge of the world argued in many passages of his adventures, we are compelled to acknowledge him absolutely tiresome.

It is, however, chiefly in his profusion, which amounts almost to prodigality, that we recognize the superior richness of Smollett's fancy. He never shows the least desire to make the most, either of a character, or a situation, or an adventure, but throws them together with a carelessness which argues unlimited confidence in his own powers. Fielding pauses to explain the principles of his art, and to congratulate himself and his readers on the felicity with which he constructs his narrative, or makes his characters evolve themselves in the progress. These appeals to the reader's judgment, admirable as they are, have sometimes the fault of being diffuse, and always the great disadvantage, that they remind us we are perusing a work of fiction; and that the beings with whom we have been conversant during the perusal, are but a set of evanescent phantoms, conjured up by a magician for our amusement. Smollett seldom holds communication with his readers in his own person. He manages his delightful puppet-show without thrusting his head beyond the curtain, like Gines de Passamonte, to explain what he is doing; and hence, besides that our attention to the story remains unbroken, we are are sure that the author, fully confident in the abundance of his materials, has no occasion to eke them out with extrinsic matter.

'Smollett's sea-characters have been deservedly considered as inimitable; and the power with which he has diversified them, in so many instances, distinguishing the individual features of each honest tar, while each possesses a full proportion of professional manners and habits of thinking, is a most absolute proof of the richness of fancy with which the author was gifted, and which we have noticed as his chief advantage over Fielding. Bowling, Trunnion, Hatchway, Pipes, and Crowe, are all men of the same class, habits, and tone of thinking, yet so completely differenced by their separate and individual characters, that we at once acknowledge them as distinct persons, while we see and allow that every one of them belongs to the old English navy. These striking portraits have now the merit which is cherished by antiquaries-they preserve the memory of the school of Benbow and Boscawen, whose manners are now banished from the quarter-deck to the fore-castle. The naval officers of the present day, the splendour of whose actions has thrown into shadow the exploits of a thousand years, do not now affect the manners of a fore-mast man, and have shown how admirably well their duty can be discharged without any particular attachment to tobacco or flip, or the decided preference of a check shirt over a linen one.

In the comic part of their writings, we have already said, Fielding
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is pre-eminent in grave irony, a Cervantic species of pleasantry, in which Smollett is not equally successful. On the other hand, the Scotchman (notwithstanding the general opinion denies that quality to his countrymen) excels in broad and ludicrous humour. His fancy seems to run riot in accumulating ridiculous circumstances one upon another, to the utter destruction of all power of gravity; and perhaps no books ever written have excited such peals of inextinguishable laughter as those of Smollett. The descriptions which affect us thus powerfully, border sometimes upon what is called farce or caricature; but if it be the highest praise of pathetic composition that it draws forth tears, why should it not be esteemed the greatest excellence of the ludicrous that it compels laughter? The one tribute is at least as genuine an expression of natural feeling as the other; and he who can read the calamities of Trunnion and Hatchway, when run away with by their mettled steeds, or the inimitable absurdities of the feast of the ancients, without a good hearty burst of honest laughter, must be well qualified to look sad and gentlemanlike with Lord Chesterfield or Master Stephen.

Upon the whole, the genius of Smollett may be said to resemble that of Rubens. His pictures are often deficient in grace; sometimes coarse, and even vulgar in conception; deficient, too, in keeping, and in the due subordination of parts to each other; and intimating too much carelessness on the part of the artist. But these faults are redeemed by such richness and brilliancy of colours; such a profusion of imagination -now bodying forth the grand and terrible-now the natural, the easy, and the ludicrous; there is so much of life, action, and bustle, in every group he has painted; so much force and individuality of character, that we readily grant to Smollett an equal rank with his great rival Fielding,-'

The critic adds,

while we place both far above any of their successors in the same line of fictitious composition

And if the meaning be, that Smollett and Fielding have had no rivals in the delineation of English manners, or even that they have remained unequalled in the portraiture of manners actually contemplated-of living manners absolutely-our readers may probably be inclined to assent to what is here said. But if, by the same line of composition,' be meant the literature of the novel generally, we are sure every reader will agree with ourselves that Fielding and Smollett have had one successor, who is not merely a rival but a superior.

The great novelist of our own time has never framed a plot so perfect as that of Tom Jones; nor has he the wit of a Fielding -to say nothing of a Le Sage;-but he much more than atones for such deficiencies by the display of a far wider combination of excellencies than is to be found in any one novelist besides. He has widened the whole field to an extent of which none that went before him ever dreamed; embellished it by many original graces, as exquisite at least as any that their hands had intro

duced

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