called snobbishness; but the evil
principle attacked by either writer is merely one avatar of the demon
assailed by the other.

The resemblance, which extends in some degree to style, might perhaps be
shown to imply a very close intellectual affinity. I am content,
however, to notice the literary genealogy as illustrative of the fact
that Fielding was the ancestor of one great race of novelists. 'I am,'
he says expressly in 'Tom Jones,' 'the founder of a new province of
writing.' Richardson's 'Clarissa'[7] and Smollett's 'Roderick Random'
were indeed published before 'Tom Jones;' but the provinces over which
Richardson and Smollett reigned were distinct from the contiguous
province of which Fielding claimed to be the first legislator. Smollett
(who comes nearest) professed to imitate 'Gil Blas' as Fielding
professed to imitate Cervantes. Smollett's story inherits from its
ancestry a reckless looseness of construction. It 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 'Oedipus 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 amusing anecdotes; or from such
work as De Foe's, in which the external facts are given with an almost
provoking indifference 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
psychological analysis.[8]

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 could tell
the hour by looking at the