Page:The Adventures of David Simple (1904).djvu/12

 life, the kindly humour, the delicate portraiture of the individual, which were to be the finest characteristics of the English novel of manners. There was also the element of satire, and it is as a satirist and a censor of society in the Addisonian style that, I think, Sarah Fielding may be most favourably regarded. Her theme is friendship. The sentiments which she has expressed in the adventures of David, Cynthia and Camilla, and in the tender episode of Stainvllle and Dumont are, says Henry Fielding, with brotherly patronage, "as noble and elevated as I have anywhere met with Nay, there are some touches, which I will venture to say, might have done honour to the pencil of the immortal Shakespeare himself." Professor Wilbur L. Cross has summarized the literary tendency of the period that began with Pamela and ended with the publication of Humphry Clinker, in the following admirable terms: — "The novels of this period which have become a recognized part of our literature, whether they deal in minute incident as in Richardson and Sterne, or in farce, intrigue and adventure as in Smollett and Fielding, have one characteristic in common: their subject is the heart. Moreover, underlying them, as their raison d'être, is an ethical motive. Richardson makes the novel a medium for Biblical teaching as it is understood by a Protestant precisian; Fielding pins his faith on human nature; Smollett cries for justice to the oppressed; Sterne spiritualizes sensation, addressing 'Dear Sensibility' as the Divinity whom he adores." But David Simple, though it belongs of right to the period, appeared at too early a date, when the school was yet unformed. Miss Fielding had no definite model before her, and was without the constructive skill to invent a suitable one. To set forth the admirable philosophy that underlies her criticism of