Page:The Adventures of David Simple (1904).djvu/13

 society, and to portray ideal sentiments and characters, she could hardly have chosen a more unfortunate plan than that of the picaresque story, with its loosely linked episodes and motley succession of characters, as fortuitous in arrangement as the faces we meet with in the street. Nothing can be more clumsy than her introduction of dialogue, with the names of the interlocutors formally prefixed as in a play; nothing more perplexing than her stories within the story, and then again the story told at second or third hand, but still in the first person, of brothers, lovers and acquaintances, amid whose long-protracted speeches we are apt to lose the thread altogether. Nevertheless, this method did very well up to a certain point. David Simple, it is noticeable, falls into two parts; the earlier is critical and satirical in spirit, the second half devoted to the portraiture of ideal virtues and sentiments. Henry Fielding's preface, which does ample justice to his sister's powers of drawing individual character and expressing lofty emotion, is reprinted here. Let us turn to the other side of the work.

Every novelist of that period thought it was incumbent on him to have a moral purpose in his work, and most of them were pronouncedly and deliberately didactic. Richardson taught his morality directly, with a heavy seriousness; Fielding preferred the lighter and more ambiguous method of the satirist. His sister halted between the two courses. Her satire is lacking in the right spirit of comedy. It is rather the satire of the moral essayist than of the dramatist or the story-writer. But her wit, at its best, is wonderfully sane, discriminating, and caustic. She belongs to that highest type satirist who sees things not merely as related the fashions, mannerisms and prejudices of his own time and place, but in the dry light of abstract intelligence and perfect sanity. Let the following