and ridiculed the follies of life with equal strength,
humour, and propriety. But might it not be said of him, as of Dickens,
that his range of character was limited; and that his method of
proceeding from a central idea in all his leading people, exposed him
equally to the charge of now and then putting human nature itself in
place of the individual who should only be a small section of it? This
is in fact but another shape of what I have expressed on a former page,
that what a character, drawn by a master, will roughly present upon its
surface, is frequently such as also to satisfy its more subtle
requirements; and that when only the salient points or sharper
prominences are thus displayed, the great novelist is using his
undoubted privilege of showing the large degree to which human
intercourse is carried on, not by men's habits or ways at their
commonest, but by the touching of their extremes. A definition of
Fielding's genius has been made with some accuracy in the saying, that
he shows common propensities in connection with the identical
unvarnished adjuncts which are peculiar to the individual, nor could a
more exquisite felicity of handling than this be any man's aim or
desire; but it would be just as easy, by employment of the critical
rules applied to Dickens, to transform it into matter of censure.
Partridge, Adams, Trulliber, Squire Western, and the rest, present
themselves often enough under the same aspects, and use with sufficient
uniformity the same catchwords, to be brought within the charge of
mannerism; and though M. Taine cannot fairly say of Fielding as of
Dickens, that he suffers from too much morality, he brings against him
precisely the charge so strongly put against the later novelist of
"looking upon the passions not as simple forces but as objects of
approbation or blame." We must keep in mind all this to understand the
worth of the starved fancy, that can find in such a delineation as that
of Micawber only the man described by Mr. Lewes as always in the same
situation, moved with the same springs and uttering the same sounds,
always confident of something turning up, always crushed and rebounding,
always making punch, and his wife always declaring she will never part
from him. It is not thus that such creations are to be viewed; but by
the light which enables us to see why the country squires, village
schoolmasters, and hedge parsons of Fielding became immortal. The later
ones will live, as t