starting-points one is undoubted; the other, though less generally
admitted, not much less indubitable to my mind. The parody of
Richardson's _Pamela_, which was little more than a year earlier (Nov.
1740), is avowed, open, flagrant; nor do I think that the author was so
soon carried away by the greater and larger tide of his own invention as
some critics seem to hold. He is always more or less returning to the
ironic charge; and the multiplicity of the assailants of Joseph's virtue
only disguises the resemblance to the long-drawn dangers of Pamela from
a single ravisher. But Fielding was also well acquainted with Marivaux's
_Paysan Parvenu_, and the resemblances between that book and _Joseph
Andrews_ are much stronger than Fielding's admirers have always been
willing to admit. This recalcitrance has, I think, been mainly due to
the erroneous conception of Marivaux as, if not a mere fribble, yet a
Dresden-Shepherdess kind of writer, good at "preciousness" and
patch-and-powder manners, but nothing more.

There was, in fact, a very strong satiric and ironic touch in the author
of _Marianne_, and I do not think that I was too rash when some years
ago I ventured to speak of him as "playing Fielding to his own
Richardson" in the _Paysan Parvenu_.

Origins, however, and indebtedness and the like, are, when great work is
concerned, questions for the study and the lecture-room, for the
literary historian and the professional critic, rather than for the
reader, however intelligent and alert, who wishes to enjoy a
masterpiece, and is content simply to enjoy it. It does not really
matter how close to anything else something which possesses independent
goodness is; the very utmost technical originality, the most spotless
purity from the faintest taint of suggestion, will not suffice to confer
merit on what does not otherwise possess it. Whether, as I rather think,