The chance for fun is palpable here.  But something unexpected happened:  what was begun as burlesque, almost horse-play, began to pass from the key of shallow, lively satire, broadening and deepening into a finer tone of truth.  In a few chapters, by the time the writer had got such an inimitable personage as Parson Adams before the reader, it was seen that the book was to be more than a jeu d’esprit:  rather, the work of a master of characterization.  In short, Joseph Andrews started out ostensibly to poke good-natured ridicule at sentimental Mr. Richardson:  it ended by furnishing contemporary London and all subsequent readers with a notable example of the novel of mingled character and incident, entertaining alike for its lively episodes and its broadly genial delineation of types of the time.  And so he soon had the town laughing with him at his broad comedy.

In every respect Fielding made a sharp contrast with Richardson.  He was gentle-born, distinguished and fashionable in his connections:  the son of younger sons, impecunious, generous, of strong often unregulated passions,—­what the world calls a good fellow, a man’s man—­albeit his affairs with the fair sex were numerous.  He knew high society when he choose to depict it:  his education compared with Richardson’s was liberal and he based his style of fiction upon models which the past supplied, whereas Richardson had no models, blazed his own trail.  Fielding’s literary ancestry looks back to “Gil Blas” and “Don Quixote,” and in English to “Robinson Crusoe.”  In other words, his type, however much he departs from it, is the picturesque story of adventure.  He announced, in fact, on his title-page that he wrote “in imitation of the manner of Cervantes.”

Again, his was a genius for comedy, where Richardson, as we have seen, was a psychologist.  The cleansing effect of wholesome laughter and an outdoor gust of hale west wind is offered by him, and with it go the rude, coarse things to be found in Nature who is nevertheless in her influence so salutary, so necessary, in truth, to our intellectual and moral health.  Here then was a sort of fiction at many removes from the slow, analytic studies of Richardson:  buoyant, objective, giving far more play to action and incident, uniting in most agreeable proportions the twin interests of character and event.  The very title of this first book is significant.  We are invited to be present at a delineation of two men,—­but these men are displayed in a series of adventures.  Unquestionably, the psychology is simpler, cruder, more elementary than that of Richardson.  Dr. Johnson, who much preferred the author of “Pamela” to the author of “Tom Jones” and said so in the hammer-and-tongs style for which he is famous, declared to Bozzy that “there is all the difference in the world between characters of nature and characters of manners:  and there is the difference between the characters of Fielding and those of Richardson.  Characters of manners are very entertaining; but they are to be understood by a more superficial observer than characters of nature, where a man must dive into the recesses of the human heart.”