CHAPTER XIX

THE ART OF TOM JONES

I

Regard "Tom Jones" as you will-from the standpoint of mere artifice, characters, or ethics-and it will turn out to be an innovation in the history of fiction, no less unexpected than the meteors and earthquakes that were let loose after its publication. Hitherto those novelists who had aimed at a portrait of contemporary manners had taken as the basis of their plots a story from real life, and embroidered it with fictitious details. Such, so far as one can divine it, had been the method of Defoe in "Moll Flanders" and even in "Robinson Crusoe." Such, too, was the method of Richardson in "Pamela." Twenty-five years before "Pamela" was written there had actually lived in England a Mrs. B., who had reformed and married a rake and was then living happily with him after all his villainous attempts to undo her. Exactly as in the novel, the girl had tried to drown herself in a pond as the only escape from the wiles of the young gentleman. Richardson let his imagination play upon this story and spun it into a novel of four volumes. As he possessed the dramatic sense lacking in Defoe, he was able to give to his narrative the form of bourgeois comedy. He took the drowning incident for his climax of distress, introduced, in the character of Mr. Williams, a foil to Mr. B., and eventually wrought the conversion of his hero by placing in his hands the journal of Pamela which laid bare all her suffering for

virtue's sake. From the structural point of view, this dramatic manner was the novelty that Richardson at a stroke brought into fiction.

In his next novel, "Clarissa Harlowe," he did not go to fact directly for his story, but made such changes in the plot and characters of a "Pamela" as were necessary to turn it from a bourgeois comedy into a bourgeois tragedy. In the process of transformation, he left real life further and further behind him; never strong in the motivation of his characters, his art in this respect weakened with age until he had nothing to offer but portraits of ideal goodness and villainy-Clarissa, Lovelace, and that monstrous compound of all the Christian virtues, Sir Charles Grandison, who was the logical outcome of his method.

Fielding set about quite differently. In "Joseph Andrews" he adopted, as I have remarked in discussing that novel, a conventional type of dramatic structure as old as the Greek drama-what Aristotle called the procedure by "revolution and discovery"; but within that framework he put incidents and characters drawn from his own observation and sometimes from his most intimate experience; he kept close to men and women as he knew them, none of whom were without their weaknesses, and several of them were rogues. Rarely was there any idealizing. For this reason the characters depicted in "Joseph Andrews' were denounced by Richardson and others as "low." In reply to his critics, Fielding more than once admitted the truth of their strictures, but contended that, with here and there an exception, life is really "low," in the sense that few men are always governed by disinterested motives; that no writer can pursue a series of human actions and keep entirely clear of human frailties and vices. This cannot be gainsaid. It must, however, be admitted that the realistic aim in "Joseph Andrews"Fielding knew it as well as his critics-was obscured by his

parody of "Pamela" and his direct imitation of "Don Quixote." These secondary aims, which had led Fielding into exaggeration, burlesque, farce, and some horse-play, were mostly to disappear in "Tom Jones," a novel that was to present on a large scale the pure comedy of English life. In these essential aspects "Tom Jones" was to differ from "Joseph Andrews"; it was to be the fulfilment of that earlier design of a comic epic such as Homer might have written. The plot was to be artificial; but the characters were to be real men and women. Some account of Fielding's art at its maturity is the subject of this chapter.

Being a dramatist, Fielding could not conceive of a novel without an elaborate plot. Of itself the plot of "Tom Jones" was to him a source of amusement and just pride. In his assignment of the novel to Millar, he declared that the story had been "invented" as well as written by himself. Upon his plot, too, he depended for keeping his readers alert through six volumes. From the first they became interested in the mystery of Tom's parentage, and as they progressed, other mysteries rose one by one out of the narrative; and at last they were all cleared up by a succession of discoveries accomplished in perfect ease and with fine strokes of humour and social satire. It was almost as if one were present at the representation of a score of comedies, some pathetic, some burlesque, others possessing the gay wit of Vanbrugh or Congreve, and all united in a brilliant conclusion, where every character was rewarded in accordance with his deserts as Fielding understood them, except that the author was inclined to mercy rather than to strict justice in the case of hypocrites and villains. When the curtain was rung down, there was nothing left, in the language of the time, "for God Almighty and another world." The drama was all played out to the very end, where it exploded in a burst of mirth. Fielding's contemporaries had never seen anything so clever

off the stage. Lady Luxborough, to be sure, before she had read the novel entire, thought the plan "far-fetched"; and Richardson, who professed to have never read it at all, pronounced it "a rambling collection of waking dreams"; but to Allan Ramsay the painter, "Tom Jones" was above all other novels "an artful story," and average readers, like the daughters of Aaron Hill, were impressed by Mr. Fielding's "regular design" whereby the lives of all the characters, which had seemed to run in different ways, were eventually brought together "in an extremely moving close." So Coleridge, who exclaimed: "What a master of composition Fielding was! Upon my word, I think the Oedipus Tyrannus, the Alchemist, and Tom Jones the three most perfect plots ever planned.”

If Coleridge's exclamation cannot be accepted at full value, it is still true that "Tom Jones" has an excellent plot. The wonder is, not that the practised hand of a dramatist succeeded so well in the mere mechanism of his novel, but that the mechanism, except occasionally in the last volume, does not obtrude, that characters and incidents are inseparable, the one appearing to determine the other. This is all the more remarkable when we consider that "Tom Jones" is, to a large extent, a novel of reminiscences having as its motto, Mores Hominum Multorum; Fielding called it "a history," meaning thereby that many of its characters were drawn from real men and women, that many of its incidents had come within his observation. Not, of course, that each character had an exact original, nor that every real incident occurred just as it is given in the story, nor indeed that there was an absence of pure fiction. To take thus the most interesting experiences of a lifetime and adjust them, without the perversion of their essential truth, to the requirements of a rather intricate plot, was an artistic triumph of the first order. No one had ever done that before in a novel.

Obviously the course of a man's life is known in its entirety by no one except the man himself. He alone can tell of the people whom he meets, what they said and what occurred. The outsider must be content to pick up scraps of information here and there, and piece them together as best he can. It is therefore impossible to say just how far Fielding mixed fact with fiction in a novel that reads as if it were all true. Generalizations such as I have made in the preceding paragraphs on his procedure rest upon a partial, indeed a very fragmentary knowledge of his life. Still, enough of it is known to warrant them, if a biographer may infer the direction of the wind from the way in which a few straws blow.

Fielding himself, in the dedication to "Tom Jones" and elsewhere, encouraged the reader to identify Mr. Allworthy with Ralph Allen of Prior Park, and in another place emphasized the resemblance by drawing a sketch of his friend as an example of "the truly benevolent mind" which he designed to depict in the character. Allworthy's mind, he said in substance without mentioning the name, was but a copy of Allen's. True, he added that it was a copy of Lyttelton's and the Duke of Bedford's also; but the afterthought was by way of compliment; it was Allen's virtues that he wished to immortalize. Fielding, it should be observed, never quite asserted that Allworthy was a portrait of Allen; but when the novel was completed, the character displayed so many of his traits that it was everywhere regarded as such by persons who knew him. In Allworthy's kindliness, generous spirit, hospitality, and charities, they saw at once their friend at Prior Park.

It was a very close parallel when Fielding said of Allworthy: "Above all others, men of genius and learning shared the principal place in his favour; and in these he had much discernment: for though he had missed the advantage of a learned education, yet being blest with vast