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Summer and Miss Bridget Allworthy. It would have been as easy to do that as to kill off the young man with the smallpox. By a mere flourish of the pen, he might have removed a stain from Tom and his mother, and kept his morality on a high plane. To say all this is but to restate the old quarrel of romance against realism. Fielding took over from fiction and the drama a hackneyed type of mystery and gave it fresh interest by correlating it with English life in the country. As a realist, this was the only course open to him. "Tom Jones" might be rewritten as 米 a romance, but it would then cease to be "Tom Jones"; there could then be no Bridget Allworthy of flesh and blood; and with her would be washed out several other characters and all that social satire centering about her frailty and that of the Captain Blifil who became her husband.

Nowhere does Fielding's irony cut deeper than in those passages where he relates the attempts of the amiable hypocrites to visit upon Tom the sins of his parents, unless it be in the final chapter where Parson Supple is married to Mrs. Waters, and Partridge to Miss Molly Seagrim. The entire portrayal of Tom Jones is of course irony. It is the art of "Jonathan Wild" and numberless comedies refined to a greater degree of subtlety. A boy, whose moral code is of necessity defective, is sent out into the world and receives a temporary smirch from the contact. But he quickly learns his lesson and becomes in the end a most respectable country squire. Never does Fielding set the seal of his approval upon the boy's conduct as a whole. On the contrary, he condemns much of it.

Throughout the novel, the author himself is always present in the full maturity of his powers. There is no dramatic aloofness such as wé associate with French literary art. "No man," said Fielding in agreement with Horace, "can paint a distress well, which he doth not feel while he is painting it," and "I never make my reader laugh heartily

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but where I have laughed before him." That is, the characters were to Fielding real men and women in whose joys and sorrows he shared as if they were his own friends or acquaintances. His presence is felt quite as much as Tom's, for example, when the young man, confronted by a duel, has to reconcile the code of honour with the teachings of Scripture. Fielding doubtless smiled there with his reader when Tom's scruples were quieted by the assurance, coming from a parson over a bowl of punch, that a certain latitude might be granted to a gentleman, or that there must be a mistake, somewhere or other, in the translation or in the understanding of the command that we should love our enemies and do no murder.

Likewise, though the plot has its logic, Fielding is never a detached spectator merely interested in the solution of his problem; he thrusts himself in with remarks, anecdotes, and disquisitions, becoming a sort of ubiquitous character whose appearance anywhere on the scene is conditioned by neither time nor place. Consequently the action is often suspended in order that the author may speak in propria persona, and pass sentence, as a Bow Street justice ought, on the conduct of his characters. This procedure Fielding likened to the parabasis of ancient comedy, where the chorus, between the Acts as it were, turned to the audience and addressed it directly. In fulfilment of his design, he comments on the follies of Tom Jones, foreshadows the punishment that will be meted out to them, and warns his young readers against imitation. If we look for a moral, here it is: "Prudence and circumspection are necessary even to the best of men. They are indeed as it were a guard to virtue, without which she can never be safe." According to his temper, one will like or dislike this kind of novel which "Tom Jones" established in English fiction. If we wish to do our own moralizing, we must shun Harry Fielding, the grandson of an archdeacon. And

yet it may be worth while to listen to a preacher who turns the light of his experience and humour on the devious ways of mankind.

It is right to consider apart from these casual parabasisopenings those long initial chapters to the successive books which were eliminated in the first French translation of "Tom Jones" and which some readers still pass by. They have little or no direct connection with the story, and so their presence may be explained rather than justified. In them Fielding, saturated with Cicero, Shaftesbury, and the New Testament, elaborated piecemeal a theory of morals based upon "goodness of heart," and out of his wide reading and practice in the drama set forth a complete art of fiction. They are essays, which have less finished analogues in many leading articles that Fielding had written for his newspapers. In Fielding's view, the essays lent dignity to the novel, which in his day was despised as a literary form. Those dealing with conduct supplied the reader with an extensive background of morality with which to judge the behaviour of the characters; those dealing with the novelist's craft described the "new province of writing" which he had discovered. The novel of real life was then in its infancy. No one before Fielding had ever written a novel comparable with his in its reliance upon contemporary manners and the facts of human nature. He accordingly felt it necessary to state in clear words his general design, his moral code, and his method of procedure with plot and characters. It would not have served his purpose to have published these essays by themselves; in order to gain the attention which he wished for them, they must be bound with his novel. Had Fielding lived in the nineteenth century, there might have been no introductory chapters. He could have reserved for the great quarterlies what he had to say on the art of fiction. What he did say in the only place at his command, we now read not be

cause the essays are an organic part of the story but because they embody profound observations on art and life united with matchless irony and humour.

If either the story or the introductory chapters-one and not the other-were to be lost, many would be unable to decide which could go with the less pain. On this point George Eliot was uncertain, but she lamented the departure of those Georgian days "when summer afternoons were spacious, and the clock ticked slowly in the winter evenings"; when there was leisure to listen to the digressions of Fielding, "when he seems to bring his armchair to the proscenium and chat with us in all the lusty ease of his fine English."* Scott had no doubt about his choice: he would have sacrificed the novel, despite his high regard for it, to the essays. "Those critical introductions," he declared, "which rather interrupt the course of the story, and the flow of the interest at the first perusal, are found, on a second or third, the most entertaining chapters of the whole work." It would be difficult to imagine "Tom Jones" without its initial chapters; and were they removed, I suspect that one would find it quite another book. *Middlemarch," Bk. II, Ch. XV.

CHAPTER XX

THE MIDDLESEX MAGISTRATE

I

THE RIOTS OF 1749

The man who wrote "Tom Jones" was already presiding as principal justice over the Bow Street police court, before which came business from all parts of the metropolis. By Fielding's friends, the position was regarded as lucrative as well as honourable, being worth, if the justice insisted on his full fees, a thousand pounds a year. Relying too much upon this assurance, Fielding entered upon his duties in the winter of 1748-1749, and began sending thieves and footpads to the Westminster jail where Tom Jones had spent an unhappy week. Among his first cases recorded in the newspapers, is the following from "The St. James's Evening Post" for December 8-10, 1748:

"Yesterday John Salter was committed to the Gatehouse by Henry Fielding, Esq; of Bow Street, Covent Garden, formerly Sir Thomas De Veil's, for feloniously taking out of a Bureau in the House of the Rev. Mr. Dalton, a Quantity of Money found upon him."

The man whose bureau was robbed may have been the Rev. John Dalton, known for his sermons and verses and for a sentimental friendship with Lady Luxborough and the Duchess of Somerset. He was a canon of Worcester, and the rector of St. Mary-at-Hill in London.

In a more serious case, given in the same newspaper a week later, the culprit bore the surname of Fielding's hero;

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