It would have been useless for our Lord Jesus Christ to come like a king, in order to shine forth in His kingdom of holiness. But He came there appropriately in the glory of His own order.

It is most absurd to take offence at the lowliness of Jesus Christ, as if His lowliness were in the same order as the greatness which He came to manifest. It we consider this greatness. we shall see it to be so immense that we shall have no reason for being offended at a lowliness which is not of that order.

—Pensées

These are solemn words to bring to Fielding's novels; yet their import is essential to an understanding of his lowness. I have argued for his constant subversion of forms, his deliberate overturning of rigid stances or systematized attitudes. Even the attitudes he espouses and the characters he admires submit to this untiring alertness to pretense. It is not simply the hypocritical or affected he attacks but the insensible conversion of active feeling into formal structure. The lowness of Fielding's heroes—the fact that in one sense or another they are dispossessed or disinherited—thrusts them into a situation where they have no props of status. The nakedness of Joseph, as he lies at the roadside after the robbery, is itself an extreme instance of the unprotectedness of these characters.

Not only are the characters without recourse to position; they are, by their nature, unable to foresee the malice of others. This inability is both worldly folly and the wisdom of charity. Parson Adams, we are told, "never saw farther into people than they desired to let him." Hypocrites like Peter Pounce were "a sort of people whom Mr. Adams never saw through." Allworthy, of course, carries on the pattern, and Dr. Harrison is no more beyond it than Booth and Amelia. In contrast, the selfish count on finding their own deviousness in others and often as a result overshoot their mark, like Fainall and Mrs. Marwood in The Way of the World. Fielding is insisting upon the fact that goodness cannot be recognized unless it is first felt within. This is a counterpart of the traditional Christian view that one cannot know God until one loves Him. Until that love is felt, one's knowledge remains fixed in categories of another order. There is no way of grasping the order of charity, one might say, with the categories of the order of mind. The kind of awareness upon which characters act seems deficient when it is interpreted in the terms of another order. Dr. Harrison charges Booth with abusing him by calling him wise: "You insinuated slily," says the doctor, "that I was wise, which, as the world understands the phrase, I should be ashamed of, and my comfort is that no one can accuse me justly of it" (Amelia, 9, 4). Characters speak to each other in foreign tongues, although the words they use are the same. It is Fielding himself who can entertain all these levels of discourse at once, who can perceive how men think in each order of being, and who can embody a harmony of orders within himself.

Fielding's strategy is to dissociate orders—to give us figures who upset our conventional expectations of "goodness and innocence." In the preface to Joseph Andrews he sets forth a doctrine of the "comic epic in prose" that steers a course between the conventional high heroism of romance and the monstrous parodies of burlesque. He offers us "low" characters, and among them, "the most glaring in the whole," Parson Adams, "a character of perfect simplicity" whose goodness of heart "will recommend him to the good-natured." As Stuart M. Tave has shown (in The Amiable Humorist, Chicago, 1960), Fielding's profession to write "in imitation of the manner of Cervantes, author of Don Quixote" is deceptive to the modern reader, for Fielding is one of the pioneers in the gradual recognition of the dignity of the foolish Quixote. Parson Adams is a challenge to the reader to discern an essential goodness within a sententious, vainly bookish, shortsighted country clergyman. It is only near the close of the novel that he can rise to the dignity of self-assertion in his reply to Lady Booby:

Madam … I know not what your ladyship means by the terms master and service. I am in the service of a master who will never discard me for doing my duty.… Whilst my conscience is pure, I shall never fear what man can do unto me. (4, 2)

The contrasts that run through Joseph Andrews are less sharp than those of Jonathan Wild, the dissociations less overtly satirical and emphatic. The strain of pastoral allows Fielding to use his setting as commentary; it reaches its culmination in Mr. Wilson's garden, where the freshness and vitality of the country (already so evident in Joseph and Fanny) take on dignity and serenity:

No parterres, no fountains, no statues, embellished this little garden. Its only ornament was a short walk, shaded on each side by a filbert-hedge, with a small alcove at one end; whither in hot weather the gentleman and his wife used to retire and divert themselves with their children, who played in the walk before them. But though vanity had no votary in this little spot, here was variety of fruit, and every thing useful for the kitchen; which was abundantly sufficient to catch the admiration of Adams, who told the gentleman, he had certainly a good gardener. Sir, answered he, that gardener is now before you: whatever you see here is the work solely of my own hands. (3, 4)

When the visitors leave, Adams declares "that this was the manner in which the people had lived in the golden age," an echo of his obsession with classical learning, but also of Pope on pastoral poetry: "pastoral is an image of what they call the golden age. So that we are not to describe our shepherds as shepherds at this day really are, but as they may be conceived then to have been, when the best of men followed the employment." What gives Joseph Andrews its striking quality is that Fielding mixes this Virgilian note with the Theocritean of Gay's mock pastorals. The low energies of nature are given their animal vigor (though carefully distinguished from the urgencies of Lady Booby or Slipslop, let alone Beau Didapper), but they are made continuous with the warmth and generosity of a pastoral golden age and of the Christian charity that has drawn so much of its imagery from the life of the shepherd.

In Tom Jones the pastoral motive is also present, with the mock pastoral centering in Molly Seagrim and Squire Western. Western is the most startling creation in the novel; perhaps the finest English comic character to have emerged after Falstaff. He is a great baby, frankly selfish and uncontrolled, imperious in his whims, cruelly thoughtless, with the tyranny of a demanding child but none of the capacity to spin out of his appetites subtle schemes of domination or revenge, like Blifil and Lady Bellaston. When he bursts into the London scene, he brings with him the simplicity of the flesh at its most fleshly. He breaks through the code of honor, that most elaborate and attractive of worldly substitutes for goodness, as he breaks through the delicate modesty of Sophia ("To her, boy, to her, go to her"). Early in the novel we see his simplicity achieve the same ends as real astuteness. Thwackum and Square compete in praising Blifil, who has maliciously released Sophia's bird; Square sees in him another Brutus, Thwackum an exemplary Christian. "I don't know what you mean, either of you," Western breaks in, "by right and wrong. To take away my girl's bird was wrong in my opinion" (4, 4). And it is he who defends Tom's effort to recapture the bird for Sophia. "I am sure I don't understand a word of this," he says to Square and Thwackum, still debating their moral doctrine.

It may be learning and sense for aught I know; but you shall never persuade me into it. Pox! you have neither of you mentioned a word of that poor lad who deserves to be commended; to venture breaking his neck to oblige my girl was a generous-spirited action; I have learning enough to see that. D n me, here's Tom's health! I shall love the boy for it the longest day I have to live. (4, 4)

It is only to be expected that Squire Western cannot sustain this noble intention. He has as little mind as any man can have; he lives in bursts of enthusiasm, maudlin affection, barbarous willfulness, sheer physicality. He pairs off with his sister—she all Whig politics and would-be townish smartness, he the typical hard-drinking Tory country squire. But Fielding does more with him than that. He uses him to embody animal energy without either the selfish cunning that builds upon appetites in some or the generous charity that fuses with appetite (and transforms it) in others. Tom stands between Western and Allworthy, able to participate in the worlds of both—an innocent carnality in Western and a rational charity in Allworthy—and to bring them together. It would be hard, in fact, to conceive of Tom without the presence of both Allworthy and Western in the novel.

One should observe as well how Jenny Jones, who is something of a prig at the outset, mellows into the generous, if irregular, Mrs. Waters of the later parts—in marked contrast to the vain and shallow Harriet Fitzpatrick. The progression of Tom's temptresses is significant. Molly Seagrim is coarse but pretentious, Lady Bellaston is refined and vindictive. Mrs. Waters strikes a balance between Molly's unmitigated (and slightly corrupt) low and Lady Bellaston's inverted high. She is capable—in the case of Tom—of a robust and unfastidious appetite:

The beauty of Jones highly charmed her eye; but as she could not see his heart, she gave herself no concern about it. She could feast heartily at the table of love, without reflecting that some other already had been, or hereafter might be, feasted with the same repast. (9, 6)

But she is also capable—in the case of Northerton—of "that violent and apparently disinterested passion of love, which seeks only the good of its object" (9, 7). Fielding allows her only a strong sensuality in her relations with Tom, but he makes her a woman who squares her passions with her conscience more boldly than the hypocrites around her. She defends, in Allworthy's presence, an attachment that has constancy without legal sanctions, and she values Tom's virtue at a greater rate than his freedom from vices. And, all the while, she retains her deep gratitude to Allworthy and recognizes in his goodness something that "savored more of the divine than human nature" (18, 8). Fielding discriminates carefully between moral laxity and moral obliviousness—or, as Coleridge puts in, between what a man does and what he is.

Amelia is a weaker novel than Tom Jones, but it is clearly moving in a new direction. The fact that Billy Booth has a family depending upon him makes his irregularities less appealing than Tom's. His only sexual infidelity takes place at the opening of the novel, before our concern for his family has grown too strong. For the rest of the story he is suffering from remorse and the threat of Miss Matthews's revenge; we see more of the hangover than the intoxication. He is guilty of less attractive vices than Tom's; he is vain about keeping a coach, and he gambles disastrously when his family is near starvation. He is also older and shabbier than Tom; and he can do little for himself in the course of the novel. The center of attention is Amelia, his wife. Fielding makes their marriage the object of the world's attack, and Booth's moral dependence upon Amelia gives the marriage all the more significance. Amelia is as close as Fielding comes to a pure embodiment of the order of charity; she has traces of vanity, and she is sometimes handled with irony, but she is never made so ridiculous as Mrs. Heartfree. Still, Fielding seems to have gone back to the Heartfrees, that "family of love," reworked them in a new way, and perhaps offered them finally as a further qualification of the ethical doctrines of Tom Jones.

It is Amelia's Christian goodness—selfless, warm, readily forgiving—that sets the tone of the book. We hardly see Booth acting well on his own—except on the battlefield—as we see Tom Jones refuting the Gulliver-like misanthropy of the Man of the Hill, keeping Partridge in check, advising Nightingale, resisting the kind proposal of Mrs. Hunt. In this novel the generosity of goodness is much more strictly limited to the forgiveness of Amelia and the benevolence of that harsher, less amiable version of Adams, Dr. Harrison. And goodness is heavily beleaguered; under the stress of difficulties, Amelia tells her children hard truths. Good people will show love, "but there are more bad people, and they will hate you for your goodness" (4, 3).

More than this, Fielding brings to the surface and faces what he cannot escape in the Heartfrees; the sentimentalism of Booth and Amelia in their innocence. The book opens with the savage injustices perpetrated by Justice Thrasher and the moral chaos of the prison itself. But it moves on at once to the two narratives of Miss Matthews and Booth. Miss Matthews is a brilliant instance of sentimental vanity; she is capable of stabbing her betrayer, and we have few doubts about her strength of will, but she voluptuates in a vision of herself as the creature of helpless passion. She can describe her method quite coolly in the case of her father. The kind old man had once caused Miss Matthews to miss a ball, and she fanned this memory until it could be revived at will in full strength. "When any tender idea intruded into my bosom, I immediately raised this phantom of an injury in my imagination, and it considerably lessened the fury of that sorrow which I should have otherwise felt for the loss of so good a father, who died within a few months of my departure from him" (1, 9). As Booth tells his own story, with torrents of tears, he inflames Miss Matthews's passion for him; and it bursts out in her brilliantly funny interruptions. But he is totally involved in his tale of how Amelia recovered from the accident wherein "her lovely nose was beat all to pieces."

Amelia's nose has become famous because Fielding failed, in the first edition of the novel, to make explicitly clear that it was restored, and the image of a noseless Amelia danced before critics' eyes. Even if we allow for an unfortunate oversight, the choice of a nose seems singularly inept. Amelia's suffering consists of having to hear false friends say that "she will never more turn up her nose at her betters"; and surely no author of Fielding's skill brought this kind of difficulty upon himself unintentionally. We can pity Amelia, but we cannot take her accident with quite the solemnity that Booth does. There is an undernote of laughter in more than Miss Matthews's sublime remarks ("a cottage with the man one loves, is a palace"). And there is surely laughter as well as pathos in Booth's account of his departure from Amelia:

clinging round my neck, she cried, "Farewell, farewell forever; for I shall never, never see you any more." At which words the blood entirely forsook her lovely cheeks, and she became a lifeless corpse in my arms.

Amelia continued so long motionless, that the doctor, as well as Mrs. Harris, began to be under the most terrible apprehensions; so they informed me afterwards, for at that time I was incapable of making any observation. I had indeed very little more use of my senses than the dear creature whom I supported. At length, however, we were all delivered from our fears; and life again visited the loveliest mansion that human nature ever afforded it. (3, 2)

Booth's sentimentalism helps explain his belief that man could act only "from the force of that passion which was uppermost in his mind, and could do no otherwise" (1, 3). Just as his sister Nancy dies, he learns that he may lose Amelia to someone else. "I now soon perceived how superior my love for Amelia was to every passion; poor Nancy's idea disappeared in a moment; I quitted the lifeless corpse, over which I had shed a thousand tears, left the care of her funeral to others, and posted, I may almost say flew, back to Amelia.…" (2, 5). It is necessary for Colonel James, his superior officer, to warn him—when he seems dangerously wounded—against going back to Amelia. James can appreciate "the comfort of expiring in her arms," but he points out the cruelty, too: "You would not wish to purchase any happiness at the price of so much pain to her" (2, 5). The danger of Booth's temperament is obvious; as Fielding says, he is "in his heart an extreme well-wisher to religion … yet his notions of it [are] very slight and uncertain." He comes close to the error Dr. Johnson found in his friend Savage: "he mistook the love for the practice of virtue, and was indeed not so much a good man as the friend of goodness."

Amelia, far more than Booth, grows stronger under the stress of suffering. Fielding has designed the novel so that, at each point, we see Amelia—so much a human embodiment of pure charity—assailed by those who cannot understand her nature. She lives with a landlady who is little more than a procuress. She is tried by the designs of two rakes who have no comprehension of the sanctity of "wedded love." When Booth, too, seems to have lost all sense of the meaning of Amelia's love, she is close to despair. Amelia can, however, be freed from the temptations of sentimentality by devoting herself to others. When she joins Booth "she could not so far command herself as to refrain from many sorrowful exclamations against the hardships of their destiny; but when she saw the effect they had upon Booth she stifled her rising grief [and] forced a little cheerfulness into her countenance" (12, 2).

Fielding allows Amelia's purity of character to emerge from the test of ridicule. Amelia is constantly seen in contrast with Mrs. Atkinson, who is good but vain and touchy, and whose story of her life exhibits a certain amount of partiality and self-justification. The angelic selflessness of Amelia is her primary quality, and it can afford to be seen in lights that make others ridiculous. Amelia's pathos is heightened by the very kind of extended simile that was once used to overwhelm a Deborah Wilkins or to mock a naíve Tom Jones; Amelia's quiet goodness can wear it with grace.