SOURCE: "Fielding: The Comic Reality of Fiction," in The First English Novelists: Essays in Understanding, edited by J. M. Armistead, Tennessee Studies in Literature, Vol. 29, University of Tennessee Press, 1985, pp. 109-42.

Fielding's achievement in his four novels is immense. Joseph Andrews (1742) is not only the first English comic novel but the Declaration of Independence for all fiction. Jonathan Wild (1743), though imperfectly, turns Augustan satire into a novel. Tom Jones (1749) supersedes and absorbs the drama as the dominant form and, more significantly, culminates the Augustan world of poetry and Pope in the new poetics of prose. Amelia (1751) signals the eighteenth century's sombre midday equinox as its undercurrent of sentiment and uncertainty wells up through the cool neoclassic crust. Amelia is the first novel of marriage, and it explores a new and modern indeterminacy of character. Notwithstanding Defoe's and Richardson's achievement in fictionalizing the lonely struggle of modernity, Fielding proclaimed the truth of fiction as he gave the novel form. He also gave it mystery with the romantic, and psychic, discovery of identity, acceptance, and success. He gave it its omniscient narrator and comprehensive scope.

Fielding is not of Defoe's and Richardson's rising middle class, where the individual makes himself and the future, where the underdog's struggles are no longer comic. Fielding is a young aristocrat down on his uppers.¹ His is the Augustan perspective, a sophisticated detachment that staves off evils and passionate dogmas through satire and irony, seeking a rational balance between violent extremes. His allegiance is to hierarchy in orderly rank. Like Swift, he prefers Ancients to Moderns. Like Pope, he perceives God's providential creation with calm optimism, and amusement.

He elects himself a Scriblerian. His first major effort, his anonymous The Masquerade (1728), a satire in Swiftian tetrameters, is "By LEMUEL GULLIVER, Poet Laureate to the King of Lilliput." Soon, with his eminent cousin, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, he is writing a burlesque of Pope's recent Dunciad (1728). His first stage satire and ballad opera, The Author's Farce (1730), is "Written by Scriblerus Secundus," emulating the Dunciad in a trip to the underworld of the Goddess of Nonsense. Tom Thumb (1730), which imitates Swift's Lilliputian-Brobdingnagian contrasts and, in its final form, Pope's mock-scholarly preface and footnotes, is also by Scriblerus Secundus, who becomes H. Scriblerus Secundus, with Fielding's initial, in the expanded Tragedy of Tragedies (1730). The Grub-Street Opera (173 1) is by Scriblerus Secundus in all three versions. In short, Fielding set out to emulate the three Augustan masterpieces, all deriving from the brief heyday of the Scriblerus Club (February to June 1714): Swift's Gulliver's Travels (1726), Gay's Beggar's Opera (1728), Pope's Dunciad (in three books, 1728). As Sherburn suggests ("Dunciad"), Pope confirmed the alliance by borrowing back from Fielding's farces the kaleidoscopic court of Dulness in his fourth book (1742, 1743).

The theater was Fielding's apprenticeship.² It gave him stock characters and situations, repeated until they became universal types. It gave him a knack for scene and dialogue, the balanced structural arch of Tom Jones, and the long, downward comic slant of fortune that thrusts suddenly upward like a reversed check mark. It gave him social satire and comedy of manners aimed at a serious point.

Fielding's first play, Love in Several Masques (1728), written at twenty-one, forecasts Tom Jones in surprising detail. It is intricately plotted. Its hero is Tom Merital, a meritorious rake, a preliminary Tom Jones. Tom's wealthy lady love is an orphan guarded by an aunt and uncle—a stock preliminary Sophia, to be married against her will to save her from the rake. The heroines speak up for the hero, and the aunts respond.

Lady Trap: I have wondered how a creature of such principles could spring up in a family so noted for the purity of its women. (II.vi)

Mrs. Western: You are the first—yes, Miss Western, you are the first of your Name who ever entertained so groveling a Thought. A Family so noted for the Prudence of its Women.… (VI.v)

Lady Trap is also an Amorous Matron—the first Lady Booby, Mrs. Slipslop, Mrs. Waters, and especially Lady Bellaston, who, like Lady Trap, has bad breath: "Brandy and Assafoetida, by Jupiter," cries kissing Tom.

Here, at the play's mathematical center, the heroine catches Tom just as Sophia will discover her Tom and Mrs. Waters at central Upton. We also have the stock comic maid, saucy and ingenious, who will become Mrs. Honour. Finally, we have Wisemore, a junior and sourer Allworthy, a virtuous young country squire who introduces Fielding's perpetual contrast with the wicked city and represents the play's moral center, a bookread idealist whom his mistress twice calls Don Quixote. Wisemore will also transform comically into Parson Adams.

In his six rehearsal-farces—no one else wrote more than one—Fielding discovered himself as parodic satirist. In The Author's Farce (1730), he also discovered his autobiographical authorship of comic romances, a comic double self-portraiture in hero and author alike. Harry Luckless, the "author," is young playwright Harry Fielding, luckless with Mr. Colley Cibber of Drury Lane, who appears in no less than two comic versions and two more allusive thrusts. Harry loves Harriot, in the twinnish way of romance, whom his nonentity denies him—courtly love in a London roominghouse. Then Harry stages his show in the Popean realm of Nonsense and becomes Fielding commenting on his work as it goes. In the giddy finale, a pawned jewel proves Luckless a farcical foundling, lost heir of a fabulous kingdom, who may now marry and live happily ever after as Henry I. Fielding's blithe comedy distances his wish for recognition, the universal yearning typical of romance, as we simultaneously fulfill and recognize our fancies in the way of Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones.

Fielding eventually put nine commenting authors on the stage—seven in the rehearsal-farces (two in Pasquin) plus two authorial inductors like Gay's in The Beggar's Opera—breaking the bonds of drama to reach for narration. Many of their comments Fielding will repeat less facetiously in his novels. Medly, in The Historical Register (1737), Fielding's last, comes particularly close:

Why, sir, my design is to ridicule the vicious and foolish customs of the age … I hope to expose the reigning follies in such a manner, that men shall laugh themselves out of them before they feel that they are touched.

Fielding says of Tom Jones (in the Dedication):

I have employed all the Wit and Humour of which I am Master in the following History; wherein I have endeavoured to laugh Mankind out of their Favourite Follies and Vices.

But The Historical Register brought down Sir Robert Walpole's wrath, and the Licensing Act (1737) shut Fielding from the stage. He made himself a lawyer and followed the circuits along the roads of his future novels. He turned to journalism with the Champion, the opposition newspaper backed by Lord Chesterfield and Lord Lyttelton, Fielding's Eton school-friend. He is now "Capt. Hercules Vinegar, of Hockley in the Hole," slaying the Hydras of political corruption like the popular cudgel player and boxing promoter of that name. Like Pope, who had declared himself "TO VIRTUE ONLY AND HER FRIENDS, A FRIEND" in his first Imitation of Horace (1733), Fielding is the champion of England against Walpole's government, the future essayist as novelist who will dedicate Tom Jones to Lyttelton, believing that it will serve as "a Kind of Picture, in which Virtue becomes as it were an Object of Sight."

Fielding's religious concern deepens in the Champion. We can almost see Shamela and Joseph Andrews accumulating. In the spring of 1740, Fielding pauses in his political championship to write four thoughtful essays about the materialism and vanity of the clergy and the necessity of humble charity. The first (March 29) is untitled. Then in the next issue (April Fool's Day, by luck or design), he satirizes Walpole, along with a new book by "the most inimitable Laureat," none other than An Apology for the Life of Mr. Colley Cibber, Comedian, Written by Himself Cibber had been a standing joke as political sycophant and bad writer ever since Walpole had made him poet laureate in 1730. Moreover, Cibber, from his side of the political fence, had in his Apology called Fielding a mudslinger and failed writer. So Fielding interrupts his religious meditation here and returns in several papers to ridicule the vanity and grammar of his old personal and political opponent, whom he will enthrone as an egotistical fraud in Shamela and Joseph Andrews, as Pope would also in the Dunciad. Fielding then continues with his religious essays under the ironic title "THE APOLOGY FOR THE CLERGY,—continued."

As Cibber and the clergy mix in Fielding's mind, another new book appears: A Short Account of God's Dealings with the Reverend Mr. George Whitefield (1740), written by himself in what would seem Cibberian conceit at God's personal attention. It stirred a controversy between the new Methodist (and old Calvinist) belief that only faith and God's grace warranted Heaven as against the doctrine that "Faith without works is dead" (Battestin, Moral Basis, 18), which Fielding had asserted in the Champion. Whitefield's Dealings would become Shamela's favorite reading, as Fielding mocks Pamela's egotistical piety, and Parson Williams espouses spiritual grace to release the body for pleasure.³ Fielding turns these negatives positive when he transforms Williams into Adams, who, with Methodist John Wesley, prefers a virtuous Turk to a tepid Christian (Woods, "Fielding," 264). Adams is a lovingly comic portrait of a Whitefieldian enthusiast, who shames the fatness of orthodoxy and nevertheless condemns Whitefield's enthusiastic grace:

"Sir," answered Adams, "if Mr. Whitfield had carried his Doctrine no farther… I should have remained, as I once was, his Well-Wisher. I am myself as great an Enemy to the Luxury and Splendour of the Clergy as he can be." (I.xvii)

But selfless charity was the center of Fielding's religion, and Whitefield stood ready with Cibber to coalesce with pious Pamela, when she arrived in the fall, as symbols of meretricious vanity and hypocrisy.

Pamela: Or, Virtue Rewarded, the "real" letters of a serving girl, prefaced by twenty-eight pages of letters praising its moral excellence, is really An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews (1741)—so proclaims Fielding's title page in the typography of Cibber's Apology, with "Conny Keyber" as author: Keyber being the standard political slur at Cibber's Danish ancestry. Parson Tickletext, who can dream of nothing but Pamela undressed, sends a copy of the new best seller to Parson Oliver so that he too can preach it from the pulpit (as had actually been done in London). Oliver tells Tickletext the book is a sham, doctored by a clergyman who can make black white. The girl is really Shamela, a calculating guttersnippet from London working in a neighboring parish. Richardson's Mr. B. is really Squire Booby, his busybody Parson Williams is really an adulterous poacher of Booby's hares and wife. He sends Tickletext the real letters—Fielding's breezy parodies of Richardson's, which concentrate on his two bedroom scenes, now lifted to peaks of hilarity as Fielding brilliantly condenses two volumes to some fifty pages.

Fielding's title page tells us immediately that something has happened to fiction, now allusively declaring and enjoying in the Augustan way the fictive pretense Defoe and Richardson had pretended real. English fiction has become literate. Here, suddenly, is a book that—like Joyce's Ulysses, let us say—generates its being, and its meaning, from other literature as it gets its hold on life. By declaring his letters true to tell us ironically they are not—precisely the comic pose Cervantes shares with his readers—Fielding asserts both the validity and power of fiction, which he will proclaim in Joseph Andrews. Shameta is probably the best parody anywhere, but it is also a broadly Augustan burlesque of social ills—moral, political, religious, philosophical—in the true Scriblerian mode (Rothstein, 389).

In naming "Conny Keyber" the author, Fielding concentrates his inclusive satire in a bawdy sexual symbol. "Conny" merges Cibber's first name with that of the Rev. Mr. Conyers Middleton, whose dedication to his Life of Cicero (February 1741, less than two months before Shamela) Fielding closely parodies as a dedication by Conny Keyber to "Miss Fanny, &c." Middleton had dedicated his Cicero to John, Lord Hervey, Walpole's propagandist; and Hervey, an effeminate bisexual, had acquired the epithet "Fanny" from Pope's first Imitation of Horace (1733), where Pope had saucily Anglicized Horace's Fannius, a bad poet and a homosexual. Now, as Rothstein notes (387), Conny, coney, and cony (for "rabbit") were all pronounced "cunny"—a version of the still-prevailing obscenity for the female pudendum, and Fanny and et cetera were both slang terms for the same (382).

In parodying one of Richardson's introductory letters praising Pamela, Fielding writes, "it will do more good than the C y have done harm in the World," wherein one may read both the clergy and the cunny of Fielding's satirical attack. Later, Shamela reports that her husband gave her a toast so wicked she can't write it and that Mrs. Jewkes then "drank the dear Monysyllable; I don't understand that Word, but I believe it is baudy." Williams and Booby likewise drink to and joke about her "et cetera." In short, Cibber, Hervey, Middleton, Richardson, and Pamela, "that young Politician" named on the title page, are all moneysyllabic prostitutes in their various ways. Fielding's slyest touch is in quoting directly another introductory letter telling Richardson he had "stretched out this diminutive mere Grain of Mustard-seed (a poor Girl's little, innocent, Story) into a resemblance of Heaven, which the best of good Books has compared it to." Fielding alters only the parenthesis of this extravagant Biblical allusion (Matt. 13:31): "has stretched out this diminutive mere Grain of Mustard-seed (a poor Girl's little, &c.) into a Resemblance of Heaven."

Shamela sharpened Fielding's belief, to be formulated in Joseph Andrews, that comedy can be both realistic and morally instructive. No serving maid was ever named Pamela, after the romantic princess in Sidney's recently republished Arcadia, nor wrote such letters, if she could write at all. The realistic idiom of Shamela and the housekeepers, and even their calculating morality, amusingly point up the falsity in Richardson's idea of virtue. Tearful Pamela, proud of her dead mistress's clothes, becomes Shamela, wanting to set herself up with Parson Williams, since "I have got a good many fine Cloaths of the Old Put my Mistress's, who died a whil ago." Her language rings colloquially true and yet mimics Richardson at every turn. Shamela actually seems more honest, and Mrs. Jewkes more wholesome, than their prototypes. Nothing seems more typical of Fielding's realistic countryside than Booby riding in his coach with Shamela and catching Williams poaching. Yet as Williams rides off in the coach with Booby's bride, we realize that this is all a mime of an episode in Pamela where we find Williams walking, book in hand, at the meadowside; he is met, reconciled, and finally taken into the coach by Mr. B. with his Pamela.

The close parody of Richardson's bedroom scenes taught Fielding the high comedy of sex. The amorous scenes in his plays are heavy. The ladies know what's what. But Shamela shimmers with the comic hypocrisies of civilized sex. Pamela wants—not simply for prestige—to submit to her master, but everything she believes in prevents her desire from even breaking surface. Richardson, simply to keep his story going, has her stay when she wants to go, writing into his tale this elemental sexual hypocrisy that gives it the mystic dimension of Beauty and the Beast. In burlesquing it, Fielding learned what it was. His stage ladies wish to appear proper only in the eyes of others; Lady Booby and Mrs. Slipslop of Joseph Andrews wish to appear proper in their own eyes as well. A great deal of the comedy in Fielding's novels comes from the universal struggle of hidden passion against propriety or, on the masculine side, of passion against the best of intentions. Shamela, more than anything before, brought this to the center of Fielding's comic vision.

Parson Oliver, another step toward Fielding's commenting author, decrying Richardson's lascivious images and meretricious rewards, spells out the moral. He declares the future lesson of Tom Jones: Prudence must rule. Pamela, he says, encourages young men to impetuous matches that will "sacrifice all the solid Comforts of their Lives, to a very transcient Satisfaction of a Passion." In Tom Jones, Fielding will seek "to make good Men wise" by instilling in them "that solid inward Comfort of Mind, which is the sure Companion of Innocence and Virtue." Oliver writes of "the secure Satisfaction of a good Conscience, the Approbation of the Wise and Good … and the extatick Pleasure of contemplating, that their Ways are acceptable to the Great Creator of the Universe." "But for Worldly Honours," Oliver continues, "they are often the Purchase of Force and Fraud." Tom Jones cries out concerning Blifil, who has defrauded him:

What is the poor Pride arising from a magnificent House, a numerous Equipage, a splendid Table, and from all the other Advantages or Appearances of Fortune, compared to the warm, solid Content, the swelling Satisfaction, the thrilling Transports, and the exulting Triumphs, which a good Mind enjoys, in the Contemplation of a generous, virtuous, noble, benevolent Action? (XII.x)

Shamela 's success made Fielding a novelist; he gives Pamela another parodic turn in Joseph Andrews (1742) and also finally brings Cervantes to English life. At last, Fielding finds his authorial voice in the playful ironies of Cervantes and Scarron:

Now the Rake Hesperus had called for his Breeches… In vulgar Language, it was Evening when Joseph attended his Lady's Orders. (I.viii)

And now, Reader, taking these Hints along with you, you may, if you please, proceed to the Sequel of this our true History. (III.i)

He now ironically holds up Pamela and Cibber as consummate models for the kind of biography he is writing. He extends the joke of Shamela in its next inevitable mutation, transposing the sexes for the more ludicrous effect. Pamela Andrews, who had become Shamela Andrews, will now become Pamela's equally virtuous, and hence more comically prudish, brother: a footman named Joseph, after the biblical hero who resisted Potiphar's wife. Lady Booby now pursues her servant—Squire Booby is her nephew—as Mr. B. pursued his. Richardson's Mrs. Jewkes, "a broad, squat, pursy, fat thing" who drinks, becomes Mrs. Slipslop, who also reflects Cervantes's grotesque chambermaid, Maritornes,⁴ a libidinous little dwarf with shoulders somewhat humped and a breath with "a stronger Hogoe than stale Venison" (I.iii.2). Mrs. Jewkes's salacious lesbianism becomes Slipslop's comic passion for Joseph.⁵ Fielding even dares to name his heroine after the obscene "Miss Fanny" of Shamela, rinsing the name clean without losing all of its comic pubic potential. In fact, Fielding's Beau Didapper, who attempts to rape the purified Fanny, is none other than Lord Hervey again (Battestin, "Hervey"), the original "Miss Fanny," as if everything of Shamela must be converted to new uses. Finally, Mr. B.'s curate Williams becomes, through the wringer of Shamela, Lady Booby's curate Adams.

Adams is Fielding's triumph. At twenty-one, as a student at Leyden, Fielding had tried to naturalize Cervantes in his Don Quixote in England—eventually a ballad opera (1734). Now, in Joseph Andrews ("Written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes") he finally creates a thoroughly English Quixote, a country parson drawn from the very life—from Fielding's friend from childhood, the absentminded parson William Young. Like Cervantes, Fielding comically confronts the ideal quest of romance with the satiric picaresque tour of society. Adams is his comic knight, a quixotic Christian benevolist embodying the virtues outlined in the Champion. Like Quixote, he is book-blinded, but by the New Testament and classics alike. His tattered cassock replaces Quixote's patchwork armor. His borrowed horse, soon abandoned, a Christian Rosinante, frequently stumbles to its knees. He rescues "Damsels" (Fanny) and stands up for the innocent with his crabstick against the selfish world's windmills. Andrews travels the English roads and inns as realistic squire to the daft idealist and, like Sancho Panza, grows in wisdom.

Fielding's parody becomes paradiorthosis, as the Greeks would say, an emulative borrowing and bending of a master's words, well loved by Augustans, except that Fielding finds creative joy in allusively reapplying whole characterizations, episodes, and dramatic arrangements. Richardson furnishes his major structure—two wild bedroom episodes at beginning and end, followed by the discovered truth of identity and social elevation of romance, which Pamela had also enacted. It is almost as if Fielding had cut Shamela down the middle and pulled the halves apart to accommodate his Cervantic roadway. The first bedroom scenes (I.v-vi), in which first Lady Booby and then Mrs. Slipslop try to possess Joseph—"Madam," says Joseph, "that Boy is the Brother of Pamela"—are probably the most hilarious chapters in the English novel. The second and concluding bedroom episode (IV. xiv) is more broadly comic, a reworking of the old picaresque fabliau about a wrong turn into bed that simultaneously parallels two versions from Cervantes and three from Scarron, as critics from Cross to Goldberg have detected, and primarily into the bed of Mrs. Slipslop, that caricature of Mrs. Jewkes, in whose bed Richardson's second scene of attempted rape is laid, if one may use the term. Even Lady Booby must laugh at the universal selfish scrambling of sex to which intrinsic virtue is impervious (Spilka, 403).

Fielding's central Cervantic joumey is linear and episodic, as Joseph becomes both romantic hero and practical companion to idealistic Christianity. When Lady Booby dismisses him, he heads not for home (as Pamela longs to do) or for "his beloved Sister Pamela," but to Lady Booby's country parish to see the girl he loves. Fielding's genius is nowhere more blithely evident than in his ability to change his lighting and reveal the young man within the parodic abstraction—this very funny male Pamela—without losing his hero, or his readers. Joseph matures, as Taylor notes, and clearly becomes the romantic hero at an inn, very near the center of the novel (II.xii), which reunites the major characters (except Lady Booby) in much the way the inn at Upton will do at the central climax of Tom Jones.

Fielding is reworking an episode from Cervantes he had already used for the whole of Don Quixote in England, where the lovers, as Tom and Sophia will be at Upton, are under the same roof unbeknownst to each other. Adams has brought the rescued Fanny, who, like Dorothea in the play and Sophia in Tom Jones, has set out across country in search of her lover. Mrs. Slipslop in her coach has picked up Joseph along the road and brought him in "Hopes of something which might have been accomplished at an Ale-house as well as a Palace" (II.xiii). As in Cervantes, our heroine hears a beautiful voice singing. But realism renders romance comic. Joseph's pastoral song ends in sexual climax, with Chloe "expiring." Fanny, only recognizing the voice, cries "O Jesus!" and faints. Adams, to the rescue, throws his beloved Aeschylus into the fire, where it "lay expiring," and enraged Slipslop rides off in disappointment.

Balancing this comic juxtaposition of ideal and sexual love is another structuring episode Fielding will also elaborate in Tom Jones. This is Mr. Wilson's story, just on the other side of the central divide between Books II and III, which is, as Paulson ("Models," 1202) and Maresca (199) have noted, Fielding's realistic version of the descensus Averno (Aeneid VI. 126), the trip to the underworld for truth.⁶ Our travelers descend a hill in spooky darkness, cross a river, and find Elysium in the country Eden of Wilson, who tells them the truth about the wicked world of London. Wilson's straightforward account fills out Fielding's social panorama, and Wilson, in the end, neatly fits into Fielding's comic romance as the long-lost father of cradle-switched Joseph, whose white skin (which, as with Tom Jones to come, a lady discovers in succoring the wounded hero) has already disclosed to the reader of romances his unknown nobility.

Fielding comically fulfills the romantic dream of Harry Luckless. He opens his preface by assuming that his readers will have "a different Idea of Romance" from his, never before attempted in English, which will be "a comic Romance." He takes his term from Paul Scarron's Romant Comique (1651), the Comical Romance in Tom Brown's translation (1700) recently read, which augments Cervantes's authorial facetiousness and claims of "this true History,"⁷ and sends its lovers chastely down the picaresque road disguised as brother and sister, in the amusingly incestuous twinship of romance that Fielding will exploit with Joseph and Fanny, the almost identical foundlings of romance from Daphnis and Chloe onward. His identical portraits gently parody those typical of Scudery's romances (Shesgreen, 33-34; Maresca, 200-201), especially in their noses "inclining to the Roman" (I.viii; II.xii). In Joseph's nose and brawny physique, Fielding has again pictured himself both accurately and comically as romantic hero.

"Now a comic Romance," he writes, "is a comic Epic-Poem in Prose." From his bows toward the epic, the twentieth century has largely ignored his, and his readers', context: the vast French romances—which he names, and which had virtually shaped the fancies, manners, and idiom of English elegance—and the new romance of princess Pamela, the serving maid. He is not writing the high life of epic, which can live among modern realities only in mock heroics: "Indeed, no two Species of Writing can differ more widely than the Comic and the Burlesque," touches of which he has indulged here and there to amuse his classical readers. In his conclusion he insists again on distinguishing his realistic comedy from "the Productions of Romance Writers on the one hand, and Burlesque Writers on the other." His new "Species of writing … hitherto unattempted in our Language" avoids both the impossibilities of "the grave Romance" and the absurdities of the comic mock-epic. His comic romance will draw from the realities of ordinary life, as his friend Hogarth has done pictorially, to illustrate the vanity and hypocrisy everywhere and eternally evident.⁸

This comic realism he outlines in III.i, which, most likely written before his preface, stands as his Declaration of Independence for fiction. Unlike actual historians, he says, Cervantes has written "the History of the World in general," as have Scarron, Le Sage, Marivaux, and other authors of "true Histories," including the Arabian Nights. Fiction is truer than history. It illustrates the typical, the perennially true in human nature in all time and every country: "I describe not Men, but Manners; not an Individual, but a Species." One might add only that typicality is the very stuff of comedy, along with the celebration of life (which Wright and Langer point to)—that central romantic thread on which the comic typicalities are strung, and which Pamela seriously exploits: the unknown nobody's becoming somebody in happy marriage. Fielding keeps the wish fulfillment of all us Harry Lucklesses playfully comic, letting us know in his affectionate irony that our deep-seated yearning is real enough, but with no Richardsonian guarantee. Romance encapsulates the central psyche: one's secretly noble self, whom no one appreciates, crying for recognition and riches, especially in the classless world emerging as Fielding wrote, and surely representing his own declasse impulse. His comic-romantic perspective acknowledges the comic impossibility of the ideal and romantic glories of life, yet affirms their existence and value.

Adams, like Quixote, comically embodies the romantic struggle of the ideal against the cruel realities. As with Quixote, we begin in laughter and end in admiration. For the Duke and Duchess who amuse themselves at Quixote's expense, Fielding gives us an actual practical-joking country squire—son-in-law of the Duchess of Marlborough, indeed (Wesleyan ed., xxiv)—who cruelly abuses Adams for a laugh, and we uncomfortably discover ourselves in company with the laughers at the noble in spirit. In fact, Fielding goes beyond Cervantes, first with Adams and then even with Slipslop, as true nobility rises within the comic bubble without bursting it. When Lady Booby threatens Adams with losing his livelihood if he proceeds to marry Joseph and Fanny, he answers: "I am in the Service of a Master who will never discard me for doing my Duty: And if the Doctor (for indeed I have never been able to pay for a Licence) thinks proper to turn me out of my Cure, G will provide me, I hope, another." If necessary, he and his numerous family will work with their hands. "Whilst my Conscience is pure, I shall never fear what Man can do unto me" (IV.ii). Adams's comically honest parenthesis deepens the effect as it sustains the amusing characterization, and the scene returns to amusement as Adams awkwardly bows out, mistakenly thinking Lady Booby will understand.

Fielding never again equals this. Neither Quixote, his model, nor Jones to come must stand up for others against tyranny with all they have. And Fielding repeats this feat, in which comedy contains the feeling that would destroy it, when funny old never-to-be-loved Slipslop, the image of the selfish world, turns selfless in Joseph's defense—"I wish I was a great Lady for his sake"—and a chastened Lady Booby mildly bids her goodnight as "a comical Creature" (IV.vi). Evans well illustrates how in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones comedy necessarily absorbs the tragic in its broader rendering of the "whole truth" ("World," "Comedy"). Tom Jones is the masterwork, of course—bigger, richer, wiser, more Olympian—but because of Adams and his comic depth here achieved, along with the very neatness of the parody, its enduring comic realism, and its joyous energy, Joseph Andrews achieves a perfection of its own.

In Jonathan Wild (1743), Fielding turns from comic romance for an uneven experiment in sardonic satire. As Digeon suggests, he patched it together for his Miscellanies (1743), during a time of sickness and trouble, from previous satirical attempts perhaps beginning as early as 1737, the bitter year when Walpole drove him from the stage. Indeed, a dialogue between Wild and his wife, little suiting them, carries a stage direction: "These Words to be spoken with a very great Air, and Toss of the Head" (III.viii).⁹ Fielding takes his tone from Lucian, as he had in the dreary Journey from This World to the Next, also published in the Miscellanies. Although Fielding's Booth calls Lucian "the greatest in the Humorous Way, that ever the World produced" (Amelia, VIII, v), and although Fielding claims to have "formed his Stile upon that very Author" (Covent-Garden Journal, 52), his Lucianic writings are among his least attractive, uncongenial in a way he could not see.¹⁰

In Jonathan Wild, Fielding tries in a Lucianic-Swiftian way to emulate Gay's Beggar's Opera without the Scriblerian verve. Gay had already animated the standing Opposition parallel between Walpole, the "Great Man" of public power, and Wild (executed 24 May 1725), the "Great Man" of London's underworld. As Fielding says in his Preface, "the splendid Palaces of the Great are often no other than Newgate with the Mask on."

Defoe's pamphlet on Wild (1725), one of Fielding's sources (Irwin, 19), indicates the difficulty. Defoe "does not indeed make a jest of his story … which is indeed a tragedy of itself, in a style of mockery and ridicule, but in a method agreeable to fact." Life down here is tragic, not to be viewed from Fielding's comic heights.¹¹ The vicious life of Newgate is too real for comedy, too dark for Fielding's satire on human foibles. It rises again in Amelia, after Fielding's exposure as magistrate, again to cloud his comic optimism.

Nevertheless, Jonathan Wild constantly reflects Fielding's characteristic situations, turns of style and thought, as it exposes his uncertainty. His real hero is Wild's victim, Thomas Heartfree, an older merchant-class Thomas Jones, innocently trusting hypocritical avarice; a Booth, married, with children, jailed for debt by the mighty to seduce his wife. Like Adams, Heartfree believes that "a sincere Turk would be saved" (IV.i). Like Jones, he extols a good conscience, "a Blessing which he who possesses can never be thoroughly unhappy" (III.v). Not harming others brings him "the Comfort I myself enjoy: For what a ravishing Thought! how replete with Extasy must the Consideration be, that the Goodness of God is engaged to reward me!" (III.x).¹² Fielding has idealized Heartfree from his honest friend, the jeweler and playwright George Lillo (Digeon, 121). But this is the serious middle-class world of Defoe and Richardson, essentially alien to Fielding, in spite of his generous condescension.

Fielding distinguishes "Greatness" from "Goodness" in his preface and opening chapter. The "true Sublime in Human Nature" combines greatness with goodness, but the world associates greatness only with the powerful rascal, the "Great Man." Fielding hopes to tell the world that greatness is not goodness (cf. Hatfield, "Puffs," 264-65). But as Dyson remarks (22), no one can believe Wild's great roguery generally typical enough to be of much interest, and Heartfree's goodness is both unconvincing and sentimental.

Of course, Fielding manages some genuine comedy here and there, especially in Mrs. Heartfree's disclaimer of pleasure in repeating compliments to herself (IV.xi). But all in all, Jonathan Wild strains at ideas already overworked—Walpole had fallen from power the previous year. Fielding, in ill health and with his wife desperately ill, has tried to clear his desk for his Miscellanies, make some badly needed money, and end his career as writer:

And now, my good-natured Reader, recommending my Works to your Candour, I bid you heartily farewell; and take this with you, that you may never be interrupted in the reading these Miscellanies, with that Degree of Heart-ache which hath often discomposed me in the writing them. (Preface, Miscellanies)

A year later, in his preface to his sister's David Simple (July 1744), Fielding reiterated his farewell. But before long (Wesleyan ed., xxxviii), Lyttelton prompted Tom Jones, with financial support. "It was by your Desire that I first thought of such a Composition," writes Fielding in his Dedication. Lyttelton evidently had proposed something new, a novel recommending "Goodness and Innocence" and the "Beauty of Virtue." Fielding adds its rewards: "that solid inward Comfort of Mind," the loss of which "no Acquisitions of Guilt can compensate." He also adds the lesson most likely to succeed, the one taught Tom Heartfree, "that Virtue and Innocence can scarce ever be injured but by Indiscretion." Prudence is the theme, because "it is much easier to make good Men wise, than to make bad Men good."

Again Fielding's hero, handsome, impetuous, generous, is comically romantic self-portraiture, amusing but now admonitory, played opposite an affectionate version of his dead wife. Again, a Cervantic idealist and realist, now reversed as young Jones and old Partridge, travel English roads in picaresque satire. The story is again the essence of romance: the mysterious unknown foundling, with the qualities and white skin of noble knighthood, discovers identity, paternity, riches, and marriage. Fielding called his new book The History of a Foundling as late as six months before publication, and others continued to call it The Foundling after it appeared (Wesleyan ed., xliii-xlvi). Indeed his title, usually foreshortened, is actually The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling. To keep the comic-romantic expectation before us, across the tops of its pages marches not "The History of Tom Jones," but "The History of a Foundling." But Fielding nevertheless seems to find this generally different from Joseph Andrews, with its comically positive Christian championship. Tom Jones, though philosophically positive, is morally cautionary. Be wary, or your goodness comes to naught. The old Adam should grow wise before he is old. In this cautionary balance and wiser view, Fielding culminated the Augustan perspective.

Martin Price epitomizes (3) the neoclassic period in the concepts of balance and the detached individual. Irony and satire stake out for the individual the ground on which he dare not dogmatize. Any stand is extreme, smacking of Commonwealth enthusiasm and bloody fanaticism. With orthodoxy shattered, the emerging individuals of either the middle-class Defoes or the shaken aristocrats must regain their footing, the Defoes in engagement, the aristocrats in detachment. Tom Jones embodies the detached Augustan's vision. As Pope in his Essay on Man (1733-34) surveyed the cosmic maze in gentlemanly ironic detachment, balancing deism and orthodoxy in a synthesis of divine immanence and contemporary psychology, so Fielding works out the ways of Providence in this conflicting world.

Battestin well makes "The Argument of Design."¹³ This evidently unjust and accidental world has really a Providential order. The mighty maze has a plan, comically and affectionately fulfilled. Fielding had declared Pope "the inimitable Author of the Essay on Man," who "taught me a System of Philosophy in English Numbers" (Fielding's preface to Plutus, the God of Riches, 1742). Fielding's literary creation reflects the providential order beyond our limited vision:

All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;
All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see;
All Discord, Harmony, not understood;
All partial Evil, universal Good.…
(Pope, Essay, 1:289-92)

Fielding illustrates this concordia discors, the Horatian harmony of discords (Ep. I.xii.19) that one finds repeatedly echoed in Pope and other Augustans, with a superbly comic "as if," which reflects both the ultimate resolution and its daily dissonance. Chance is really direction: a stupid guide misdirects Jones from the sea toward the army and Upton; Sophia chances upon the same guide to change her direction toward Jones; Blifil's betrayal works out Jones's identity and marriage with Sophia, the name of the "wisdom" he is to obtain (Powers, 667; Battestin, "Wisdom," 204-205; Harrison, 112). Fielding's very sentences reflect the balancing of opposites, the ordered containment of discords, of Pope's couplets as well as of his serenely balancing philosophy (Alter, 61; Battestin, "Design," 297).

All the thorny vines of Nature are really God's Art. And art, in its providential ordering, reflects God's universe. Providence orders the macrocosm; Prudence (semantically linked in Latin) orders the microcosm, man (Battestin, "Design," 191). Fielding the novelist plays God to the world of his creation, illustrating God's ways to man. Fielding sums this in a crucial passage, pausing with ironic detachment in the architectural middle of his comic confusion. He warns the reader not to criticize incidents as "foreign to our main Design" until he or she sees how they fit the whole, for "This Work may, indeed, be considered as a great Creation of our own," of which any fault-finder is a "Reptile" (X.i), a proud and imperceptive Satan in the creator's garden. The analogy, he says in ironic humility, may be too great, "but there is, indeed, no other." The artist brings order out of chaos and reflects God's providential order. Form symbolizes meaning (Battestin, "Design," 301).

Fielding's remarkable ironic balancing of opposites, first comically coupled for him in Cervantes, illustrates both the universal harmonizing of discords and the Augustan sense that opposites mark the norm without defining it: the principle "of Contrast," says Fielding, "runs through all the Works of Creation" (V.i). Everyone notices the contrasting pairing: Tom and Blifil, Allworthy and Western, each with a comically learned spinster sister; Sophia and Mrs. Fitzpatrick, as well as Sophia contrasted successively with her worse and worse opposites, Molly, Mrs. Waters, Lady Bellaston; Thwackum and Square; even the two brothers Blifil and Nightingale. Everything balances as formal artifice ironically orders daily chaos: six books for the country, six for the road, six for the city, as Digeon first noted (175, n.2). Hilles diagrams the remarkable structural balances on the scheme of a Palladian mansion, of which Ralph Allen's at Bath furnished one of the models for Allworthy's—a wing of six rooms angled up to the central six, a wing of six rooms angled down.¹⁴

For his architectural reflection of providential order, Fielding has heightened the linear episodic structure of Joseph Andrews into the arch of formal comedy. The episodic scene from Don Quixote in England now becomes the centerpiece. The high hurly-burly of sex and fisticuffs in the inn at Upton spans Books IX and X at the novel's mathematical center. As in the play, our heroine, running off in pursuit of her lover on the eve of forced marriage, arrives at the inn where he is, both lovers unaware of the other's presence. Fielding again comically contrasts sex and love, as Mrs. Slipslop's purpose with Joseph climaxes with Mrs. Waters and Tom, and bedrooms are scrambled as wildly as those concluding Joseph Andrews. As in the play, a foxhunting squire with his hounds rides up in pursuit, now converted from the unwanted suitor into Western, the heroine's father. The actual name Upton coincides with Fielding's peak of comic complexity (Wright, 89-90). It even seems the top of a geographical arch, as Sophia pursues Tom northward and then Tom pursues Sophia southward.

Fielding combines his favorite dramatic plot of the worthy rake and the heiress with the basic romantic story of the foundling, both in hopeless courtly love. Love in Several Masques has proliferated into a novel, complete with the country lover pursuing his mistress into the wicked city, an element repeated in three other plays (The Temple Beau, 1730; The Lottery, 1732; The Universal Gallant, 1735). In fact, four plays from Fielding's burgeoning year of 1730 awaken in Tom Jones nineteen years later. Here again is the wicked brother bearing false witness to defraud the hero of his birthright (The Temple Beau), the threat of inadvertent incest through unknown identity (The Coffee-House Politician, The Wedding Day, written c. 1730), and especially the comic pattern of discovered identity already borrowed from romance for The Author's Farce.

As readers have frequently noticed, Fielding balances two retrospective stories precisely on either side of his central theatrical peak: a lesson for Tom, a lesson for Sophia. The first is another descensus Averno, as if Fielding had lifted Wilson's account of wasted youth from the middle of Joseph Andrews, put it before his Cervantic inn, and also put it on Mazard Hill to suggest the greater peak to come. In Joseph Andrews, our travelers descend "a very steep Hill"; now Jones and Partridge, their quixotic counterparts, ascend "a very steep Hill" because Jones wants to cultivate his romantic "melancholy Ideas" by the "Solemn Gloom which the Moon casts on all Objects" (VIII.x). Partridge fears ghosts. They see a light and come to a cottage. Jones knocks without initial response, and Partridge cries that "the People must be all dead." Like Wilson, the Man of the Hill has retired from the world of debauchery and betrayal, which he describes for Jones and the reader. But Wilson, with wife and children, lives like people "in the Golden Age," as Adams remarks (III.iv); the Man of the Hill is an embittered recluse. Young Jones rejects his misanthropy and urges Fielding's lesson of prudence—the old man would have continued his faith in humanity had he not been "incautious in the placing your Affection" (VIII.xv). In his descensus, Jones has learned the truth. On the other side of Upton, Sophia hears from her cousin Mrs. Fitzpatrick a tale of elopement and amours that illustrates what she should not do with Jones.

Upton emphasizes the balanced theatrical architecture of Tom Jones. And many have noticed the theatricality of the city section (Cross, II:202; Haage, 152). Two scenes—with Lady Bellaston behind the bed, then Honour, then both—are pure theater (XIV.ii, XV.vii). Moreover, Lady Bellaston descends directly from Fielding's versions of Congreve's Lady Wishfort, beginning with Lady Trap in his first play. Tom Jones courts her to get at her ward, just as Mrs. Fitzpatrick urges him to court Mrs. Western (XVI.ix), the very ruse of her own ruin (XI.iv), as Fielding thrice deploys Tom Merital's strategem, acquired from Congreve. But Fielding shapes the whole novel in the abstract pattern of five-act comedy: Act I, exposition; Act II, intrigue; Act III, climactic complications; Act IV, unraveling toward disaster; Act V, depression shooting upward into triumph—the playlike ending already traced in Joseph's reprieve from Platonic celibacy and Heartfree's from the gallows.

If we treat the central six books as Act III, dividing the first and the last six books in halves, we find startling references to the theater at each break, except the invocation to Fame that begins the London section, or "Act IV." At "Act V," where the stage expects the final darkness before dawn, Fielding talks, first about the playwright's problem of prologues (XVI.i) and then, in the next Book, most facetiously about the playwright's problem of concluding a comedy or tragedy, and about his own in extricating "this Rogue, whom we have unfortunately made our Heroe," whom he may have to leave to the hangman, though he will do what he can, since "the worst of his Fortune" still lies ahead (XVII.i). "Tragedy is the image of Fate, as comedy is of Fortune," says Susanne Langer (p.333). Indeed, the formal structure of comedy, superimposed on the novel's more realistic vagaries, comments more quizzically on Fortune than a simple affirmation. It sustains with an ironic detachment Fielding's demonstration that the partial evils, the accidents that happen (in his frequent phrase), interweave fortunately in "universal Good." As "we may frequently observe in Life," says Fielding, "the greatest Events are produced by a nice Train of little Circumstances" (XVIII. ii). The author, like the Craftsman of Creation, is shaping our nearsighted joys and blunders, the realities of life.

Life does have odd coincidences. Apparent evils do often prove blessings as life flows on. For Fielding, as Stevick shows, history has meaning, just as his comic "true History" reflects a meaningful actuality. There are people, who, like Jones, have in fact accidentally taken the right road. Possessions, like Sophia's little book with a £100 bill in its leaves, have in fact been lost and luckily recovered—perhaps have even changed a course of life, as when Jones turns from the army to find Sophia. Acquaintances do turn up in restaurants and airports, like Partridge, Mrs. Waters, or Dowling, who seems to dowl his way through apparently random events to conclude the mystery. Accident, bad and good, which Ehrenpreis finds a weakness (22ff.), is actually the very stuff in life from which comedy creates its mimesis.

Fielding's third-person detachment, on which comedy also depends, may seem to deny the inner life that Defoe and Richardson opened for the novel with first-person narration (Watt, Rise). But actually, we are perceiving psychic complexities exactly as we do in life—from the outside, from what people do and say. Dowling, apparently only a comically busy lawyer, proves a complex rascal in blackmailing Blifil and keeping Tom from his birthright, yet he is affable and even sympathetic. Bridget, the sour old maid, actually attracts all eligible males. Her secret passions, simmering toward forty, not only beget the illegitimate Tom but thwart her plans for him (Crane, 119) as, again pregnant, she rushes to marry Blifil, whom she has evidently trapped—with his calculated concurrence. She takes a sly pleasure in having Thwackum whip her love-child, when Allworthy is away, for the psychic strain he has caused her, but never her legitimate son, whom she hates, as Fielding tells us directly. She later attracts not only Thwackum but Square, with whom (now that she is past the threat of pregnancy) she has an affair—from which Fielding turns our eyes even as he ironically confirms it, attributing it to malicious gossip with which he will not blot his page (III.vi). Before Tom is eighteen, he has openly replaced Square in her affections, with a hint of the incest that plays comically through Tom's affairs (Hutchens, 40), incurring Square's hatred and his own expulsion from Paradise.¹⁵ Fielding's psychological realism abounds in little self-deceptions: Sophia's about Jones is neatly symbolized in her muff, which appears when love blooms, turns up in Jones's empty bed at Upton, and accompanies him to London, an amusingly impudent visual pun in public slang (Johnson, 129-38). Jones has put his hands into it, as Honour reports: "La, says I, Mr. Jones, you will stretch my Lady's Muff and spoil it" (IV.xiv).

But Fielding's implied psychology fails with Allworthy. From the first, readers have found him bland if not unreal: the ideal benevolist and ultimate judge, taken in by duplicity, throwing out the good. Fielding seems to have intended a more dignified comic Adams. Allworthy talks "a little whimsically" about his dead wife, for which his neighbors roundly arraign him (I.ii). And we first meet him indeed in a bedroom, absentmindedly in his nightshirt, contemplating "the Beauty of Innocence"—the foundling sleeping in his bed—while Fielding wonderfully suggests that Mrs. Wilkins, "who, tho' in the 52d Year of her Age, vowed she had never beheld a Man without his Coat," believes she was summoned for another purpose (I.iii). Had Fielding sustained this comic view of the imperceptive idealist—he must make him imperceptive at any rate—his book would have fulfilled the perfection it very nearly achieves. But except for some touches about Thwackum's piety and Square's "Philosophical Temper" on his misperceived deathbed (V.viii), Allworthy fades from comic view.

As Hutchens says, Fielding takes an ironic and "lawyerlike delight in making facts add up to something unexpected" (30), and he does the same with the facts that convey personality. Mrs. Western, the comic six-foot chaperone, proud of her little learning and political misinformation, is also the superannuated coquette. Fitzpatrick has fooled her; she treasures in her memory a highwayman who took her money and earrings "at the same Time d—ning her, and saying, 'such handsome B—s as you, don't want Jewels to set them off, and be d—nd to you"' (VII.ix). To avoid forced marriage with Lord Fellamar, Sophia slyly flatters her with the many proposals she claims to have refused. "You are now but a young Woman," Sophia says, one who would surely not yield to the first title offered. Yes, says Mrs. Western, "I was called the cruel Parthenissa," and she runs on about "her Conquests and her Cruelty" for "near half an Hour" (XVII.iv). And Western, with his vigor, his Jacobite convictions, his Somerset dialect, his views as narrow as the space between his horse's ears, who has cruelly driven his wife to the grave, yet stirs our compassion as Fielding reveals the feeling that threatens and heightens the comic surface in a Falstaff or Quixote, as he had done with Adams and Slipslop. Western's comic limitations reveal their pathos in London, where—lonely, beaten by Egglane, bewildered—he pleads with Sophia:

'Why wout ask, Sophy?' cries he, 'when dost know I had rather hear thy Voice, than the Music of the best Pack of Dogs in England.—Hear thee, my dear little Girl! I hope I shall hear thee as long as I live; for if I was ever to lose that Pleasure, I would not gee a Brass Varden to live a Moment longer. Indeed, Sophy, you do not know how I love you, indeed you don't, or you never could have run away, and left your poor Father, who hath no other Joy, no other Comfort upon Earth but his little Sophy.' At these Words the Tears stood in his Eyes; and Sophia, (with the Tears streaming from hers) answered, 'Indeed, my dear Papa, I know you have loved me tenderly'.… (XVI.ii)

And the scene soon returns to full comedy as Western leaves in his usual thunder of misunderstanding.

This is the comic irony of character, the comedy of limited view, of the ide fixe, which plays against our wider perception and the narrator's omniscience, and in turn makes us part of the human comedy as we think we see all but learn that we do not.¹⁶ Fielding's omniscience guides and misguides us constantly; in his lawyerlike way, he presents the evidence and conceals the mystery, tempting our misunderstandings along with those of his characters, whom we believe less percipient than ourselves, or pretending ironically not to understand motives to guide our understanding: "Whether moved by Compassion, or by Shame, or by whatever other Motive, I cannot tell," he will write of a landlady who has changed her hostile tune when Jones appears like an Adonis and a gentleman (VIII.iv). This is Cervantes's mock-historian elevated to mock-psychological ignorance in the ironic service of psychology. This is Fielding's Cervantic omniscience, which delights us by showing in comic fiction life as it is, comic in selfish imperception, comic in providential blessing.

Fielding's commenting authorship has reached its full ironic power and elegance, and much more pervasively than in Joseph Andrews. The earlier twentieth century scorned this kind of "intrusive author." But McKillop (123) and, especially, Booth have well certified the central impact and necessity of Fielding's authorial presence. He has become his own most worthy character, amiable, wise, benevolent, literate, balanced between extremes, engaging us constantly through a long and pleasant journey until "we find, lying beneath our amusement at his playful mode of farewell, something of the same feeling we have when we lose a close friend, a friend who has given us a gift which we can never repay" (Booth, 218). He has shown us the world of Sophias and Toms, Blifils and pettifoggers, but he has also shown us that it contains a wonderfully ironic and compassionate intelligence we have come to know, which is something very like the wisdom of a benevolent God surveying our selfish vices and romantic yearnings.

Booth, of course, insists on the "implied author," a fictive creation clear of biographical irrelevancies. When the author refers to himself as infirm, Booth says that it "matters not in the least" whether Fielding was infirm when he wrote that sentence: "It is not Fielding we care about, but the narrator created to speak in his name" (218). But I dare say readers do care about Fielding as Fielding—Keats as Keats, Whitman as Whitman, Joyce as Joyce—else why our innumerable researches? Booth also oddly implies that Fielding's introductory chapters, which we can read straight through "leaving out the story of Tom," comprise all the narrator's "seemingly gratuitous appearances" (216). But Fielding actually "intrudes" on every page as the authorial voice ironically displaying life's ironies or commenting earnestly, with or without the "I."¹⁷

Fielding clearly considers that he himself addresses his readers, however much he may pretend, in the Cervantic way, that his history is true, that Allworthy may still live in Somerset for all he knows, or that he has given us "the Fruits of a very painful Enquiry, which for thy Satisfaction we have made into this Matter" (IX.vii). He is playful or straight, facetiously elevated or skeptically glum, exactly as he would be in conversation or anecdote, writing as if he were actually present—as indeed he was when he read his book aloud to Lyttelton and others before publication. He hopes that some girl in ages hence will, "under the fictitious name of Sophia," read "the real Worth which once existed in my Charlotte," and that he will be read "when the little Parlour in which I sit this Instant, shall be reduced to a worse furnished Box," and all this in a wonderfully mock-heroic invocation conveying his actual aims and beliefs as a writer (XIII.i). As Miller says ("Style," 265), "he is Henry Fielding all right." As with Pope—who characteristically begins by addressing a friend, who refers to his garden, his grotto, his ills, his aims, and concludes again in autobiography—the "implied author" seems unnecessary, or irrelevant. Fielding is projecting himself, playing the kind of role we all must play in whatever we do, as teacher, citizen, neighbor, fellow trying to write a scholarly essay, or whatnot. He dramatizes himself, of course, but in a way quite different from those partial versions of himself he comically (or guiltily) dramatized in Harry Luckless, Andrews, Jones, and Billy Booth.

As Miller well says, Fielding in his comic romance gives us a seamless weave of the real and ideal with life inhering "down to the smallest particle" ("Rhetoric," 235). Many have admired these verbal particles that reflect the universe. Take his "solid comfort." Here is the common reality of life, verbally and emotionally. Shamela's Oliver upholds "all the solid Comforts of their Lives." In his preface to the Miscellanies, Fielding says that his wife, dangerously ill, gives him "all the solid Comfort of my Life." In Tom Jones, he writes to Lyttelton of the "solid inward Comfort of Mind" that will reward benevolence and that Tom will aver as "solid Content" (XII.x). Yet Fielding acknowledges the universal ambiguity even in sincere belief, playing ironically with his favorite term in an extended passage revealing the motives of Bridget and Captain Blifil, who—bearded to the eyes, built like a plowman—bristles virility: Bridget expects a solid phallic comfort; Blifil, the comfort of hard cash.

She imagined, and perhaps very wisely, that she should enjoy more agreeable Minutes with the Captain, than with a much prettier Fellow; and forewent the Consideration of pleasing her Eyes, in order to procure herself much more solid Satisfaction.…

The Captain likewise very wisely preferred the more solid Enjoyments he expected with his Lady, to the fleeting Charms of Person. (I.xi)

That "Minutes" speaks sexual volumes.¹⁸

With Amelia (1751), the realities darken beyond comic affirmation.¹⁹The Augustan certainties, earned in irony, have faded into the doubts and sentimentalities of the century's second half. Free will now enters the providential scheme (Knight, 389), infinitely more chancey than the happy accidents of comedy. Individual responsibility replaces comic Fortune, now only an "imaginary Being." Each must shape his own luck in an "Art of Life" that resembles the cagey and protective maneuvering of chess. What we blame on Fortune we should blame on "quitting the Directions of Prudence," now active as well as cautionary, for "the blind Guidance of a predominant Passion" (I.i). The world of Tom Jones, which had darkened from country to city, reversing the progress of Joseph Andrews, now opens in the Newgate of Jonathan Wild, with a diseased and vicious Mrs. Slipslop, no longer funny, as Blear-eyed Moll. The subject is the "various Accidents which befel a very worthy Couple," as the husband redeems "foolish Conduct" by "struggling manfully with Distress," which is "one of the noblest Efforts of Wisdom and Virtue"—a struggle and virtue the hero hardly exhibits. In his Dedication, Fielding says that he also wants to expose "the most glaring Evils," public and private, that "infest this Country," and here, at least, he succeeds.

Fielding has attempted another new species of writing. For the first time, he adopts an epic, the Aeneid, for his "noble model" as he tells us in the Covent-Garden Journal (Jensen, ed., I.186). His serious subject can now sustain the epic parallel his comic romance had prohibited as burlesque mock-heroics. In his Court of Censorial Inquiry, "a grave Man" stands up to defend "poor Amelia" from "the Rancour with which she hath been treated by the Public." He avows "that of all my Offspring she is my favourite Child," on whom he has "bestowed a more than ordinary Pains" (186). Fielding's strange favoritism doubtless owes to his loving fictionalization of his dead wife, complete with scarred nose, whom he elevates to his title and make the virtuous lodestone (Wendt, "Virtue"):

H. Fielding [writes Lady Mary Wortley Montagu] has given a true picture of himself and his first wife, in the characters of Mr. and Mrs. Booth, some compliments to his own figure excepted; and, I am persuaded, several of the incidents he mentions are real matters of fact. (Cross, 11.328)

Fielding is clearly working out some remorse, perhaps for the same infidelities both religious and sexual through which Booth suffers.

Powers demonstrates how closely Fielding parallels the Aeneid. Like Virgil, Fielding begins in medias res with the long, retrospective first-person accounts of the central action that are typical of epic and new in Fielding.²⁰ Powers matches characters and actions throughout the book, beginning with Miss Matthews (Dido), who seduces Booth (like Aeneas, separated from his wife with a new order to establish), though Powers omits remarking how starkly the chamber in Newgate reflects Virgil's sylvan cave. Fielding's masquerade at Ranelagh matches Aeneas's descensus, though moved from Aeneid VI to Amelia X, where Aeneas meets the resentful shade of Dido and Booth the resentful Miss Matthews. The masquerader's conventional "Do you know me?" in "squeaking Voice" (Tom Jones, XIII.vii; The Masquerade, 190) now becomes Miss Matthews's caustic "Do'st thou not yet know me?" (X.ii). In the end, Fielding replaces the pious Aeneas's defeat of violent Turnus with Booth's escaping a duel and affirming a new order in his Christian conversion.

As Cross notes, however (II.325), Fielding also characteristically reworks his plot from three of his plays. From The Temple Beau (1730), he had already taken the evil brother defrauding the good of his inheritance, with an accomplice, as models for Blifil and Dowling. He feminizes this for Amelia. In the play, a father dies and disinherits his heir, abroad in Paris. His brother, through a false witness, had blackened the heir's character "and covered his own notorious vices under the appearance of innocence" (Works, VIII.115). Amelia's older sister likewise vilifies her while abroad. She learns in Paris of her mother's death and her disinheritance. But now sister Betty and her accomplices forge a new will reversing the mother's decree to leave her and not Amelia penniless, as Fielding adds a touch from actuality. Four years after the play, Fielding eloped to marry against a mother's wishes, as does Booth. Similarly, his wife's mother died soon after, but nevertheless left her estate to his wife, cutting off her elder sister with a shilling (Cross, II.330).

In The Coffee-House Politician (1730), Fielding also foresketches his and Booth's elopement, and introduces the good magistrate who untangles things in Jonathan Wild and becomes another self-portrait in Amelia (Cross, II.322): the unnamed justice who, about to dine, hears the evidence and resolves, "Tho' it was then very late, and he had been fatigued all the Morning with public Business, to postpone all Refreshment 'till he had-discharged his Duty" (XII.vi). Fielding concludes his play with his justice: "Come, gentlemen, I desire you would celebrate this day at my house." Similarly, the justice in Amelia:

Whether Amelia's Beauty, or the Reflexion on the remarkable Act of Justice he had performed, or whatever Motive filled the Magistrate with extraordinary good Humour, and opened his Heart and Cellars, I will not determine; but he gave them … hearty Welcome … nor did the Company rise from Table till the Clock struck eleven. (XII.vii)

The Coffee-House Politician indeed frames Amelia's plot, with the instrumental justice at the end, and at the beginning a half-pay army captain, on his way through London streets at night to a rendezvous for elopement who aids a person attacked and is jailed as attacker by a venal judge through false witness—exactly as Booth lands in Newgate at the outset.

The Modern Husband (1732) furnishes Fielding's central matter, already worked in Jonathan Wild: two influential men, one a lord, ruin and jail a husband in order to seduce his virtuous wife. The husband has an affair and suffers a painful conscience. His extravagance becomes Booth's addictive gambling. His wife's fear of a duel, which keeps the lord's advances secret, becomes the actual challenge Amelia keeps secret. In play and novel, the wife's constancy inspires contrition, confession, and reform. The play's contrasting "modern" couple, who collude in adultery for extortion, become the Trents of Amelia. ²¹

Except at beginning and end, Fielding's sustained epic parallel has no force, as it would have in the comic contrasts of a mock-epic or a Ulysses. It passes unnoticed into Fielding's romance motifs, now similarly forsaken by comedy and indeed more prevalent. Booth has himself smuggled into his lady's hostile household in a basket straight from the flowery thirteenth-century romance of Floris and Blancheflour. ²² As Maurice Johnson commented to me in a letter (26 April 1965), this smuggled entry midway in Book II matches precisely the Grecian warriors' entry into the enemy's citadel inside the Trojan horse, midway in Aeneid II. But implausible romance obliterates the epic.

Indeed, in spite of the book's seamy realism (Sherburn, "Amelia," 2; Butt, 27), Fielding's first instance of comic self-portraiture, The Author's Farce, now lends surprising and uneasy touches of romance to this more extended autobiographical fiction, no longer comic. Lady Mary, noting the autobiography, complained of Amelia, along with Tom Jones: "All these sort of books … place a merit in extravagant passions, and encourage young people to hope for impossible events … as much out of nature as fairy treasures" (Letters, III.93, quoted in Blanchard, 102). The burlesque of wonderful endings, which Fielding initiated in his Farce and continued playfully in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, now indeed becomes the fairytale strained by realism. In the play, Harry Luckless has pawned a jewel. His servant's return to the pawnshop enables a bystander to find him and disclose his identity and his kingdom far from London's unjust indifference.

In Amelia, this hero's jewel has multiplied. Fielding modifies an episode from Ariosto's Orlando Furioso—the story of Giocondo (Canto 28), the same that gives Spenser his Squire of Dames—in which the hero, departing reluctantly from his wife, forgets a little jeweled cross, a farewell gift. Booth, on his departure for war, forgets a little casket, similarly given, which should have contained a jeweled picture of Amelia, lost a month before. Her foster brother and silent courtly adorer—in the submerged incestuous way of romance, which is no longer comic as with Joseph and Fanny—has stolen it. Nothing so clearly illustrates Fielding's fall from comedy as the contrast between this scene and that with Lady Booby in bed and Joseph Andrews beside it. Now, the new noble servant Joseph Atkinson is abed, visited by Mrs. Booth. Fielding's instinctive self-revision—the Josephs, the As, the Bs—here turns romance lugubrious. Atkinson, tears gushing, returns the picture to his lady, who has come to her poor lovesick knight, with words widely adapted—in fiction and actuality both, one suspects—from that famous and monstrous romance so prominent on Fielding's early blacklist, La Calprenéde's Cassandra: "that Face which, if I had been the Emperor of the World …" (XI.vi.)²³ Later, Amelia pawns the picture; a second visit to the pawnshop discloses that a bystander has identified her by it, and his information leads to her long-lost inheritance and an estate far from London's unjust indifference.

Harry Luckless's ancient dream of the disinherited and the happy accidents of comedy dissolve into pathos and implausibility in the tragic world of Amelia. As Rawson says (70), Amelia's despairs carry the novel's conviction: "There are more bad People in the World, and they will hate you for your Goodness," wails Amelia to her "poor little Infants"; "There is an End of all Goodness in the World"; "We have no Comfort, no Hope, no Friend left" (IV.iii, VII.x, VIII.ix). This is the modern existential woe of Clarissa:

What a world is this! What is there in it desirable? The good we hope for, so strangely mix'd, that one knows not what to wish for: And one half of Mankind tormenting the other, and being tormented themselves in Tormenting! (Richardson's Clarissa 11, Letter vii)

Augustan detachment becomes sentimental involvement. The ironic providential overseer has departed, leaving a less frequent sociologist:

… I myself (remember, Critic, it was in my Youth) had a few Mornings before seen that very identical Picture of all those ingaging Qualities in Bed with a Rake at a Bagnio, smoaking Tobacco, drinking Punch, talking Obscenity, and swearing and cursing with all the Impudence and Impiety of the lowest and most abandoned Trull of a Soldier. (I.vi)

The reader, as Coley notes (249-50), has likewise diminished from the "ingenious" to the "good-natured" who enjoys a "tender Sensation." Goodness must demonstrate its sensitivity in faintings and tears (Ribble). Parson Harrison, a realistic Adams, replaces the author as evaluative intelligence, and yet in his uncomic blindness, which drives Amelia to despair, he becomes one of Fielding's most plausible characters in this new indeterminacy of characterization (Coolidge). The quixotic Adams, upholding virtue, now also becomes Colonel Bath, the swordsman upholding only the passe code of honor—pistols were to be the weapons of James's duel.²⁴ The type no longer represents the comic universals in humanity. The limited view is no longer comically typical but painfully characteristic of human imperfection.

Indeterminacy replaces comic truth in typicality. The psychological complexities authorially implied in a Bridget now become the unreliable testimony of a Mrs. Bennet. Booth agonizes and develops, as against the characteristic comic changelessness of Andrews and Jones (Coley, 251). This is a new age; subjective consciousness breaks through Augustan order and objectivity. Human nature is no longer everywhere the same. Hume's solipsistic feeling has overturned reason, and Hume is clearly Fielding's unmentioned antagonist as he attempts to adjust the new philosophy to the providential Christianity it so profoundly unsettled (Battestin, "Problem").

Booth's Epicurean fatalism wavers toward atheism. Chance is no longer providential direction nor a "blind Impulse or Direction of Fate." Man acts as his uppermost passion dictates and can "do no otherwise" (I.iii; cf. Thomas). Booth is a prisoner, psychically and physically, throughout the book—limited at best to the Verge of Court (Lepage; Wendt, "Virtue," 146; Battestin, "Problem," 631). In the end, Barrow's sermons free Booth from his passional fatalism, as Harrison frees him from custody for his providential reward. But Fielding's demonstration contradicts his theory that the will can shape the passions and one's fate. Hume's emotive philosophy has persuaded him more than he recognizes. Dr. Harrison bases his strongest argument for religion on Hume's passional doctrine, which Fielding had set out to refute (Battestin, "Problem," 632-33). Harrison asserts that men act from their passions, and that "the strongest of these Passions; Hope and Fear," support the truth of religion (XII.v). Booth converts, and Providence fulfills the dream of escape to Eden with the affluent lady, in the line of Luckless's Harriot, Wilson's Harriet Hearty, Heartfree's Mrs. Heartfree, and Jones's Sophia.

From the first play to last novel, Fielding repeats himself perhaps more than any major writer, working and reworking literary conventions as living paradigms. Even amid the sentimentalities in Amelia, his fictive truth persuades us that life is like this: selfish, conceited, agonized, wishful, looking for philosophical certainty. The primordial foundling of romance lives in our dreaming self-pity. The noble Quixote lives in our ideals. When Fielding insulated aspiration in comedy, ironically acknowledging both its truth and probable unfulfillment, he achieved the incomparable Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones.

Abbreviations

ECS	Eighteenth-Century Studies
ELH	English Literary History
MLR	Modern Language Review
PMLA	Publications of the Modern Language Association
PQ	Philological Quarterly
RES	Review of English Studies
TSLL	Texas Studies in Literature and Language

Notes

¹ Genealogists deny his family's connection to the royal Hapsburgs (Cross, 1.2-3), but Fielding and his contemporaries assumed it. "Most members of the family … have uniformly added the quartering of Hapsburg and displayed their arms upon the double headed eagle of the Holy Roman Empire" (Henley, ed., XVI.xlvi). Fielding used the double eagle as his seal on at least one letter. Oddly, Hogarth's portrait of Fielding shows an unmistakable Hapsburg lower lip. Battestin has recently identified another probable portrait ("Pictures").

² I borrow extensively throughout from my essays listed in "Works Cited." Historical details and many other points originate in Cross. Texts are Henley for plays; Wesleyan for Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones; first editions for Shamela, Jonathan Wild, and Amelia.

³ See Evans on the Whole Duty of Man, a book central to Fielding's charitable Christianity since childhood. Shamela, like Pamela, approves it but with the major duty of charity missing, and Whitefield condemned it as useless for the Grace of being born again.

⁴ Paulson, Satire, 103-04; Brooks, 161; my "Irony," 142-43; Goldberg, 146-47, 232-33.

⁵ Golden sees in Fielding's older women assaulting the heroes "the same stuff as the witches of child lore"; the aggressive males are ogres, "grotesques of adults in the child's fantasy" (145). But this wholly ignores the comic, adult perspective.

⁶ Originating in the Odyssey and taken over by Lucian and the romances as well—Ariosto sends Rinaldo to the moon; Cervantes sends Quixote down the cave of Montesinos and both Sancho and his ass down another cavern—the descensus became an Augustan favorite: Swift's Glubbdubdrib, Pope's Cave of Spleen (Rape) and Elysian shade (Dunciad), Fielding's Author's Farce and Journey from This World to the Next. For the long prevalence of the descensus, see Boyce.

⁷ Lucian also wrote a satiric Vera historia, a "true history," and, like Fielding, claimed a new way of writing (Coley, 241). But Fielding's phrase and manner comes directly from Cervantes, underlined by Scarron's more frequent reiteration; see my "Comic Romances."

⁸ The twentieth century takes "comic epic in prose" as Fielding's generic category, ignoring his defining term, "comic romance," as it also overlooks his romantic plot and Cervantic perspective. Neither he nor his contemporaries thought of his novels as epics, or even as "comic epics" like the Dunciad, from which he borrows his remarks on Homer's mock-heroic Margites, now "entirely lost." Pope's "Martinus Scriblerus of the Poem" in turn borrows, tongue in cheek, from Aristotle (Poetics, IV. 12). But Aristotle does not mention loss. Pope says "tho' now unhappily lost." Fielding's similar reference in his preface to David Simple has "tho' it be unhappily lost," indicating Pope as his source. As Goldberg (7) and Miller (Romance, 8, 16) indicate, epic for Fielding means simply "extended narrative." This, for the eighteenth century, was indeed the primary meaning. Johnson's primary definition of epic in his Dictionary (1755) is: "Narrative; comprising narrations, not acted, but rehearsed." In fact, Fielding has taken "comic epic in prose" from Cervantes's defense of romances (I.iv.20): "Epicks may be well writ in Prose as Verse." Cervantes's discussion clearly indicates that he takes epic to mean "any significant narrative," whether history, classical epic, or romance. Fielding also borrows his reference to the Telemachus from the Ozell-Motteux translator's footnote to this passage: "The Adventures of Telemachus is a Proof of this." J. Paul Hunter errs particularly in a fanciful derivation of Tom Jones from the Telemaque. See my two articles on this head, esp. "Fielding's Comic."

⁹ In 1754, Fielding revised this to "These Words were spoken …," along with changing "Prime Minister" (Walpole) to the innocuous "Statesman" (Digeon, 120). Miller sees this passage as imitating Lucian's dialogues (Essays, 367n).

¹⁰ Saintsbury claims that "Fielding has written no greater book … compact of almost pure irony" (vii-viii). Digeon finds it "profound and rich in various lessons" (127); Shea, "a highly complex satire" (73). Wendt argues that Fielding deliberately made Heartfree "imperfect" ("Allegory," 317); Hopkins (passim), that the sentimentality is really comic irony; Rawson rightly disagrees with both (234ff., 253-54), and extends his perceptive analysis through the latter half of his book (101-259). Miller observes that Fielding's confident and skeptical perspectives simply reflect different moods, with the usual human inconsistency (Essays, 75).

¹¹ Hopkins (225-27) points out that Fielding satirizes Defoe's The King of Pirates in Mrs. Heartfree's travels and (less convincingly) Defoe's matrimonial dialogue in his Family Instructor.

¹² Fielding changed this to read (1754) "that Almighty Goodness i s b y its own Nature engaged.…" Hopkins takes this passage as rendered intentionally ridiculous by ravishing, already punned upon sexually in Wild's addresses to Laetitia, and in ecstasy. But this is exactly the serious language of Parson Oliver and Tom Jones; see the foregoing discussion of Shamela.

¹³ Battestin, "Design," 290; see also Work and Williams. Preston, Knight, Poovy, Vopat, Braudy, and Guthrie resist the providential reading in various ways. Snow finds Battestin's providential equation "intriguing but ultimately a misreading of the teasing, obfuscating narrator and his story" (50). But she herself misreads Fielding's reference to secrets that "I will not be guilty of discovering" till the muse of History "shall give me leave" (II.vi). Snow believes that Battestin posits "Fielding's belief in a benevolent deity who, in effect, works like a detective in a murder mystery, perceiving the pattern of cause and effect, discovering the innocent and guilty, and distributing the rewards and punishments" (40). She takes discover to mean "find out" (39-40). But this is not Fielding's (or Battestin's) conception of an omniscient deity who eventually reveals ("discovers" in the eighteenth-century sense) the benevolent design behind apparently haphazard events.

¹⁴ Hilles elaborates Van Ghent's architectural suggestion ("Art," 81). Battestin quotes Palladio himself (pref., bk. IV) on how "these little Temples we raise, ought to bear a resemblance to the immense one of (God's) infinite goodness," in which all "parts … should have the exactest symmetry and proportion" ("Design," 300).

¹⁵ Knight well notices the imperfections in this country Paradise Hall, which Tom's restoration redeems. E. Taiwo Palmer and Combs work out the implication of Fielding's Miltonic expulsion, though this, like Fielding's naming of Allworthy's estate, seems a happy afterthought to authenticate his grand providential design.

¹⁶ Stephanson well describes this process in Joseph Andrews. See also McKenzie and McNamara.

¹⁷ See my "Narration"; Stevick: "Every word is 'told,' nothing is impersonally rendered" ("Talking," 119).

¹⁸ Alter also analyzes this passage (42). See also my "Cliché," 358. Hutchens demonstrates the similar ironic shadings in prudence, Fielding's central word and concept (101-18). Also see Hatfield (Irony).

¹⁹ From the first, readers have found Amelia a "failure" (Cross, II:328ff.; Sherburn, "Amelia," 1). See Wolff, Eustace Palmer, Hassall, Osland, Donovan, among others cited passim.

²⁰ Cross, 11:326; Digeon, 195-96; Sherburn, "Amelia," 4.

²¹ Fielding had introduced to the stage a situation aired in two contemporary lawsuits (Cross, 1:121; Woods, "Notes," 364).

²² Only this romance, and Boccaccio's version, Filocopo, where Fielding probably read it, have the lover carried past hostile guardians in a basket. Dudden calls it a device from the comic stage (811), probably thinking of Falstaff s basket: a means of escape, not of entrance. The chest in Decameron II.ix and in Cymbeline, and the jars in Ali Baba, all serve hostile intentions.

²³ Miss Matthews responds to Booth's "Scene of the tender Kind" (III.ii), describing his emotional departing from Amelia, with a sigh (nicely leading to his seduction): "There are Moments in Life worth purchasing with Worlds." In Cassandra, Statira, widow of Alexander, "emperor of the world," says that she prefers death to "the Empire of the whole World with any other Man" (V.106; also IV. 109, IV.204). Lady Orrery classed "the works of the inimitable Fielding" with "Cassandra, Cleopatra, Haywood's novels" and "a thousand more romantick books of the same kind" (quoted in Foster, 102). Watt points out that "Amelia" and "Sophia" were the most popular romance names ("Naming," 327).

²⁴ Atkinson's nocturnal "wineskin" battle with his wife, a poor attempt at the bedroom fisticuffs in Joseph Andrews, is another remnant from Cervantes, which he had derived from Apuleius (Becker, 146-47; Putnam, I:483n).

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