Henry Fielding. (1707–1754). The History of Tom Jones.
The Harvard Classics Shelf of Fiction. 1917.
. Criticisms and Interpretations
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Notwithstanding its admitted superiority to Joseph Andrews as a work of art, there is no male character in Tom Jones which can compete with Parson Adams—none certainly which we regard with equal admiration. Allworthy, excellent compound of Lyttelton and Allen though he be, remains always a little stiff and cold in comparison with the “veined humanity” around him. We feel of him, as of another impeccable personage, that we “cannot breathe in that fine air, That pure severity of perfect light,” and that we want the “warmth and colour” which we find in Adams. Allworthy is a type rather than a character—a fault which also seems to apply to that Molieresque hypocrite, the younger Blifil. Fielding seems to have welded this latter together, rather than to have fused him entire, and the result is a certain lack of verisimilitude, which makes us wonder how his pinchbeck progressions and vamped-up virtues could deceive so many persons. On the other hand, his father, Captain John Blifil, has all the look of life. Nor can there be any doubt about the vitality of Squire Western. Whether the germ of his character be derived from Addison’s Tory Foxhunter or not, it is certain that Fielding must have had superabundant material of his own from which to model this thoroughly representative, and at the same time, completely individual character. Western has all the rustic tastes, the narrow prejudices, the imperfect education, the unreasoning hatred to the court, which distinguished the Jacobite country gentleman of the Georgian era; but his divided love for his daughter and his horses, his goodhumour and his shrewdness, his foaming impulses and his quick subsidings, his tears, his oaths, and his barbaric dialect, are all essential features in a personal portrait. When Jones has rescued Sophia, he will give him all his stables, the Chevalier and Miss Slouch excepted; when he finds he is in love with her, he is in a frenzy to “get at un” and “spoil his Caterwauling.” He will have the surgeon’s heart’s blood if he takes a drop too much from Sophia’s white arm; when she opposes his wishes as to Blifil, he will turn her into the street with no more than a smock, and give his estate to the “zinking Fund.” Throughout the book he is qualis ab incepto,—boisterous, brutal, jovial, and inimitable; so that when finally in “Chapter the Last,” we get that pretty picture of him in Sophy’s nursery, protesting that the tattling of his little granddaughter is “sweeter Music than the finest Cry of Dogs in England,” we part with him almost with a feeling of esteem. Scott seems to have thought it unreasonable that he should have “taken a beating so unresistingly from the friend of Lord Fellamar,” and even hints that the passage is an interpolation, although he wisely refrains from suggesting by whom, and should have known that it was in the first edition. With all deference to so eminent an authority, it is impossible to share his hesitation. Fielding was fully aware that even the bravest have their fits of panic. It must besides be remembered that Lord Fellamar’s friend was not an effeminate dandy, but a military man—probably a professed sabreur, if not a salaried bully like Captain Stab in the “Rake’s Progress;” that he was armed with a stick and Western was not; and that he fell upon him in the most unexpected manner, in a place where he was wholly out of his element. It is inconceivable that the sturdy squire, with his faculty for distributing “Ficks” and “Dowses,”—who came so valiantly to the aid of Jones in his battle-royal with Blifil and Thwackum,—was likely, under any but very exceptional circumstances, to be dismayed by a cane. It was the exceptional character of the assault which made a coward of him; and Fielding, who had the keenest eye for inconsistencies of the kind, knew perfectly well what he was doing.
Of the remaining dramatis persona—the swarming individualities with which the great comic epic is literally “all alive,” as Lord Monboddo said—it is impossible to give any adequate account. Few of them, if any, are open to the objection already pointed out with respect to Allworthy and the younger Blifil, and most of them bears signs of having been closely copied from living models …—each is a definite character bearing upon his forehead the mark of his absolute fidelity to human nature.