INTRODUCTION.
INTRODUCTION.
Fielding's third great novel has been the subject of much more
discordant judgments than either of its forerunners. If we take the
period since its appearance as covering four generations, we find the
greatest authority in the earliest, Johnson, speaking of it with
something more nearly approaching to enthusiasm than he allowed
himself in reference to any other work of an author, to whom he was on
the whole so unjust. The greatest man of letters of the next
generation, Scott (whose attitude to Fielding was rather undecided,
and seems to speak a mixture of intellectual admiration and moral
dislike, or at least failure in sympathy), pronounces it "on the whole
unpleasing," and regards it chiefly as a sequel to Tom Jones,
showing what is to be expected of a libertine and thoughtless husband.
But he too is enthusiastic over the heroine. Thackeray (whom in this
special connection at any rate it is scarcely too much to call the
greatest man of the third generation) overflows with predilection for
it, but chiefly, as it would seem, because of his affection for Amelia
herself, in which he practically agrees with Scott and Johnson. It
would be invidious, and is noways needful, to single out any critic of
our own time to place beside these great men. But it cannot be denied
that the book, now as always, has incurred a considerable amount of
hinted fault and hesitated dislike. Even Mr. Dobson notes some things
in it as "unsatisfactory;" Mr. Gosse, with evident consciousness of
temerity, ventures to ask whether it is not "a little dull." The very
absence of episodes (on the ground that Miss Matthews's story is too
closely connected with the main action to be fairly called an episode)
and of introductory dissertations has been brought against it, as the
presence of these things was brought against its forerunners.
I have sometimes wondered whether Amelia pays the penalty of an
audacity which, a priori, its most unfavourable critics would
indignantly deny to be a fault. It begins instead of ending with the
marriage-bells; and though critic after critic of novels has exhausted
his indignation and his satire over the folly of insisting on these as
a finale, I doubt whether the demand is not too deeply rooted in the
English, nay, in the human mind, to be safely neglected. The essence
of all romance is a quest; the quest most perennially and universally
interesting to man is the quest of a wife or a mistress; and the
chapters dealing with what comes later have an inevitable flavour of
tameness, and of the day after the feast. It is not common now-a-days
to meet anybody who thinks Tommy Moore a great poet; one has to
encounter either a suspicion of Philistinism or a suspicion of paradox
if one tries to vindicate for him even his due place in the poetical
hierarchy. Yet I suspect that no poet ever put into words a more
universal criticism of life than he did when he wrote "I saw from the
beach," with its moral of--
"Give me back, give me back, the wild freshness of morning--Her smiles
and her tears are worth evening's best light."
If we discard this fallacy boldly, and ask ourselves whether Amelia
is or is not as good as Joseph Andrews or Tom Jones, we shall I
think be inclined to answer rather in the affirmative than in the
negative. It is perhaps a little more easy to find fault with its