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TWENTIETH CEKTURY VIEWS "1 FIELDIM .4 CoUcvtio)} of Critical Esuai/x Edited hv RONALD PAULSON HENRY FIELDING (THE TWENTIETH CENTURY VIEWS SERIES) by RONALD PAULSON A twentieth-century reassessment of HENRY FIELDING - his literary work, his themes and artistic methods. Well-known critics, scholars, novelists, and men of letters focus on Henry Fielding in this twentieth-century re- assessment of his work. Fielding is seen as a novelist, playwright, and His literary works, themes, satirist. and artistic the light proaches New methods are examined in of modern from ranging ap- analytical Marxist to Critical. Fielding emerges as a father of the English novel, a great innovator and craftsman, profound moralist, and comic genius. Among the thirteen significant essays Ronald Paulson has selected Andre Gide, Notes are: for a Preface to TOM lONES William Empson, TOM JONES Fielding's John Middleton Murry, ''Sexual Ethic' in Fieldings TOM JONES A. R. Humphreys, Fielding's Irony: Its Method and Effects (Continued on back flap) Withdrawn from collection / 823 ^/f^^o/^ PP- 167 28 Bk. II, ff. chap. i. of our way that Thought in the Eighteenth Century (2d ed., R. Hubert, Les Sciences sociales dans I'Ency elope die (Paris, Tom Jones and Clarissa iii her experience brings a continual deepening of her understanding of her Tom own past: as a result character and plot are indivisible. Jones, on the other hand, is not in touch with his own past at all: we feel a certain unreality in his actions because they always seem to be spontaneous re- actions to stimuli that the plot has been manipulated to provide; we have no life. sense that they are manifestations of a developing moral We cannot but feel surprise, for instance, when, immediately after accepting 50 pounds from Lady Bellaston, Tom gives his famous lecture to Nightingale on sexual ethics.^^ It is not that the two actions are inherently contradictory Tom's ethics have throughout been based on the much greater heinousness of harming others than of failing to live up to one's moral code oneself; but if we had been given some indication that Tom was aware of the apparent contradictions between his speech and his own past practice he might have sounded less priggish and more convincing. Actually, of course, separate parts of Tom's nature can hold very little converse with each other, because there is only one agency for such converse the individual consciousness through which the whole repertoire of past actions operates and Fielding does not take us into this consciousness because he believes that individual character is a specific combination of stable and separate predispositions to action, rather than the product of its own past. For the same reasons personal relationships are also relatively unimportant in Tom Jones. If there is a controlling force independent of the individual actors and their positions with respect to each other, and if their own characters are innate and unchanging, there is no reason why Fielding should give close attention to their mutual feelings, since they cannot play a decisive role. Here, again, the scene between Sophia and Blifil was typical in that it reflected the ext