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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Withdrawn from collection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