Amelia | Page 3

history is concluded

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONS.
FIELDING'S BIRTHPLACE, SHARPHAM PARK
SHE THEN GAVE A LOOSE TO HER PASSION
THEY OPENED THE HAMPER
HE SEIZED HIM BY THE COLLAR
AMELIA AND HER CHILDREN
COLONEL BATH
LAWYER MURPHY

LEANING BOTH HIS ELBOWS ON THE TABLE, FIXED HIS
EYES ON HER
BOOTH BETWEEN A BLUE DOMINO AND A SHEPHERDESS
DR HARRISON

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 characters than with
theirs; or rather, though no one of these characters has the defects of
Blifil or of Allworthy, it is easy to say that no one of them has the
charm of the best personages of the earlier books. The idolaters of
Amelia would of course exclaim at this sentence as it regards that
amiable lady; and I am myself by no means disposed to rank amiability
low in the scale of things excellent in woman. But though she is by no
means what her namesake and spiritual grand-daughter. Miss Sedley,
must, I fear, be pronounced to be, an amiable fool, there is really too
much of the milk of human kindness, unrefreshed and unrelieved of its
mawkishness by the rum or whisky of human frailty, in her. One could
have better pardoned her forgiveness of her husband if she had in the
first place been a little more conscious of what there was to forgive;