Amelia | Page 5

pleasant satire;
the mighty craftsmanship and the vast science of life of _Tom Jones;_
the ineffable irony and logical grasp of Jonathan Wild, might have left
us with a slight sense of hardness, a vague desire for unction, if it had
not been for this completion of the picture. We should not have known
(for in the other books, with the possible exception of Mrs. Fitzpatrick,
the characters are a little too determinately goats and sheep) how
Fielding could draw nuances, how he could project a mixed personage
on the screen, if we had not had Miss Matthews and Mrs. Atkinson--the
last especially a figure full of the finest strokes, and, as a rule,
insufficiently done justice to by critics.
And I have purposely left to the last a group of personages about whom
indeed there has been little question, but who are among the triumphs
of Fielding's art--the two Colonels and their connecting-link, the wife
of the one and the sister of the other. Colonel Bath has necessarily
united all suffrages. He is of course a very little stagey; he reminds us

that his author had had a long theatrical apprenticeship: he is something
too much _d'une piece_. But as a study of the brave man who is almost
more braggart than brave, of the generous man who will sacrifice not
only generosity but bare justice to "a hogo of honour," he is admirable,
and up to his time almost unique. Ordinary writers and ordinary readers
have never been quite content to admit that bravery and braggadocio
can go together, that the man of honour may be a selfish pedant. People
have been unwilling to tell and to hear the whole truth even about
Wolfe and Nelson, who were both favourable specimens of the type;
but Fielding the infallible saw that type in its quiddity, and knew it, and
registered it for ever.
Less amusing but more delicately faithful and true are Colonel James
and his wife. They are both very good sort of people in a way, who live
in a lax and frivolous age, who have plenty of money, no particular
principle, no strong affection for each other, and little individual
character. They might have been--Mrs. James to some extent is--quite
estimable and harmless; but even as it is, they are not to be wholly ill
spoken of. Being what they are, Fielding has taken them, and, with a
relentlessness which Swift could hardly have exceeded, and a
good-nature which Swift rarely or never attained, has held them up to
us as dissected preparations of half-innocent meanness, scoundrelism,
and vanity, such as are hardly anywhere else to be found. I have used
the word "preparations," and it in part indicates Fielding's virtue, a
virtue shown, I think, in this book as much as anywhere. But it does not
fully indicate it; for the preparation, wet or dry, is a dead thing, and a
museum is but a mortuary. Fielding's men and women, once more let it
be said, are all alive. The palace of his work is the hall, not of Eblis, but
of a quite beneficent enchanter, who puts burning hearts into his
subjects, not to torture them, but only that they may light up for us their
whole organisation and being. They are not in the least the worse for it,
and we are infinitely the better.
[Illustration.]
[Illustration.]

DEDICATION.
To RALPH ALLEN, ESQ.
SIR,--The following book is sincerely designed to promote the cause of

virtue, and to expose some of the most glaring evils, as well public as
private, which at present infest the country; though there is scarce, as I
remember, a single stroke of satire aimed at any one person throughout
the whole.
The best man is the properest patron of such an attempt. This, I believe,
will be readily granted; nor will the public voice, I think, be more
divided to whom they shall give that appellation. Should a letter,
indeed, be thus inscribed, DETUR OPTIMO, there are few persons
who would think it wanted any other direction.
I will not trouble you with a preface concerning the work, nor
endeavour to obviate any criticisms which can be made on it. The
good- natured reader, if his heart should be here affected, will be
inclined to pardon many faults for the pleasure he will receive from a
tender sensation: and for readers of a different stamp, the more faults
they can discover, the more, I am convinced, they will be pleased.
Nor will I assume the fulsome stile of common dedicators. I have not
their usual design in this epistle, nor will I borrow their language. Long,
very long may it be before a most dreadful circumstance shall make it
possible for any pen to draw a just and true character of