are "the three most
perfect plots ever planned" is a curious comment upon his
conception of fiction, since few stories have been more plotless
than Fielding's best book. The fact is, biographical fiction
like this is to be judged by itself, it has its own laws of
technique.

The glory of "Tom Jones" is in its episodes, its crowded canvas,
the unfailing verve and variety of its action: in the fine open-air
atmosphere of the scenes, the sense of the stir of life they
convey: most of all, in an indescribable manliness or humanness
which bespeaks the true comic force--something of that same
comic view that one detects in Shakspere and Moliere and
Cervantes. It means an open-eyed acceptance of life, a
realization of its seriousness yet with the will to take it with
a smile: a large tolerancy which forbids the view conventional
or parochial or aristocratic--in brief, the view limited. There
is this in the book, along with much psychology so superficial
as to seem childish, and much interpretation that makes us feel
that the higher possibilities of men and women are not as yet
even dreamed of. In this novel, Fielding makes fuller use than
he had before of the essay link: the chapters introductory to
the successive books,--and in them, a born essayist, as your
master of style is pretty sure to be, he discourses in the
wisest and wittiest way on topics literary, philosophical or
social, having naught to do with the story in hand, it may be,
but highly welcome for its own sake. This manner of pausing by
the way for general talk about the world in terms of Me has been
used since by Thackeray, with delightful results: but has now
become old-fashioned, because we conceive it to be the
novelist's business to stick close to his story and not obtrude
his personality at all. Thackeray displeases a critic like Mr.
James by his postscript harangues about himself as Showman,
putting his puppets into the box and shutting up his booth:
fiction is too serious a matter to be treated so lightly by its
makers--to say nothing of the audience: it is more, much more
than mere fooling and show-business. But to go back to the
eighteenth century is to realize that the novel is being newly
shaped, that neither novelist nor novel-reader is yet awake to
the higher conception of the genre. So we wax lenient and are
glad enough to get these resting-places of chat and charm from
Fielding: it may not be war, but it is nevertheless magnificent.

Fieldin