stories, like 'Vanity Fair,' may be described as novels without
a hero. It is not merely that his characters are imperfect, but that
they are deficient in the finer ingredients which go to make up the
nearest approximations of our imperfect natures to heroism. Colonel
Newcome was not perhaps so good a man as Parson Adams, but he had a
certain delicacy of sentiment which led him, as we may remember, to be
rather hard upon Tom Jones, and which Fielding (as may be gathered from
Bath in 'Amelia') would have been inclined to ridicule. Parson Adams is
simple enough to become a laughing-stock to the brutal, but he never
consciously rebels against the dictates of the plainest common-sense.
His theology comes from Tillotson and Hoadly; he has no eye for the
romantic side of his creed, and would be apt to condemn a mystic as
simply a fool. His loftiest aspiration is not to reform the world or any
part of it, but to get a modest bit of preferment (he actually receives
it, we are happy to think, in 'Amelia'), enough to pay for his tobacco
and his children's schooling. Fielding's dislike to the romantic makes
him rather blind to the elevated. He will not only start from the
actual, but does not conceive the possibility of an infusion of loftier
principles. The existing standard of sound sense prescribes an
impassable limit to his imagination. Parson Adams is an admirable
incarnation of certain excellent and honest impulses. He sets forth the
wisdom of the heart and the beauty of the simple instincts of an
affectionate nature. But we are forced to admit that he is not the
highest type conceivable, and might, for example, learn something from
his less robust colleague Dr. Primrose.

This remark suggests the common criticism, expounded with his usual
brilliancy by M. Taine. Fielding, he tells us, loves nature, but he does
not love it 'like the great impartial artists, Shakespeare and Goethe.'
He moralises incessantly--which is wrong. Moreover, his morality appears
to be very questionable. It consists in preferring instinct to reason.
The hero is the man who is born generous as a dog is born affectionate.
And this, says M. Taine, might be all very well were it not for a great
omission. Fielding has painted nature, but nature without refinement,
poetry and chivalry. He can only describe the impetuosity of the senses,
not the nervous exaltation and the poetic rapture. Man is with him 'a
good buffalo; and perhaps he is the hero required by