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Versions Of Pastoral In Henry Fielding'S Prose Fiction

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Versions Of Pastoral In Henry Fielding'S Prose Fiction

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Content 70-16,862 DOLAND, Virginia Marie, 1940- VERSIONS OF PASTORAL IN HENRY FIELDING'S PROSE FICTION. University of Southern California, Ph.D., 1969 Language and Literature, general University Microfilms, Inc., Ann Arbor, Michigan © VIRGINIA MARIE DOLAND 1970 ALL RIGHTS RESERVED THIS DISSERTATION HAS BEEN MICROFILMED EXACTLY AS RECEIVED VERSIONS OF PASTORAL IN HENRY FIELDING'S PROSE FICTION by Virginia Marie Doland A Dissertation Presented to the FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY OF SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA In Partial Fulfillment of the Requirements for the Degree DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY (English) August 1969 UNIVERSITY O F SOUTHERN CALIFORNIA THE GRADUATE SCHOOL UNIVERSITY PARK LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA 9 0 0 0 7 This dissertation, w ritten by ..VIBGINIA..MABIE..DQLAND.. under the direction of her..... D issertation C o m m ittee, and a p p ro ved by all its m em bers, has been presented to and accepted by T h e G ra d u ate School, in partial fulfillm ent of require ments of the degree of D O C T O R O F P H I L O S O P H Y Dean D a te Au&ust_J.969_ DISSERTATION COMMITTEE y n Chairm an* Y - n f £ T . . . TABLE OF CONTENTS Chapter I. PASTORAL TENSIONS AND THE PASTORAL IDEAL . . Definition of the Pastoral Three Historical Versions of the Pastoral The Pastoral Conflict in Theocritus and Virgil The Classical Ideal, Landscaping and the Country Gentleman Pastoral Themes in Fielding's Fiction II. THE PASTORAL OF INNOCENCE: JOSEPH ANDREWS . Critical Trends Pastoral Tensions Digressions Don Quixote as Analogue III. THE PASTORAL OF EXPERIENCE: JONATHAN WILD AND SHAMELA ............................... Critical Trends The Demonic Pastoral World The Urban World Distortion of the Pastoral Norm "Self-Enclosure1 1 vs. Pastoral Harmony Innocence vs. Experience: Ambiguity and Inversion in Mock-Pastoral IV. THE PASTORAL OF INNOCENCE: TOM JONES . . . Paradise Hall and the Lost Eden The Metaphor of the Way London Withdrawal to the Country V. THE PASTORAL WORLDS OF AMELIA ............ Darkened Tone in Amelia London as Symbol Amelia and the Aeneid Dr. Harrison: The Fallible Paragon Withdrawal or Retreat ii 61 127 201 273 Chapter VI. CONCLUSION......................... 340 A SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY ......................... 349 CHAPTER I PASTORAL TENSIONS AND THE PASTORAL IDEAL Definition of the Pastoral The term "pastoral" needs clarification when applied to Henry Fielding, for if one conceives of the pastoral only in terms of such pastoral elegies as Bion's "Lament for Adonis" or Milton's "Lycidas," Tom Jones is hardly pastoral. The pastoral elegy is, however, only a version of the highly conventionalized form of the pastoral genre, and the genre itself is concerned with themes as central to Fielding as to Bion or, for that matter, Theocritus. j Beneath the conventional trappings of the pastoral, | the basic principle which controls and gives form and meaning to the genre is the thematic opposition of the simple to the complex. This definition has been fairly well accepted since William Empson in Some Versions of j Pastoral defined the form as a "process of putting the j •, ! complex into the simple."1- Less flamboyant pastoral scholars like Kermode, Greg, and Congleton have given their; more or less qualified concurrence to Empson's definition. ■^(Norfolk, Conn., 1960), p. 23. 2 Kermode, for example, admits in his introduction to English Pastoral Poetry; Some modern writers use the term "Pastoral" to describe any work which concerns itself with the contrast between simple and complicated ways of living; its method is to exalt the naturalness and virtue of the simple man at the expense of the complicated one, whether the former be a shepherd, or a child, or a working-man. This is perfectly justifiable, although the title given to the kind emphasizes that the natural man is conventionally a shepherd.2 The pastoral, defined as Empson defines it, is more than a genre; it is what Leo Marx has called a "cultural symbol," an image which conveys meaning to a large number who share a specific culture.2 The pastoral world, conceived as an ideal, has been such a symbol to the western mind, becoming I particularly important to the Renaissance and the eighteenth century because it mirrored the ideals, the aspirations, the hopes and finally the disillusionments and defeats of the age. j I The pastoral does more than juxtapose the simple and j I the complex; it offers a view of the complex urban world from the standpoint of a simpler society. From such a ! i position, the pastoral writer can comment both on the j | I Icomplex society and on the reader's implicit absorption of | ; jthat society's standards. For example, in Joseph Andrews Parson Adams is utterly unable to suspect the drift of 2(London, 1952), p. 13. 2The Machine in the Garden: Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (New York, 1967) , p. 4. 3 Pounce's argument about the definition of charity until the latter's hypocrisy is inescapable; thus Pounce's selfishness is thrown into relief by Adams' pastoral naivete. The dialogue between the two characters, however, does more than condemn the society represented by Pounce; it reveals the reader to himself, for most readers under stand Pounce's arguments much better than Adams with all his good-natured simplicity ever will. In other words, the reader's ties are with the more complex world represented by Pounce's self-centered logic even though his sympathies are with Adams' simple goodness. The writer, thus, puts the complex into the simple, expecting the two concepts to illuminate each other, particularly expecting that the complex will be shown to be out of accord with the simple standard. It is Pounce, representative of the urban, non-pastoral world, not Adams, who fares the worst when the two are juxtaposed. The situation, nonetheless, is not one of simple condemna tion, for while the writer unmasks the complex by its contact with the simple, he is himself a representative not of the less complicated, ideal society, but of a more complex and perhaps a more corrupt reality. This basic opposition of the simple and the complex which is at the heart of pastoral can express itself in various dichotomies. W. W. Greg refers to the "protean 4 forms assumed by . . . the pastoral ideal,"4 but like Proteus of old, the essence of the pastoral always remains the same. Given the basic dichotomy of the simple and the complex, the antitheses of city and country, art and nature, real and ideal are simply variations on the original theme. The conflict between the city and the country, the most obvious of these dichotomies, is a theme which runs through Virgil, Horace, Sidney, and Spenser, to become one of the stock literary themes of the eighteenth century. The antithesis has its origins in the classical world, particularly in Rome, where the development of a definitely urban and eventually suburban society produced a nostalgia for the simplicity of the country, and where the feeling that the world, in the form of Rome, was too much with them. Juvenal's Third Satire on the city makes explicit this feeling that it is the city which is the source of all present corruption. In contrast, the country, envisioned in Virgil's second georgic, offers opportunity for the contemplation of natural beauty and a refuge from the luxury and confusion of sophisticated Rome. This feeling in the classical world was not confined to Rome; Theocritus nostalgically described the simple country life while he ^Pastoral Poetry and Pastoral Drama; A Literary Inquiry with Special Reference to the Pre-Restoration Stage in England (New York, 1959), p. 2. 5 was himself a court poet in the sophisticated and cultured city of Alexandria, but the Romans were more preoccupied than the Greeks with the pastoral age of gold, perhaps because they suspected that their present age was of a baser metal. Among the many Roman poets who dealt with the theme there are such significantly urban writers as Ovid, Horace, Martial and Lucretius, while such moralistic writers as Seneca, Cicero, and Cato are nostalgic for the conservative vigor that supposedly marked a more rural jRome. ! The Renaissance, with its own reasons for finding this contrast between the rural and the urban life, further j i developed the contrast. The attitude toward the country life was complex in such writers as Sidney when he wrote | the Arcadia, in which the court, as representative of the i i city, moves to the greenwood and brings with it all the j complications of a more developed urban existence. The | i attitude toward the country was popularly sentimentalized; | j as Frank Kermode says of the Elizabethan age, "There was a \ tendency to laugh at country folk, and this was a i traditional activity; but there was also a tendency to idealize them" (Kermode, p. 38). The conflict between ! laughter and idealization was natural but important, for it ; was located deep within the Renaissance man's conception of himself. While the Renaissance abounded in mythological j I and idealized countries such as Arcadia, Elysium, Atlantis, j 6 Tirnanogue, and Hesperides, few really took these myths straight (Marx, p. 40); most people tended to see them only as an ideal from which the present age had departed, but departed so far that the ideal was no longer felt as even seriously desirable. For example, Shakespeare in As You Like It reflects this attitude by his treatment of the green world when he reverses the usual process of satire and, instead of judging the real by the ideal (as did ' Butler in Hudibras and Swift in Gulliver's Travels), judges the ideal, in this case the pastoral ideal, by the real. If they are deprived of their traditional target, the corrupt court, Touchstone and Jacques will rail against I C ! pastoral innocence and romantic love instead.3 Shakespeare mocks the "contradictory nature of the desires ideally I resolved by pastoral life" (Barber, p. 227) when he has Touchstone reply to Corin's question "How like you this j shepherd's life?" with: Truly shepherd, in respect of itself, it is a good | life; but in respect that it is a shepherd's life, it | is naught. In respect that it is solitary, I like it ] very well; but in respect that it is private, it is a I very vile life. Now in respect that it is in the j fields, it pleaseth me well; but in respect that it is j not in the court, it is tedious. As it is a spare life, look you, it fits my humour well; but as there isi no more plenty in it, it goes much against my stomach.6; 5C. L. Barber, Shakespeare's Festive Comedy: A Study of Dramatic Form and its Relation to Social Custom (Princeton, 1959), p. 229. ^As You Like It, ed. Louis B. Wright and Virginia A.I La Mar (New York, 1960), III. ii. 13-21. j 7 Touchstone's desire to be at court is at odds with his desire to be in the fields, and the former disturbs the tranquillity of the latter; the goodness of the life in itself is destroyed by the fact that the good life is also a low life and therefore naught. Such self-contradictions j come close to the basic conflict of the pastoral; the urbanj dweller longs for a simpler, more essential existence, yet simultaneously feels that the simpler existence is coarse and low. I I The conflict of city and country is the "social (aspect of the great Art-Nature antithesis" (Kermode, p. 37) which Leo Marx sees as the controlling theme of the Pastoral (p. 25). Art-Nature is only another, more j specific, way of saying Complex-Simple; Art is urban, while Nature is rural. In the Renaissance, however, rural naturej I was often idealized as a green or golden world, an Arcadia j or a Hesperides, while the urban world was left i i unidealized. Thus the unidealized world of art, being j | urban, was both inferior and superior to the natural world, j i The courtly intruder in the green world was thus at once j inferior and superior, for: I i ; | what is important about the rural world . . . is not I merely the agricultural economy but its alleged moral, aesthetic, and, in a sense, metaphysical superiority to the urban, commercial forces which threaten it. (Marx, p. 99) The natural world can only serve the artist as raw ; i material, while the very portrait he paints is artificial. j 8 Ironically, the pastoral form which purports to deal specifically with natural phenomena is often the most artificial of modes. Greg comments: . . . the methods adopted by the greatest masters of the form are inconsistent with the motives that impelled them to its use, and where these motives were followed to their logical conclusion, the result, both in literature and in life, became a by-word for absurd unreality. To live at all the ideal appeared to require an atmosphere of paradox and incongruity; in its essence the most "natural" of all poetic forms, pastoralism came to its fairest flower amid the artificiality of a decadent court or as the plaything of the leisure hours of a college of learning, and its insipid convention having become "a literary plague on J every European capital," it finally disappeared from j view amid the fopperies of the Roman Arcadia and the puerile conceits of Petit Trianon. (pp. 1-2) The pastoral never was a genuinely natural mode for the shepherd; the emphasis is not upon the shepherd and his flocks, but upon the poet and the artificial world from which he comes and the equally artificial world which he is trying to create. "The essential trick of the old j i pastoral," writes William Empson, "... was to make a ! i simple people express strong feelings . . . in learned and j fashionable language" (p. 11). From Virgil to Pope, the | language of the pastoral was not natural but artificial, | and although Gay defected in mockery and Philips in j ; |earnest, the artificiality is essential to the form. Such ! |artificiality offers a perspective to the work, for if the ; pastoral offers a view of a complex world from the view point of a simpler society, that simpler society is 9 nonetheless manipulated by an artist who is at home in the complex world and who writes for an urban or courtly audience. Similarly, the conflict of the ideal and the real, which is the third form of the simple-complex antithesis, has been implicit all along in the recognition that the pastoral ideal is almost never accepted at its face value. In the true pastoral, the idyllic world of Arcadia is always brought into contact with a contradictory reality; the simple ideal is always threatened by an alien outside world. Marx, using the metaphor of a quiet, meditative country scene shattered by the sound of a locomotive, calls this alien intrusion a "counterforce" (pp. 16-33). The pastoral counterforce is anything which destroys the serenity of the ideal, and there is always a counterforce or intruder in Arcadia. Erwin Panofsky has pointed out that the traditional intruder in Arcadia is Death; in the midst of the idyll, the shepherds are shocked by the discovery of a tomb upon which is inscribed "Et in Arcadia 7 Ego" (Even in Arcadia, there am I). The motif of the memento mori is recurrent in Arcadia, for Death is the ultimate reality which intrudes upon the ideal. The pastoral ideal is inevitably modified by reality: ^"Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition," Meaning in the Visual Arts (New York, 1957), p. 307. 10 . . . no sooner had this new, Utopian Arcady come into being than a discrepancy was felt between the supernatural perfection of an imaginary environment and the natural limitations of life as it is. (Panofsky, p. 300) By its very nature, the pastoral evokes an ambivalent response; the oppositions of the city and the country, the real and the ideal, the simple and the complex, the world of nature and the world of art are by their very nature unresolved. The attitude toward the Arcadian ideal is both yearning and disdain; Touchstone's answer that pastoral life is good in respect to itself but bad in respect that it is a shepherd's life is not far from the proper response. The total effect of responsible | pastoralism, as distinguished from idyllic wish- fulfillment, is complex: Most literary works called pastorals— at least those i substantial enough to retain our interest— do not | finally permit us to come away with anything like the j simple, affirmative attitude we adopt toward pleasing i rural scenery. In one way or another, if only by | virtue of the unmistakable sophistication with which they are composed, these works manage to qualify, or I call into question, or bring irony to bear against the j illusion of peace and harmony in a green pasture. | (Marx, p. 2 5) I The yearning for the simple, natural life of the country I . ! swain is always qualified by the identification of the poetj ;and the reader with a more complex, sophisticated, and 1 ; iartificial life. The pastoral, after all, is an urban, not! a rural product, and the city poet who sits in his pruned 11 garden and writes in the artificial genre of the pastoral has already committed himself to the complex life. W. W. Greg describes the town as looking on with "amused envy at the rustic freedom of the country" (p. 6). j Amusement and envy seem contradictory, as does the city1s | i attitude toward the pastoral world. The longing which the i l poet and the sophisticated reader have for this simpler existence is at best half-sincere and sentimental, hardly lasting for the duration of the reading. The point is, of I course, that such yearning is not intended to last and that I i the writer intends us to perceive the real beneath the j ideal. j The simplest kind of pastoral assumes that the quiet j wildness of the country is better than the cultivated j and complex life of the hurrying city and country. j (Kermode, p. 17) J | This is, however, only the simplest kind of pastoral, and j most pastorals are not simple in their final attitude. J i Eighteenth-century Englishmen, caught up by the j contrast of the Augustan ideal with the reality of London's j I muddy streets and Walpole's corrupt administration, were not particularly susceptible to naive, idyllic dreams of a j i ; jgolden age. Such men longed for a better age, certainly, but it was difficult for them to take any ideal with dead seriousness. This complex of yearning and disdain can be 1 polarized into the two types of pastoral popular in the eighteenth century, the idyllic and the mock pastoral. The j 12 former implied a simple and naive belief, the latter a rejection of the foundations of belief. The Golden Age Idyll The idyllic golden age pastoral was inevitable in the background of the English pastoralist whether he believed the myth or not; indeed, all Englishmen were exposed to the concept via the Biblical tale of Eden. All pastorals, even those which are complex in their final effect, are related to this conception of a golden age, but not all pastoral authors believe in it. The term "golden age" has come to epitomize a nostalgic and idealistic attitude toward the pastoral; developing from Virgil's eclogues and the Italian pastoralists, the ideal was | established as essential to the pastoral by Rapin. It was j George Chapman who introduced the term into England when he I 1 informed Fletcher, who had just written the Faithful | i Shepherdess, that "This iron age, that eats itself, will j never bite at your golden world. . . .1,8 The conception of the golden world dominated pastoral theory in the | neo-classical age. Knightley Chetwood displays the typical; ! attitude of the neo-classical critic when, in his "Preface I jto the Pastorals," he explains that the Golden-Age shepherd; 8"To his Loving Friend, Master John Fletcher, j Concerning his Pastoral being both a Poem and a Play," j Works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, ed. A. H. Bullen, III (London, 1908), 14. 13 is the proper character for pastoral poetry because this kind of poetry was: formed upon the model of the first innocence and simplicity, which the moderns, better to dispense themselves from imitating, have wisely thought fit to treat as fabulous and impracticable.9 The neo-classical tendency, discernible in Chetwood, to seek some sort of solace in remembrance of an ideal age in the past points toward an awareness of non-ideal present. The belief that somewhere in the history of man there has been a better age from which men have "fallen" i but to which they might attain imaginatively is a usual feature of the pastoral in an age of iron. It is this belief which underlies much of the pastoral literature of solitude in the eighteenth century; Pomfret's "The Choice" j j j iand Thomson's "The Seasons" are equally: I ! an expression of that yearning for the golden age, for j escape from the complexities, the tensions, the j frustrations of civilization, which has haunted man j since he ceased to live in caves.10 j ! This dream of a golden age has its roots deep in the desire| for an age which comes closer to the aspirations of the j human spirit; significantly, however, the ideal age is j i always distant either in time or in space. The artificial j i |form of the pastoral with its dream of a distant golden age j Q "Preface to the Pastorals," Works of Dryden, ed. Sir Walter Scott, rev. George Saintsbury, XIII (Edingburgh, 1887), 328. •^Raymond D. Havens, "Solitude and the Neoclassicists," ELH, XXI (Dec. 1954), 261. 14 is both the "expression of instincts and impulses deep- rooted in the nature of humanity" (Greg, p. 2), and a realization of "the primary impulse, human resentment at the conditions and struggles of life ..." (Kermode, p. 14). The golden age itself is unattainable, but it is desirable precisely because it remains unattainable; it is a realm of the imagination, an image of the desire of the soul. Located in the past or in a future millenium or in far-away, non-existent Arcady, the golden age can never be found; instinctively man preserves a territory of desire where the ideal may remain intact. Especially when the present age is iron, the tendency is to look toward an idealized age of gold. The Age of Anne, for example, was hardly golden, in spite of the tradition which heralded a new English Golden Age, but John Gay insisted that no age could be "so justly . . . instiled Golden, as this of our Sovereign lady Queen Anne"11 even though, as Adina Forsgren points out, no one believed in "either Arcadia or a Golden Age in the sense of the age of Saturn" any more.12 For the Englishman in the early eighteenth century, the golden age was in the future, a future which never materialized as the throne passed to 11"The Shepherd's Week," The Poetical Works of John Gay, ed. John Underhill (London, 1893), I, 66. 12John Gay Poet "of a lower order"; Comments on his Rural Poems and Other Early Writings (Stockholm, 1964), p. 126. 15 the equivalent of German princes. Dennis's "A Poem on the Death of Queen Anne" with its prophesy of a future English golden age seems ironic in the light of the latter eighteenth century, but Dennis was not alone, as such poems as Oldmixon's The Muses Mercury, Philips sixth Pastoral and! Gay's The Shepherd's Week indicate. The irony is not out of place, however, for the pastoral trades in irony, and | even the Augustan Age itself was a mockery of the original |Roman Augustan Age. | The pastoral ideal is a way of transcending the limits of a diminished present, and the theme of the idyllic age in an innocent green world is a symbolic victory over the forces of futility, or, as Northrop Frye would have it, a "triumph of life and love over the waste l a n d . The human spirit insists upon its ideal even when jreality insists upon its denial; to the neoclassical writerj i of pastorals, the green world was hope, a victory over the j limitations of unideal existence. The golden age idyll is j less a refined toy than Petit Trianon would lead us to J believe; indeed, the idyll can attain an almost mythic j \ level as an expression of the ideal of perfection. j ! The ideal of perfection expressed in the golden world and its various analogues, the garden of Eden, Hesperia, and Arcadia, is archetypal. In this sense, the ; i 13Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (New York, 1965), p. 182. 16 archetype is like Marx's "cultural symbol," with continuity in time. The garden, the golden world, and the idyll can be traced in pastoral and semi-pastoral literature as early as Sumer; the garden archetype of Eden, Arcadia and Hesperia is, in other words, a recurrent patterning of human experience and desire. Frye's definition of an archetype as "a typical or recurring image . . . a symbol which connects one poem with another and thereby helps to unify and integrate our literary experience" (p. 99) implies that the archetype points to man's basic conflicts and ideals; man's dream of innocence and goodness in an idyllic garden is as often as not a reflection of the reality of evil and guilt in the non-idyllic city. The wealth of associations and possibilities which can be attached to the conventional pastoral is illustrated by Frye's summary of the transmutations which have occurred in the form in Theocritus, the ritual Adonis lament, The Shepherd's Calendar, Sidney, The Faerie Queene, Shakespeare's Forest comedies, Shelley, Arnold, Whitman, and Dylan Thomas (p. 99). As Frye points out in this same discussion, however, the most significant associations cluster around the pastoral symbolism of the Bible and the i Christian pastoralism of the middle ages. The shepherd is j an omnipresent figure in the Bible, for not only was Abel, j the first sacrificial victim of man's fallen nature, a shepherd, but as the Twenty-third psalm assures us: 17 The Lord is my Shepherd; I shall not want. He maketh me to lie down in green pastures; he leadeth me beside the still waters . . . (Psalms 23:1-2) Similarly, Christ in the New Testament is both the good shepherd who cares for his sheep and the sacrificial Lamb of God. In all of these examples, Christ is both Shepherd and Lamb. Virgil's messianic eclogue can be seen as a link between the pastoral symbolism of the Bible and the classical pastoral (Frye, pp. 99-100); with this connection, the archetype of the lost Eden becomes inevitable in western experience. Thus the classical golden age is merely a variation of Eden, an Eden spread over the whole earth. Eden for the Western writer, particularly for the writer of pastoral, is inescapable whether or not the actual Eden ever existed, for it is an image that haunts the spirit of man, an image of a golden world from which man has fallen by his own nature. The fall from Eden is the "archetypal tragedy" which underlies the pastoral experience, for . . . the loss of innocence of Adam and Eve, who, no matter how heavy a doctrinal load they have to carry, will always remain dramatically in the position of children baffled by their first contact with an adult situation. (Frye, p. 220) In re-enacting the fall from innocence of Adam and Eve, men are then "in the position of children," and the exposure to unideal reality can result in the "childlike" nostalgia for the golden age (Frye, p. 186) which lies at the center of idyllic pastoralism. The conflict between 18 the ideal and the real thus reflects our own nature and the loss which we have imaginatively sustained. Because we have "fallen," there must always be a tension between what we conceive as the ideal and the reality in which we are trapped, between the simplicity of an idyllic life and the complex duplicity which our inter-relations sometime assume. The Mock-Pastoral The eighteenth century excelled in mockery, and it is no accident that the mock-pastoral form flourished then. The mock-pastoral form itself implies disillusionment, bitterness, even rejection of the ideal world represented by the conventional pastoral; it comes as "a kind of pantomime following the great play" (Kermode, p. 42). When men were too bitter even to dream of the ideal world, the ideals were mocked by grotesque parodies of themselves, and thus the pastoral became the mock or anti-pastoral. The reaction of mockery insisted upon the inversion of all the values of the ideal and all the idyllic dreams; while the traditional pastoral envisioned an ideal golden age, the mock-pastoral insisted that there was no other possibility but the diminished present. If the mock- pastoralist writes about the country, he insists upon 19 showing it "as truth will paint it, and as Bards will not, "14 in an its squalor and poverty. Instead of the conventional Corydon, the shepherd in this type of pastoral is likely to be named Grubbinol or Bumkinet in token of his all too evident earthiness. Often the mock- pastoralist, not content with painting the unideal elements in country life, shifts his locale altogether from the green countryside to the grey city. The translation of the country pastoral into the city eclogue is accompanied by a substitution of the fecund symbols of life which are traditional in the conventional pastoral by symbols of sterility and isolation from the natural world. The setting of the town pastoral concentrates upon the city half of the country- city antithesis and in place of a golden age shows us the streets of London and an artificial, often corrupt society bereft of its visionary ideals. In this grey world where i the pastoral ideal is a half-forgotten memory, the streets | I I of London and the walls of Newgate must substitute for the j I green meadows and meads of the country. ! I Yet with all its inversion of traditional values, j the mock-pastoral does not manage to negate the pastoral dichotomies; the contrasts and conflicts of the city and ! I ■^George Crabbe, "The Village," The Poetical Works of George Crabbe, ed. A. J. and R. M. Carlyle (London, 1914), p. 35 (1.54). 20 the country, the ideal and the real, the simple and the complex, the artful and the natural still exist, but now we start from the opposite viewpoint. Sven Armens is essentially speaking of these inversions when he says of the town or mock-pastoral: When the pastoral coin is reversed, we find that the town image reflects realism in contrast to country idealism, cynicism in contrast to country sentimen talism, and vice in contrast to country virtue. Yet, the coin still maintains its pastoral unity. It has been remarked that the realistic pastoral, which is often embodied in the mock pastoral of Gay's town eclogues and town georgic, often gives a natural expression for a sense of social injustice.15 The vision of the idyllic life, or life as it could be lived, is inverted in location, but also in all the associations which go with the form until the ideal is ultimately swallowed up in the corrupt and diminished present. The pastoral world, the greenness of the grass, the dream of innocence, is no longer interesting or even conceivable in this version of the pastoral, and all that is left is mockery. Significantly, it was Jonathan Swift who suggested to Pope that the pastoral ridicule is not exhausted, and that a porter, footman, or chairman's pastoral might do well. Or what think you of a Newgate pastoral among the whores and the thieves there?16 15jphn Gay, Social Critic (New York, 1954), p. 51. ^Alexander Pope, Works, ed. W. Elwin and W. J. Courthope, VII (London, 1889), 17. 21 The diminished present makes idealism a relative thing; the eighteenth-century satirists introduced into the pastoral not just a ridicule of the complex pastoral world, but a ridicule of the very ideal of any pastoral world at all. When the swains are metamorphosed into cutthroats and the shepherdesses into prostitutes, the ideal disappears, and the reader is left in a world in which there is no standard of judgment. William Empson in his discussion of Gay's mock- pastoral Beggar's Opera observes that "this clash and identification of the refined, the universal, and the low . . . is the whole point of pastoral" (p. 239). If this is so, then the mock-pastoral implies that there is no difference between the two worlds which have heretofore been kept in strict opposition; the shepherdesses and prostitutes, prime ministers and cheats are all the same. The mock-pastoral implies an acceptance of a fallen world which has been cast out of Eden so long that it can no longer even believe in the myth. Pastorals of Innocence and Pastorals of Experience The pastoral deals with a projected racial innocence, and even when its conventions are parodied, it is primarily the ideal of innocence which is being mocked. The opposition between innocence and experience at the heart of pastoral can perhaps be illuminated by a 22 consideration of four terms of Northrop Frye's: the apocalyptic, the analogy of innocence, the analogy of experience, and the demonic. The first two, the apocalyptic and the analogy of innocence, are basically identified with the conventional pastoral, while the last two, the analogy of experience and the demonic, are similarly related to the version of mock-pastoral which Swift calls the "Newgate pastoral.” The apocalyptic and the demonic worlds are seemingly opposing myths which represent a dichotomy in human experience: . . . undisplaced myth . . . takes the form of two contrasting worlds of total metaphorical identifi cation, one desirable and the other undesirable. These worlds are often identified with the existential heavens and hells of the religions contemporary with such literature. These two forms of metaphorical organization we call the apocalyptic and the demonic respectively. (Frey, p. 139) These two realms are also the realms of the pastoral, for the conventional pastoral with its dream of a permanent, supernatural golden age is close to the heaven of the apocalyptic mode, while the Newgate pastoral mocks heaven and substitutes for it a nightmare hell in the labyrinthine city. The apocalyptic world is paradise, the paradise of the human spirit fully realizing its ideal. Such a world is alive with the fecund spirit of joy? it is, appropriately enough, a garden of the body and the spirit. Men in this world are larger than life; indeed, the world itself is larger than life. This world is green or golden; here men are at harmony with themselves and their world, and even the animals are at peace. The garden of paradise serves as an image of what life might be, of a realized idyll, the permanent golden age. The demonic world, in contrast, is an inferno, an inferno of the human spirit which abrogates the possibility of any ideal. In opposition to the fecundity of the apocalyptic world, this world is sterile and dead, and men in it are isolated within themselves. The prison, a type of hell, looms large in the demonic world and in the Newgate pastoral which exists within its territories. In this world, animals are monsters or beasts of prey, and the image of the scaffold, gallows, and pillory casts its shadow over every action. This is the wasteland, a city of destruction, the labyrinthine metropolis which winds its way into oblivion. The demonic world would seem antithetic to the pastoral form, but in some Newgate pastorals, most notably Fielding’s Jonathan Wild and Gay's Beggar's Opera, the demonic is often close to the surface. The complete abrogation of paradise is hell, and the complete abrogation of the golden age is the bitter Newgate pastoral. What the apocalyptic and demonic are in the mythic, 24 the analogy of innocence and the analogy of experience are in the human realm. The art of the analogy of innocence, which includes most of the comic . . . the idyllic, the romantic, the reverent, the panegyrical, the idealized, and the magical, is largely concerned with an attempt to present the desirable in human, familiar, attainable, and morally allowable terms. (Frye, p. 157) The Garden of Eden, for example, is a human, innocent counterpart of the apocalyptic paradise. By definition, the analogy of innocence is in opposition to the world of experience, yet they touch at the green or golden world. The garden of Eden and Adam cast out from the idyllic existence to seek his sustenance in a hostile and unidyllic world together illustrate this point of conflict. This dream world [the green world] collides with the stumbling and blinded follies of the world of experience . . . and yet proves strong enough to impose the form of desire on it. (Frye, pp. 183-184) The green world is a spiritual battlefield between the i forces of life and the forces of death, and conventionally life is the victor. In this struggle and resolution rests much of the imaginative power of the pastoral; the pastoral insists upon life. While the apocalyptic and the demonic are mythic modes which illustrate the extremes implied in the j i pastoral, most pastorals are more closely aligned with the analogies either of innocence or of experience. That version of the pastoral (and it is the traditional one) which grants the existence of an ideal, even an 25 unattainable one, is ultimately an expression of optimism, of the indomitability of the human spirit. Such a form may be called the "Pastoral of Innocence," for it springs from a naive and unsullied faith in life and in the potentiality of man. But there is another version of the pastoral, which could be called the "Pastoral of Experience" because it implies that the ideal is either the same thing as the real or that the ideal is negated because our experience in life falls so far short of it. The pastoral of experience mocks the pastoral of innocence; the idyllic world must be travestied lest we believe in it and feel our pain the more. The eighteenth century was the great age of the mock-pastoral as it was of the mock-epic, and both mockeries spring from the same feeling of a diminished present bereft both of innocence and heroism. These two types of pastoral, the pastoral of innocence and the pastoral of experience, represent two attitudes toward the discrepancy between what we imagine as an ideal and the reality in which we are forced to live. The traditional pastoral implies an optimistic, hopeful belief in man's potentialities; it is this type of pastoral which can be called the pastoral of innocence. But the Newgate pastoral suggests that these poten tialities are non-existent, at best an illusion, at worst a bitter mockery of the dream of innocence, a post-golden 26 world of experience in which man has not only been cast out of the garden, but has fallen into a world in which the dream is irretrievable. Three Historical Versions of the Pastoral The definitions of the pastoral which we have been elaborating are the generally accepted modern interpre tations, but in the course of pastoral theory the form has been explained in ways which at first glance seem to contradict the modern definitions. These historical conceptions, or misconceptions, are, however, not basically in opposition to the present definition; rather, they are either partial, myopically concerned with one or the other term in the pastoral antithesis, or they implicitly recognize the existence of the pastoral dichotomy. The pastoral antithesis, the tension between the worlds of the simple and the complex, has given rise to three types of historical explanation: the idyllic, the allegoric and the realistic. In reality these three explanations converge upon the opposing terms of the j pastoral? the idyllic interpretation sees primarily the simple world, the realistic sees the complex world, and the allegoric interpretation envisions the simple world | only as a transparent cover, a kind of sugar coating for the complex world. 27 Allegoric Pastoralism The allegoric pastoral critic assumes that the idyllic world is not sufficient in and of itself; there must be more and deeper meaning than appears on the surface if the form is to be justified. Under such an interpre tation, the pastoral becomes an esoteric roman a clef, with much effort expended upon such questions as the identification of Meliboeus in Virgil's first and ninth eclogues or the promised child in his fourth. The allegoric mode of the pastoral does have an origin in Virgil's eclogues, and indeed it was Virgil who introduced allegory into the tradition of Theocritus. Theocritus wrote idylls about the country, but seldom did he have any relationship with court politics at the center of his writing. Virgil, the Roman court poet, was not content merely to paint country scenes; he insisted upon bringing the politics and personal scandals of the court into the country scenes. J. A. Symonds expresses one possible attitude to such an innovation when he complains that Virgil "with Roman bad taste, . . . commits the capital crime of allegorizing."^ True, the Roman countryside is more than,a vehicle for the appreciation of nature and the golden age of innocence; Virgil's fourth eclogue, characteristically, is so allegoric that later ^studies of the Greek Poets (London, 1880), I, 267. 28 critics have been unable to agree if the promised child is to be the infant son of C. Pollio, the offspring of the marriage of Octavian and Scribonia from which the notorious Julia was born, the child of Antony and Cleopatra, or as the middle ages would have it, a divinely inspired prophesy of the Jewish messiah.^ Such are the vicissi tudes of pastoral allegory! The Christian pastoralists of the middle ages, however, used the pastoral form as a vehicle for religious moralizing; after all, does not the pastoral deal with sheep and shepherds, and is not Christ the good shepherd who cares for his sheep? Obviously, the pastoral is re lated to Christ as shepherd and the concept of a golden age of innocence is related to Eden, but the form is plainly more than moral pablum for the masses. Nonetheless, there is a strongly allegorical strain which runs through the history of the pastoral. This strain is particularly strong from Virgil to the Renaissance, when the allegorical pastoral disappears at the threshold of the neoclassical age. Such allegoric pastoralists as Alexander Barclay, the earliest English writer on the theory of the pastoral, reflect the presuppositions of their age by promises to the readers that if they will read the pastoral "treatise" to 18Eclogues, ed. H. Rushton Fairclough (London, 1932) , I, 576-578. 29 the end they will find much that is "both true and profitable" from the shepherd's discourse which is "but a fable." Similarly, George Puttenham in the Arte of English Poesie makes the same moralizing tendency explicit by his denial that . . . the Eglogue should be the first and most ancient forme of artificial Poesie, being perswaded that the Poet devised the Eglogue long after the other dramatick poems, not of purpose to counterfait or represent the rusticall manner of loues and communica tion, but under the vaile of homely persons and in rude speeches to insinuate and glaunce at greater matters. . . .20 To the reader of English pastoral, the most familiar allegoric theorist is undoubtedly E. K., who is ever ready in his "General Argument of the whole book" which he appends to Spenser's The Shepherd's Calendar to explicate the moral implications of his poet. Indeed, the very idea of appending a "general argument" to such a work as the Shepherd's Calendar is in itself significant, and indicates that the theorist will be treating the pastoral allegorically. E. K. is undampened by any qualms about classifying and dividing the eclogues into three groups: the Plaintive, the Recreative and the Moral. Obviously, 19"Prologue," Certayne Eglogs, ed. Beatrice White, E.E.T.S., O.S., 175 (London, 1928), p. 2. 20"The Arte of English Poesie," English Literary Criticism: The Renaissance, ed. O. B. Hardison, Jr. (New York, 1963), p. 167. 30 his heart is with the latter group, for, he writes, many of this group are mixed with some Satyrical bitternesse, namely the second of reuerence dewe to old age, the fift of coloured deceit, the seuenth and ninth of dissolute shepheards and pastours, the tenth of contempt of Poetrie and pleasant wits. And to this diuision may every thing herein be reasonably applyed: A few onely except, whose speciall purpose and meaning I am not priuie to.21 Thereby the three groups of the eclogue suddenly become one group, the moral; that is, unless E. K. is at a loss for an allegorical interpretation, which he seldom is, Spenser is to be interpreted morally. Even the plan of having twelve eclogues in the form of a calendar which can be explained as a formal structure or an attempt to follow the natural cycle, becomes allegorical to E. K. who sees this division as plainly referring to the incarnation of our mighty Sauiour and eternall redeemer the L. Christ, who as then renewing the state of the decayed world, and returning the compasse of expired yeres to theyr former date and first commencement, left to vs his heires a memoriall of his birth in the ende of the last yeere and beginning of the next. (Spenser, p. 420) Obviously, E. K. has some basis for his allegory, but the allegory does not seem sufficient to explain the Shepherd1s Calendar. The allegorical pastoralist assumes that the complex world is the raison d'etre for the simple world. 2lThe Poetical Works of Edmund Spenser, ed. J. C. Smith and E. De Selincourt (London, 1912), p. 419. 31 In such an interpretation, the simple world either does not exist, or its existence is not significant. Again, neither world is completely denied, and perhaps the allegorical pastoralist if he were properly approached might assent to the simple-complex dichotomy in the pastoral, but he would insist that the simple was only a dumb show for the complex. Idyllic Pastoralism The sheerly idyllic interpretation sees the p p pastoral world as a realm of "earthly content"where all things are as they might be and the sun always shines while the rain never falls. This interpretation is not entirely fair to the idyllic pastoralist, however, for the idyll is definitely inherent in the pastoral form, and such an interpretation has the official sanction of Virgil. As with the allegorical pastoral, Virgil can be pointed to as a historical forebear of the idyllic pastoral, for he made his Arcadia a land of beauty and innocence, a "golden world" in which the ideal has triumphed over reality. Of course, the modern interpreters of pastoral would agree, the pastoral is idyllic, the golden world is important, but nonetheless, is such an explanation sufficient for the pastoral form? 22Martha Hale Shackford, "A Definition of the pastoral Idyll,” PMLA, N.S. XII (1904), 587. 32 The idyllic dream, as we have seen, is persistent; the country offers an alternative of goodness and innocence in place of our everyday existence, and most of us believe that such an existence would be better. Thomas Purney in his Enquiry Into the True Nature of the Pastoral is subject to such a belief when he declares that the pastoral should describe a "State, or Life," which we as readers would "willingly exchange our present State for." The pastoral world is, then, the world of wish fulfillment, of the realization of desire, for although a man might willingly exchange his present life for "the busy, great, or pompous" these are not the realm of pastoral but of epic and tragedy; when man desires to change his state to "the retir'd, soft, or easy," he will turn to the pastoral life.23 The pastoral, then, offers an alternative to the business of life; it is an easy and soft retreat into an idyllic paradise where nothing disturbs the tranquility of the sheep and the shepherd. Such an interpretation of the pastoral is inherent in the English tradition; and Rapin and Fontenelle, the two great French pastoral critics who together laid out the path which English pastoral theory was to take, seem to agree that the pastoral is basically idyllic. Rene Rapin, the originator of the neoclassical school of 23ed. Earl Wasserman, Augustan Reprint Society, Series 2, no. 4 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1958), pp. 25-26. 33 pastoral theory in which such famous figures as Pope, Swift, and Gay have been included, declared that the Eclogue should only delight, and charm by its takeing prettiness. . . . There must be nothing in it but Hony, Milk, Roses, Violets, and the like sweetness, so that when you read you might think that you are in Adonis's Gardens, as the Greeks speak, i.e. in the most Pleasant Place imaginable . . .24 The purpose of such an eclogue would be, then, simply to delight the reader and to portray a golden age through idyllic surroundings. Similarly, Fontenelle, who is generally considered a progenitor of the rationalistic pastoralists, suggests that the pastoral should not bother itself with reflections of the actual country life but should instead create a variation of this life in which the unpleasant facts of country existence have been carefully filtered out: Our Imagination is not to be pleased without Truth; but it is not very hard to please it; for, often 1tis satisfied with a kind of half Truth. Let it see only the half of a Thing, but let that half be shown in a lively manner, then it will hardly bethink it self that you hide from it the other half, and you may thus deceive it as long as you please, since all the while it imagines that this single moiety, with the Thoughts of which it is taken up, is the whole Thing. The Illusion and at the same time the pleasingness of pastorals therefore consists in exposing to the Eye only the Tranquility of a Shepherd's Life, and in 24pe Carmine Pastorali (Prefixed to Thomas Creech's Translation of the Idylliums of Theocritus), Augustan Reprint Society, Series 2, no. 3 (Ann Arbor, Mich., 1947), pp. 42-43. 34 dissembling or concealing its meanness, as also in showing only its Innocence and hiding its Miseries. . . .25 This careful filtering of experience in the pastoral was not, evidently, considered as dishonest— it was simply a means of creating an ideal and idyllic golden age. By the beginning of the neoclassical period, this idyllic golden age became the standard interpretation of the pastoral; the allegorical explanation was supplanted and Virgil's fourth eclogue was reinterpreted not as a cover for a political puff or a prophesy of Christ's birth, but as a presentation of a realm of the imagination. Even though one could not entirely believe in the idyllic world, at least it presented an ideal which offered some escape from an increasingly unideal reality. The neoclassical critics seized upon the concept of the "golden age," possibly for political or personal reasons, but the point is that the idyllic world offered a world in which the wished-for ideal could triumph. The idyllic interpretation is, of course, more than, sentimental escapism, but this is a danger which it might encounter. In ignoring the complex reality for the simple ideal, the neoclassical and idyllic critics ran the danger of cutting themselves off from the hidden springs of the form's power. The pastoral is, 25»a Treatise upon Pastorals," Monsieur Bossu's Treatise of the Epick Poem (London, 1695), p. 284. 35 essentially, a reflection of life, not an escape from it. Realistic Pastorallsm To the later writers of the eighteenth century, an interpretation of the pastoral which left out the facts of everyday existence was patently invalid, for the pastoral dealt with existence in this life, not in a mythic golden age. In a reaction against the idyllic pastoral, such pastorals as Philips painted with everyday characters in a recognizably English setting had no lack of admirers. Even Gay's parody of Philips and the rationalistic pastoral was admired by those, and they were not a few, who did not understand his mockery. Such men of common sense as Samuel Johnson, who has made himself famous as a critic of the pastoral, rightly objected to the excesses of the golden age idyll and in Rambler 37 proposed instead that the pastoral should be simply "an action or passion . . . represented by its effects upon a country life."2® As one might have predicted, the pastorals which Samuel Johnson conceived would make no use of such trumpery as the Golden Age. If one considers the pastoral in general as a representation of rural nature, and consequently as exhibiting the ideas and sentiments of those, whoever they are, to whom the country affords pleasure of employment, (I, p. 216) Johnson thinks it would be hard to "discover why it is 26 (London, 1794), I, 215. 36 thought necessary to refer descriptions of a rural state to remote times" (I, p. 215). In other words, Johnson would seem to be saying, the pastoral should be about the English countryside, because the purpose of the pastoral is simply to portray rural scenery. This is, of course, a vast oversimplification of the purpose of the pastoral, but it does have its place as a needed corrective to the "easy" genre of the pastoral. George Crabbe is in the same general school of thought, although more extreme when he condemns the "sleepy bards" who prolong the "flattering dream" of an idyllic golden age, for such "trifling objects" require "no deep thought." Only those poets, according to Crabbe, who "sing of happy swains" are by virtue of mental incapability never to "know their pains" (I, 17-34). Crabbe1s "The Village" succeeds in breaking down the pastoral distinction between the real and the ideal by making the ideal merely another version of the real. Yet this breaking down of distinc tions was not based upon a desire to get back to the essential nature of the pastoral, for Crabbe "shows no enthusiasm for primitive life or feeling for external nature. . . . He is more concerned with showing what the pastoral should not be than he is with showing what it might become."27 27j. e . Congleton, Theories of Pastoral Poetry in England, 1684-1798 (Gainesville, Fla., 1952), p. 150. 37 Crabbe, however, is an extreme case, and Hugh Blair in his comments on "Pastoral Poetry" in Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres takes a middle way which shows dissatisfaction with both the golden age neoclassical pastoral and the portrayal of coarse, ugly English life. Blair describes three alternate views of pastoral life, but finally rejects two of these views as inadequate. The first mode of pastoral life sees the form as bound to reproduce life in the country as it now actually is; when the state of Shepherds is reduced to be a mean, servile, and laborious state; when their employments are become disagreeable, and their ideas gross and low. . . .28 Such a version of the pastoral is, of course, the rationalistic pastoral of Crabbe, and it is not sufficient. Blair's second mode of pastoral life is that which we may suppose it once to have been, in the more early and simple ages, when it was a life of ease and abundance; when the wealth of men consisted chiefly in flocks and herds, and the Shepherd, though unrefined in his manners, was respectable in his state. (II, 337- 338) It is this second, ideal, pastoral life which Blair accepts as the true pastoral, for it has neither the ugliness of the rationalistic pastoral nor the distortions of the idyllic golden age pastoral. The third type of 28"pastoral Poetry— Lyric Poetry," Lectures on Rhetoric and Belles Lettres, ed. Harold F. Harding (Carbondale, 111., 1965), II, 337. pastoral, strikingly similar to the golden age pastoral, shows life such as it never was, and never can in reality be, when, to the ease, innocence, and simplicity of the early ages, we attempt to add the polished taste and cultivated manners, of modern times. (II, 338) Blair, along with many modern critics, chooses the second of these alternatives because: Of these three states, the first is too gross and mean, the last too refined and unnatural, to be made the ground-work of Pastoral Poetry. (II, 332) The determining factor for Blair, then, is not the transformation of the ideal, but whether or not the pastoral situation which is described "may have actually taken place" (II, 338). Basically, then, Blair is voicing the belief of the realistic pastoral, although in a more modified form than Crabbe, for the standard is ultimately verisimilitude. The final emphasis rests upon the real world. Again, these historical views need not contradict the definition of pastoral as a conflict of the ideal and the real. Indeed, the idyllic and the realistic pastoralists each see but half of the conflict? while the neoclassicist neglects the real to concentrate upon the ideal, the realistic critic makes that ideal simply another version of the real. The allegorical interpre tation, on the other hand, implicitly grants the premise of the simple-complex, real-ideal dichotomies by having 39 simple shepherds covertly symbolize court happenings. The modern definitions of the form, indeed, go further than either the idyllic, the realistic, or the allegoric pastoralists in putting the stress not upon the terms of the antithesis, but upon the relationships between them. The Pastoral Conflict in Theocritus and Virgil The pastoral conflict between an apparently idyllic, simple ideal and an ironically coarse, complex reality has been inherent in the genre since its beginnings in Theocritus. Together Virgil and Theocritus were both the two earliest practitioners of the form and the founders of the tradition from which the eighteenth-century pastoral develops, and the presence of such a conflict in their writings indicates its centrality in the tradition. If the reader expects to find a simple, idyllic attitude even in the poetry of Theocritus, the earlier and less complex of the two, he will be disappointed. M. H. Shackford may define the idyll as a state in which we have always a charmed atmosphere, some suggestion of satisfying happiness . . . a picture of life as the human spirit wishes it to be, a presentation of the chosen moments of earthly content, (p. 5 87) but Theocritus's idylls are not idyllic in this sense. "Life as the human spirit wishes it to be" seems to be incongruous when the rejected shepherd of Theocritus's third idyll vows in a cry of despair to throw himself 40 down, never to stir until the wolves devour him.2^ Similarly, it is difficult to reconcile "satisfying happiness" with his fifteenth idyll, which ends with the promise of a choral dirge sung for the funeral of Adonis. The idylls of Theocritus, in spite of their simplicity and apparent realism, are seldom wholehearted celebrations of pastoral joy, and moments of earthly content are significantly sparse. When Theocritus celebrates the innocent country life, he seems always to leave a residue of irony. Part of this ironic residue may derive from the fact that as often as not the Theocritean shepherds are "urban intellectuals in disguise," who "live above their intellectual means."30 still another explanation, however, might be the poet's detachment from his shepherds; Theocritus, the court poet and city dweller, cannot help but feel a type of superiority to the "two old catchers of fish" in his twenty-first idyll (XXI.8). The fishermen have no key, door, or watchdog because "all such things were ill-store to the likes of them, seeing in that house kept Poverty watch and ward ..." (XXI.14). The 29The Greek Bucolic Poets, trans. J. M. Edmonds (Cambridge, Mass., 1912), p. 47 (III.52-54). 30sruno Snell, "Arcadia: The Discovery of a Spiritual Landscape," The Discovery of the Mind, trans. T. G. Rosenmeyer (Cambridge, Mass., 1953), pp. 286-287. 41 conditions of life in Theocritus's idyll are hard: the fishermen are old, poor, and hungry, sleeping on a bed of dry tangle. The poet feels sympathy mingled with condescension, but at the same time there is an attitude that these fishermen, in spite of their coarseness, are closer in tune with the essential forces of nature than is the city poet, for they lie in a house where "the very cabin walls were hemmed by the soft and delicate upflowing of the sea" (XXI.15). The fishermen themselves are half mythic, like forces of nature, and the dream that the dreamer dreams is older than time. Yet the golden fish of his dream vanishes when he awakes, and his companion gives him the ironically realistic advice that . . . there's wisdom to be had of empty shows; for if you will make real and waking search in these places there's hope for your sleep and your dreams. Go seek the fish of flesh and blood, or you'll die of hunger and golden visions. (XXI.64-67) Even the world of Theocritus, the first genuine pastoral poet, is undermined by the presence of the unideal actuality; fishermen no matter how mythic or in touch with nature do starve there, and the world is populated by wolves, but at the same time there is also an idyllic world in which his shepherds and fishermen can have a qualified superiority. Theocritus's attitude toward the reality which he pictures is inevitably ambivalent. On one level he can paint the fishermen larger than life, but his consciousness of himself as the poet and a member of 42 more complex culture holds him at a distance. In this ambivalence resides the dichotomy of nostalgia and disdain which is near the center of the pastoral conflict. Virgil's final attitude is, if anything, more complex than Theocritus's. Although Virgil's shepherds exist in the recognizably unreal dream world of Arcadia, they are nonetheless "Virgilian pseudo-shepherd[s]."31 Virgil's creation of an ideal Arcadia is inevitably separate in imagination if not in geography from the cold and mountainous section of Greece in which the inhabitants are known equally for their excellence in music, their ignorance, and their low standard of living. What Virgil succeeded in doing was to imaginatively transform the physical place into a territory of the human spirit. Arcadia became an embodiment of the myth of the golden age, but Virgil and even his shepherds are well aware that it is all a myth. The dream of the golden age is as old as man's thinking about the course of the world, no matter whether it springs from a sense of bewilderment, in which case it is remembered as a paradise at the beginning of time, or whether it embodies the ideals of man's positive striving, projected into the end of history. (Snell, p. 294) The much longed for Age of Gold of Virgil's fourth eclogue is appropriate in such a symbolic and spiritualized landscape, for this is a realm of the spirit freed from 3^Robert Graves, The Common Asphodel: Collected Essays on Poetry (London, 1949), p. 253. 43 the necessity of toil and deceit, where the lion lies down with the lamb and where all is innocence and beauty. Virgil's landscape here is idealized, yet not so much so that the careful reader can fail to discern the reality of an age of iron beneath the fiction of the age of gold. Even the bare conception of an age of gold presupposes a present age which is iron. The presence of an alternate world which is not entirely innocent can be felt in all of the eclogues, even in the fourth or Messianic eclogue in which a child who will redeem the world and bring in a new age of Saturn is promised to a lost world. Traditionally, the middle ages saw this child as identical with Christ, but it has become apparent with the perspective of history that the poet was more likely thinking of a new Roman emperor than prophesying a new world religion. Similarly, two of Virgil's ten eclogues, the first and the ninth, deal with the dispossession of a shepherd from his lands by a faraway, omnipotent, and possibly corrupt power. The shepherd Tityrus in the first eclogue lies contentedly under the "spreading beech's covert, wooing the woodland muse on slender reed ..." (1.2) j I while his friend Meliboeus, having been forced off his ! land by some corrupt power outside rural Arcadia, is j leaving for the distant city. Virgil balances the Arcadian ideal against the reality of a basically unjust, 44 corrupt world, and lets the latter modify the former. The power which has forced Meliboeus from his lands is the counterforce of an outside world, but Arcadia should be immune from the world of reality where music and sheep are commodities and pastures are given as political favors. Meliboeus, the evicted shepherd, "reveals the inadequacy of the Arcadian situation as an image of human experience" (Marx, p. 23). Yet it is not quite so simple as this, for the golden world does exist for Tityrus even though Meliboeus must leave. The simple and the complex, imaged in the country and the encroaching city is perhaps one explanation for that quality of "dissonance" in Virgil's poetry which is "resolved in that Vespertinal mixture of sadness and tranquility. . ." (Panofsky, p. 300). The Classical Ideal, Landscaping, and the Country Gentleman At first glance the three terms "the classical ideal," "landscaping," and "the country gentleman" may seem to have only a tenuous relationship to each other, but all three are vitally related to the concept of the pastoral ideal. The rise in popular interest in landscape gardening which occurred in the eighteenth century is, like the classical ideal of a happy life spent in meditative retirement, based upon an assumption that the country is not only good, but somehow physically and spiritually superior to the complex city. The classical 45 ideal has always been a part of the pastoral ideal, but the new landscape gardening of the eighteenth century offered, in the opinion of one critic at least (Marx, p. 75), an alternative to the traditional pastoral. The classical ideal had always been that the truly happy, satisfied man was he who could live a moderate, retired life, preferably in the country, where he could meditate alone and grow to understand both himself and his society. This ideal was still very much alive in eighteenth-century England; Calvin D. Yost, Jr. expresses the age's attitudes toward meditative solitude: . . . solitude was a retreat from the bustle and the vices of the world, a secluded country place where the wise and virtuous man could live a sensible and happy life amid the beauties of nature and with the human enjoyment of choice friends. The man who retires to solitude is leaving the gay world, not fleeing from it. He is a philosopher, not a penitent.32 In the past, the pastoral itself had offered a version of the classical ideal, as shepherds, actually courtiers in disguise, tended their flocks in secluded places, meeting only for singing matches or to discuss the corruption of the clergy. The philosophy of a contented and simple rural life is classical, deriving from Virgil and Horace, but it is also close to the ideal of the pastoral. Martin C. Battestin points out the omnipresence of the classical 32»jhe Poetry of the Gentleman's Magazine: A Study in Eighteenth-Century Literary Taste (diss. Philadelphia, 1936), pp. 69-70. 46 theme of retirement in the eighteenth century, for Cowley, Prior, Parnell, Pope, Dyer, Thomson, Green, Joseph Warton, Goldsmith, Shaftesbury's The Moralists and the writers of fugitive verse in the Gentleman1s Magazine all dealt with it: The classical ideal in its simplest form underlies . . . the favourite eighteenth-century genre of the pastoral, the purpose of which, according to Rapin and his followers, was 'to hold up a picture of the Golden Age to a less fortunate generation.'33 The eighteenth-century country gentleman was often proud of his retirement, but even more often the denizens of grub street, sitting in their London garrets, liked to grow sentimental about the joys of country living. Officially, at any rate, to go into the country was to escape the vices of the city, and to spend a life in rural solitude was to come close to the purpose of human life. Man when he does not have opportunity or desire for this retirement and solitude is not fully man. In The Happy Man, Maren-Sofie Rfzfstvig emphasizes the tendency of the eighteenth century to associate the rural life with the recovery of pure reason, and to believe that the "rural life afforded opportunities for the full development of man's intellectual and moral abilities. . . . ,l34 The 33The Moral Basis of Fielding's Art: A Study of "Joseph Andrews" (Middletown, Conn., 1959), p. 47. 3^ n (Oslo, Norway, 1958), 56. 47 classical ideal of the retired life, like the pastoral, can thus be seen to imply the antithesis of the simple and the complex, the city and the country, the ideal and the real. Contrast between the wholesomeness and simplicity of the country and the unhealthiness and complexity of the city, dating from the Roman writers, was an old story even by the eighteenth century, but in a letter dated July 22, 1709, Henry Needier expresses the eighteenth-century country gentleman's feelings on this classic theme: Who wou'd not prefer the charming Odors of Roses and Jessamin, before the unwholsom Vapours of- a populous City; and the pleasant Prospects of shady Groves and flowery Meads, and all the beauteous Scenes of Nature, to the narrow Spectacle of smutty Walls and dirty Pavement? What Comparison, to any contemplative and philosophical Mind, between the blissful Obscurity, Leisure, and Serenity of a quiet Rural Retreat, and a busy turbulent City-Life?35 Pope among his flowers and grottos at Twickenham must have felt so, for the eighteenth-century man was particularly assiduous in seeking relief from the intrusions and tensions of urban life in the wholesomeness and solitude of the country. The eighteenth century marks the end of both the neoclassical and the rationalistic pastoral in England, but at the same time the void left in the popular imagination by the ideal golden age was filled by a renewed interest in 35^he Works of Mr. Henry Needier, 2nd ed. (London, 1728), pp. 79-80. 48 landscape gardening- Leo Marx comments upon this phenomenon in The Machine in the Garden: At the time that the old pastoral was dying, however, Europe was swept by a wave of enthusiasm for rural landscape and rural life. With this new feeling for the country came a fresh idiom, a vocabulary capable of investing the ancient ideal with new vitality. (Marx, p. 75) When the landscape replaced the golden age as an embodiment of the pastoral ideal, much of the feeling that had gone into a description of shepherds and shepherdesses in green groves was now focused on the landscape as an expression of the pastoral ideal. Perhaps, as Rjzfetvig tells us, the exodus from London into the surrounding countryside is merely "one of the consequences of the increasing financial prosperity of the rising middle classes" or a reflection of Addison's ideal of the rural dweller, but the concept of the Open Landscape I also had much to do with the feeling for the country (R<zfstvig, pp. 13, 18) . The Renaissance walled garden, representing as it did the concept of withdrawal from the world and solitude in the midst of a patterned existence, was a thing of the past. The Open Landscape offered a more subtle appreciation of the order of God's universe: j Order in the natural world was not a question of straight lines and symmetrical balance of parts. . . . j A more accurate representation was found in the serpentine line, and in the scene whose variety and irregularity nevertheless bespoke conformity to the larger plan of God's creation. (Rjzfstvig, p. 107) At the heart of the Open Landscape was the concept of 49 apparent irregularities and confusions which nevertheless permit the perception of an ultimate harmony and order. The Open Prospect enabled man to view the country around, to perceive its fecundity and fruitfulness, and to enjoy the varying vistas that it offered. Timothy Nourse's "Essay of a Country House" embodies this view, for he insists that the country house should be "built on the side of a Hill, over-looking the neighbouring Plains, and whose Prospect is terminated by other Hills at a greater distance"; an estate should be placed "on the side of a Ground gently rising, not amongst Enclosures, but in champaign, open Country: and if a Navigable River ran within two or three miles of the place . . . it would much contribute to the Beauty and Prospect of the Seat . . ."36 Theoretically at least, the Open Prospect Landscape allowed the beauty of the rural ideal to be perceived in its relationship to the Creation. The eighteenth-century, thus, saw the landscape as a religious metaphor, "an expositor . . . of the divine mind (Marx, p. 97). As always, Joseph Addison reflects the popular attitude when, in Spectator 15, he describes how joyous the Open Landscape can be: 36campania Faelix: Or, a Discourse of the Benefits and Improvements of Husbandry . . . (London, 1700), pp. 299-300. 50 True happiness is of a retired nature, and an enemy to pomp and noise. . . . It loves shade and solitude, and naturally haunts groves and fountains, fields and meadows. . . .37 Marx sees Addison here as "building a theoretical bridge" between the traditional pastoral ideal and a new attitude which mingles nature and art (p. 93). The "natural" concept of landscaping in the eighteenth century was more sophisticated and hence more "artificial" than in the renaissance. A Well-planned landscape garden could be viewed both as a work of nature (i.e., as the handiwork of God) and as a work of art (i.e., as the handiwork of man) . (Rjrfstvig, p. 91) Landscape gardening, then, came to be appreciated on an intellectual level, for its reflection of the divine mind or the beauty of creation, or as a religious metaphor, or perhaps for its reflection of the harmonious scheme of a benevolent Creator. When viewed like this in the light of prevalent neo classical trends, the reason for the great popularity of gardening becomes apparent enough. Pope's garden at Twickenham, and Shenstone's at the Leasowes, are admirable examples of the conversion, into the mute symbols of gardening, of the popular classical philosophy of rural retirement. Each scene conveyed a part of this philosophy, whether of the futility of earthly greatness (as in ruins), the necessity of establishing the reign of reason by means of introspective solitude (as in hermitages, groves, and grottos), the tranquility of rural life (as in rustic scenes), or the harmonious variety of God's creation. . . . (Rjrfstvig, p. 104) 37The Spectator, ed. Donald F. Bond (Oxford, 1965), I, 264. 51 The garden, then, was both a refuge and an ideal; it was a portion of nature upon which the control of man could be imprinted. The ideal garden reflected the hopes and aspirations of the age, and in its embodiment of the ideal it tried to incorporate the surrounding countryside into its harmony. The renaissance garden, like the pastoral, implied a direct antithesis of the ideal and the real; the eighteenth-century garden and pastoral often attempted to combine the ideal and the real, the simple and the complex, the natural and the artificial into one harmonious whole. Perhaps this was the reason why Marx could describe the pastoral as dying, for it depended for its power upon the tension between, not the harmonious resolution of, anti thetical principles. Pastoral Themes in Fielding's Fiction In his own prose fiction, Henry Fielding makes surprisingly good use of the pastoral tensions which we have been discussing; indeed, there is a sense in which to ignore the existence of such tensions in Fielding's writ ing is to ignore much of his complexity. In Tom Jones, for example, the pastoral conflict between simple and complex is thematically and structurally important. Here the existence of the ideal world is never far from the surface, but we are never allowed to come away with the illusion that Tom's is a totally idyllic world; even 52 Paradise Hall houses Blifil, Thwackum, and Square. Similarly, we have seen that the idea of innocence in conflict with the forces of real life which attempt to corrupt innocence is a fundamentally pastoral conception, but understanding of this conflict can help to explain the importance of the theme of beseiged innocence in all of Fielding's novels. Fielding was fascinated by the conflict and significantly connected it with the dichotomy of the country and the city. In this instance, Joseph Andrews offers a good illustration because of its simplicity; in this novel Fielding's three pastorally innocent characters, Joseph, Fanny, and Parson Adams, are each subject to more or less vicious attacks from those who attempt to take advantage of their country innocence. Joseph is confronted by the triad of Lady Booby, Mrs. Slipslop, and Betty the Chambermaid, each intent upon seducing him, but it is the Eve-like Fanny who finally conquers him. Similarly, Fanny is subjected to at least three attempted rapes, and Parson Adams is buffeted repeatedly for his naive belief in the goodness of the world. It would not be distorting the book to see it primarily in terms of the many encounters of innocence with experience resulting in the ultimate triumph of innocence. The same perspective could also be employed with Tom Jones and Amelia, although it must be admitted that both Tom Jones and Captain Booth need a very favorable perspective 53 in order to be called innocent. Tom is, however, basically innocent in spirit, while Booth seems innocent only when taken in relation to his surroundings. The pastoral theme of beseiged innocence can be related to one of Fielding's favorite themes— the good versus the great. All Fielding's novels employ characters whose sole purpose seems to be a type of counterforce for the good hero and heroine. Peter Pounce fulfills this function in Joseph Andrews, as does Blifil in Tom Jones and Colonel James in Amelia. In these three novels, Goodness is a strong force almost overcome by the massed forces of the world, but the Good are inevitably victorious. Joseph Andrews is saved by his strawberry birthmark, but his goodness and strength of will make him worthy of such salvation; Tom Jones, with the sympathy of all his readers, is rescued from a hopeless position by Jenny Jones; Captain Booth is restored to freedom and wealth by an unbelievable chain of circumstances, and yet the ultimate reason for his triumph, his basic goodness, is believable. Fielding significantly reverses this technique in Shamela and Jonathan Wild when he makes the main character identical with the pastoral counterforce. Shamela is placed in opposition to Squire Booby, who manifests goodness only in that he is too stupid to be threatening, while Jonathan Wild, as the personification of greatness, is placed against the emaciated goodness of Heartfree. In 54 these last two novels, when the "good" characters are saved, it is only by the merest accident, and often in flagrant violation of their deserts. The contrast between the basically simple "good" characters and the "great" complex characters is implicit in all of Fielding's novels, particularly in Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, and Amelia. At times the pastorally good characters seem overwhelmed by the complexity in which they are placed, but at other times their conflict with these complex forces is used to illuminate their strength in simplicity or to expose the weakness of the complex characters. Again, this illumination which results from the juxtaposition of the simple and the complex is definitely related to the pastoral conflict in which two worlds are juxtaposed in order to illuminate both. Similarly, Fielding's treatment of the themes of affectation and hypocrisy is related to his treatment of the pastoral ideal. Characters who pretend to be something that they are not are omnipresent in Fielding; sometimes this pretense is humorous, as with Mrs. Slipslop, but it is occasionally diabolic, as with Mrs. Ellison. Behind the theme of pretense is the opposition of the natural and the artificial; those characters who are simply and naturally good are forced into conflict with those who are merely masquerading as good. Significantly, such encounters with artifice are usually associated with 55 the urban world and urban viciousness. The theme of artifice and masquerade becomes a kind of metaphor for the evil of the urban world, and it is quite appropriate that in Shamela and Jonathan Wild the masquerade is turned into a frightening actuality which suggests that all of life is a masquerade with insidious intent. This juxtaposition of the ideal with reality can be related also to the flawed paragons of virtue who show up in Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, and Amelia. The flaws in the paragons become more noticeable as the novels progress: Parson Adams is just lovably obtuse, but Allworthy's blind spots are almost fatal, and the sufferings of Amelia on Dr. Harrison's account are almost more frightening because they are less melodramatic. . The early paragons can be counted upon more to make things right; somehow the reader is more convinced that Jones will be saved from hanging than Bill Booth from debt. Although the idea of an imperfect image of perfection need not be confined to the pastoral genre, it is based upon the same discrepancy as is the genre, for it treats the distance of the perfection we can imagine from the imperfection to which we are doomed by the facts of our existence. Again, one of the most important elements in Fielding's fiction is the contrast between the non-pastoral city and the pastoral country. In Fielding's novels, as in the mainstream of the pastoral, the country is 56 identified with simplicity, innocence, the golden age, and the classical ideal of the happy man, while the city is associated with complexity, corruption, duplicity, and an age of iron. The main characters in all three of Fielding's major novels are inhabitants of the country who, by virtue of their contact with the city and the complex world, embroil themselves in difficulties from which their creator can save them only with the aid of a deus ex machina. The heroes of the novels inevitably find themselves tempted the moment they enter the city world; Joseph Andrews remains uncorrupted by the city; true he goes to the theatre too frequently, wears his hair in curlers, and goes to church less regularly than heretofore, but neither Fielding nor the reader is much concerned for his ultimate welfare. However, Tom Jones' affair with Lady Bellaston and Lord Fellamar's attempted rape of Sophia are no longer amusing; the city now is no longer simply a source of foppishness, but is the origin of an evil which genuinely threatens the well-being of the Good. Significantly, by the time of Amelia the evils of the town have become so threatening that the whole of London seems a vast trap; no one is to be trusted and almost nothing is what it seems. The city in Amelia becomes a whirlpool of corruption which all but sucks the "good" characters under; now there is no resisting the power of corruption, and even innocence is all but overwhelmed. 57 Fortunately, the main characters in Fielding's novels can retire from this urban "sink of iniquity" into the country, where we are assured they will live out the remainder of their days in pastoral bliss. Of course their withdrawal into the country is not accidental; this is their reward, a lifetime of rural retirement with adequate income and all the requirements for a simple, good, almost ideal life. The visions of Fanny helping with the dairy, Squire Western playing with Sophia's and Tom's little girl in the countryhouse nursery, and Billy Booth living quietly in the country and never being out of humour are intended as pictures of life as it should be lived and as it only could be lived in the country. In these three novels, there is a movement from the country to the city and an alternate and opposing movement from the city back to the country. The first movement to the city is fraught with danger for the good character who must overcome various obstacles to his progress, but the second movement indicates a kind of triumph over the city. Obviously these movements have relationships with the simple-complex antithesis which we have been developing, but the journey can also be related to the pastoral as an analogue of our own psychic experience. Leo Marx suggests the potency of this version of the pastoral when he says: 58 It is not necessary to commit the pathetic fallacy in order to accept the restorative power of this movement, literal or symbolic, away from the city toward nature. The contrast between "city" and "country" in the pastoral design makes perfect sense as an analogue of psychic experience. It implies that we can remain human, which is to say, fully integrated beings, only when we follow some such course, back and forth, between our social and natural (animal) selves. (Marx, p. 70) The pastoral and the movement which controls it is, then, very close to the human experiences of innocence and initiation, and perhaps this is one of the reasons for the tenacity and power of the form. Significantly, while the country is the natural habitat for the "good" heroes of Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews, and Amelia, the city is merely a threatening experience, while in the mock or Newgate pastorals, Shamela and Jonathan Wild, the central character is a native of the city and seems at home only there. Shamela goes into the country only in search of a victim, while Jonathan Wild finds victims enough around London, leaving the city only long enough to take the Grand Tour of his majesty's plantations in America, probably at government expense. In these two novels, the association of the main character with the city is significant, since this association identifies them with the complexities and corruptions of the town. Instead of basically good, innocent and simple characters, the swains of the mock Newgate pastoral are corrupt and complex. We are now in the world of the 59 pastoral of experience; hence the main characters reflect the inverse of innocence and become identified with urban vice and corruption. From even this short examination, it becomes apparent that there are two pastoral strains in Fielding's novels. The first type, represented by Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones and Amelia, is very like the conventional pastoral where the ideal is at least officially triumphant over the diminished reality. The second type, represented by the mock or Newgate pastoral of Shamela and Jonathan Wild, is the pastoral of experience where the ideal is completely submerged by the mockery of reality. These two types of pastoral do not remain unmixed, for Amelia, Fielding's last novel, seems to incorporate elements of both. Of the three pastorals of innocence, the tone is darkest in Amelia; almost all of the novel's action takes place in the city, the pastoral innocence of hero and heroine is here most severely threatened, and the good characters, with the exception of Amelia herself, are flawed or ambiguous. By the time of Amelia, Fielding's vision seems to have darkened so that the powers of destruction seem stronger, those of innocence become weaker, and the happy resolution, if there is to be one, must be forced or made into a mockery of probability. It would be tempting, but not entirely necessary, to see a deep split in Fielding's psychic life which 60 resulted in an alternate attraction to and repulsion from the city, or a gradual misanthropy which grew with the years and finally expressed itself in the mock Newgate pastoral. What is necessary is to see the conflict of attitudes toward a simple ideal and a complex reality and to realize how this conflict operates in the fiction of a great artist. The themes of the pastoral do run through all his prose fiction, and their treatment does change as the man's own feelings must have changed, but there is definitely no neat chronological progression from mock to idyllic or from idyllic to mock-pastoral. If the pastoral conflict is carefully examined in Fielding's prose fiction, many of the commonplaces about Joseph Andrew's "lightness" and Amelia's "depressing tone" will have to be reassessed. When examined in the light of the pastoral conflict, the first is neither so bright nor the second so dark as is usually suspected. The pastoral conflict, in other words, offers a means of tracing Fielding's conception of the ideal, a conception which is essential in understanding the aesthetic, ethical, and intellectual development of one of the masters of the English novel. CHAPTER II THE PASTORAL OF INNOCENCE: JOSEPH ANDREWS Critical Trends Frederic Blanchardl and Wilbur Cross2 both describe at some length Joseph Andrews1 reception in the London literary world. In contrast to the waves stirred up by Pamela1s introduction in 1740, Joseph Andrews seems relatively unnoticed; the village of Slough did not ring its bells for the safe return of Fanny, nor did Dr. Slocock recommend Fielding's morality from the pulpit. However, Joseph Andrews was ultimately an undeniable literary success. In Fielding's lifetime there were five authorized editions totalling 10,500 copies,3 a circu lation roughly half that of Pamela's (Cross, I, 357). There is little purpose in caviling about how popular or unpopular Joseph Andrews was; the important thing is its lFielding the Novelist: A Study in Historical Criticism (New York, 1926), pp. 1-25. 2The History of Henry Fielding (New York, 1945), I, 354-359. 3Martin C. Battestin, Introd., Joseph Andrews (Middletown, Conn., 1967), pp. xxx-xxxv. 61 62 inevitable contrast with Pamela. The relationship between Pamela and Joseph Andrews has plagued serious criticism; even now it is a commonplace to see the later novel primarily as an expanded Shamela which more effectively burlesques Pamela. Such a commonplace tends not only to suggest the inferiority of Joseph Andrews, since burlesque is a recognizably lower form of art, but it also suggests that Fielding is extemporizing upon a theme which gets out of control. Typical of this kind of myth-making is Louis Kronenberger1s observation in Kings and Desperate Men: Fielding's retort [to Richardson's Pamela] was direct and instantaneous: he parodied Pamela in Shamela, and he started to parody it again in Joseph Andrews, where Pamela's brother is depicted as a model of sexual virtue. The mere shift from a female to a male virgin is almost comic enough in itself to annihilate Richardson's thesis, but it was not enough to fill a real novel, or satisfy a real novelist, and Joseph Andrews soon turns into a lively picaresque tale of which the true hero is not Andrews but Parson Adams.4 Kronenberger, of course, could be dismissed as a popularizer, but even a Fielding scholar like Homes Dudden suggests a version of this belief when he speculates: it seems . . . that after he had well begun his story he became so interested and absorbed in it as to forget his original plan of ridiculing P a m e l a .5 4 (New York, 1942), pp. 299-300. 5Henry Fielding: His Life, Works and Times (London, 1952), I, 337. 63 The emphasis is shifted slightly here, but basically Dudden also views Joseph Andrews as an accidental develop ment from the original Pamela burlesque. Similarly, Aurelien Digeon, while defending Fielding's conscious artistry and control, concedes the tendentiousness of the burlesque theme: I mistrust an explanation which is founded on a supposed weakness of so great a writer. The truth seems to me simpler. If Fielding ceased to develop the original idea of his book, it was perhaps simply because the idea did not lend itself to further development.6 These critics all assume that the burlesque framework is an accidental technique with little inherent connection with the actual novel. More modern critics, however, have tended to emphasize the contribution of the burlesque to the thematic unity of the book. Richardson's Pamela thus illustrates a type of ideal which Joseph Andrews satirizes and refutes, while the burlesque framework is simply a way of making the Richardsonian ideal look ridiculous. Thus Michael Irwin can explain the novel's thematic purpose as a contrast of Fanny and Joseph's Ideal love with Pamela's specious passion. The Pamela burlesque itself is thus reduced to an instance of the false ideal, a moral intention which the "element of parody dilutes but does not 6The Novels of Fielding (New York, 1925), p. 53. 64 disguise. . . ."7 Similarly, Ronald Paulson explains the anti-Pamela elements in Joseph Andrews as actually "Pro-Pamela" since they discuss real virtue and by this framework present an "ideal of conduct" and an "alternative to Pamela."8 Sheldon Sacks in Fiction and the Shape of Belief also develops the idea that Joseph represents an ideal contrary to the Pamela framework: . . . if Fielding intended the London scenes only as destructive burlesque of Pamela unconnected to the rest of his novel, he has not made as much of his "satiric" tools as he might have. By keeping our sympathy with Joseph stronger than with those he frustrates and by focusing his attack on characters other than Joseph and on incidents which have only the most tenuous analogy to those in Pamela, Fielding makes the burlesque secondary to an expos?-of the ridiculous that takes our attention away from Richardson's work.9 The tendency in Irwin, Paulson, and Sacks is to see the burlesque elements as integrally related to the thematic development of the novel. The present study agrees that the false ideal represented by the Pamela framework is integral to the work, but the conflict between the two types of ideals is seen primarily in relationship to the innocence-experience dichotomy. The Pamela burlesque framework itself will be seen to be associated primarily with an urban, non-pastoral 7Henry Fielding: The Tentative Realist (London, L967) , p. 67. ^Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, Conn., 1967), pp. 126-129. 9(Los Angeles, 1967), pp. 85-86. ________________ 65 background; so when Pamela and Booby appear in a rural setting, they are more foils for the pastoral characters. In other words, the burlesque framework is a means of ironic contrast to the ideal rural world; it is an instance of the archetypal city-country dichotomy which underlies the pastoral of Joseph Andrews. If the burlesque framework has often been misinterpreted, so also has the idyllic ending. Digeon, to whom the ending is a "weak point" (p. 60), and Homes Dudden, who condemns it as "not satisfactory" (I, 352), here implicitly agree with J. Oates Smith's more recent complaint that Joseph Andrews1 ending "seems conjured up."-*-® Except for Mark Spilka's "Comic Resolution in Fielding's Joseph Andrews," which explains the final scenes at Booby Hall as a culmination of the "lust/ chastity theme,"11 there has been little positive criticism to balance so many negative voices. The present study, although it does not attempt a justification of Fielding's fortuitous ending, does not see its relationship to both the ideal reality which Fielding hoped to create in his pastoral of innocence and the non-ideal reality of which he was insistently aware. 10"Masquerade and Marriage: Fielding's Comedies of Identity," Bail State Univ. Forum, VI (Autumn 1965), 15. llCE, XV (Oct. 1953), 18. 66 The ending of the novel explicitly states the classical ideal of rural retirement in a golden age setting, and accomplishes a resolution of both the ideal and the non ideal themes in allowing the first to triumph while acknowledging the omnipresence of the latter. The movement of the work will be seen to be symbolically toward retirement in the country and the unmasking of urban viciousness, a movement which is resolved thematically by the adventure at Booby Hall and Joseph's retirement to the country. Similarly related to the tension between alternate ideals is the whole problem of tone in Joseph Andrews. It is, of course, usual to talk about the novel's lightness and grace. Michael Irwin, for example, praises the novel's "prevailing lightness of tone" (Irwin, p. 82). Unfortun ately, in an age where joyous optimism is easily confused with superficiality, Joseph Andrews has sometimes suffered from its reputation for "lightness." At present, however, it is most popular to see Fielding as a predominantly ethical writer; Joseph Andrews is thus more likely to be commended for its sermonistic qualities12 than for its lightness of tone. Andrew Wright, for instance, sees "deeper pathos" the further the reader 12See, for example, Martin C. Battestin, The Moral Basis of Fielding's Art; A Study of "Joseph Andrews" (Middletown, Conn., 1959). 67 progresses into Joseph A n d r e w s,13 and Morris Golden observes the "sad implications" of Fielding's novels.14 The ethical fad in Fielding criticism has tended to ignore the fact that such novels as Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews are, for all their ethical darkness, intended as laughing comedy. When all is said and done, an analysis of Joseph Andrews' debt to the Latitudinarian divines might miss much of the turbulent joyousness of the novel itself. As we will see in the course of this chapter, the implications of Joseph Andrews are far from light in tone; the ethical world through which Joseph, Fanny, and Adams must journey is undeniably dark. Yet in spite of the darkness, the novel itself is basically hopeful, for the three sojourners represent pastoral innocence and simplicity; they are essentially innocent, travelling through, but unsullied by, the vicious world around them. The work, then, is both light and dark; there is a clash between the ideals of the travelers and the reality with which they come into contact. This conflict involves a clash between innocence and experience, between the corruption represented by the city and the simplicity of the country; most important in regard to the tone of the l^Henry Fielding: Mask and Feast (Los Angeles, 1966), p. 64. i^Fielding1s Moral Psychology (Amherst, Mass., 1966), p. 124. 68 work is the fact that it is the innocent, not the experienced reality, which finally attains a qualified kind of triumph. Joseph Andrews is a pastoral of innocence, and being set in an officially golden world, reflects the optimistic lightness and grace of that world. The pastoral element can, then, be seen to explain at least three of the common criticisms of Joseph Andrews. Structurally the burlesque framework reflects the ironic pastoral contrast, the optimistic denouement is an official idyllic triumph, and the proverbial joyousness of the novel reflects the optimistic triumph of the forces of innocence and light over those of darkness. Pastoral Tensions The idyllic pastoral world has already been described as a basically innocent realm where the sun always shines, the lambs never stray, and man inevitably thrives; it is an open and simple world, where the shepherds, far from the vices and corruptions of the city, lead a natural, healthy life. It is this pastoral world, where profession is always performance, where charity is always the guide in inter-relationships, where innocence is not only safe, but is also the norm, to which Fielding's Parson Adams and his travelling companions, Joseph Andrews and Fanny Goodwill, belong. They share the naivete and innocence which we have identified as a 69 pastoral quality; of the corruptions and pitfalls of a non-idyllic reality they know "no more . . . than the Cat which sat on the Table."-*-'’ These three are golden age characters created for a better world in which safely resides all the simplicity and goodness that man desires. The golden world, however, is only a dream, and the world of Joseph Andrews is by no means completely idyllic. The traditional pastoral conflict between the idyllic sheepfold and an alien and hostile outside world can be seen on virtually every page of the novel. Outside the idyllic world of which Fanny, Joseph, and Adams are citizens lies the world of hard and fast reality where simplicity and innocence seem insurmountable obstacles and where profession is often antithetical to performance. Accordingly, in Joseph Andrews the alien world is insistently visible, even in those passages, such as that which pictures Mr. Wilson's arcadian retirement, where its existence would seem to be denied. The world which Fanny, Joseph, and Adams confront is filled with hypocrites and villains, attempted rapes and murders, uncharitable clergymen and unjust magistrates. This uncomfortable reality leads Henry Knight Miller to observe that 15Henry Fielding, Joseph Andrews, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Middletown, Conn., 1967), p. 158. 70 . . . even in the 'optimistic' atmosphere of Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, the fools and villains out number the good-natured by a sizeable margin; in Jonathan Wild, the Journey from this World to the Next, and Amelia, the proportion is overwhelming.16 The proportion of villains and fools in a specific Fielding novel can be an implication of how far the world of that novel is from the pastoral ideal; in the tradi tionally pastoral Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones there is a tension between the "good" and the villainous characters, while in the mock-pastoral Jonathan Wild and Amelia the "good" have already been defeated, or overwhelmed. The important thing here is the realization that even in the pastoral world the tension of non-pastoral reality forms a backdrop to the golden idyll. Awareness of the power of non-pastoral reality is structurally and thematically embedded in the description in Joseph Andrews of a journey from the corruption of the city to the merely relative innocence of the country. Martin C. Battestin in the Moral Basis of Fielding's Art acknowledges this tension when he describes Adams' journey as a "pilgrimage through strange and idolatrous lands" (p. 31) and a "wayfaring from the corruption of the Great City toward happiness in a better country . . ." (p. 43). Battestin, along with such critics as Andrew Wright and Maurice Johnson, interprets the journey allegorically, but 16Essays on Fielding's Miscellanies: A Commentary on Volume I (Princeton, 1961), p. 75. 71 the conflict can be as well described in non-allegoric terms. Maynard Mack, for example, in his introduction to the Rinehart Edition of Joseph Andrews, describes the work as having "two poles of value . . . the country-world and the city, neither perfect, but the former superior to the latter because more honest. The central image of Joseph Andrews, seen in this way, is the progress from relative corruption to relative innocence, a journey from the archetypal city to an equally archetypal country. The City The starting point for the journey is the world of London, the New Babylon of the preachers, and the world of Jonathan Wild. In the eighteenth century, the city was a symbol of vice, or corruption, of alienation from nature and innocence. If we have read Johnson's London, Gay's Trivia, or Goldsmith's Deserted Village, it is hardly necessary to have Battestin point out that the town and the country are morally antithetical (Moral Basis, p. 91). In his feelings about the city, Fielding shared the usual attitude of his day even in what Miller calls his "anti-urban prejudices" (p. 127). It is the reflection of this attitude in his works which elicits George Sherburn's 17(New York, 1948), p. xii. 72 observation that "Fielding drops his high spirits whenever he writes about London."I8 Early in Joseph Andrews, the city of London is established as antagonistic to goodness and simplicity. London here is the scene of the corruption of innocence, a ridiculous world ruled by vanity, hypocrisy, and affectation. Accordingly, the representatives of the London world are always vicious or affected. For example, when we are told that Lady Booby was "a Woman of Gaiety, who had been bless'd with a Town-Education," we are also told that she "never spoke of any of her Country Neighbours by any other Appellation than that of The Brutes" (p. 25). Since she includes the sterling Parson Adams within this general appellation, her own wisdom and discernment are seriously called into question. Fielding juxtaposes his own and Lady Booby's assessment of Adams in order to reveal the distorted values of the Town-Educated noble woman . Parallel to the introduction of the citified and affected Lady Booby is that of Mrs. Slipslop, another representative of the London world, who insists on a Deference to be Paid to her Understanding, as she had been frequently at London, and knew more of the World than a Country Parson could pretend to. (p. 25) 18"Fielding's Amelia; An Interpretation," ELH, III (March 1936), 4. 73 Although she claims London as a source of superior wisdom, Slipslop's learned discourse upon the Incense of Matter (p. 26) exposes her all-too-limited understanding. Through a juxtaposition similar to that employed with Lady Booby, Fielding shows up the affected ignorance of his London representative; in this context, London as a source of superiority is a bitter joke. In this early section, the illustration of London affectation and experience is centered in Slipslop, not Lady Booby, probably because Fielding, wanting to discredit the city-world, picks the most ridiculous pawn available. As Slipslop descants upon learned languages, the experience of London is firmly opposed to knowledge and understanding: 'And why is Latin more necessitous for a Footman than a Gentleman? It is very proper that you Clargymen must learn it, because you can't preach without it: but I have heard Gentlemen say in London, that it is fit for no body else.' (p. 26) The ignorance of both Slipslop and the London beaux is especially significant in the light of how basic a knowledge of Latin was to any creditable eighteenth- century education. This theme associating ignorance, affectation, and the city recurs in the end of the novel when Beau Didaper, a I^ondon fop, replies to Adams' pleasantry "Non mea rehidet in Domo Lacunar" with a disdainful observation that "he did not understand Welch" (p. 312). Ignorance, complacency, and affectation are the 74 initial associations of London, and these qualities are consistently associated with the city characters whenever they recur in Joseph Andrews. Even before the scenes set in London itself, Fielding is preparing the reader to associate the city with affectation, ignorance and misjudgement. The city brings all associated with it down to its own level; thus, Joey, who, as a protege of Adams has previously been regarded as virtuous and "good," is shown as slightly ridiculous in his London context. The urban Joseph is described in terms apparently intended to make him a dupe; we are told: No sooner was young Andrews arrived at London, than he began to scrape an Acquaintance with his party- colour'd Brethren, who endeavor'd to make him despise his former Course of Life. His Hair was cut after the newest Fashion, and became his chief Care. He went abroad with it all the Morning in Papers, and drest it out in the Afternoon; they could not however teach him to game, swear, drink, nor any other genteel Vice the Town abounded with. He applied most of his leisure Hours to Music, in which he greatly improved himself, and became so perfect a Connoisseur in that Art, that he led the Opinion of all the other Footmen at an Opera, and they never condemned or applauded a single Song contrary to his Approbation or Dislike. (p. 27) Joseph with his hair in curlers or leading the footmen at the opera is a figure of fun quite different from the rural Joseph who was an excellent cudgel player and horse-back rider. The corrupt city is further defined by the town amusement of gossip; Tittle and Tattle, for example, go forth with the vengeance and destructiveness of Fama in 75 The Aeneid in order that they might publish a new scandal to engross the "whole Talk of the Town" (p. 2 8). Gossip is a typically selfish and senseless urban entertainment; even Lady Booby herself is much engrossed in the sport (p. 43). The inherent evil of such an amusement comes from a willingness to sacrifice others to one's own amusement. The supremacy of self at the center of gossip is a basic evil in Fielding's universe, and it is significant that such an evil is most closely related to the urban setting. The unfeeling, self-absorbed quality of town-life is reinforced when Fielding describes Sir Thomas Booby's disconsolate widow as confined to her House as closely as if she herself had been attacked by some violent Disease. During the first six Days the poor Lady admitted none but Mrs. Slipslop and three Female Friends who made a Party at Cards. . . . (p. 29) So self-absorbed is the London world that grief itself is a disease unwelcome only because it is both uncomfortable and compulsory. Social convention dictates a time of grieving, but grief is only a convention, and the time is filled up by "a Party at Cards." The Party lasts for six days, after which time Lady Booby may sally forth seeking whom she might devour. Lady Booby's attempted seduction of Joseph is explicitly connected with the Joseph-Potiphar's Wife account in the Bible; Fielding via Joseph himself reminds the reader of this connection when he refers in a letter to 76 Pamela, to "Joseph, my Name's-sake" (p. 47). The reference to the Hebrew Joseph does more than simply evoke a standard against which to measure Lady Booby's conduct; it also reminds the reader that the biblical setting of the Potiphar's wife story was Egypt, prototype of the corrupt world. In the Bible, a pastoral even older than Theo critus, Egypt is consistently symbolic of the flesh triumphing over the spirit; it is a land symbolic of corruption and bondage. Therefore, through the location of the Joseph burlesque in London, that city becomes asso ciated with the corruption of Biblical Egypt. Similarly, Joseph's eventual retirement into the country, once the parallel of Egypt with London has been established, is reminiscent of the Promise that the children of Israel would be brought out of corrupt Egypt into a land flowing with milk and honey. The burlesque section of Joseph Andrews can thus been seen to be closely tied to the central pastoral theme of the innocent country vs. the corrupt city; the biblical allusion functions specifically to establish the town as corrupt. Two last observations need to be made about the London scenes, namely, that Joseph's apparent innocence is hardly better established than his sister Pamela's, and that this ambiguity reflects urban complexity. It is not entirely certain how naive and innocent Joseph really is. Lady Booby's frustrated exclamation is never completely____ 77 refuted: . . . you are either a Fool or pretend to be so, I find I was mistaken in you, so get down Stairs, and never let me see your Face again; your pretended innocence cannot impose on me. (p. 30) Even though this complaint can easily be read as Lady Booby projecting her own experience onto Joseph (and such is probably Fielding's primary meaning), Joseph's naivete has at least been questioned. Joseph has a faculty, amazing for one of his innocence, for saying the most naively chilling thing at the most critical moment. For example, he reminds the languishing Lady Booby, just seven days a widow and preparing to enjoy her freedom with Joseph, that "I have always endeavoured to be a dutiful Servant both to you and my Master" (p. 30). With the voracious Slipslop, he takes a similar tack when he declares, "I have always loved you as well as if you had been my own Mother" (p. 33). For Lady Booby, the reminder of her husband and that Joseph is a servant serves as the best antidote for her amorousness; with Slipslop the reminder that she is old enough to be Joseph's mother works with complete effect. In both cases, Joseph uses the discomposure his naivete has caused to extricate himself from a difficult position. Such ambiguous innocence, associated specifically in the early burlesque section with London, seems a symptom of the distorting influence of the urban world, especially since it contrasts with the latter 78 sections of the novel in which chastity is treated as "an action that is unambiguous . . . and by which the spectators are judged" (Paulson, p. 125). The London scenes of Joseph Andrews furnish a view of the corrupt non-pastoral reality, or the alien world, always discernible behind the ideal world of the pastoral. This corrupt reality is handled in such a way that it is more ridiculous and amusing than threatening, for Joseph Andrews is predominantly a pastoral of innocence in which the forces of virtue and innocence, the pastoral forces, are meant ultimately to triumph. Through the Countryside The emphasis in Joseph Andrews, however, is not upon the corrupt city but upon what Northrop Frye in his discussion of apocalyptic imagery calls "the metaphor of the 'way.111- * - ^ With the London scenes occupying quanti tatively only about 10 per cent of the total volume, the novel is concerned primarily with the journey of the pastoral main characters from the city into the country. This concentration upon the country has caused Homes Dudden to remark, On London and its highly sophisticated inhabitants he touched only slightly. What he did provide was a peculiarly vivid representation of the life and 19Anatomy of Criticism; Four Essays (New York, 1965), p. 144. 79 manners, the interests and pursuits, of the people who lived in the country . . . (I, 3 83) The apocalyptic country as opposed to the demonic city is, then, "quantitatively and thematically" the substance of the novel (Irwin, p. 67). The country in Joseph Andrews is not simply idyllic; that is, it does not mirror a world where the pastoral ideals of goodness, simplicity, and healthiness are uncomplex. Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones are ironic or traditional pastorals, recognizing the alien world without the gates of the idyll. Although the characters are themselves pastoral and the countryside is preferable to the city, the road which the three heroes take is inhumane, with an inhumanity which is "unchanged and unchangeable" (Smith, p. 14) simply because it reflects a non-pastoral real world. If we were to see the novel idyllically, Joseph lightheartedly turning his face toward the country and his back to the city could be mistaken for an allegorical pilgrim who, like Christian in Pilgrim1s Progress, finds that all his burdens have rolled away as he sets out for the Celestial City. As it is, however, the simple, undisturbed idyll continues for approximately three pages until Joseph runs into the first of a long series of his encounters with the non-pastoral world in an incident which Andrew Wright calls a "paradigm of the experience 80 of the road" (p. 62). We will see that this encounter is not only a paradigm of the experience of the road, but that it thematically embodies the clash of pastoral with non-pastoral, or, in Fielding's terms, of "goodness" with "greatness." Since the basic thematic tensions of the novel are encapsulated in this complex encounter, it will be treated in detail. Just prior to the meeting with the robbers, the idyllic world, in the account of the pastoral love of Fanny and Joseph, has been given its most complete realization up to this point. At first the reader, remembering Lady Booby, is prepared for more fun at Joseph's expense when he reads the full-blown romantic prose description of how "A thousand Sighs heaved the Bosom of Joseph; a thousand Tears distilled from the lovely Eyes of Fanny," but he is soon convinced of the genuine emotion beneath the stereotyped description by such details as: Tho' her Modesty would only suffer her to admit his eager Kisses, her violent Love made her more than passive in his Embraces; and she often pulled him to her Breast with a soft Pressure, which, tho' perhaps it would not have squeezed an Insect to death, caused more Emotion in the Heart of Joseph, than the closest Cornish Hug could have done. (p. 49) Joseph and Fanny's love is seen as basically "innocent" and ideal, but it is made more believable by the inclusion of such mundane details as that Fanny's touch is so gentle it "would not have squeezed an Insect to Death," yet it 81 raises more rapture in Joseph than a "Cornish Hug" could have done. By describing Joseph's ideal, pastoral love in concrete terms, Fielding causes him to emerge as a better developed character, while retaining the associations of goodness and simplicity. The juxtaposition of the romantic interlude with the robbery makes the latter incident more shocking by contrast; it is a reminder of the real world, and its occurence here is the type of shock common in the ironic pastoral. When the description of Joseph and Fanny's pastoral love is taken along with the two initial encounters along the road (those with Plain Tim the master of the Lion Inn and with Tom's friend who generously loans his extra horse), the world of Joseph Andrews seems rather a comfortable one. An ideal pastoral milieu has been constructed around the main character; what happens with the robbery is that this ideal world is suddenly shattered by a reality that has lain dormant all along. From an idyllic world of generosity, compassion, and love, we are suddenly plunged into a merciless world of rapacity and self-enclosure, but plunged into it with such matter-of- factness that we recognize its commonplaceness: He had not gone above two Miles, charmed with the hopes of shortly seeing his beloved Fanny, when he was met by two Fellows in a narrow Lane, and ordered to stand and deliver. He readily gave them all the Money he had. . . . Both together fell to be-labouring poor Joseph with their Sticks, till they were convinced they had put an end to his miserable Being: They then stript 82 him entirely naked, threw him into a Ditch, and departed with their Booty. (pp. 51-52) By juxtaposing the attack of the thieves with Joseph's romantic wanderings, Fielding suggests that all is not well in the idyllic world. This suggestion is reinforced when Joseph is subsequently ill-treated by the stage-coach passengers who have found him naked and left for dead. In a series of incidents seemingly designed to illustrate the extent of the wrongness of this world, the passengers display their callousness and indifference to others' sufferings. The pastoral ideal of charity is unknown to the prude who will not ride in the coach with a naked man even though he is dying, as it is to the lawyer who puns about Joseph's nakedness and misery. Of course, reactions to Joseph are oververbalized; every man reveals his inner being by his response to Joseph's misfortune. The stage-coach driver, for example, does not hesitate to say "Go on, Sirrah . . . we are confounded late, and have no time to look after dead Men" (p. 52). The point of such over-verbalization is that every man objects "in terms that display the trait which characterizes him" (Sacks, p. 96), and thus Fielding can illustrate the self-enclosure and vice of the non-pastoral world. The distortion of the ideal by reality is mitigated only by the theme of charitable lowness, a theme which 83 ironically centers compassion with such flawed low characters as the stagecoach's postillion and Betty the chambermaid. The postillion, "a Lad who hath been since transported for robbing a Hen-roost" (p. 53), is the only person with enough compassion to stop the coach at the sound of another's groans and to loan the naked and shivering Joseph a Great Coat. Betty, the all-too-amorous chambermaid of Tow-Wouse's Inn, instinctively helps Joseph: . . . being a good-natur'd Wench, and not so squeamish as the Lady had been, she clapt a large Faggot on the Fire, and furnishing Joseph with a great Coat belonging to one of the Hostlers, desired him to sit down and warm himself, whilst she made his Bed. (p. 55) A number of things have happened in these scenes; first, the pastoral ideal has been established, only to be shattered by the intrusion of unideal, non-pastoral reality. Misfortune has revealed the affectation, vanity, and hypocrisy of man in real life. This revelation seemed at first to give the lie to the Pastoral conception, but ironically characters who were morally flawed in society's eyes exhibited the charity their "betters" lacked. The ideal would seem to have been destroyed, but at the last moment a sizable fragment of evidence points to the essential soundness of the ideal even in the face of discordant reality. The tension thus created between the ideal and the real, the high and the low, is an essen tially pastoral conflict. The Good Samaritan incident 84 is, although in a somewhat different sense than the one Wright means, a paradigm of the journey. Joseph Andrews, then, is organized as a series of clashes of the ideal with reality in a context which we have called ironically pastoral; these clashes reveal the perverse reality beneath the ideal, and expose the hypocrisy, vanity, and affectation which go to make up life in a distinctly non-pastoral world. In the novel the discrepancy between the Ideal and the Real is explored in at least six separate areas of life: social, political, legal, sexual, financial, and religious. These six areas touch upon most of the aspects of human experience, indicating that idealism in all its aspects is consistently undermined by reality, and that our own world is closer to urban reality than to the pastoral Ideal. At the same time that we realize the actual primacy of the non-ideal world, the ideal remains firmly established in our minds as a standard or "touchstone" against which reality fails to measure up. The social ideal equates superiority of position with moral superiority; theoretically the "high" people have a responsibility to be better than the "low" people. The inversion of this ideal has already been seen with the postillion and with Betty the Chambermaid, characters who although low are yet more humane than their betters. This basic pattern is repeated later with the poor pedlar 85 who shares his last sixpence with Adams after Trulliber, the reputed "Man of great Charity" (p. 169) , had refused him. Conversely, the social pretensions of the "high" Miss Grave-Airs are revealed as false. We are told, for example, that Joseph's Entrance into the Coach was retarded by Miss Grave-Airs insisting, against the Remonstrances of all the rest, that she would not admit a Footman into the Coach: for poor Joseph was too lame to mount a Horse. A young Lady, who was, as it seems, an Earl's Grand Daughter, begged it with almost Tears in her Eyes; Mr. Adams prayed, and Mrs. Slipslop scolded, but all to no purpose. She said, 'she would not demean herself to ride with a Footman: that there were Waggons on the Road: that if the Master of the Coach desired it, she would pay for two Places: but would suffer no such Fellow to come in.' (pp. 122-123) Such social pretensions are illusory and superficial, for the reader learns later that Miss Grave-Airs is herself the daughter of a Stage Coach driver who has risen in the world. In like manner, the reader is intended to laugh, albeit cynically, at Slipslop's social pretension when upon meeting Fanny she withdraws into another room muttering that "she wondered who the Creature was" (p. 155). Slipslop affects ignorance in accord with the artificial stratification which Fielding explains in his digression on "high and low people." In the ideal pastoral world there should be such stratifications; the high assume the garb and manners of the low, and harmony is the predominant quality in human relationships. The 86 social stratifications, as practiced by Slipslop and Grave-Airs, are arbitrary and inaccurate; in every meaningful sense of the word, Joseph is the moral "superior" of Grave-Airs and Fanny of Slipslop. The ideal which equates social with moral superiority is inoperative in the real world, but what distinguishes the traditional from the mock-pastoral use of the high and the low theme is that the former, like Joseph Andrews, always sets the violation of the ideal before us in outraged terms, while the latter, like Jonathan Wild, accepts the violation as the norm of human activity. In the ideal pastoral world, government is just and men act consistently from altruistic motives; in the unideal world of practical politics, the ideals of justice and altruism can seldom be upheld. Adams' long narration to the Man of Courage in Book II, Chapter 8 of Joseph Andrews illustrates the unideal state of the political world, even on the Parish level. What we have here is, essentially, a naive and uncomprehending account of the non-pastoral world of political reality from the point of view of a pastoral innocent. Adams is naive in believing shibboleths such as "the Church in Danger" (p. 133); he unknowingly allows his higher sympathies to be manipulated for lower motives. He is characteristically and disinterestedly idealistic in standing for his principles so that rather than be coerced 87 into going against his conscience he "lived a full Month on one Funeral Sermon" preached only "on the Indisposition of a Clergyman" (p. 133). His pastoral good faith makes it difficult for him to believe that Fickle would turn his support to Courtly, a candidate he had hitherto opposed, and this same good faith adds pungency to his quiet observation that the candidate he had chosen for Parliament would sacrifice every thing to his Country . . . except his Hunting, which he stuck so close to, that in five years together, he went but twice up to Parliament; and one of those times, I have been told, never was within sight of the House. (p. 134) Adams terminates his political career by supporting Sir Thomas Booby, who made "speeches of an Hour Long ..." (p. 134), and never could find the time to fulfill his promise to his curate. If Adams does not perceive the hypocrisies and lies which make up his political world, neither the Man of Courage nor the reader is unaware of the discrepancy between the ideal of just government and public service and the reality of inefficiency and bad faith. Even the parish which has Adams for its shepherd is set in a world governed by politicians and self- interest. If Fielding was concerned to show the unideal world of political interest, he was even more concerned with distortions in the legal system, for these distortions become symbolic of all non-pastoral reality. In Joseph 88 Andrews, the law is more often a menace than a refuge; intended as a means of protection for the weak, the law becomes a weapon for the strong. The misuse of the law as a weapon can be seen in the advice of a by-stander at the Battle of the Inn, who tells the host that You may take your own Opinion; but was I in your Circumstances, every Drop of my Blood should convey an Ounce of Gold into my Pocket: remember I don't advise you to go to Law, but if your Jury were Christians, they must give swinging Damages, that's all. (p. 121) Similarly, Mrs. Trulliber reveals her ignorance and misappropriation of the basic premises of both Christianity and the law when she admonishes her husband to "shew himself a true Christian, and take the Law of him" (p. 16 8). Both advisors reveal the basic assumption that law is unconnected with justice; within the world of the novel, such an assumption seems only too true. Signifi cantly, it is always the non-pastoral, never the pastoral characters, who go to law. Distorted law, since it reveals the disparity between the ends and the practice of law, is a typical non-pastoral commodity. The unjust magistrate in Book II, Chapter 11 is an even more frightening revelation of distortion of the ideal justice than the advisors. In his trial of Adams, justice is twisted from a means of protecting the innocent into a sport for company, and trial becomes a grim farce. The magistrate 89 being now in the height of his Mirth and his Cups, bethought himself of the Prisoners, and telling his Company he believed they should have good Sport in their Examination, . . . he ordered them into his Presence. (p. 145) Even if the ideal of law is not itself unjust, its everyday enactment often is so. The parson, for example, having been unjustly accused, is about to be committed unheard: 'Is it no Punishment, Sir, for an innocent Man to lie several Months in Goal?1 cries Adams: 'I beg you would at least hear me before you sign the Mittimus.1 'What signifies all you can say?' says the Justice, 'is it not here in black and white against you? I must tell you, you are a very impertinent Fellow, to take up so much of my time.— So make haste with his Mittimus.' (p. 148) Adams, naively trusting "rather to his Innocence than his Heels" (p. 143) and hence relying upon the law for justice, is rescued only by accident, and his rescue does not leave us unaware that in the common course of events he would have been unjustly committed. The exalted ideal of law, which Adams assumes, is undercut by the reality of a social framework that uses law as a form of amusement or as a weapon for revenge and self-aggrandizement. The road through the countryside reveals the disparity between things as they are and as they ought to be, between the ideal of the just golden age and the actuality of an unjust leaden age. Nevertheless, reality is not allowed to triumph over the ideal, for Joseph Andrews is a pastoral of innocence, and it is innocence which is finally 90 vindicated although in such a way that the normal probabilities are clearly violated. The pastoral ideal of chastity contrasted with the manifold attacks made upon such chastity creates a tension which is central to Joseph Andrews. The importance of this conflict is recognized when Mark Spilka in "Comic Resolution in Joseph Andrews" describes the lust-chastity theme as an organizing principle (p. 18). In the central section of the novel this theme focuses upon Fanny, since Joseph1s chastity has ceased to be an important concern after the London scenes. On one level, the jeopardy to which Fanny is repeatedly subjected (four times in the novel, twice in the central section, she is in imminent danger of rape) is simply a foil to the more comical danger of Joseph and Pamela, but these attacks also point to a reality where the innocent and chaste are in constant danger from the lustful. The attempted rape scenes reflect the non-pastoral reality of exploitation with which the pastoral characters have to deal, and this reality almost overwhelms Fanny, Joseph, and Adams. The personal chastity of the three touchstone, or pastoral, characters is set at variance with the moral laxity of those characters with whom they come into contact. The pastoral characters are presented as models of chastity: Adams, though the father of six children, "never knew any more than his Wife" (p. 46); Joseph, in 91 spite of his impatience to publish the banns, is able to maintain his "Virtue against all Temptations" (p. 47); while Fanny, with a "natural Gentility, superior to the Acquisition of Art" (p. 153), is a virtual paragon of maidenly innocence. The ideal does exist, but it is sorely beset by reality, and its ultimate triumph is possible only in a pastoral of innocence. When asked if he has any money about him, Don Quixote replies, "Not a Cross . . . for I never read in any History of Chivalry that any Knight-Errant ever carry'd Money about him."20 Don Quixote and the three protagonists of Joseph Andrews are citizens of a common world, a world in which money, the most inescapable of all realities, is not important. In Don Quixote's romantic world, which, as William Empson observes, is like the pastoral world,2- 1 - goodness, virtue, bravery, and personal worth are the standards of measurement, but the reality which militates against these ideals measures everything, including virtue and goodness, by the gold standard. In Joseph Andrews, as in Don Quixote, the society surrounding the central characters judges almost entirely by appearances which indicate either the possession or the 20Miguel De Cervantes, Don Quixote, trans. Peter Motteux (New York, 1950), p. 15. 21Some Versions of Pastoral (Norfolk, Conn., 1960), p. 188. 92 lack of money. Money is an obsession in Jonathan Wild and Shamela, where the central characters are committed to its possession, but in Joseph Andrews only the minor, non pastoral characters care deeply about the acquisition of wealth. Money is incongruous in the golden world, but it is a necessity in the world of the conventional pastoral. Thus there is a recurrent pattern of unpayable bills in Joseph Andrews; Adams, unaware of money, repeatedly runs himself into debts with inn-keepers and is rescued only by the charity of one of the low. The unpayable bills are thus connected to the pattern of charitable lowness and hypocritical highness noticed before. Adams escapes from Tow-Wouse's Inn only with the help of a guinea borrowed from one of his parishoners, a servant who happens to pass by; at the inn in Trulliber's parish, he is rescued only by the loan of a Pedlar's six shillings, sixpence; and from the Inn in the Promiser's neighborhood it is the Inn-keeper, himself a victim of false promises, who honours "the Clergy too much to deny trusting one of them for such a Trifle" (p. 177). The implication of so long a procession of unpayable bills and uncharitable innkeepers is that reality is inevitable even to a golden age character, but the helpfulness of the compassionate low also suggests that the ideal of goodness and charity is still real even though it is not to be found where one would expect. 93 The non-pastoral world finds it difficult to understand the pastoral character's attitude toward money. Joseph, for example, finds it impossible to explain to Mrs. Tow-Wouse that he will not part with his gold because it is a sentimental keepsake. Joseph answered, he had such a Value for that little Piece of Gold, that he would not part with it for a hundred times the Riches which the greatest Esquire in the Country was worth. 'A Pretty Way indeed,' said Mrs. Tow-Wouse, 'to run in debt, and then refuse to part with your Money, because you have a Value for it. I never knew any Piece of Gold of more Value than as many Shillings as it would Change for.' (p. 95) Mrs. Tow-Wouse is unanswerable in her world, as is Joseph in his, and it is well that Slipslop happens along, for the debate is not resolvable. How can a golden age character operate in a leaden age, and how can a citizen of the non-pastoral world understand an ideal in which money is an object of sentiment? One more example will suffice to illustrate the relationship of money and the attitudes attendant upon its presence or lack in an ironically pastoral world. The dialogue between Peter Pounce and Parson Adams is important structurally and thematically, coming as it does at the end of the third book and formulating the final statement of the inhumanity of the road before the three pastoral characters enter Lady Booby's parish. Fielding was himself aware of the importance of this dialogue, which occupies a pivotal position between the forces of good 94 nature and greed, an awareness Martin C. Battestin substantiates when he describes how extensively Fielding revised this dialogue in the second edition.22 Early in the dialogue Pounce reveals himself as insensitive to everything but praise and money: The Chariot had not proceeded far, before Mr. Adams observed it was a very fine Day. 'Ay, and a very fine Country too,1 answered Pounce. 'I should think so more,1 returned Adams, 'if I had not lately travelled over the Downs, which I take to exceed this and all other Prospects in the Universe.' 'A fig for prospects,' answered Pounce, 'one Acre here is worth ten there; and for my own Part, I have no Delight in the Prospect of any Land but my own.' (p. 2 74) Pounce contradicts the pastoral concept of a world in which man is closely attuned to nature. Although the scenery of Arcadia may be stylized, it has always been appreciated, for nature is inevitable in pastoral man's experience where the harmony of man with man and man with nature is projected outwardly on a harmonious landscape. Pounce, oblivious to nature and thus to the pastoral world, sees land only as wealth, a type of money, so that when he bewails the fact that his Heir will wish he had "loved Money more, and Land less" (p. 275), he is again expressing not his love of the countryside but his belief in nature as a projection of man's acquisitive instinct. In Pounce's mind, although not in Adams', the landscape is simply a sterile medium of exchange. 22"Fielding's Revisions of Joseph Andrews," Studies in Bibliography, XVI (1963), 88-89. 95 Thematically the meeting with Pounce is a final statement of the disparity between profession and action, between the ideal of simplicity, charity, and love and the reality of selfishness and hypocrisy. The representatives of the pastoral and the non-pastoral worlds are placed in juxtaposition and allowed to discuss the key concepts of Nature and Charity, until it becomes apparent to the reader that they are not really talking about the same things at all, and that the pastoral ideas are only parodied and distorted in the real world. The tension between the ideal and the real in religion is explored at some length in Joseph Andrews; references to religion and the clergy are legion, and many critics, most notably Martin Battestin in The Moral Basis of Fielding's Art, have commented upon their symbolic significance. One of the most insistent themes of Joseph Andrews is the corruption of the clergy, a theme shared by such pastorals as The Shepherd's Calendar and Lycidas. This corruptness is especially important as a reminder of the unideal world since, ideally, the clergy are pastors or spiritual shepherds to their flocks. Joseph Andrews deals at length with two corrupt clergymen: Barnabas, the curate who tends Joseph at the Tow-Wouse's Inn in Book I, chapters 12-18, and Parson Trulliber in Book II, chapters 14-15. Barnabas represents a type of clergyman whose doctrine has led him to 96 misunderstand the basic issues of Christianity, a legalist who has rationalized away all the unpleasant obligations of his religion; Trulliber, on the other hand, is a cari cature of the thoroughly secular parson who is at home only with the grossly physical. Both clergymen share in an enthusiasm for Whitefield and faith without works, in direct opposition to Adams', Fielding's, and the Latitudinarian divine's contention that "by their Works shall ye know them."23 When Barnabas overhears the supposedly dying Joseph soliloquize upon innocence, virtue, and his willingness to resign himself to the divine will, he immediately concludes that the boy is uttering "nothing but a Rhapsody of Nonsense" (p. 59). The point here is Barnabas' incapacity to understand Joseph's spiritual state. This incapacity shows itself later when Joseph confesses his rancour toward the thieves who have robbed him, beaten him, and left him for dead. Barnabas is not quite up to the situation, for as Joseph confesses a desire to hear the thieves have been taken, the following conve rs ati on ens ue s: Joseph answered. . . . nothing would give him more Pleasure than to hear they were taken.' 'That,' cries Barnabas, 'is for the sake of Justice.' 'Yes,' said Joseph, 'but if I was to meet them again, I am afraid 23Martin C. Battestin discusses this point at length in The Moral Basis of Fielding's Art. 97 I should attack them, and kill them too, if I could.1 'Doubtless,' answered Barnabas, 'it is lawful to kill a Thief: but can you say, you forgive them as a Christian ought?' Joseph desired to know what that Forgiveness was. 'That is,' answered Barnabas, 'to forgive them as— as— it is to forgive them as— in short, it is to forgive them as a Christian.' Joseph reply'd 'he forgave them as much as he could.' 'Well, well,' said Barnabas, 'that will do.' (p. 60) Apparently unaware of the meaning of such key terms as "forgiveness" and "Christian," Barnabas relies for solace upon cliches and pious phrases which smooth over his ignorance and lack of insight. Again Adams serves as a touchstone to reveal Barnabas' spiritual incompetence; when, for example he finds that Adams is "an Enemy to the Luxury and Splendour of the Clergy" (p. 82), his attitude changes from brotherly professionalism to suspicion. Even more explicitly, Adams' contention that a virtuous and good Turk, or Heathen, are more acceptable in the sight of their Creator, than a vicious and wicked Christian, tho' his Faith was as perfectly Orthodox as St. Paul's himself . . . (p. 82) elicits from Barnabas the suspicion that he is "in Company . . . with the Devil himself" (p. 84). Since Adams is firmly established in the novel as an ideal character, the reader does not accept Barnabas' evaluation, but instead realizes that the latter's concept of Christianity is undermined by a shallow, enthusiastic, and cliche-ridden profession. While Barnabas is merely shallow and confused, Parson Trulliber, the second of Fielding's corrupt clergymen, completely ignores the ideal of a spiritual shepherd. In this sense his physical grossness is an adequate symbol of his spiritual grossness. "Little inferior" in physical and spiritual size to the hogs he raises, He was indeed one of the largest Men you should see, and could have acted the part of Sir John Falstaff without stuffing. Add to this, that the Rotundity of his Belly was considerably increased by the shortness of his Stature, his Shadow ascending very near as far in height when he lay on his Back, as when he stood on his Legs. His Voice was loud and hoarse, and his Accents extremely broad; to complete the whole, he had a Stateliness in his Gate, when he walked, not unlike that of a Goose, only he stalked slower, (p. 162) The animal imagery is incorporated here to suggest that Trulliber is more beast than man, that he shares the qualities of the well-stuffed animals whom he resembles. His obesity is the result of "much ale" and self gratification, indulgences which reflect his self-enclosed, animalistic view of the world. Not only does Trulliber fail to look like a clergyman, he is also a violator of the Ecclesiastical law which forced the clergy not to "take lands to farm or to 9 A buy and sell in markets." Trullxber, we are told, was "a Parson on Sundays, but all the other six might more properly be called a Farmer" (p. 162). Of the two professions, that of a feeder of hogs or of souls, the 2^Martin C. Battestin explains this point in a footnote on p. 162 of Joseph Andrews. 99 former is most in line with his native abilities and understanding. Trulliber violates not only the Ecclesiastical Law, but later on the law of hospitality as well when instead of helping Adams out of the mire he simply laughs and taunts at him. Similarly, having been forced by unavoid able essentials of decency to offer Adams some refreshment, he audibly orders "his Wife to draw a little of the worst Ale" (p. 163), and when it is brought to Adams, "he snatched it out of his Hand" because he "caal'd vurst" ! (p. 165) . Such a man lacks the spiritual understanding to teach more ethereal concepts than the slopping of hogs. j Trulliber's major inadequacy in his role as J I clergyman rests finally, however, not in his vulgarity, i ! but in his refusal to give Charity to the distressed. j This refusal of common Charity, since Charity is a j i I synonym for love, points to his basic lack of love; j j therefore, his first reaction to Adams' invitation to lay j up "Treasure in a better place than any this World j affords" (p. 165) is incredulity, followed by cliches, j and climaxed by the conclusion that Adams is either a ! fool or a thief. Trulliber can imagine no other way of j parting with his money to a distressed traveller than by | being robbed. Trulliber, like Barnabas, then, is a devotee of easy faith unimpeded by works; he "was reputed j a Man of great Charity; for tho' he never gave a j 100 Farthing, he always had that Word in his Mouth" (p. 169) . The two non-ideal clergymen inevitably remind the reader of the non-pastoral world in which selfishness, self-gratification and spiritual inadequacy are more common than love, selflessness, and compassion. Although the derivation of the word "pastor" indicates a shepherd caring for his sheep, neither Trulliber nor Barnabas adequately fulfill this responsibility. They clash with the pastoral ideal in the form of Parson Adams, who, being i a good spiritual shepherd, had shewn his Parishoners by a uniform Behaviour of thirty-five Years duration, that he had their Good entirely at heart; so they consulted him on every Occasion, and very seldom acted contrary to his Opinion, (p. 48-49) In summary, the road has shown itself inhumane, has ] shown that there is more hypocrisy, vanity, and vice in the world than goodness and love; the pastoral ideal has i j been juxtaposed to a reality in which the ideal is either | I distorted or ignored. In the six areas of human j | experience in which we have examined this contrast at work,i | we have seen the "secret egoism which lies behind our j ! apparently most disinterested actions" (Digeon, p. 84) and i ! ! j realized, much to our sorrow, that "the scene is the world j I i j that is the world of all of us and the actions are neither j remote nor fantastical, nor unique."2^ The main narrative ; 2^W. L. Renwick, "Comic Epic in Prose," Essays and | Studies, XXXII (1946),41. I 101 has been used, as Battestin comments, to expose "selfishness and hypocrisy along the highway" (Moral Basis, p. 129), but occasional manifestations of charity and goodness make the way not totally dark. In spite of the land journey through sinful and strange lands, goodness remains goodness, and it is Adams, the repre sentative of the ideal, who triumphs; at the same time, it is painfully inescapable to the reader that in the world of reality it is always the Tow-Wouses and the Trullibers, never the Adamses and Josephs, who actually i I succeed. Destination; Rural Retirement As Adams, Fanny, and Joseph enter their home parish midst shouts of joy for their safe return, we are informed i that "no three persons could be more kindly received, as indeed none ever more deserved to be universally beloved" (p. 278). Having at last attained the promised land, the three heroes might be expected to settle down to pastoral bliss and serenity. In a golden world, such might be the > case, but in our world, many a rural paradise is infested i with snakes. So it is in Joseph Andrews; when once the ! | ; ! pastoral characters have attained their own land, there is a reduction in the immediate menace threatening them, ; I ; I but affectation, vanity, and hypocrisy are by no means conquered. The country-retreat offers only comparative j 102 serenity: The two poles of value in Joseph Andrews (as later in Tom Jones) are the country-world and the city, neither perfect, but the former superior to the latter because more honest. In the first book the relative honesty of the country penetrates to the city in the person of Joseph and, having resisted corruption there, is reinforced in its withdrawal by another of its repre sentatives, Adams. In the last book the relative hypocrisy of the city-world (Lady Booby, Beau Didapper, and the rest) invades the country and is again defeated, the action alternating back and forth between country and city symbols. . . . (Mack, p. xii) In the traditional ironic pastoral world, even the country itself is only comparatively innocent; the tension between the ideal and the real life can always be seen beneath the serene surface. The pastoral innocence is thematically set against that of urban affectation and vanity when the entry of Fanny, Joseph, and Adams into the country coincides with that of Lady Booby. Both parties are greeted with rejoicing, but the motives for such rejoicing are in direct contrast since Lady Bobby is welcomed for economic, Parson Adams for affectionate reasons. Lady Booby is celebrated not as a person, but as an economic asset: She entered the Parish amidst the ringing of Bells, and the Acclamations of the Poor, who were rejoiced to see their Patroness returned after so long an Absence, during which time all her Rents had been drafted to London, without a Shilling being spent among them, which tended not a little to their utter impoverishing. . . . (p. 277) Even in rural retirement, money is the medium of exchange, and beneath the sentimental concept of a country life lies 103 the reality of economic exploitation of the poor country folk. Lady Booby does not see the country except as a source of revenue; thus, reacting in kind, it sees her only economically. In contrast, Adams' return is described in terms explicitly evoking the original pastoral image of a pastor and his flock: They flocked around him like dutiful Children round an indulgent Parent, and Vyed with each other in Demonstrations of Duty and Love. (p. 277) The contrast between the ideal characters, Fanny, Joseph, and Adams, and the non-ideal Lady Booby is made even more vivid by the vision of the former "enjoying perfect Happiness" in contrast to the latter for whom "Restless, interrupted Slumbers, and confused horrible Dreams were her portion the first Night" (p. 278). Such contrast between the country and city characters is obvious enough in its purpose: to contrast j j the simple serenity of the pastoral characters with the j confused disorder and frustration of the non-pastoral j characters, and thus to make a qualitative judgement in ! i i favor of the former. It is also important that Lady | ! ! Booby brings the stratagems and complexity of the London j I world with her in her rural retirement. She is inimical to pastoral serenity, and the country is changed with her arrival. The reader knows that her machinations will be j 104 futile, but she succeeds at least in disrupting the surface serenity of the rural life. Having come to the country with the mistaken belief that she will there find refuge from the storms of life, she brings to her rural retirement all the urban prejudices and affectations which make the London mode. Her assumption, for example, that true beauty is urban and that there is nothing beautiful in the country is coupled with her jealousy to make her to react strongly to Adams' i description of Fanny as a "Beauty": "Beauty indeed,— a Country Wench a Beauty.— I shall be sick whenever I hear Beauty mentioned again" (p. 282) . Similarly, Lady Booby's attachment to an urban I world in which love is equated with sex and "innocent enjoyments" are non-existent makes her class as "loose i discourse" Adams' defense of Fanny and Joseph's right to j marry since j I the poor have little share enough of this World ! already; it would be barbarous indeed to deny them the J common Privileges, and innocent Enjoyments which j Nature indulges to the animal Creation, (p. 283) | j Adams has stated his case a bit floridly, and Lady Booby j is tortured by jealousy, but basically her reaction comes j i from an urban inability to conceive of "innocent enjoyments" apart from loose indulgence. Her reaction illustrates the criterion of the sensual London world in j contrast to Adams' expression of the healthy sexuality of j 105 the country. The alien city characters, Slipslop, Lady Booby, Beau Didapper, and later Squire Booby and Pamela, transplanted into the country continue in their London ways, but they are limited comically by the pastoral setting in the amount of harm they can do. Lady Booby, nevertheless, employs rural agents for her services; both the unjust magistrate who would "commit two Persons to Bridewell for a Twig" (p. 290) and Lawyer Scout, who assures her that "The Laws of this Land are not so vulgar, to permit a mean Fellow to contend with one of your Ladyship's Fortune” (p. 285), are already living in the country before Lady Booby's arrival. Evidently the country has never been, even before her arrival, an Arcadia; injustice and inhumanity were already there awaiting her command; she serves, however, as a catalyst for the latent corruption in the country setting, j Beau Didapper, the second of the disruptive city characters, symbolically makes his entrance with an attempted rape upon Fanny, who is the apotheosis of ipastoral chastity. Didapper's abortive rape attempt is, i I i ! incidentally, the only such attempt in the novel which j t ! Fanny is able to prevent unassisted. Didapper is "not of j the Herculean Race," and because of his effeminacy, the ! normal course of events is reversed; Didapper defeated and "soon out of breath in the Struggle, quitted her. . . . 106 (p. 303). His effeminacy seems a reflection of the sterility of his world; stripped of the artificial urban inducements, he is not a genuinely threatening character in the pastoral world. Martin C. Battestin points out what perhaps many readers of eighteenth-century literature would already have suspected, that Didapper is Lord Hervey of Sporus fame, and thus of "the type of contemptible courtier that he represents."26 The comic limitation of the menacing urban character is explicit here since Did apper, who represents a type of Vanity, Affectation, and even potential evil, is limited by his own nature from being a serious threat to Fanny's virtue and pastoral happiness. Even though he embodies urban vanities, in the country he is merely contemptible and amusing. In a similar way, Booby and Pamela, who here become spokesmen for the non-pastoral social order, are comically ineffectual in their worldly-wise advice to Joseph, and instead of threatening pastoral happiness, they only reveal the limitations of their own natures. Booby shows himself a pawn so harmless that one wonders with Cross "how the deuce she ever had any trouble with him" (I, 320); Pamela shows herself a hopeless snob when she observes that "I am no longer Pamela Andrews, I am now this Gentleman's Lady, and as such am above her. . ." (p. 302). 2®"Lord Hervey's Role in Joseph Andrews," PQ, XLII (April 1963), 239. 107 This comic reduction in menace, seen specifically in Didapper, Booby, and Pamela, is related to the ironic pastoral theme; the London characters introduced into a pastoral setting disturb its serenity and order, but their destructive powers are circumscribed. In a genuinely pastoral setting, the affectations and vices of the urban world are intrusions which, although they may temporarily J retain their disruptive effect, are never allowed to triumph permanently. The comic limitation of menace results in the much-criticized ending of Joseph Andrews where, most improbably, the pastoral forces triumph. We are aware that the whole force of ordinary reality is opposed to such final triumph by the pastoral character: I In the end Fortune rewards Joseph and Fanny— not, of ! course, for anything they have achieved— but the { inhumanity of the road which Parson Adams and Joseph j have experienced is certainly unchanged and I unchangeable. (Smith, p. 14) j j The improbability of the ending is in accord with the ! | improbability of the journey; the ordinary order of j I events would have forced Fanny, Joseph, and Adams to ! i succumb to the manifold dangers and inconveniences of the I j road had not Fielding insisted that the Pastoral Ideal of i j goodness and simplicity must be victorious. Although out ; of accord with non-pastoral probability, The Adventures of Joseph Andrews and His Friend Abraham Adams reasserts j 10 8 a basic human dream, the dream of the ultimate victory of good. Such an interpretation is undeniably optimistic, yet it is not blindly so; Fielding himself is not unaware of the forces which would destroy man's dreams, nor is he ignoring their power. Morris Golden, observing the opposition of Ideal and Real in the novel, interprets this tension as symptomatic of a darkened, not a hopeful vision: Despite Fielding's hopes for reform and the buoyancy of Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, his novels often have sad implications, as is inevitable when happiness is seen as residing only within the mind. He provides us with gloriously triumphant fantasies— the deliberate substitution of the ideal for the actual— but frequently forces us to abandon them, or at least subordinate them to sane awareness of surrounding actuality. Pervasively, he opposes the romance, the fairy tale, the myth or reverie, the self-indulgence of the mind, with the actuality which seems to give it the lie. (p. 124) What is more mythical than the golden world, the innocence of Eden or the pastoral ideal? The awareness that these myths are incongruously inadequate to ordinary non-pastoral reality is one of the elements of the traditional pastoral; and it is this awareness which is responsible for the inevitable tension between the Ideal and the Real which is at the center of the pastoral. The point that makes the pastoral myth an expression of man's dreams is not that it is unreal (we know that), but that it does set an Ideal against which we can at least measure our failures. Joseph Andrews does, indeed, have "sad implications"; the 109 dream is after all only a dream, but within the world of Joseph Andrews, the sovereignty of that dream has been for once asserted, and the pastoral forces of life and fruitfulness have at least temporarily overcome those of death and sterility. The final expression of the triumph of the ideal is Fanny and Joseph's rural retirement at the end of the novel. Marriage is a traditional comic resolution, indicative of the triumph of the forces of life, but here it is combined with the pastoral idea of retiring to live in the country far from the vices and hypocrisies of the city. Fanny and Joseph, having overcome the obstacles of the city, the road, and the parish, are married, and we are told, j j The third Day, Mr. Wilson and his Wife, with their Son j and Daughter returned home; where they now live ! together in a State of Bliss scarce ever equalled. j Mr. Booby hath with unprecedented Generosity given Fanny a Fortune of two thousand Pound, which Joseph ! hath laid out in a little Estate in the same Parish I with his Father, which he now occupies (his Father | having stock'd it for him;) and Fanny presides, with | most excellent Management in his Dairy; where, j however, she is not at present very able to bustle much, being, as Mr. Wilson informs me in his last ! Letter, extremely big with her first Child, (pp. 343- j 344) ; ! This is on one level the traditional "they lived happily j ever after" ending, but it is significant that the place of their happiness is the country and that their happiness I i is to a large extent dependent upon their locale. j Although Mrs. Wilson's paradise is only a qualified type I 110 of Eden, its existence does represent a triumph, however limited, of the Pastoral Ideal over the conditions of life. Joseph, significantly, becomes a farmer, the closest eighteenth-century equivalent to a Shepherd, and, equally significantly, at the end of the novel Fanny is "extremely big with her first Child," a reminder both of the theme of social continuity and the physical fecundity of the Pastoral world. Even in the triumphant ending, Fielding juxtaposes [the spiritual forces of life to those of death; following the news of Fanny's pregnancy is an account of Lady Booby's sterile, self-enclosed liaison: I As for the Lady Booby, she returned to London in a few days, where a young Captain of Dragoons, together with eternal Parties at Cards, soon obliterated the Memory of Joseph, (p. 344) i I Digressions j That the three digressive cautionary tales in | | Joseph Andrews are thematically relevant no longer seems j to be in doubt; I. B. Cauthen, Jr. typifies the modern | j attitude when he explains these digressions as attempts to j j "unmask the vices of hypocrisy and vanity in courtship, in ! |marriage, and in the life of the r a k e ."27 This is a . cogent enough analysis of the tales' thematic relationship i to the novel; the hypocrisy and vanity which confront the j 27"Fielding1s Digressions in Joseph Andrews," CE, XVII (April 1956), 382. Ill pastoral characters represent the non-ideal reality against which they are pitted. It is significant, however, that in Joseph Andrews, hypocrisy and vice in their most virulent forms are associated with the archetypal city, and this association is reflected in the digressions by the settings in which they are placed. Of the three tales— Wilson's, that of Leonora the Unfortunate Jilt, and that of Paul and Lennard— the first takes place in London, the second in "a Town in the North of England" (p. 103), and the last in an indeterminate country setting near the estate of Lennard, who has become a "Country Gentleman" (p. 315). The degree of vanity and hypocrisy revealed is directly related to these settings: the first digression, i jthe "rake's progress through the vanities of London" (Battestin, Moral Basis, p. 129), reveals the darkest picture of urban vice, the tale of Leonora shows a vice more silly than threatening, but the third digression, I j which is set in the country, is so innocuous that the reader merely smiles at the vanities of its central characters. ; I Wilson's tale, the longest and most obviously relevant of the digressions, has justly elicited the most / ' critical comment; not only does it actualize the evils and - vices of the London from which Joseph has just escaped, but it is structurally connected with the novel through j Wilson's paternity of Joseph. Here the vices of the city | 112 are presented through the "satiric expository form," a form which involves "a list of the evils of London, ending with . . . withdrawal to an Eden (of Golden Age) in the country" (Paulson, p. 124) . The satiric accumulation of vices begins with London defined as a corrupt, thriftless place in which the youthful Wilson finds that his six pounds are "soon consumed," but that he can get easy credit from the "Tradesmen at the Polite End of Town" who "deal as largely as they can, reckon as high as they can, and arrest as soon as they can" (p. 202). The thriftlessness and expense of life in London are symbolic equivalents for the waste of human energy and potential. Repeatedly the simplicity and inexpensiveness of the country are contrasted with the complexity and expensiveness of the city; when, for example, Wilson loses three thousand pounds as damages to the husband of an unwanted mistress, the reader can hardly help contrasting this with the other i three thousand pounds by which the reformed and married j Wilson builds a new life in the country. The reader also j j might remember that the two hundred pounds lost when ! another of Wilson’s mistresses breaks open his escritoire ! I and absconds with its contents is roughly equivalent to ten years' wages for Parson Adams. Throughout the London ; I section of Wilson's tale, money and the sense of its i i rapidly diminishing is a constant theme, but those j 113 sections depicting life in the country substitute husbandry and labor for money, suggesting perhaps that money is a basic concern only in the non-pastoral world. Another means of depicting the vanity and affectation of Wilson's London is through the gossip in which the town seems submerged. Gossip, it will be recalled, was one of the means used to characterize the town in the Pamela-burlesque section of Joseph Andrews, but in the Wilson context, gossip becomes more vicious as we see the corruptions of the city firsthand. Initially gossip is mere thoughtless affectation as Wilson cultivates the reputation of having intrigues with half a dozen women who are "all Vestal Virgins" for anything he knows to the contrary (p. 203) , or when we are told that the beaux of the Temple being the "Affectation of Affectation . . . drank with Lords they did not know, and intrigued with Women they never saw" (p. 206). Such gossip is relatively harmless, but when Wilson's luck has turned against him, gossip becomes malicious, and he is branded as a "careless, idle Fellow" (p. 218) by the bookseller who has worked him to the brink of collapse. A form of malicious, studied gossip hastens the end of Wilson's wine business; Wilson explains: endeavouring to deal with the utmost Honesty and Uprightness, I soon found our Fortune in a declining Way, and my Trade decreasing by little and little: For my Wines which I never adulterated after their 114 Importation, and were sold as neat as they came over, were universally decried by the Vintners, to whom I could not allow them quite as cheap as those who gained double the Profit by a less Price. (pp. 223-224) In Wilson's tale, as in the early London scenes of the Pamela-burlesque, the uselessly affected and malicious gossip of the city points to.a basic distortion of human nature; gossip expresses selfish indifference to another's suffering and is antagonistic to any kind of harmony. Gossip is a product of the leaden age, an age in which all relationships are self-enclosed. Similarly, in the London scenes of Joseph Andrews sexuality is sterile. Battestin observes that Vanitas Vanitatum is a theme underlying the treatment of love in Ecclesiastes, Lucretius, Juvenal, Virgil, Horace, Ovid, Martial, Seneca, Cicero, Boethius, and "countless sermons and poems more or less contemporary with Fielding" (Battestin, Moral Basis, p. 45). In its classical form, this theme is frequently equated with the unideal and unproductive reality of the city. In the non-pastoral world, the usual equivalent for love is sex, but often, as in the case of Wilson's recurring French disease, sex is productive of disease and death. The frequent occurrence of Wilson's disease is symbolic of the essential unhealthiness of the town vice and may be contrasted with the healthiness of the pastoral swains. Wilson's condemnation of the Town Harlots as 115 "painted Palaces inhabited by Disease and Death" (p. 209) is an explicit statement of the inter-relationship of sex and disease, and, as Cross points out, is an echo of Juvenal (I, 350), one of the most vicious classical anti-urban writers. In spite of his sermonistic phrases, Wilson is imaginatively right about urban sex; in this world, sexuality is productive not of life, but of death. Wilson's degeneration is marked by each recurrence of the disease since progressively his guilt comes to involve a greater breach of faith and an increasing tendency to use others selfishly. His first contact comes from having "made Love to Orange-Wenches" (p. 206), a rather risky and foolhardy avocation, no doubt, but one j which since it is based frankly on a monetary arrangement involves little responsibility on either side. His second encounter results from co-habitation with a kept mistress j i "recommended by a celebrated Bawd" (p. 206). Common sense j ! should have warned Wilson that such a recommendation was dangerous at best, but he proceeds in good faith until he i is made to suffer for his naivete. His third and I j ostensibly last exposure results from a liaison with "a j ! beautiful young Girl, the Daughter of a Gentleman" j (p. 206), whom he has himself seduced. This relationship . involves a double breach of faith, his own in seducing the: girl and hers in being unfaithful to him. j 116 I had been perfectly constant to this Girl, during the whole Time I kept her: But she had scarce departed before I discovered more Marks of her Infidelity to me, than the Loss of my Money. In short, I was forced to make a third Visit to my Surgeon, out of whose hands I did not get a hasty Discharge. (pp. 208-209) The increasing degree of betrayal in Wilson's sexual encounters is symptomatic of the darkening urban corruption which transforms him from an innocent school-boy into a desperate and disillusioned debtor. The betrayal and hypocrisy of Wilson's London world becomes progressively darker until life is reduced to a moral jungle, but the second part of his tale, the account of his withdrawal from London into the country where he lives in "that calm serene Happiness which is seated in Content" (p. 227), poses a pastoral alternative to this ethical and spiritual darkness. Andrew Wright points out: The moral of Wilson's tale is surely that withdrawal from the town is the only way to escape the world's snares: Wilson loses but recaptures the innocence which is Parson Adams' salient characteristic. (p. 65) As far back as Virgil's Georgies, the ideal of rural retirement from the vicious world offered such an alter native for the "good" man. Adams is, therefore, in character both as an optimist and a classicist when he exclaims at Wilson's life of retirement: "This was the Manner in which the People . . . lived in the Golden Age" (p. 229). It is consonant with the pastoral theme of Joseph 117 Andrews that the "Golden World" represented by Wilson's rural retirement is seriously qualified by its context. All is far from well in Wilson's world, for his tale is preceded by the sheep-stealers, interrupted by the killing of his little daughter's dog, includes an account of his son's kidnapping and an explanation that "most of [their] Neighborhood" take them "for very strange People" (p. 224). Through these incidents, the "forest-of-Arden perfection of Wilson's place of retirement" is seriously qualified (Wright, p. 66); the idyllic pastoral becomes ironic, for even in Wilson's earthly paradise, the ideal is not free from non-ideal existence. Nevertheless, Wilson's rural retirement is as close as Joseph Andrews ever gets to Eden, and "there is a conscious flavor of a bucolic idyll to Wilson's course of life and to the chaste and innocent love of Fanny and Joseph" (Battestin, Moral Basis, p. 128). Wilson's tale has been used to contrast the unideal, vicious life of the city with the "ideal of the happy life" (Battestin, Moral Basis, p. 129) in the country, but the contrast does not obscure the fact that the pastoral reality is only relatively better than the non-pastoral. The story of Leonora the Jilt also deals with the Vanitas Vanitatum theme, but the tale, cast in an urban although not a London setting, exposes foibles rather than vices. Again, the urban preoccupation with fashion and____ 118 with gossip is made to characterize a distorted social world. Bellarmine and Leonora, the two central characters of the tale, are for the most part too foolish to concern the reader deeply, so that the total effect of the digression is less disquieting and more amusing than Wilson’s story. Leonora's identification as a coquette, the ironic town equivalent of a rural shepherdess, is established by the information that she very rarely missed a Ball or any other Public Assembly; I where she had frequent Opportunities of satisfying a j | greedy Appetite of Vanity with the Preference which i I was given her by the Men to almost every other Woman present” (p. 103). Lest any doubt of her character be left in the reader's j I mind, she is shown exulting over her triumph at a Ball: I i She had never tasted any thing like this Happiness. | She had before known what it was to torment a single Woman; but to be hated and secretly cursed by a whole j Assembly, was a Joy reserved for this blessed Moment. As this vast profusion of Ecstasy had confounded her j Behaviour; she played a thousand childish Tricks, : distorted her Person into several Shapes, and her Face ■ into several Laughs, without any Reason. In a word, j her Carriage was as absurd as her Desires, which were s to affect an Insensibility of the Stranger's Admiration; and at the same time a Triumph from that Admiration ' over every Woman in the Room. (p. 109) By her actions she establishes herself as the very 1 ; I antithesis of all that the shepherdess stands for; with her, innocence becomes toying, faithfulness becomes ‘ faithlessness, and devotion becomes manipulation. ; Her male counterpart, Bellarmine, is described as j 119 a fop, the ironic town equivalent of the rural swain. Bellarmine1s insipidity and urbanity are linked to the description of his dress; we are told: He had on a Cut-Velvet Coat of a Cinnamon Colour, lined with a Pink Satten, embroidered all over with Gold; his Waistcoat, which was Cloth of Silver, was embroidered with Gold likewise. I cannot be particular as to the rest of his Dress: but it was all in the French Fashion, for Bellarmine . . . was just arrived from Paris, (p. 108) Bellarmine and Leonora both violate the pastoral ideal of simplicity, virtue, and innocence, and both substitute a superficial attractiveness for depth and consistency of character. They are, in a sense, negative analogues of the pastoral ideal. In Leonora's tale, as in the remainder of the novel, the non-pastoral characters are exposed by their contrast with a "good" or pastoral character; Leonora and Bellarmine reveal their smallness by their relations with Horatio just as other characters j j reveal themselves by comparison with Parson Adams. The j l touchstone quality of Adams and Horatio is a measure of j ! their pastoral strength. j I The tale ends with a parody of the rural retirement j j theme as Leonora retires to the country not to meditate, I j but either to do penance for her vanity or to hide her j disgrace. In this case, rural retirement is not an alternative to an urban life of vanity, an alternative leading to a happy life in rural Eden; Leonora's ; withdrawal into the country is simply a self-imposed I 120 punishment. The country here is not simply a place to find peace, but a place of retribution and expiation for past sins, a kind of social purgatory. The last interpolated tale is set in the country and recounted in Adams1 cottage to a combined cast of urban and rural characters, none of whom take the story seriously. This is characteristic of the diminished importance of the tale itself; affectation and vanity are less threatening here than in the other digressions, and i j so attenuated is its cautionary bite that even the satiric point is not clear. Cauthen, one of the few critics who deign to discuss the point, claims that the tale "is an exposure of vanity, this time . . . the vanity of being preeminently correct" (p. 381). This explanation is probably as good as any offered, but it seems that Fielding is also after larger game here. He is laughing at the ridiculous inconsistencies which make us human, but which also make it impossible to attain the golden age. In Lennard we are shown a relatively happy man, a I "Country Gentleman and a Justice of Peace" (p. 315) who ! has retired to the country and has married a wife, "quite I ; j the best sort of Woman in the World" (p. 316). Lennard has attained the eighteenth-century ideal of a happy life; j there is nothing to disturb the serenity of his pastoral retreat except heated discussions with his wife about j ] whether their guest is eating potted woodcock or potted \ 121 partridge. There is affectation, vanity, even hypocrisy in this tale, but none of these seem very treacherous, and their similarities to the inanities of everyday life make them simply amusing. These inanities are, however, sadly amusing since they spring from the human condition which separates us from all possibility of a pastoral world. Even in the golden world we are ourselves, and we will find a way to destroy Eden even if it be only by quarrels over who ought not to quarrel. The digressions are closely related to the central conflict between the pastoral ideal and the non-ideal reality; although each handles this conflict on a different level, ranging from the morally serious tone of Wilson's tale to the inconclusive clowning of Paul and Lennard's. All three digressions exhibit in some degree the associations usually attached to the city and the country; the least serious offenses take place in the country, the most serious in London. All three works significantly insist upon the presence of a disturbing reality beneath the ideal facade. Don Quixote as Analogue The figure of the lean and idealistic knight of La Mancha is distinctly visible beneath the English solidness of Abraham Adams. The connection is official, Fielding's statement on the title page that the novel was 122 "written in Imitation of the Manner of Cervantes” (p. 1) is explicit, but the analogy goes deeper than a similarity in form (both are episodic romances of the road) or character (Adams is an English version of Quixote): the essential similarity is thematic; just as the original Quixote found himself lost in a world where illusion and reality insistently clashed, so his English counterpart is not at home in a real world which cannot understand his I idealism. i Both Joseph Andrews and Don Quixote concern a clash between an ideal world, which ought to be true by all | I standards of goodness and logic, and a real world which j t is illogical, threatening, often evil, but nonetheless j i true. This clash of the ideal and the real is, as we have j | seen, a basic pastoral conflict; the ideal world is j roughly equated with the pastoral world where damsels in j distress are unhesitatingly rescued and money is non- j | existent, while in the non-pastoral world damsels turn into cooking-wenches and gold is the measure of all things.! Wilbur Cross observes of Fielding 1s Joseph Andrews that j "Like Cervantes, he let two worlds collide for the i amusement and instruction of mankind" (I, 333) . The world : of Don Quixote, slayer of windmills, and Abraham Adams, preserver of innocence, collides with the real world of Sancho Panza, who merely sees the literal windmills, or a . Man of Courage, who concludes that he is not well enough j 123 armed. The world Don Quixote and Adams conceive in their minds is basically simple; in it a knight errant can right injustice by freeing convicts or can demolish evil by crushing puppets; reality can only prove their ideals inapplicable, not false. William Empson, discussing the identification of Quixote with the pastoral and heroic character, sees an inverse relationship between the two character types. Don Quixote "though mock-heroic . . . is straight pastoral; only at the second level, rather as the heroic becomes genuine, does the pastoral become mock" (Empson, p. 188). Empson's connection between Quixote and pastoralism carries some weight, for his influence on pastoral theory is recognized as seminal. The general acceptance of this connection, however, can be attested to by Paulson's use of quixoticism as a synonym for pastoralism (p. 36). Essentially, Quixote, Adams, and the pastoral characters share qualities which mark them as symbols of goodness and innocence which rebuke the knowledge of the world.28 These characters have in common a naive innocence and simplicity which is reflected in their idealism in the midst of a non-ideal world. The clash of a Quixote-pastoral character with diminished reality 28Stuart Tave, The Amiable Humorist; A Study in the Comic Theory and Criticism of the Eighteenth and Nineteenth Centuries (Chicago, 1960), p. 141. 124 reiterates the archetypal situation of the conventional pastoral. With Abraham Adams, Fielding's most quixotic i hero, the spectacle of the impact of his idealistic person ality on a world that has no knowledge of or interest in ideals is essentially the same spectacle that diverts us in Cervantes' masterpiece. (Dudden, I, 339) In Don Quixote and Joseph Andrews alike, ideals hover over ! an abyss of annihilation; hopelessly at sea in a hostile world, Quixote and Adams both set out on an idealistic quest, the realistic end of which must be defeat. Cervantes' novel ends with this inevitable defeat as Quixote, dying in the non-pastoral world, recants his dream of the ideal; in Fielding's novel, the ideal pastoral dream is strengthened and reasserted by the j ending. As Andrew Wright has observed, although Don j Quixote dies of a broken heart, "Joseph Andrews' life begins . . . at the end of the book" (p. 29) and so, for I | that matter, does Adams'. The quixotic defeat emphasizes | the normal probabilities for the pastoral ideals of our J j world; defeat, Don Quixote would say, is inevitable, and \ -------------------------------------------------- t ideals are fragile. In the world of Joseph Andrews, the ' ■ ! ideal is at least officially triumphant; the ultimate J i i I expression of the pastoral spirit, retirement to the country, exerts itself, and the reality of the road is j denied. ! . . i The influence of Don Quixote and its satiric ; 125 pastoral spirit was strong in English literature, and Joseph Andrews is part of a long tradition. In Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England, Ronald Paulson describes this influence: The Quixote syndrome, when it appears whole, involves a partial recantation. It says that Quixote is totally wrong, that he is mad and the world is real; and yet in a sense he is right and the world is unreal or at least wicked and unimportant. Don Quixote is by all odds the most seminal narrative satire of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries; in the majority of works influenced by it these contrary interpre tations appear separately, with the emphasis at first on his error and then, in the later eighteenth century, increasingly on his innocence. Only in a significant few do they join. (p. 33) What happens in Joseph Andrews is essentially a joining of the two views with an official emphasis upon the latter view. It is the pastoral world which ultimately triumphs, blocking out the wickedness of reality, but at the same time there is an acute awareness that the world is definitely real. In this real world, the pastoral simplicity of Adams or Quixote, which on an ideal scale is j justified, is accounted madness. The tension which thus j results from the ideal and the real worlds1 collision j j identifies Joseph Andrews as an ironic pastoral. The two I views implicit in what Paulson calls "the Quixote j |syndrome" are both present in Joseph Andrews; the quixotic i pastoral world is simultaneously real and unreal, ! triumphant and defeated, natural and artificial. Joseph I Andrews is, then, truly "written in Imitation of the Manner 126 of Cervantes," for it has the thematic ambiguity, "the skyline beyond skyline of . . . irony" (Empson, p. 188) of its great original. CHAPTER III THE PASTORAL OF EXPERIENCE: JONATHAN WILD AND SHAMELA Critical Trends It is not accidental that of Fielding's five prose fictions, the two "pastorals of experience," Jonathan Wild and Shamela, have been accorded the most adverse critical | jcomment. The feeling that these two works are apart from the main stream of Fielding's art, written in a different vein before he "found himself" in Joseph Andrews, and that they are vastly inferior to the rest of his prose fictions i has become a critical commonplace. But in fact, Jonathan j I Wild and Shamela are much closer to the Fielding of Tom j i Jones and Joseph Andrews than most critics realize; j Shamela and Jonathan Wild concern themselves with the same themes as does the rest of Fielding's fiction, but they offer a less idealistic and hence less comic solution. At I least part of the reason for their relative unpopularity j has been the uneasiness with which their less idealistic j version of the pastoral inspires us. ! Jonathan Wild and Shamela are the only fictions of j l Fielding which are set wholly in the nightmare world of ; ! j 127 ! 128 shadows, the pastoral of experience; they are also his only prose fictions which consistently use the inverted norm and ironic-satiric techniques. Perhaps some of the adverse criticisms directed against both works stem from the shock of Fielding's consistent use of the techniques of parody and satire, for generally we think of E'ielding as a "comic" rather than a "satiric" genius. From the beginning Jonathan Wild was disturbingly "low" for middle-class readers. Frederic Blanchard describes the delight of Old England when, in their January 7, 1749 issue, they could righteously condemn the "Buffoonery" of this "Old Bailey B i o g r a p h y ."2 Similarly, Sir Walter Scott in his Lives of the Novelists has made himself immortal in Fielding criticism by admitting that It is not easy to see what Fielding proposed to himself by a picture of complete vice, unrelieved by anything of human feeling, and never by any accident even deviating into virtue; and the ascribing a train of fictitious adventures to a real character has in it something clumsy and inartificial on the one hand, and, on the other, subjects the author to a suspicion that he only used the title of Jonathan Wild, in order to connect his book with the popular renown of that infamous d e p r e d a t o r .3 3-A. E. Dyson, "Satire and Comic Theory in Relation to Fielding," MLQ, XVIII (1957), 230. ^Fielding the Novelist: A Study in Historical Criticism (New York, 1926), p. 34. 3(London, 1910), p. 59. 129 Jonathan Wild1s lowness and its criminal locale originally gave rise to much criticism, but what is interesting is that such a reaction still lies at the basis of some of our feelings about the work. The criminal biography of the late seventeenth and early eighteenth century was, after all, a thoroughly disreputable form, and Jonathan Wild is solidly within that tradition. Nonetheless, in both Jonathan Wild and Shamela the urban criminal world is essential to the pastoral of experience, for the juxtaposition of excessively low with the high pastoral ideal is essential to the mock-pastoral. The elaborate satiric irony of Jonathan Wild is related to the criminal low-life theme, for irony is a fundamental characteristic of the pastoral of experience. In the eighteenth century, as Blanchard points out, "Fielding the Ironist was never . . . adequately appreciated ..." (p. 563), but nineteenth century critics were all too aware of Fielding's irony and often reacted against it. Edmund Gosse in his introduction to the Constable edition of Fielding is typical in finding the irony "infinitely fatiguing."^ Gosse has his modern counterpart in such critics as Maurice Johnson, who notices Jonathan Wild's "nagging, shrill tone," 4I (London, 1898), xxiii. ^Fielding's Art of Fiction . . . (Philadelphia, 1961). p. 116._______________________________________________ 130 Sheldon Sacks, who sees the work as a "series of bitingly ironic fictional examples,"6 and James Sutherland, who comments: Jonathan Wild is a brilliant and sustained performance, but I must add the damaging reservation that no one ever wished it longer. The satirical idea of the book becomes a little monotonous. As W. P. Ker once remarked, 'One wishes to end it; the jury does not desire to hear more.' Jonathan Wild, in fact, raises in an acute form the question of how long one can endure unmitigated s a t i r e . ^ The question of "how long one can endure unmitigated satire" had been asked before in a slightly different form by Samuel Taylor Coleridge, who, although he asserts that j Jonathan Wild is "assuredly the best of all fictions in which a villain is throughout the prominent character," cannot help exclaiming: . . . how impossible it is by any force of genius to create a sustained attractive interest for such a ground-work, and how the mind wearies of, and shrinks from, the more than painful interest . . . of utter depravity,— Fielding himself felt and endeavored to mitigate and remedy by the . . . far too large a ! proportion and too quick recurrence, of the interposed i chapters of moral reflection, like the chorus in the ; Greek tragedy,— admirable specimens as these chapters j are of profound irony and philosophic satire.6 I The charge of excessive irony is a serious one, and, on j the level of reader response, an unanswerable one; it ! ^Fiction and the Shape of Belief: A Study of Henry Fielding . . . (Los Angeles, 1967), p. 49. ^English Satire (Cambridge, Eng., 1958), p. 115. ^Complete Works, ed. W. G. T. Shedd (New York: 1871), IV, 382-383. 131 should be pointed out, however, that the world of the mock-pastoral is steeped in, perhaps overwhelmed by, irony. The excessive irony and shrill tone of Jonathan Wild come from a conception of the world as diminished and i non-pastoral; irony is, in other words, one of the necessary adjuncts of the pastoral of experience. The most recent trend in criticism has been either to ignore or to allegorize the work. Maurice Johnson omits a discussion of Jonathan Wild from his Fielding's Art of l Fiction because it lies "outside the direct progression from Shamela to Joseph Andrews to the achievement of Tom Jones and Amelia. . ." (p. 5) . Similarly, Andrew Wright in Henry Fielding: Mask and Feast dismisses the book with i the observation that "it is the simplest of his four works j I of full stature, and it is thoroughly angry. I think it is over-praised. . . ."^ Martin C. Battestin in The Moral Basis of Fielding's Art, a book primarily devoted to j l Joseph Andrews, merely points out that Jonathan Wild is j j limited since the mode of travesty is "essentially j parasitic, negativistic, and superficial. "10 j The allegorizing tendency in modern criticism is j |represented by such critics as Robert Smith, William Irwin, and Alan Wendt. Robert Smith sees Wild primarily 9(Los Angeles, 1966), p. 56. j 10(Middletown, Conn., 1959), p. 9. i 132 as a "personification of diabolic evil" and a device for presenting the great man motif, H while William Irwin notes that "Ethically considered . . . Jonathan Wild is a popular allegorical presentation of a fundamental moral problem."^ The most effective modern allegoric reading of the work has been done by Alan Wendt, who, seeing Wild and Heartfree as representatives of greatness and goodness, concludes: It is greatness personified that ends on the gallows, goodness personified that lives happily ever after. Both consummations are devoutly to be wished, but their allegorical representation in Jonathan Wild offers neither wishful thinking nor sentimental optimism— it offers rather Fielding’s belief in the ultimate and eternal justice of the universe, a belief which he shared with almost all eighteenth- century philosophers and theologians.13 Jonathan Wild unquestionably contains allegorical elements, but these elements are used equally to illustrate the superiority of goodness to greatness and to evoke the ! world of the Newgate Pastoral where greatness not goodness j i is the only standard of worth. The ending of Jonathan j Wild contrasts the "happy ending" of Heartfree's goodness j with Wild's early exaltation to greatness in the form of j H"The 'Great Man' Motif in Jonathan Wild and The Beggar1s Opera," CLAJ, II (March 1959), 183. l^The Making of Jonathan Wild; A Study in the Literary Method of Henry Fielding, Columbia University Studies in English and Comparative Lit., CLIII (New York, 1950), 79. 13"The Moral Allegory of Jonathan Wild," ELH, XXIV (December 1957), 310. 133 the gallows, but the remainder of the novel is submerged in Wild's own world, the world of the mock-pastoral. Greatness epitomizes those forces which make the true pastoral world impossible. Jonathan Wild, then, can be seen primarily as a Newgate pastoral, and once this is realized, the criticisms of the work fall into place. Patently the novel does concentrate upon low-life, but then the point of the pastoral of experience is the triumph of the real world over all ideals, and if the work utilizes excessive irony, so also does the form to which it belongs. The moral allegory of the work is also clear, but .that allegory is used to evoke the Newgate pastoral world. Of Shamela's critical fortunes not much needs to be said except that it has suffered many of the charges made against Jonathan Wild plus the even more damaging charge of frivolity. The work has repeatedly been dismissed for its lowness, its "parasitic" form, and even for its bawdiness. In literary merit and complexity, Shamela is unquestionably inferior to Fielding's major prose fictions, yet it hardly deserve Lionel Stevenson's comment that it is an "impudent parody, " - * - 4 or the silence about it which reigns in the pages of Scott, Saintsbury, Dudden, and Blanchard. Until the twentieth century when its l^The English Novel: A Panorama (Boston, 1960), p.85___________ ______________________________________________ 134 authenticity as Fielding's work was definitely established by Cross, Dobson, McKillop, and Woods, there is little, indeed, except scornful mention of it. Since Fielding's authorship has been fully established, there has been more serious criticism, as evidenced by Maurice Johnson's essay in Fielding's Art of Fiction, Ian Watt's introduction to the Augustan Reprints edition, and Bernard Kreissman's full length study Pamela-Shamela. This newer criticism of Shamela has tended to be more sympathetic than formerly, as indeed it could not be much less so. Johnson, for example, sees Shamela as "one of the important parodies of prose fiction in English" which "amusingly and tellingly distorts its models in minute details" (p. 19), and Martin C. Battestin in his introduction to the Riverside edition of the work has called it a "brilliant and bawdy p a r o d y . "15 Nonetheless, the tendency discernible beneath these appreciations is to value Shamela only as a superior example of an inferior form. Even Ian Watt's admission that he finds this "salty hors d'oeuvre . . . more to his taste than some of the more imposing dishes on the Pierian buffet"1® has about it the air of condescension. Shamela, set in the city and employing the technique of 15(Boston, 1961), p. xi. 16lntrod., An Apology for the Life of Mrs. Shamela Andrews, Augustan Reprint Society, LVII (Los Angeles, 1956), p. 11. 135 parody, can like Jonathan Wild be partially explained as a pastoral of experience. The elements which have either alienated or amused its readers are part and parcel of its submersion in the pastoral of experience. Both works create a fallen world within which to play out their action, and much of the ambivalence of our reaction to both comes from our feelings about this mocking pastoral world. The Demonic Pastoral World The Newgate pastoral of experience is set in a world that is, in Northrop Frye's term, "demonic" rather than "apocalyptic"; it is a world of shadows where man is at war with mankind, where the gods or natural powers are brutal and distant; a world of cannibalism, torture, mutilation; a world where love corrupts to lust and sexual deviation. Its presiding animals are the wolf, the tiger, and the dragon; its landscape is the jungle and the wasteland; its j buildings are labyrinths, dungeons and Towers of | Babel.1 ' i I Such is the world of Jonathan Wild, The Beggar's Opera, ! i London, Trivia, and Shamela, a world where distortions of J the ideal define the norm; a world where the natural j j impulses, which in the traditional pastoral were j l j j satisfied in fruition, are distorted and perverted, ! where virtue becomes "vartue" and love a commodity. In j j l^Alvin B. Kernan, The Plot df Satire (New Haven, j Conn., 1965), p. 22. | 136 the demonic world, the world of the Newgate pastoral, the universal oneness of the apocalyptic vision is fragmented, the city becomes a wasteland, the sheep changes to the wolf and the vulture, while the garden reverts to the jungle. (Kernan, p. 14) The beasts of prey who replace the pastoral sheep in the Newgate pastoral are men who prey upon each other, while the ruined garden turns into the human jungle of the city j and the labyrinthine traps set for unwary innocence. In | the center of this ironic, tragic world is the "vision of | the source of all evil in a personal form"18 and a j worthless, futile quest. Shamela and Jonathan Wild seem travesties of the pastoral ideal as outlined in the first chapter; instead of a golden world, there is a leaden substitute poorly i covered with gilt. The mock pastoral of experience | inverts the traditional pastoral, implies that its dreams j ! are nonsense and that its ideals are unattainable. Most j of the themes of the traditional pastoral, themes such as ! innocence versus experience, the high versus the low, and j I l the country versus the city, also recur in the Newgate j pastoral, but here they are inverted or made ambiguous. j The themes of pastoral harmony and of the natural i j healthiness of rural swains become parodies of themselves i I ; in the non-pastoral world; so that in place of harmony — — — — j ISjtforthrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four j Essays (New York, 1965), p. 239. i 137 there is self-enclosure or absorption within oneself, and in the stead of health there is twisted sickliness. Such distortions amount to a denial both of the traditional pastoral itself and of the whole complex of ideas surrounding it. The Newgate pastoral, because of its picture of a world in which there is no longer an ideal, presents a darkened horizon; in it hope is gone, or at best the ideal has receded from our grasp. Yet for all this, the ! Fielding who wrote Jonathan Wild and Shamela was no embittered pessimist, just as the Fielding of Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones was no simple optimist. Fielding saw both the ideal and the real, sometimes believing more fervently in the ideal, sometimes overwhelmed by the j I I complex and often sordid reality around him. These two visions in Fielding find their expression in the pastorals of innocence and the pastorals of experience respectively, but any complete understanding of the man j must take into account both elements. The Newgate pas toral is characterized by a tendency to deny, mock, or ‘ violate the pastoral ideal and thereby imply a diminished j or "fallen" world, a demonic world of nightmares in which | the worst of the nightmare is that we recognize j ourselves. I 138 The Urban World Of Fielding's prose fictions, only Jonathan Wild and Shamela are set wholly in the nightmare reality of the pastoral of experience. Both works, even in those scenes which take place in the country, are town-oriented and have their basic locale in the labyrinthine city of London, the human jungle of the demonic world. The urban milieu is particularly appropriate for a satiric work which employs mockery and distortion. "Satire," as Kernan observes in The Plot of Satire, is "usually set in the city, not in nature" (p. 13). By setting his anti-pastorals in the city and using the techniques of mockery, Fielding suggests that the true pastoral world is dead or non-existent. What Sven Armens observes about Gay's mock-pastoral technique is here applicable to Fielding's as well: Direct distortion twists the use of an established form or method to convey Gay's personal meanings. Perversions often illustrate the misuse of man or woman in society, or the misuse of a virtue such as love for evil ends. Debasements lower a satirized subject through analogy to beast or to something ludicrous. Degenerations indicate the decay of the pastoral as a genre, the decay of the nobility as a class, or the decay of love as an impulse toward good. And finally, idealizations, which are actually forms of distortion, are employed, probably unconsciously to sentimentalize some deep-rooted feeling or attitude, often connected with his love for the country.I9 i^john Gay, Social Critic (New York, 1954), p. 8. 139 The very idea of a pastoral in Newgate implies the incongruity and distortion which anti-pastoral assumes. It is easy to see, then, how this incongruity and distortion could create a mock pastoral world in which the dominant qualities are mockery and a debased urban j setting. Thus Shamela and Jonathan Wild are filled with things, people, and materials which crowd against each other. Such crowding with material is a satiric technique, |but it is also the result of the prose fiction's urban i milieu. The world of Jonathan Wild is completely urban both in its geographical situation and in the context of its thought, so that the most basic ideals of its main characters are seen only in relation to the city of London. The Town is implicit in Jonathan's ambition toward greatness when he informs Count La Ruse: I had rather stand on the summit of a dunghill than at the bottom of a hill in Paradise. I have always thought it signifies little into what rank of life I am thrown, provided I make a great figure therein. . . . The same parts, the same actions, often promote men to the head of superior societies, which raise them to the head of a lower; and where is the essential ! difference if one ends on Tower Hill and the other at j Tyburn?20 , f j j The city of London is the background for this speech, for i i ' I the dunghill upon whose summit Jonathan is destined to ' 2C>Henry Fielding, Jonathan Wild (London, 1932) , p. 15. 140 stand is specifically the London underworld of Newgate, Covent Garden, and Old Bailey. From the beginning of his career, the only two alternatives which occur to Wild are Tower Hill and Tyburn, both within the city of London. London, then, serves as the background for Wild's rise to greatness and the whole context of Wild's thought and action is urban. The central action of Jonathan Wild involves the formation of a gang, but a gang is possible only within the urban context of London. Wild's gang, which true to his alternatives of Tower Hill or Tyburn he dominates as a Prime Minister might dominate his gang, is specifically an urban phenomenon, requiring by its size and organization a large number of people upon whom the great man and his subordinate great men can prey. Not only does the organization of the gang involve a sufficient number of victims, but the recovery bureau which Wild institutes depends to some extent upon the anonymity possible only in an urban background. The pastoral ideal I I i I t i of harmony and co-operation is distorted in the mock- [ pastoral world of the city into a gang which preys upon society. Wild is a child of the labyrinthine city, and the scenes which he naturally inhabits are those of the low life demonic world of the Compter, the bawdy house, the Night Cellar, the street, and the jail. Most scenes in Jonathan Wild which take place away from this natural 141 habitat involve some scheme of Wild's; only three settings in the novel involve other than low-life establishments— Heartfree1s house, the various ships, the sea, the stagecoach on Wild's brief journey with Mrs. Heartfree, and Wild's own house. Such settings are in themselves innocent enough, but they are made menacing by Wild's villainies, with which they are associated. Heartfree1s house becomes the scene for a swindle; the journey scenes are likewise darkened throughout by Wild's intentions. Wild's house, a kind of a lair to which he is not easily traced (p. 109), is associated with low-life simply because i it is Wild's. The two journeys which are mentioned in the novel, the grand tour of his Majesty’s plantations and the journey with Mrs. Heartfree, are not actualized; they are j merely interruptions in Wild's career, and the primary stress of the narrative is not upon these, but upon London. Since the basic idiom of Jonathan Wild, then, is j urban, the work is inconceivable away from such a setting. ■ Throughout the novel, the Great Man in distress retires to ! a Night Cellar to think, a tavern to quell an insurrection in his gang, or a bawdy house to demonstrate that he is | free from the low vice of constancy. Wild himself sees his destiny as Newgate prison; his reaction to Heartfree's I confinement in the prison makes this quite explicitr j i He was uneasy at the place of Mr. Heartfree's confinement, as it was to be the scene of his future glory. . . . (p. 93) 142 The prison and the streets of the city dominate the novel; everyone turns up at Newgate or at the Compter at some time in the novel. We are told near the end that as readers "we will now repair to Newgate, it being the place where most of the great men of this history are hastening as fast as possible. . ." (p. 123). The novel concludes with the information that: I As to all the . . . persons mentioned in this history in the light of greatness, they all had the fate adapted to it, being every one hanged by the neck, save two. . . . (p. 177) Wild's debased society accounts in part for this conver gence upon Newgate and Tyburn, but the nonchalance with which everyone assumes that he will someday be hanged reflects the distortion of life in the London underworld. Newgate, in the world of Jonathan Wild, is the center of the archetypal city, the natural and intended consumation | of all of their lives. Instead of a golden old age in pastoral serenity, the violence of a jeering crowd and a ! public execution is their fitting "apotheosis" (p. 168). j In the world of Jonathan Wild, there is no explicit ! opposition between the city and the country because no j i other location but the city is possible for Wild. It is j j ! only the reader who can remember an ideal world outside of , the nightmare world. The immersion into low-life, the [ retreats of distorted innocence, become the only reality, j In this version of the pastoral, the ideal is all but , 143 denied; in the pastoral of innocence, we can see the outside world encroaching upon the idyllic world, but in the pastoral of experience, we are within the outside world, only dimly remembering that there has ever been a golden world. The pastoral of experience is set in a world where the forces of evil have already defeated the forces of good; in this world, low-life merges with and overwhelms the pastoral. Jonathan Wild represents a distorted aspect jof the traditional pastoral. All along there has been an I [unpleasant real world, whether it was the political I corruption of Rome in Virgil's first eclogue or the reality of hunger in Theocritus' twenty-first idyll. This real world has always threatened to engulf the innocent, idyllic dream, so that what is different in the mock- pastoral is simply that the unpleasant real world becomes the only efficient reality. Shamela, the other of Fielding's prose fictions which makes extensive use of the techniques of mockery, j like Jonathan Wild is directed toward the urban world. ! ------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I i Although much of the action of Shamela takes place in the j I country, Shamela's own orientation is inevitably centered ! I j I in London. In the country, she is still a child of the ! city, and her "pleasant j o u r n e y " 2 1 into Lincolnshire is | _____________________________________________________________________ i I ^^Henry Fielding, Shamela, ed. Martin C. Battestin j (Boston, 1961), p. 317. 144 pleasant not because she responds to the rural landscape, but because of the twin prospects of meeting Williams and ensnaring Booby. Her presence is inimical to pastoral harmony; the city girl in the country simply converts the country into a version of the city. For example, Shamela's description of a gathering at Squire Booby's house has a Hogarthian air: Booby came to me, and told me he had left Mr. Williams, the mayor of his borough, and two or three aldermen heartily at it, and asked me if I would go hear Williams sing a catch, which, added he, he doth to a miracle . . . when we returned, the whole corporation were got together, and the room was in a cloud of tobacco; Parson Williams was at the upper end of the table, and he hath pure round cherry cheeks, and his face looked all the world to nothing like the sun in a fog. If the sun had a pipe in his mouth, there would be no difference, (p. 335) The air of careless dissipation, the crowded, disorganized atmosphere evoked by Shamela1s description is reminiscent | of the third plate of "The Rake’s Progress" in which the rake is shown at a bawdy house. Fielding's scene, of course, lacks the accompaniment of the fair sex in various stages of dress and undress, but the same air permeates I both. j j Shamela, like Wild, remains a denizen of the city j with indissolvable ties to the world of London low-life; j her origins are associated with the disreputable life of the town. Fielding in the guise of Parson Oliver informs j the reader: 145 Her father had in his youth the misfortune to appear in no good light at the Old Bailey; he afterwards served in the capacity of a drummer in one of the Scotch regiments in the Dutch service; where being drummed out, he came over to England, and turned informer against several persons on the late Gin-Act; and becoming acquainted with an hostler at an inn, where a Scotch gentleman's horses stood, he hath at last by his interest obtained a pretty snug place in the custom house. Her mother sold oranges in the play house. . . . (p. 308) As the passage quoted indicates, Shamela's parents have been involved in at least seven unsavory, typically urban occupations. The city of London, as seen in the refer ences to the Gin-Act, Old-Bailey, and the play-house, is the specific background for the world of Shamela Andrews as it was for Jonathan Wild. When Shamela gets homesick, it is for "the balconey at the Old House" (p. 309) . The Old House is not a country estate, but Drury Lane Play house, and she longs not only to enjoy the view from the "balconey," but to be back selling oranges. Shamela's city birth and her identification with the slums of London make her lack of innocence and naivete even more significant, for these were qualities which most readers had attributed to Richardson's pastoral Pamela simply because she was a country girl. Since Drury Lane and the surrounding neighbourhoods were hardly the haunts of innocence, Shamela's experienced manipulation of Booby's passions is not surprising. Yet she knows the precise value of a simple, innocent appearance when she appears before Booby in the dress of a country girl: 146 Miss Sham . . . desired me to acquaint you with the success of her strategem, which was to dress herself in the plain neatness of a farmer's daughter, for she before wore the clothes of my late mistress, and to be introduced by me as a stranger to her master. To say the truth, she became the dress extremely, and if I was to keep a house a thousand years, I would never desire a prettier wench in it. As soon as my master saw her, he immediately threw his arms around her neck, and smothered her with kisses. . . . (p. 315) Innocence here is merely a means of evoking Booby's passions, and Shamela's employment of the technique identifies her as the experienced city woman rather than the innocent country maid. Here, as in Jonathan Wild, the pastoral ideal is inverted by identifying the central character with the city instead of the country. The work begins and ends with the city; Shamela is at home only within the city and has no intention of making anything but a tactical foray into the country. Fielding's pastorals of innocence, Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, and Amelia, each involve an action which has its ultimate beginning in the country, and end in a return to the country and rural retirement. In the pastorals of experience, the action begins and ends in the city with any journey into the country remaining unactualized. Shamela at the beginning of the work is already in the city, writing to her mother at the "Fan and Pepper-Box in Drury Lane" (p. 30 8) that she might "commodate [her] with a ludgin, as near . . . as possible in Couslin's-Court, or Wild-Street, or somewhere thereabouts . . ." (p. 308). 147 By the end of the work when she has succeeded in marrying Squire Booby, Shamela is ready to make her triumphant re-entry: At last he hit on the only method which could have brought me into humour, and proposed to me a journey to London, within a few days. This you may easily guess pleased me; for besides the desire which I have of showing myself forth, of buying fine clothes, jewels, coaches, houses, and ten thousand other fine things, Parson Williams is, it seems going thither too, to be instuted. 01 What a charming journey I shall have; for I hope to keep the dear man in the chariot with me all the way. . . . (p. 336) Shamela's return to the city, unlike Joseph's return to the country, does not augur a fruitful and serene future in which long struggles are rewarded by pastoral bliss; it promises only an era of unprecedented extravagance and indulgence. Shamela is not allowed to enjoy the fruits of her conquest; when she is "caught in bed with Williams" | and "turned . . . off" by Booby (p. 340), her future j i becomes the very opposite of the pastoral serenity enjoyed j i by Fielding's conventional heroes. j The city-country opposition so basic to the j pastoral is inverted in Shamela and Jonathan Wild to make | — — — - ^ t the idyllic pastoral become the town pastoral. The central character in both works is intimately identified I I with the city both by background and inclination. The ; pastoral of experience, then, as found in Shamela and Jonathan Wild is an urban phenomenon and implicitly mocks ; the pastoral ideal by creating an alternate world which is I 148 assumed to be the only possible one. The demonic city rather than the apocalyptic garden is the rightful milieu of Fielding's pastorals of experience. Distortion of the Pastoral Norm One of the most characteristic techniques of the mock or Newgate pastoral, whether in Fielding's Jonathan Wild, Gay's Beggar's Opera, or Lady Mary Wortley Montague's Town Eclogues, is distortion of the natural. The natural, the healthy, the norm of human activity is essential to the pastoral concept, for the golden world in theory at least stands for the human condition at its best, with a healthful harmony of mind, body, and spirit. Thus, one of the traditional complaints about Town as opposed to Country life was that the Town was unnatural and unhealthy, corrupting the spirits and ruining the bodies of those who lived within its influence. Oliver Goldsmith in The Deserted Village describes the physical and spiritual desolation which awaited the immigrant to the city: If to the city sped— What waits him there? To see profusion that he must not share; To see ten thousand baneful arts combin'd To pamper luxury, and thin mankind; To see those joys the sons of pleasure know Extorted from his fellow creature's woe. Here while the courtier glitters in brocade, There the pale artist plies the sickly trade; Here while the proud their long-drawn pomps display, There the black gibbet glooms beside the way. The dome where Pleasure holds her midnight reign 149 Here richly deck'd, admits the gorgeous train; Tumultuous grandeur crowds the blazing square, The rattling chariots clash, the torches glare. Sure scenes like these no trouble e'er annoy! Sure these denote one universal joy! Are these thy serious thoughts?— Ah, turn thine eyes Where the poor houseless shivering female lies. She once, perhaps in village plenty bless'd, Has wept at tables of innocence distress'd. . . .2 An explicit contrast is made between the artificial splendor of the city and the suffering of the poor and sick; the contrast implies that the splendor and the suffering are alternate versions of the same experience. To the writer of pastorals, the life of the town was traditionally an unhealthy existence, and the town dweller was seen as cut off from all the most meaningful experiences in nature. The city alienates man from J i nature and substitutes a sickly and unnatural life for the pastoral. Sven Armens describes the distortion of the natural in terms of power, money, and sex; The implication of all pastoral forms of poetry . . . I is that this country life is the ideal for all mankind; the illusions of power, vast armies, and j subtle gradations in bombs; of money, vast houses and ] subtle distinctions in rank; of love, vast varieties j of sextual partners, and subtle modifications of j pursuit are meant to crumble before the idyllic pastoral picture of physical and mental health which j Augustan reason, based on natural instinct, j immediately recognizes as true. (p. 30) j i j i What if they do not crumble, and the distortions are : accepted as the norm? Such a pastoral would seem to deny ; ^ Selected poems, ed. Austin Dobson (Oxford, 1907) , pp. 33-34. 150 the pastoral ideal; in place of the natural and healthy there is the artificial and the sickly. This mockery of the pastoral denies the pastoral conception, rejects its probability, and sadly laughs at the belief that such a world could exist. Jonathan Wild, built upon a distorted spiritual and emotional norm, is such a mock pastoral. There is a preponderance of the "monstrous and unnatural"23 in both of Fielding's pastorals of experience. This distortion can be seen in the treatment of the themes of love, friendship, and sleep, for in the idyllic pastoral world, friendships j are true, love is lasting, and sleep is sound. These three) i themes reflect fundamental facets of life, and indicate ! I I relationships with others. Man without love or friendship is isolated and self-enclosed, and sleep itself can be seen as symbolic of one's peace with the world. Wild's and Shamela1s inability to attain these norms indicates their dwarfed stature as human beings and their distance i from the natural pastoral impulses. The distortion in j I I these fundamental human relationships, in other words, j becomes an indication of the mockery of their pastoral j ! world. 1 i | i _ _ _ _ _ _ _ _ 23Homes Dudden, Henry Fielding; His Life, Works, ! and Times (London, 1952) , I, 331. 151 Sleep The joys of the pastoral life conventionally include slumbers undisturbed by strife and worry. Prom Tasso to Goldsmith, it is the country man who can sleep secure from the storms of life. In the Aminta, Tasso admonishes cares not to inhabit the "poor cells" of the golden age men, but to go "Disturbing greate ones in their sleepe;/And let us meaner men alone."2^ The simple shepherd should sleep soundly, while the Great who dwell in cities toss restlessly. Similarly, in the sixth book of the Faerie Queene Spenser sees the pastoral life as refreshed by "silver sleepe." To them that list, the worlds gay showes I leaue; And to great ones such follies doe forgiue, Which oft through pride do their owne periil weaue, And through ambition downe themselves doe driue To sad decay, that might contented liue. Me no such cares nor combrous thooghts offend, Ne once my minds unmoued quiet grieue, But all the night in siluer sleepe I spend, And all the day, to what I list, I doe attend.25 The anonymous author of "A Song, in Praise of a Beggar's Life" in 1611 also contended that the pastoral life was one of joy and sound slumbers, for beggar shepherds may "Eate, drinke, and play, sleepe when we list . . . (English ^Reprinted in English Pastoral Poetry: From the Beginnings to Marvell, ed. Frank Kermode (London, 1952), pp. 82-83. 25The Poems of Spenser, ed. J. C. Smith and E. De Selincourt (London, 1912), p. 377 (VI.ix.22). 152 Pastoral Poetry, p. 182). John Fletcher in the Faithful Shepherdess evokes the peaceful atmosphere of slumber in "Pastoral Evening Hymn." Let one eye his watches keep, Whilst the tother eye doth sleep. . . . Sweetest slumbers, And soft silence, fall in numbers On your eyelids! So farewell: Thus I end my evening's knell.26 Boethius in The Consolation of Philosophy described the "first white age" and the innocent sleep of pastoral man: They slept upon the wholesome grass, And their cool drink did fetch from rivers deep The pines did hide them with their shade. . . .2^ Sweet sleep, then, is a pastoral characteristic; in the golden age of the green world man sleeps soundly, having been freed from the cares and frustrations which disturb the more sophisticated man. In contrast to such pastoral peace, Jonathan Wild is almost never allowed to rest; four times in the novel he retires to a night cellar to spend the night either in revelling or deliberation. We are told, for example, that upon his first encounter with Heartfree, Wild "was . . . retiring to rest" since it was "now near nine in the morning" (pp. 45-46), for the night had been consumed in 26works of Francis Beaumont and John Fletcher, ed. A. H. Bullen (London, 1908), III, 43 (II.i.27-34). 27Trans. I. T., rev. H. F. Stewart (London, 1926), p. 205 (II.v.10-13). 153 schemes and deliberation. Wild can hardly be blamed for not sleeping in his castaway boat, but we are nevertheless informed that he spent the time "in contemplation, that is to say, in blaspheming, cursing, and sometimes singing and whistling" (p. 81). Wild, having escaped the perils of the sea and entered again upon the perils of the city, is described as "disdaining repose," sitting up "all night," and "consulting how he might bring about the final destruction of his friend. . . (p. 98). Having had Heartfree arrested for a felony, our hero, nobly disdaining rest, lay sleepless all night, partly from the apprehensions of Mrs. Heart- free ' s return before having executed his scheme, and partly from a suspicion lest Fireblood should betray him. . . . (pp. 117-118) Wild's continual wakefulness is further explained by the author: But to return to our hero, who was living and strong instance that human greatness and happiness are not always inseparable. He was under a continual alarm of frights, and fears, and jealousies. He thought every man he beheld wore a knife for his throat, and a pair of scissors for his purse. As for his own gang, j particularly, he was thoroughly convinced there was j not a single man amongst them who would not, for the j value of five shillings, bring him to the gallows. j These apprehensions os constantly broke his rest, and j kept him so assiduously on his guard to frustrate and I circumvent any designs which might be formed against ; him, that his condition, to any other than the j glorious eye of ambition, might seem rather deplorable 1 than the object of envy or desire, (p. 119) ! Even in Newgate, Jonathan is unable to rest because he "dreamt so confoundedly of hanging, that it disturbed [his] 154 sleep" (p. 163). His failure to sleep illustrates his spiritual and emotional failures. In contrast, Heartfree sleeps the sleep of the just even when things have gone wrongly for him: His misfortunes did not entirely prevent Heartfree from closing his eyes. On the contrary, he slept several hours the first night of his confinement. (p. 84) Heartfree is obviously intended here as a foil to Wild, who spent the same night a free man in a "night cellar, where he found several of his acquaintance, with whom he spent the remaining part of the night in revelling ..." (p. 72). There is no difference between night and day for Wild unless it be that villainies might be more successfully accomplished at night. The only time in the novel when we are told that Wild slept was during a sermon; inevitably he sleeps through all sermons, whether they be ostensibly wholesome like Heartfree's (p. Ill) or sheer nonsense like the Ordinary's (pp. 167-16 8). Similarly, Shamela is never described as retiring for a night of repose. Certainly the bedroom is one of the main locales of the work, but usually it is more connected with Shamela's sexual schemes than with sound slumbers. For example, Shamela's sixth letter to her mother describes a typical scene: 155 Mrs. Jervis and I are just in bed, and the door unlocked? if my master should come— Odsbobsi I hear him just coming in at the door. You see I write in the present tense, as Parson Williams says. Well, he is in bed between us, we both shamming a sleep: he steals his hand into my bosom, which I, as if in my sleep, press close to me with mine, and then pretend to awake, (p. 313) Sleep here is merely a pretext to inflame Booby and to convince him of her helpless innocence. It is significant that Shamela is not really sleeping, just conterfeiting the appearance of doing so in order to play upon Booby1s emotions. Usually, then, night is associated with scheming in Shamela, as when Sham hides herself in the coal bin to avoid suspicion of her tryst with Parson Williams: As soon as he was gone, I bethought myself what excuse I should make to Mrs. Jewkes, and it came into my head to pretend as how I intended to drown myself; so I stript off one of my petticoats, and threw it into the canal; and then I went and hid myself in the coal-hole, where I lay all night; and comforted myself with repeating over some psalms, and other good things, which I had got by heart, (p. 321) Only one time is Shamela described as falling asleep; significantly it is after she has scored a triumph over ! Booby: What think you now, Mrs. Pamela? says Mrs. Jewkes; are ! you not yet persuaded my master hath honourable j designs? I think he hath given no great proof of j them to-night, said I. Your experience I find is not great, says she, but I am convinced you will shortly be my mistress, and then what will become of poor me? | With such sort of discourse we both fell asleep. (p. 324) j 156 Shamela and Mrs. Jewkes have been discussing a subject which might well keep any sweet young innocent awake— whether or not Booby's designs are really "honourable" would be of primary importance to Shamela if she were genuinely concerned about her "vartue." Sleep is here used not as the balm of an innocent mind, but as a means of showing Shamela1s lack of innocence. She can sleep because all her plans are going well, and she is not really concerned by Booby's just having attempted to rape her. i In both Shamela and Jonathan Wild, then, the golden slumbers which are the right of all pastoral characters are disturbed by the schemes and worries which come from the manipulation of others. Neither Shamela nor Jonathan can rest, for the spirit of their non-pastoral world is inimical to quiet and repose. Friendship In the golden age man was in harmony with his fellow man; since selfishness and isolated self-enclosure i did not exist, genuine friendship was possible. One of j the important themes in the pastoral is the pure friendship of the shepherd swains for each other, and by contrast it j is to a large extent the individual's "preoccupation with j i I the self"28 that makes the present an iron, not a golden j 28Morris Golden, Fielding's Moral Psychology (Amherst, Mass., 1966), p. 42. 157 age. Utopia is the "saddest of fairy tales,"29 mainly because of a failure of friendship. In the pastoral world the shepherds with their . . . lovely sheepe, Lovingly like friends did keepe, Oft each others friendship proving, Never striking, but in loving.29 Yet the world of personal power and exploitation opposes the pastoral world where friendships are true and selfishness hardly exists. The pastoral ability for friendship is granted to Milton's bereaved swain in Lycidas, who mourns for his dead friend because: we were nurst upon the self-same hill, Fed the same flock by mountain, shade, and rill. Together both, ere the high Lawns appeared Under the opening eyelids of the Morn, We drove a field, and both together heard What time the gray-fly winds her sultry horn, Battening our flocks with the fresh dews of night. . . . 1 I Friendship is a pastoral motif carried over into j I poetry which is not specifically pastoral but which uses | i pastoral themes. For example, when the eighteenth-centuryj poets Matthew Green and John Pomfret wrote about the joys ! of rural retirement, both remembered to include a good ! 29J. W. Allen, A History of Political Thought in | the Sixteenth Century (London, 1928), p. 154. I 30Sir Philip Sidney, "Disprayse of a Courtly Life," reprinted in English Pastoral Poetry, p. 141. 3lThe Poems of John Milton, ed. James Holly Hanford, 2nd ed. (New York, 1953), p. 142. 158 friend in their pastoral retreat. Green prays May Heaven (it's all I wish for) send One genial room to treat a f r i e n d . 32 Pomfret more elaborately describes the friends who will share his pastoral contentment with him: That life may be more comfortable yet, And all my joys refined, sincere and great, I'd choose two friends, whose company would be A great advance to my felicity: Well born, of humours suited to my own; • • • In their society, I could not miss A permanent, sincere, substantial bliss.33 True friendship, however, is a thing unknown in the world of Jonathan Wild and Shamela. Jonathan fails to attain a genuine friendship in much the same way and for much the same reason that he is unable to sleep restfully; both failures spring from his self-enclosure and manipulation of others. In part, of course, this tendency to isolate the central character from meaningful relationships might be traced to the independence and isolation of the traditional picaro whom Wild might be seen to resemble. Like Wild, the picaro "makes no friends whom he would not betray for an advantage,"34 32"The Spleen," Eighteenth Century Poetry and Prose, ed. Louis I. Bredvold, Alan D. McKillop and Lois Whitney, 2nd ed. (New York, 1959), p. 502. 331 1 The Choice," Eighteenth Century Poetry and Prose, p. 146. 34Frank Wadleigh Chandler, Romances of Roguery: An Episode in the History of the Novel (New York, 1899), p. 47. 159 and indeed depersonalization is one of the striking things about both Wild's and Shamela's relationships with others. Of Wild's three "friends," Count La Ruse, Fireblood, and Heartfree, the first two betray Wild in the natural course of things, surprising thereby neither the reader nor Wild, but Wild himself betrays Heartfree and conceives a deadly hatred for him. La Ruse, Wild's first friend and tutor, cheats him at cards and is himself cheated by Wild's picking his pockets. The principles upon which their friendship rests are clear: . . . he [La Ruse] resolved to enter into an acquaintance with Wild. This soon produced a perfect intimacy, and that a friendship, which had a longer duration than is common to that passion between persons who only propose to themselves the common advantages of eating, drinking, whoring, or borrowing money; which ends, as they soon fail, so doth the friendship founded upon them. Mutual interest, the greatest of all purposes, was the cement of this alliance, which nothing, of consequence, but superior interest was capable of dissolving. (p. 14) Friendship in such a world is meaningful only in relation to personal advantage, involving no disconcerting responsibilities such as loyalty or affection. Wild's friendship with the count is a type of pupil-master relationship; yet there is an equality in each's awareness that they belong to the fraternity of____ 160 Great Men. The Count is responsible for Wild's first opportunities toward meaningful greatness, for A long intimacy and friendship subsisted between the Count and Mr. Wild, who, being by the advice of the count dressed in good clothes, was by him introduced into the best company. (p. 21) Such friendship and obligations do not prevent Wild from engaging Bagshot to rob the Count of his earnings at the card table, nor do they prevent the Count from absconding with Heartfree's jewels and leaving Wild with paste gems. Wild's second friend, Fireblood, "The Achates of our Aeneas" (p. 92), betrays Wild by holding back part of the booty from his stage coach robbery, having an intrigue with Laetitia, and planning to betray Wild to Heartfree. Wild's downfall is directly caused by Fireblood's being admitted as evidence against him, since Fireblood "discovered the whole falsehood, and declared that he had been seduced by Wild to depose as he had done" (p. 141). On the other hand, Wild hates and despises Heartfree, probably his one genuine friend. The extent of Wild's plotting against the innocuous jeweler is inexplicable; it is the only recorded exception to Wild's good natured maxim by which ". . .he never did a single injury to man or woman by which he himself did not expect to reap some advantage" (p. 30). Since Wild 161 cannot profit by Heartfree's death, there is no convincing reason for his intense hatred, yet "Wild . . . applied his utmost industry to accomplish the ruin of one whose very name sounded odious in his ears . . ." (p. 113). Genuine friendship will elicit only hatred and betrayal from Wild, and this inability of Wild's only emphasizes his distortion of the natural and emotional norm. In a self-enclosed, non-pastoral world like Wild's and the Newgate Pastoral's, friend ship is impossible. Shamela's relationships with others are similarly "self-enclosed," and her three "friends," Mrs. Jervis, Mrs. Jewkes, and her mother, are both betrayers and betrayed. Like Wild's early friendship with Count La Ruse, Shamela's relationships are all variations of the apprenticeship model. Her first friend is Mrs. Jervis, who plans to come to London with her in order "to keep a house somewhere about Short's Gardens, or towards Queen-Street" (pp. 308-309). After the seventh letter, however, Mrs. Jervis fades out of the novel; there is no place for anyone whose purpose for Shamela has already been fulfilled. Mrs. Jewkes is a more imposing figure, and a friend or opponent controlled only by force. 162 How now, minx, says she. Minx! No more minx than yourself, says I; with that she hit me a slap on the shoulder, and I flew at her and scratched her face, i'cod, 'till she went crying out of the room. . . . (p. 319) The main motivation for the relationship between Mrs. Jewkes and Shamela is the expectation of the latter's becoming Booby's mistress. Even before Booby has given evidence of his "honourable" designs, Shamela gleefully informs her mother of Mrs. Jewkes' conviction that "I shall shortly be mistress of the family, and she really behaves to me as if she already thought me so" (pp. 224-225). Like Mrs. Jervis, Mrs. Jewkes is easily discarded after she has served her purpose. The most important relationship for Shamela is that with her mother Henrietta Honora Andrews. Shamela is a kind of "surrogate or apprentice" in this relationship: Like Wild she is shown stretching to reach a mark held up to her by a hard taskmaster; her mother keeps urging her on and she, in her own way, always falls a little short.35 Mrs. Andrews serves as Shamela's advisor, admonishing her that "seeing you have a rich fool to deal with, your not making a good market will be the more inexcusable" 35Ronald Paulson, Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, Conn., 1967), p. 111. 163 (p. 311) or that "it will be your own fault if you are not married to your master, and I would advise you now to take no less terms" (p. 325). She repeatedly warns Sham against Williams, and indeed Shamela1s disregard of these motherly warnings is the direct cause of her downfall. She disregards the warnings because, once having become Lady Booby, she likewise discards her mother. The elimination of a person for whom Shamela no longer has any use is by this time an established pattern, but it nonetheless comes as a shock when her own mother falls victim. The center of the world of Shamela, as of Jonathan Wild, is self; friendship and, for that matter, all human relationships are based solely upon the possibilities they offer for self- aggrandizement. The harmony of the pastoral world is here transmitted into separate and individual disharmonies; the self becomes an isolated unit, separate from the natural and the human world. Love Since, as Paulson observes, "Love stands as a norm of ordinary human activity" (p. 90), joyous love in an idyllic green world is a constant pastoral theme, for the idyllic is the natural state par excellence. Love, integrally related to the fecundity of life in the green world, becomes a kind of symbol of the completeness and 164 potentiality of the pastoral life in which man and Nature are renewed. Innocent love is a characteristic theme, but corrupt love is a mock pastoral theme. This satiric and mock pastoral version of the theme of joyous love is described as a "reduction" in Kernan's The Plot of Satire; This reduction of life to its grossest constituents has taken many forms, but the two most persistent directions it has followed are the diminishing of the vital to the mechanical and the spiritual to the vulgarly material. (p. 53) In the mock pastoral world, vital fruitful love becomes mechanical and sterile sexuality. In this diminished, self-oriented world it is natural that love or lust is essential sterile; while the pastoral world teems with fecund life, the mock-pastoral world is a dead end. Love in the mock-pastoral is merely an extension of the self; thus sex, love, and virtue are seen only in terms of their value for the self. It is no surprise, then, that the central characters of Fielding's two pastorals of experience are self-oriented and exploitive of other's passions while dispassionate themselves. The distortion of love is a natural symbol for the distortion of a leaden age, for love is the most basic of the healthy passions and it is the most easily subject to decay. The pastoral world which knows no decay sees love as symbolic of the beauty of life; in 165 such a world . . . simple love with simple vertue way'd; flowers the favours which true fayth revayled, Kindnes with kindnes was againe repay'd, with sweetest kisses covenants were s e a l e d .36 It is only in such a decay-free life that the idyllic beauty of Christopher Marlowe's "Passionate Shepherd To His Love" can exist: Come live with me, and be my love, And we will all the pleasures prove That hills and vallies, dales and fields, Woods or steepy mountain yields. And we will sit upon the rocks, Seeing the shepheardes feed their flocks.37 Marlowe's is the age-old dream of love forever young and beautiful, at one with nature in an idyllic setting. The poem is focused on "we," not "I," for love in this pastoral world is a mutual experience. The poet talks about what "we" will do together, not "what I will do with you"; the pleasures of valleys, groves, and fields must be shared together, and such shared experience implies breaking down the isolated self. It is this idealistic conception of love which underlies most pastoral literature. The dream of pastoral love is expressed in Guarini's II Pastor Fido 36Michael Drayton, "The Shepheardes Garland, Fashioned in Nine Eglogs," The Works of Michael Drayton, ed. J. William Hebei (Oxford, 1961), I, 86 (VIII.77-80). 37The Works of Christopher Marlowe, ed. A. H. Bullen (London, 1885), III, 2 83. 166 when the poet longingly says: Fair golden Age! when milk was th'onely food, And cradle of the infant-world the wood . . . Then sports and carols amongst Brooks and Plains Kindled a lawful flame in Nymphs and Swains. Their hearts and tongues concurr'd, the kisse and joy Which were most sweet, and yet which least did cloy Hymen bestow'd on them. . . .38 Love in this world is a source of eternal and fruitful joy; such joys cannot "cloy" because they are based upon mutuality and harmony with nature. One last example of the harmony implied in the conventional pastoral ideal of love is in Ben Jonson's "The Sad Shepherd" where Nature itself is in harmony with the lovers. . . . I should thinke it still might be (as 'twas) a happy age, when on the Plaines The Wood-men met the Damsells and the Swaines The Neat'ards, Plow-men and the Pipers loud, And each did dance, some to the Kit, or Crowd, Some to the Bag-pipe, some the Tabret mov'd, And all did either love, or were belov'd. • • • Those charitable times had no mistrust. Shepherds knew how to love, and not to l u s t . Love in the pastoral world, then, is harmony with nature, a source of fecundity and a mutual giving of the self; in the idyllic world at least, love is an eternal source 38a Critical Edition of . . . "II Pastor Fido," ed. Walter J. Staton, Jr. and William E. Semione (Oxford, 1965), pp. 125-126 (IV.ix.4179-4199). 39Ben Jonson, ed. C. H. Herford and Percy and Evelyn Simpson (Oxford, 1941), VII, 16. 167 of joy and fertility. This ideal is, of course, seldom realized in the real world of the conventional pastoral except in the end of novels like Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, and Amelia, but in the mock pastoral world where love is always transient and sterile, it is actually inverted. It is natural that the distortions of love which characterize the mock-pastoral are also closely associated with the urban world, and town love stands to country love as mock-pastoral to pastoral. The town and the court distort the simple innocence of country love by using the pastoral motif as an excuse for license, as with the pseudo-shepherdess of Petit Trianon in the reign of Louis XIV. When the sweet-breathing spring unfolds the buds, Love flies the dusty town for shady woods. Then Tottenham fields with rowing beauty swarm, And Hampstead balls the city virgin warm; Then Chelsea's meads o'erhear perfidious vows, And the prest grass defrauds the grazing cows. 'Tis here the same; but in a higher sphere, For Ev'n court ladies sin in open air. What cit with a gallant would trust his spouse Beneath the tempting shade of Greenwich boughs? What Peer of France would let his Duchess rove, Where Boulogne's closest woods invite to love? But here no wife can blast her husband's fame, Cuckold is grown an honourable name. Stretch'd on the grass the shepherd sighs his pain, And on the grass what shepherd sighs in v a i n ? 40 40John Gay, "Epistle to the Right Honourable William Pulteney, esq.," The Poetical Works of John Gay (London, 1893), I, 195-196. 168 The theme of corruption, the distortion of love into promiscuous sensuality and disharmony with nature, is inevitable here. The green grass which symbolizes the innocent joyfulness and fecundity of the pastoral world is "prest" by the city belles and gallants, thus "defrauding" the cows. The woods which in II Pastor Fido were the "Cradle of the infant world" become here an invitation "to love," but the context makes it clear that the actual invitation is "to lust." The pastoral ideal of fruitful love is here distorted into an amusement or game in which all win, for "what shepherd sighs in vain?" It is significant that the idyllic quality of the country is destroyed by specifically city shepherds and shepherdesses. Armens, commenting on this contrast of mock- pastoral town love and pastoral country love, observes: Town love . . . has no moral or purposeful basis; it cannot rise above the mere trifles of vanity, flattery, and pleasure, and so it is a bauble for sale to the highest bidder. If no genuine communion or mutual respect is established between the participants, any wayward circumstance or better prospect for either "lover" will destroy it. (p. 169) Town love, then, is a mock-pastoral travesty, a denial of the forces of life implicit in the pastoral theme and a substitution of sterile lust for fertile love. Love in the mock pastoral world is a force to be exploited and a means of bondage; instead of giving life, sexuality in the non-pastoral world is a type of slavery.____________ 169 It is not surprising, then, to find love used in this way in both Jonathan Wild and Shamela, where the mock pastoral conception prevails, and love is sterile, self-oriented, exploitive and enslaving. Morris Golden notices this quality in the treatment of love in Shamela and Jonathan Wild; From the beginning to the end of Fielding's career, from the plays and Shamela to Amelia, he insisted on the distinction between an intensified disposition to act kindly to another (and in the process become sublimely happy oneself), which was love, and the tendency to use another for one's sensual gratification, which he saw as the widespread corruption of love. (p. 5 8) As the corruption of love is an important theme in both Jonathan Wild and Shamela, so genuine love for others is the theme of his major prose fiction. Michael Irwin also points to this distinction when he explains that for Fielding the "cardinal virtues are kindness and concern for others" while the "cardinal sins are cruelty and egotism. The mock pastoral conception of love dominates the world of Jonathan Wild, a demonic world in which sterility and bondage wither the incipient forces of life. Wild's greatest inadequacy is apparent in the sexual realm, and he fails "at personal relationships" 4lHenry Fielding: The Tentative Realist (London, 1967) , p. 13. 170 (Paulson, p. 112) primarily because of his distorted understanding of love. The three dominant characteristics of Wild's sexual relationships are sterility, bondage, and lust. Because Wild's love does not go outside of himself and his own desires, it is essentially sterile; his energies are concentrated primarily upon his rise to Greatness, not upon his role as a human being or a lover. His sterility indicates a futile way of life in a world that is emotionally and spiritually dead, and his physical sterility externalizes his spiritual morbidity. The reader of Jonathan Wild becomes aware early in the book of a sense of sterility and isolation which attaches itself to the figure of Wild. In the second chapter where his geneology is discussed, the paucity of actual ancestors is striking. The male line of the Wild family has a habit of leaving no issue or of having only one child; clearly the Wild clan does not run to large, prolific families. Although Edward Wild, Jonathan's paternal grandfather, had seven children, only one of these, Jonathan's father, is mentioned as having issue; the other six are apparently childless. We are told that Edward had issue John, Edward, Thomas, and Jonathan, and three daughters, namely Grace, Charity, and Honour. John followed the fortunes of his father, and, suffering with him, left no issue. Edward was so remarkable for his compassionate________ 171 temper that he spent his life in soliciting the causes of the distressed captives in Newgate, and is reported to have held a strict friendship with an eminent divine who solicited the spiritual causes of the said captives. He married Edith, daughter and co-heiress of Geoffry Snap, gent., who long enjoyed an office under the High Sheriff of London and Middlesex, by which, with great reputation, he acquired a handsome fortune: by her he had no issue. Thomas went very young abroad to one of our American colonies, and hath not been since heard of. As for the daughters, Grace was married to a merchant of Yorkshire who dealt in Horses. Charity took to husband an eminent gentleman, whose name I cannot learn, but who was so famous for so friendly a disposition that he was bail for above a hundred people in one year. He had likewise the remarkable humour of walking in Westminster Hall with a straw in his shoe. Honour, the youngest, died unmarried: she lived many years in this town, was a great frequenter of plays, and used to be remarkable for distributing oranges to all who would accept of them. (pp. 7-8) Fielding might be saving himself space by leaving Wild's uncles ostensibly childless, but his pains to inform us of the most unsavory details of their lives by contrast calls attention to this childlessness. Wild is himself apparently an only child, and, since he dies childless, is the end of the male line; with his death the family and their century-old tradition of villainy are ended together. The omens which surround Wild's birth emphasize his sterility. Wild's mother "while she was with child of him" dreamed that "she was enjoyed in the night by the gods Mercury and Priapus" (p. 8). Mercury, the god of thievery and cleverness, is an obvious choice, but 172 mercury is also a cure for venereal disease. Priapus, the god of the male procreative power (whose name Mrs. Wild significantly pronounces with a short instead of a long "a"), seems ironic in the light of Wild's apparent sterility. In this context, Wild's father when he heard of her dream could not deny knowledge of the god of thievery, but of Priapus, the god of fertility, he can assert that "he never in his life could anywise put her in mind of that . . . deity, with whom he had no acquaintance" (p. 9). The assertion here that Mr. Wild is ignorant of any acquaintance with the god of male fertility reinforces the themes of impotence and sterility already associated with the Wild family. The theme of sterile sexuality is reiterated when the reader is shown the young Wild: Wild now made a considerable figure, and passed for a gentleman of great fortune in the funds. Women of quality treated him with great familiarity, young ladies began to spread their charms for him, when an accident happened that put a stop to his continuance in a way of life too insipid and inactive to afford employment for those great talents which were designed to make a much more considerable figure in the world than attends the character of a beau or a pretty gentleman. (p. 21) The familiarity to which Wild is admitted, and the "charms" which the young ladies spread for him are patently sexual, but the significance is not in Wild's early sexual triumphs but that some accident happened 173 to evidently put an end to such triumphs. The nature of the accident is unclarified, but the context is definitely sexual, for it is impossible for him to continue such "familiarity." The implication is that Wild has encountered some sexual accident which leaves him impotent or at best sterile, a suggestion which is later given support by Laetitia's complaint in the "dialogue matrimonial": And far be it from me to accuse you of any necessity for a wife. I believe you could have been very well contented with the state of a bachelor; I have no reason to complain of your necessities, but that, you know, a woman cannot tell beforehand. (pp. 104-105) This impotence or sterility may underly the fact that Wild, in spite of his bondage to Laetitia, is only superficially interested in women. Wild's relationship with Molly Straddle is typical of his sexual entangle ments; although he is "very vehement in his addresses," such vehemence is "to no purpose" until he has "made her a present" (pp. 53-54). So far is Wild from attracting Straddle that in the midst of his "amorous caresses" (p. 55) she picks his pocket of a thousand pound banknote. Nonetheless, Wild is anything but an ardent lover, for Notwithstanding . . . all the endearments of that young lady, he soon made excuse to go downstairs, and thence immediately set forward to Laetitia without taking any formal leave of Miss Straddle, or indeed of the drawer with whom the lady was afterwards obliged to come to_______ 174 an account for the reckoning. (p. 54) Wild's limited interest in sex and great interest in larceny thereby delay his discovery of the missing banknote. Wild is consistently the dupe of women, and his failure in the sexual realm is a gauge of his failure as a human being. The contrast between the "great" Wild and the dupe Wild is related to the anti-heroic, anti-pastoral theme of the novel. Northrop Frye indicates something close to this when, in discussing the irony in Jonathan Wild, he says, The figure of the low-norm eiron is irony's substitute for the hero, and when he is removed from satire we can see more clearly that one of the central themes of the mythos is the disappearance of the heroic. This is the main reason for the predominence in fictional satire of what may be called the Omphale archetype, the man bullied or dominated by women. . . . (p. 228) Wild is a classic example of the "Omphale archetype," for although the author ironically informs us that the Great Man is "not of that low snivelling breed of mortals who, as it is generally expressed, tie themselves to a woman's apron-strings" (p. 53), yet he is in bondage to them with a "meaningless and unending turmoil, leading only to short-lived moments of passional satiety. . ." (Golden, p. 35). Wild's relationship with Laetitia further underscores his sexual and personal incapacity; the 175 shrewish Laetitia Snap of the novel "more than equals . . . the half-dozen wives with whom history credits the original Wild."42 Laetitia's chastity is more apparent than real, and the looseness and uncontrolled liberty of her clothes and person reflect that of her morals: her body was loosely attired, without stays or jumps, so that her breasts had uncontrolled liberty to display their beauteous orbs. . . . (p. 26) Only the unsuccessful Wild remains "thoroughly convinced of the impregnable chastity of the lady" (p. 102). Wild's attempt to rape Laetitia fails; evidently, like Beau Didaper in Joseph Andrews, he is not "of the Herculean r a c e " 4 3 since he also fails in similar attempts with both Straddle and Mrs. Heartfree. That Laetitia is by no means as unattainable as Wild thinks her is made clear by Smirk's immediate success where he had failed. Indeed, the pattern of Wild's failing sexually where his inferiors in greatness succeed is repeated later in the novel with both Bagshot and Fireblood. Laetitia's coldness to Wild is explained by the author as a result of her varied passions: 42g . T. Bisphram, "Fielding's Jonathan Wild," Eighteenth-Century Literature: An Oxford Miscellany (Oxford, 1909), p. 63. 43ed. Martin C. Battestin (Middletown, Conn., 1967) , p. 303. 176 This young lady . . . had three very predominant passions; to wit, vanity, wantonness, and avarice. To satisfy the first of these she employed Mr. Smirk and company; to the second, Mr. Bagshot and company; and our hero had the honour and happiness of solely engrossing the third. Now, these three sorts of lovers she had different ways of entertaining. With the first she was all gay and coquette; with the second all fond and rampant; and with the last all cold and reserved. (p. 55) She reserves for Wild the only passion which is specifically non-sexual; Wild, who always approaches her selfishly, elicits the response of selfishness and avarice. Only avarice, of Laetitia's three passions, is entirely impersonal. The dialogue matrimonial makes it clear that marriage changes neither Wild's nor Laetitia's basic attitude of self-centered exploitation; both remain self-enclosed, isolated from any meaningful relationship with each other. Laetitia denies marrying for love, but of having married Wild "Because it was convenient and my parents forced me." Wild frankly replies to this confidence, To tell you a truth, I married you for my convenience likewise, to satisfy a passion which I have now satisfied, and you may be d d for anything I care. (p. 106) Love and marriage with the usual connotations of joy, selflessness, and mutuality are completely absent from the world of Jonathan Wild; the pastoral ideal of love is completely distorted into self-enclosed exploitation. 177 Throughout Jonathan Wild, Jonathan's relationship with Laetitia is described in terms which stress its unnatural compelling power. Wild is said to have that weakness of suffering himself to be enslaved by women, so naturally incident to men of heroic disposition; to say the truth, it might more properly be called a slavery to his own appetite; for, could he have satisfied that, he had not cared three farthings what had become of the little tyrant for whom he professed so violent a regard. (p. 9 3) The stress here is not only upon his slavery, but also upon his unsatisfied and apparently unsatisfiable appetite; Wild's sterile lust is incapable of satis faction. Similarly, when Wild unorthographically signs his letter to Laetitia "lour most passionate amirer, Adwhorer, and slave" (p. 100), he speaks more truly than he realizes. Instead of life and freedom, love is twisted in the Newgate world into a sterile bondage. The basis of such a life, as becomes apparent from the above quotations, is appetite and lust; sex, separated from love and the power of reproduction, is a dead-end of self-absorption and bondage. Wild becomes a slave to his self-enclosed passions and hence to the exploitive power of the "little tyrant" who controls those passions. The same association of lust and bondage is reiterated in the scene where Wild and Fireblood, fighting over the charming Laetitia, are described as 178 "both being encumbered with the chains which they wore between their legs" (JW, 157). The chains they wear are the chains of lust to which they are both slaves; the power which is originally life-giving is here a living bondage. Another appropriate image of the twisted and distorted sexuality which dominates Wild's world is his hanging, the "apotheosis" and elevation for which he has been destined all the way through the novel. William Empson has explained that in The Beggar1s Opera hanging is associated with the sexual act.44 The same association is true in Jonathan Wild, where Wild's final "elevation" is a patently sexual image. This association is further reinforced by Wild's having "swung out of this world" (p. 171) with the ordinary's corkscrew clutched firmly in his hand. This last bit of larceny has been taken as the final manifestation of Wild's malevolent and almost purposeless greatness, and Fielding gives warrant for such a reading himself by designating this action as "the most admirable conservation of character in our hero to his last moment ..." (p. 171). The incident, however, does more than this; it brings together the two themes of 44some Versions of Pastoral (Norfolk, Conn., 1960), pp. 213-219. 179 thievery and sexuality and merges them into one final futile action, as Wild deliberately takes that which he does not need and cannot use. The corkscrew, with its twisted phallic imagery, is reminiscent of the distorted sexuality of Wild and his world; Wild's sexuality is essentially as sterile and as distorted as the worthless corkscrew which he symbolically "carried out of the world in his hand" (p. 171). The corkscrew, then, is an appropriate image for the world of both Jonathan Wild and Shamela, for it is a fallen, demonic world in which love is only a name for lust, and in which the natural forces of life become bondage. It is lust which dominates the world of Shamela also, since Booby's lust causes him to "lay aside all considerations of fortune, and disregard the censure of the world" (p. 326) in order to marry a woman who although she "thought once of making a little fortune" by her person now "intends to make a great one by [her] vartue" (p. 325) . Sex is a weapon by which to manipulate others (as with Booby) or an instrument of sexual gratification (as with Parson Williams), but it is never given the connotations of innocence, joy, or fertility which mark pastoral love. Shamela illustrates two distortions of the pastoral conception of love by her relationships with Booby and Williams and in neither case is she any closer to genuine love. 180 With Booby her attitude is mercantile and manipulative? with Williams it is lecherous and extravagant. Shamela's relationship with Booby is ostensibly the central one in the book, so many of her comments are centered upon her calculations and expectations regarding him. A casual survey of the work will turn up speculations like the following: Nothing under a regular taking into keeping, a settled settlement, for me, and all my heirs, all my whole lifetime, shall do the business— or else cross-legged is the word, faith, with Sham. . . . (p. 313) I shall be Mrs. Booby, and be mistress of a great estate. . . . (p. 320) I have him now sure as a gun. (p. 329) The element of calculation, dehumanizing Mr. Booby's passions into an accounting asset, is the common denominator of these three quotations; in none does she consider Booby as anything but a difficult and lucrative contract to be acquired. Mercantile terms come naturally to all the low-life characters who discuss Booby, as Mrs. Jervis writes to Shamela's mother: You will, I believe, Madam, wonder that the squire, who doth not want generosity, should never have mentioned a settlement all this while; I believe it slips his memory: but it will not be long first, no doubt: for, as I am convinced the young lady will do nothing unbecoming your daughter, nor ever admit him to taste her charms, without something sure and handsome beforehand; so, I am certain, the squire will never rest till they have danced Adam and Eve's kissing dance together. (p. 316) 181 Not only must Shamela be paid, she must be paid in advance, since credit in such matters is bad business. Similarly, Virtue, a word which Shamela significantly corrupts to "Vartue," is valuable only as a mercantile commodity. She is utterly innocent of any understanding of genuine virtue, but makes efficient capital of her "vartue" with Booby. Yes, sir, says I, I see your Honour intends to ruin me, that nothing but the destruction of my vartue will content you. 0 what a charming word that is, rest his soul who first invented it! (p. 322) Shamela's relationship with Booby, like Wild's with Laetitia, is centered in self and in economic exploitation. In this connection, Shamela's marriage with Booby is a mockery of the conventional pastoral marriage which is a symbol for social continuity. As You Like It is perhaps the best example of this convention, since it ends with multiple marriages in the green wood, thereby implying that the world is righted, that nature will renew itself, and all will be well. Marriage is the traditional comic resolution, a symbol of the triumph of the powers of life and social continuity; for Shamela and Booby, however, it is a sterile farce. Nothing can come out of this marriage because it is based upon social, economic, and sexual exploitation. It is not 182 surprising, then, that the relationship is short-lived: Since I have writ, I have a certain account, that Mr. Booby hath caught his wife in bed with Williams; hath turned her off, and is prosecuting him in the spiritual court. (p. 340) Shamela's relationship with Williams simply reveals another side of her self-enclosed nature. At least two critics, Maurice Johnson and Ronald Paulson, have called attention to this liaison in terms which suggest that this is Shamela's one genuine relationship, but both critics are forced to conclude that the authen ticity of her love is at best ambiguous. Maurice Johnson points out that Shamela fails to live up to her own ideals of greatness when she "jeopardizes her future . . . by a rendezvous in the garden with Parson Williams" (p. 31). Such willingness to disregard her future does indeed point to Shamela's weakness, but it is a weakness based on passion, not love. Ronald Paulson likewise observes Shamela's basic flaw as her inability to control her passion for Williams, but this passion has its object in sensual gratification, not in concern for the loved one's well being. The obverse of Wild's failure at personal relationships, Shamela's passion is her tragic flaw. Love as a lack, Fielding seems to say, helps to characterize the bad man and foretell the disintegration of his designs; but love as a positive force, even in so crude a form as Shamela's lust, must destroy hypocrisy and calculation, just as Shaftesbury's ridicule must 183 destroy Sham. It is not certain whether Shamela's love affair with Parson Williams is supposed to be more important as an act of hypocrisy or as a sign of her passion that obtrudes to destroy her hypocritical fabrication. What should appear to be vice punished may be interpreted as Shamela's one sincere action discovered. The Shamelian context admittedly warrants a less positive construction. . . . (p. 112) In actuality, it seems that the "less positive construction" is the more likely of the two, for neither Shamela nor Williams is particularly concerned about the other except in relationship to himself. If Shamela jeopardizes her chances to marry Booby by her rendezvous in the garden, how much does she jeopardize Williams' chances for preferment? Who, after all, is more likely to be the object of Booby's revenge? Williams is equally unconcerned about Shamela when he asks her to help him win his freedom regardless of the consequences to her, "not scrupling anything for righteousness sake" (p. 328) . Similarly, when Williams offers her an elaborate and blasphemous rationalization for adultery in the form of a discourse on the spirit and the flesh, Shamela's response indicates the delicate quality of her love. Therefore, says he, my dear, you have two husbands, one the object of your love, and to satisfy your desire; the other the object of your necessity, and to furnish you with those other conveniencies. . . . As then the Spirit is preferable to the Flesh, so am I preferable to your other husband, to whom I am antecedent in time likewise. I say these things, my dear, (said he) to satisfy your conscience. A fig for my conscience, said I; 184 when shall I meet you again in the garden? (p. 334) Shamela's concern is not with the Spirit, but with the Flesh, which is to be satisfied by her correspondence in the garden. When she speaks of Williams it is usually in terms of sexual gratification, as when describing her wedding night she explains: I acted my part in such a manner, that no bride groom was ever better satisfied with his bride's virginity. And to confess the truth, I might have been well enough satisfied too, if I had never been acquainted with Parson Williams. (p. 330) As the world of Shamela is a self-enclosed, exploitive, and commercial world, it is also a sterile one, the passion of lust being essentially sterile. Shamela, unlike Pamela, does not produce heirs for the Booby fortune, and her relationship with Booby, since it is based upon sexual exploitation, is easily cut off. Reportedly Shamela's past relationship with Williams has been too fruitful, for there is reference to her having "had her small one by Parson Williams about a year ago" (p. 315) and to her fear that Mrs. Jewkes "had heard something about the bantling" (p. 321). The "bantling," however, is never referred to as a human being and remains a consequence, not a person; it is something roughly equivalent to, though slightly less important than, Booby's discovery of Williams and Shamela in each other's arms. The child by this means is not 185 a manifestation of fecundity, but simply another aspect of Shamela's sexual misadventures. It is typical of Sham's self-enclosed nature that she never thinks of the child as anything but a consequence and a secret; she cannot feel any emotions which do not directly gratify her, thus her emotional range includes only ambition, lust, and avarice. We have seen non-pastoral love in the world of Shamela and Jonathan Wild, in contrast to the traditional pastoral love in Guarini, Sidney, Drayton, Milton, and Marlowe, as a sterile force based upon selfish exploitation of others and becoming a type of bondage; in both worlds, love is equated simply with sex. The sterility of love in both worlds results from the turning of passions inward, making the self the center of the protagonist's private universe. The pastoral conception of a fruitful, joyous, enduring love becomes a mock-pastoral lust which is futile, sterile, enslaving and temporary because it is based upon transient passions. In the mock-pastoral, all natural actions and instincts are distorted into degrading forms; the forces of life have dried up, and the self has become so important that there is no longer the possibility of meaningful human relationships. Mutations and distortions are the norm in the wasteland of the Newgate pastoral; the fertile green grass of the pastoral world 186 is denied, and in its place is the city pavement. The world of nature and natural forces no longer exists here; in its stead there is the man-made world of experience, the world of the city and of a self-enclosed reality which negates the pastoral ideal. "Self-Enclosure" vs. Pastoral Harmony The golden world is a harmonious world; this is a pastoral tradition with origins as far back as the Jewish scriptures, "our grammar of apocalyptic imagery" (Frye, p. 141). The imagery of the pastoral of innocence is, as we have seen, basically apocalyptic; thus it freely employs the biblical figures of shepherd, sheep, and flock. Christ in the Bible is repeatedly referred to as the "good shepherd" who protects his sheep at the peril of his own life. The hireling fleeth, because he is an hireling, and careth not for the sheep. I am the good shepherd, and know my sheep, and am known of mine. As the Father knoweth me, even so know I the Father: and I lay down my life for the sheep. And other sheep I have, which are not of this fold: them also I must bring, and they shall hear my voice; and there shall be one fold, and one shepherd. (John 10:13-16) The dream of "one fold, and one shepherd" is an ancient one; it is the basic dream of Virgil's "reign of Saturn" which returns so that "the iron brood shall . . . cease, 187 and a golden race spring up throughout the w o r l d ! "45 Pastoral harmony is the most outstanding quality of the coming golden age when The wolf also shall dwell with the lamb, and the leopard shall lie down with the kid: and the calf and the young lion and the fatling together; and a little child shall lead them. And the cow and the bear shall feed; their young ones shall lie down together: and the lion shall eat straw like the ox. (Isaiah 11:6-7) Pastoral harmony is universal friendship; in it selflessness prevails, and men live together in mutual harmony. The ideal of harmony is central to the regular pastoral, but disharmony, exploitation and tyranny prevail in the mock pastoral of experience. In the demonic world of Jonathan Wild, the central image is a power or force which attempts to impinge its will upon all with whom it comes into contact. There is no rival for the center of Jonathan Wild, as there is in Joseph Andrews; from first to last, Wild insists upon the center. The other characters seem at times to be mere puppets manipulated by Wild, mere intellectual abstractions subdued by a yet stronger abstraction. Wild is the tyrant-leader, inscrutable, ruthless, melancholy, and with an insatiable will, who commands loyalty "Eclogue IV,1 1 Virgil, trans . H. Rushton Fairclough, rev. ed. (Cambridge, Mass., 1935), I, 29 (IV.8-10). 188 only if he is egocentric enough to represent the collective ego of his followers, (Frye, p. 148) the leader whom Frye sees as characterizing society in the demonic world. Wild's manipulation and ruthlessness are concentrated upon the members of his gang whom he controls by their fears. Fierce revolts against Wild's authority and is promptly "peached;1 1 Mr. Marybone refuses to engage in a robbery and is similarly treated; Blueskin attempts an insurrection and a constable, with a numerous attendance, and Wild at their head, entered the room and seized on Blueskin, whom his companions, when they saw our hero, did not dare attempt to rescue. (p. 122) Wild's gang is a smouldering volcano which can be controlled, in this instance, only by treachery and betrayal: . . . They were all complete prigs, whom he was to govern by their fears, and in whom he was to place no more confidence than was necessary, and to watch them with the utmost caution and circumspection: for a rogue, he wisely said, like gunpowder, must be used with caution; since both are altogether as liable to blow up the party himself who uses them as to execute his mischievous purpose against some other person or animal. (p. 123) Wild is the self-enclosed man, a "paragon of selfishness, a model of complete inability to consider others as human" (Golden, p. 9), and thus manipulates others for his own amusement or gain. The apocalyptic harmony of the pastoral world is 189 further shattered in the demonic mock-pastoral world when man becomes a beast of prey, the human counterpart of the "monsters or beasts of prey" which Frye places in the demonic animal world (p. 149) . This image of a vicious animal world is behind the elaborate chain of robberies in which each thief becomes in turn a victim until Wild himself is victimized. Fielding shows this animal cycle in action when, going beneath the surface in a low-life social gathering, he observes: . . . the company proceeded to drink about with the utmost cheerfulness and friendship; drinking healths, shaking hands, and professing the most perfect affection for each other. All which were not in the least interrupted by some designs which they then agitated in their minds, and which they intended to execute as soon as the liquor had prevailed over some of their understandings. Bagshot and the gentleman intending to rob each other; Mr. Snap and Mr. Wild the elder meditating what other creditors they could find out to charge the gentlemen then in custody with; the count hoping to renew the play, and Wild, our hero, laying a design to put Bagshot out of the way, or, as the vulgar express it, to hang him with the first opportunity. (p. 39) Wild is successful to the extent of tricking Bagshot out of the rest of his money, only to lose it himself to the gambling sharks. The image of Wild as a predator preyed upon is one of the central images in the novel; he is the last link in the chain of nature, for this particular series of robberies starts with the Count's success at the gaming tables, progresses through Bagshot's robbery of the Count, and Wild's intimidation 190 and swindling of Bagshot, until Wild becomes the victim of the gambler and the cycle is complete. In the demonic world thus pictured, man, absorbed wholly in self, is reduced to an animal level and becomes a vicious predator, a "voracious" pike (p. 45). In a similar manner, Shamela lives in a world where self is supreme. Shamela's readiness to discard useless friends and her sexual exploitation of Booby have already been noted, as has the readiness of others, notably Williams, to use her simply as an agent. Everyone in Shamela is attempting to manipulate every one else for his own purposes: Booby schemes to seduce Shamela; Shamela to make the most economic and sexual capital out of Booby; Mrs. Andrews to have her daughter become "a great lady" (p. 325) and bestow goods and honor upon her; Williams to gain the most money, position, and revenge possible from Booby, and the most money, sexual gratification, and ego-satisfaction from Shamela; Mrs. Jewkes, on both sides at once, to acquire position and money from either Shamela or Booby. All these people are seen in the perspective of Shamela, partially because she is writing by the epistolary method, but also because she is the object of their various kinds of greed and in turn makes them the object of her greed. 191 There is no possibility of harmony in the mock- pastoral world of Jonathan Wild and Shamela, where men can only be held together by a "molecular tension of egos" (Frye, p. 147). Like the concepts of friendship and love, the pastoral ideal of harmony is not even a dream; just as no one could conceive of love or friend ship in the Newgate world where it is understood that self is the center and that all men are the natural enemies of all other men. Innocence vs. Experience: Ambiguity and Inversion in Mock-Pastoral The contrast of innocence with experience, as the introductory chapter showed, is one of the basic pastoral themes; Morris Golden sees the "confrontation of relatively simple innocence with the varied and confusing experience of the world" as both an "archetype" related to the country-city dichotomy and as one of Fielding's major themes (p. 136). Innocence is essential to the pastoral character; the genuine swains and shepherdesses of Guarini, Spenser, or Sidney are unequivocal representatives of innocence. " In Fielding's conventional pastorals, the "good" characters are similarly possessed of the qualities of simplicity and innocence. Fanny, for example, in the conventionally pastoral Joseph Andrews, has an innocence which is never questioned by any but the malicious characters, and when 192 the "bad" characters question her innocence, the questioning reflects not upon Fanny but upon themselves. In the mock-pastoral of experience, however, even the "good" characters, if they exist, are ambiguously innocent; their innocence is either a fugitive and cloistered virtue or deceptively based upon appearances. Heartfree in Jonathan Wild and Polly in The Beggar1s Opera offer convenient examples of such qualified innocence, for while both appear on the surface to be representatives of the "good" normal life, Heartfree seems ultimately an exasperating prude and Polly a bourgeois social c l i m b e r .46 The implication behind the Newgate pastoral is that all aspects of life have been ultimately corrupted by non-pastoral reality; the forms of innocence thus have become the forms of inexperience and stupidity. The praise of experience, or "greatness," in Jonathan Wild is unmistakably ironic; Fielding makes his condemnation of Wild's self-enclosed evil quite explicit through the blame-by-praise technique, and almost no critic has felt that the author's sympathies were with Wild. Jonathan Wild does not, however, present a simple, 46gee William Empson's discussion of Polly in Some Versions of Pastoral, pp. 216-217. 193 unambiguous contrast between a totally depraved greatness and a wholly adequate goodness, between entirely "evil" experience and "good" innocence. Wild, for all his scheming, has no victim who suffers quite as much as himself; he even suffers pangs of conscience and indecision and manages to elicit, from one critic at least, some sympathy for his uncomfortable marriage (Bisphram, p. 63). Wild might be, as Bernard Shea d e m o n s t r a t e s,47 a machiavellian character, but his frequent slips from greatness make him a rather bumbling machiavel, and his innocence of what might motivate a "good" man leaves him ultimately unprotected. Wild the "Great Man" is finally almost a pathetic figure; as Robert Hopkins points out, there are two types of dupes in the world of Jonathan Wild: those naive literalists, such as the Heartfrees, who living by an untested set of abstractions and, failing to recognize the complexities of human experience, are swindled by the surface of Wild's rhetoric; and those reductive materialists, such as Wild and La Ruse, who oversimplify experience by reducing it to a bestial materiality and who swindle themselves ultimately by coming to believe in their own illusions.48 47"Machiavelli and Fielding's Jonathan Wild," PMLA, LXXII (March 1957), 55-73. 48"Language and Comic Play in Fielding's Jonathan Wild," Criticism, VIII (Summer 1966), 216. 194 If the conflict of Jonathan Wild is between simple experience and simple innocence, both terms need qualification, for experience is here its own worst victim, and innocence is made to appear undesirable through its incredible naivete. The treatment of innocence in the novel pre supposes a world in which true innocence cannot exist. Several critics, among them Smith, Golden, Hopkins, and Wendt, have sensed this by their uneasiness about the treatment of Heartfree as a representative of "goodness." Golden points out that Fielding at this point . . . has some of the man-of-the-world1s contempt for the completely innocent and "in the world of moral fantasy, innocence can be eternally maintained . . . in social England its only equivalence is ignorance" (pp. 136-137). The reader, living in a non-pastoral world, feels that although the Heartfrees are innocent sheep led to the slaughter, they are basically rather silly sheep. If they succeed in engaging our intellectual morality, they remain emotionally unpalatable; their supposed innocence springs mainly from stupidity and unexamined assumptions. This inadequacy in Heartfree prompts Alan Wendt to observe that Jonathan Wild presents the limitations of "passive goodness" (p. 306). For example, Heartfree's soliloquies in the midst of adversity strike the modern reader, and probably would 195 have struck the eighteenth-century reader as well, as incredibly sententious. Heartfree, reflecting on the enormity of the misfortune which has overtaken him, soliloquizes: Suppose then I have lost the enjoyments of this world, and my expectation of future pleasures and profit is forever disappointed, what relief can my reason afford? What, unless it can show me I had fixed my affections on a toy; that what I desired was not, by a wise man, eagerly to be affected, nor its loss violently deplored? (p. 87) This is all very well, very reasonable and orthodox, but it loses some of its force when the reader realizes that the mere "toy" to whose loss Heartfree is reconciling himself is his wife. Fielding was hardly the man to present such sentiments seriously as unambiguously admirable. The ambiguous nature of Heartfree1s goodness is reinforced later when Heartfree, answering Wild's suggestion that he escape from prison, again speaks very orthodoxly, but inadvertently reveals some of his most cherished feelings about his own goodness: Almighty Goodness is by its own nature engaged to reward me! How indifferent must such a persuasion make a man to all the occurrences of this life! What trifles must he represent to himself both the enjoyments and the afflictions of this world! . . . Dost thou think then, thou little, paltry, mean animal . . . that I will forego such comfortable expectations for any pitiful reward which thou canst suggest or promise to me; for that sordid lucre for which all pains and labour are undertaken by the industrious, and all barbarities and iniquities 196 committed by the vile; for a worthless acquisition, which such as thou art can possess, can give, or can take away? (p. Ill) The reader's sympathies, if indeed like Wild he has not gone to sleep, are alienated by the smugness of Heart- free 's sermon with its air of self-congratulation that he, praise God, is not as Wild. While the reader's sympathy does not attach itself to Wild, it does detach itself from Heartfree, who apparently is so well supplied with self-satisfaction that he does not stand in need of sympathy. Smith and Hopkins both point out that the "goodness" and "innocence" of Mrs. Heartfree, like that of her husband, is at best ambiguous. Heartfree's association of his wife's virtue with a "jewel" reminds the reader of Pamela's virtue, which was also a jewel of great price, but the jewel was, after all, for sale. Hopkins observes the "'Jewel' in Wild . . . ridicules the mercenary equation of chastity with material prosperity" (p. 226). Mrs. Heartfree's long journey, during which she preserved her virtue against incredible odds, is probably a parody of journey literature as produced by Aphra Behn, et. al, but it is also a parody of the preoccupation of goodness with itself. Mrs. Heartfree is projected into a world which seems to be designed solely to sully her innocence; could part of 197 this menacing attitude originate in Mrs. Heartfree's almost pathological preoccupation with her own innocence? In the world of Jonathan Wild, innocence becomes a morbid preoccupation with one's own virtue; thus the Heartfrees and their innocence are ambiguously treated and even the experienced vice character, Wild, has his own moments of qualified innocence. Shamela, a much less complex work, does not investigate the innocence-experience dichotomy with the same degree of subtlety as does Jonathan Wild; never theless , the basic contrast of Shamela is between an experience which poses as innocence and innocence which is ostensibly experienced. As in Jonathan Wild, there is no genuine innocence in Shamela; Booby, the only character who is naive enough for such a role, is ironically cast in the mold of the villain or seducer. It is the inexperienced or, as Irving Ehrenpreis would have it, "blockhead[ed]" Booby49 who takes seriously Shamela's none-too-vehement admonition not to be rude: upon which he run up, caught me in his arms, and flung me upon a chair, and began to offer to touch my under-petticoat. Sir, says I, you had better not offer to be rude; well, says he, no more I 49"Fielding's Use of Fiction: The Autonomy of Joseph Andrews," Twelve Original Essays in Great English Novels, ed. Charles Shapiro (Detroit, 1960), p. 30. 198 won't then; and away he went out of the room. I was so mad to be sure I could have cried. 0 what a prodigious vexation it is to a woman to be made a fool of! Mrs. Jervis, who had been without, harkening, now came in to me. She burst into a violent laugh the moment she came in. (p. 312) Not only does Booby overestimate the strength of Shamela's resistance, but he actually frustrates her expectations and offers amusement to the worldly-wise Mrs. Jervis who laughingly recalls the good old days when men were heartier. The assumption of both Shamela and Mrs. Jervis was that Booby would be "rude"; only Booby himself is innocent enough to feel guilty about his rudeness. Booby's inexperience is further shown in his attempted rape of Shamela, for when the heroine pretends to faint, The poor Booby, frightened out of his wits, jumped out of bed, and, in his shirt, sat down by my bedside, pale and trembling. . . . The squire . . . was almost really in that condition which 1 feigned, the moment he saw me give symptoms of recovering my senses, fell down on his knees; and 0 Pamela, cried he, can you forgive me, my injured maid? (p. 313) These two examples establish a pattern which recurs throughout the work, a pattern in which Booby, having been manipulated to attack Shamela's virtue, is repulsed by his more experienced adversary who easily extricates herself from his clumsy advances and then laughs silently as Booby feels seriously guilty. Behind this guilt is a mistaken conception of Shamela as innocent and himself 199 as guilty. The pursuer becomes the pursued, and the victim the victimizer; again the usual associations of innocence and experience are reversed. Sexual innocence usually associated with the woman is roughly equivalent to virginity; Shamela upsets the established expectations by giving the most sexual virtue to the man instead of the woman. The ambiguity and inversion of the innocence- experience theme is typical of the mock pastoral attitude, where simple pastoral innocence is distorted into a grotesque mockery. Heartfree's innocence is shown at bottom to be sententious, smug, lacking in emotional depth, and more than a trifle silly, while Shamela1s innocence is an illusion which fools no one but Booby. At the same time, Wild the villain possesses enough humanity to make his greatness at least partially qualified, and Booby the villainous seducer is really more like the hunted than the hunter. This lack of innocence contributes immeasurably to the "shrill tone" (Johnson, p. 116) of Jonathan Wild and Shamela, for it points to a world where all ideals are dead. Both novels use irony to reveal the disparity between the lost ideal and the realities of life in the Newgate world. Alan Thompson in The Dry Mock explains partially the basis of the emotions evoked by such anti-pastorals. 200 In irony, emotions clash . . . it is both emotional and intellectual— in its literary manifestations at any rate. To perceive it one must be detached and cool; to feel it one must be pained for a person or ideal gone amiss. Laughter rises but is withered on the lips. Someone or something we cherish is cruelly made game of; we see the joke but are hurt by it.50 It is innocence and the pastoral ideal itself which is the target in the Newgate pastoral; the irony of such pastorals hurts us because the ideal of innocence and a golden world is one of our most cherished illusions. Nevertheless, it is one of the characteristics of the mock-pastoral, a basically cynical form, to treat innocence in such a way as to deny its very existence. 50 (Berkeley, Calif., 1945), p. 15. CHAPTER IV THE PASTORAL OF INNOCENCE: TOM JONES The symbolic journey between the polar worlds of the city and the country, an implicit organizing device in Joseph Andrews and Amelia, is explicit in Tom Jones. A critical commonplace about Tom Jones is that its eighteen books are divided into three equal sections, with six books set in the country, six on the journey, and six in the city. Critics like Morris Golden,1 Dorothy Van Ghent,2 and Martin C. Battestin3 are among the more memorable of those who note this organization. Battestin, for example, explains: Tom Jones is a paradigm of the Augustan world view. Consider, for example, what may be called the 'Palladian' architecture of the novel— that nice symmetry of structure by which the eighteen books of the novel are divided into three equal parts treating, respectively, the country, the journey, and the city, with the adventures at Upton forming the keystone of the arch at the mathematical center of the narrative and being balanced on either side by the digressions of the Man of the Hill and Mrs. Fitzpatrick. The lFieiding's Moral Psychology (Amherst, Mass., 1966), pp. 109-110. 2The English Novel: Form and Function (New York, 1961), pp. 71-72. 3lntrod., Twentieth Century Interpretations of "Tom Jones" (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1968), pp. 11-12. 201___________________________ 202 design of Tom Jones mirrors a similar Order, a similar harmony and symmetry of parts, in Fielding's universe.4 Fielding himself makes explicit this relationship between the parts when, in his introductory remarks, he explains: we shall represent Human Nature at first to the keen appetite of our reader in that more plain and simple manner in which it is found in the country, and shall hereafter hash and ragout it with all the high French and Italian seasoning of affectation and vice which courts and cities afford.^ Tom Jones is the most explicitly organized of Fielding's novels, directly relating the theme of Human Nature to the ethical and moral contrast between the city and the country. The structure, then, is basically thematic, not simply a mechanical imposition of the plot. F. R. Leavis's opinion is that "Fielding's attitudes, and his concern with human nature, are simple, and not such as to produce an |effect of anything but monotony. . . ."6 However, Fielding's theme of human nature in the city and the j i country does evoke a basic, if simple, response in his I ! reader. What Tom Jones ultimately involves is our j interpretation of our own human nature and the ideal values | | which we recognize as desirable. We see human nature in a | i | irelatively ideal and in a non-ideal setting, only to I 4Ibid. 5Tom Jones (New York, 1964), p. 3. ^The Great Tradition (New York, 1964), p. 18, 203 realize that it is basically the same everywhere, the difference being only in degree. The country-city structure in Tom Jones is directly related to the pastoral conflicts of Ideal-Real, Natural- Artificial, and Innocent-Experienced. What is involved here is the structure of Fielding's world. There is no absolute triumph of the ideal over the real, but only a relative triumph explicitly associated with the country. Throughout the novel, the country appears as an imperfect Eden and Tom a culpable Adam, but there is no question at the end that his retirement into the country is a "paradise . . . happier far."7 In contrast to the pastorals of experience which reflect the "affectation and vice of the town," the world i I of Tom Jones seems reassuring. Tom's world is simple and j pastoral; Dorothy Van Ghent describes the effect it can j have on the modern reader thus: j I We may think of Tom Jones as a complex architectural ! figure, a Palladian palace perhaps: immensely j variegated, as Fortune throws out its surprising j encounters; elegant and suavely intelligent in its j details . . . but simply, spaciously, generously, | firmly grounded in Nature, and domed with an ample ! magnitude where Fortune shows herself as beneficent j artisan. The structure is all out in the light of | intelligibility; air circulates around and over it and ; through it. Since Fielding's time, the world has found' itself not quite so intelligible. . . . our world is tunneled by darkness and invisibility, darknesses of I ! infantile traumata, in the human mind, neurotic j ^John Milton, Paradise Lost, ed. Merritt Hughes (New ' York, 1935), p. 410 (XII.587). i 204 incalculabilities in personal and social action, fission in the atom, explosion in the heavens. We may feel, then, that there was much— in the way of doubt and darkness— to which Fielding was insensitive. Nevertheless, our respect is commanded by the integrity and radiance of the building that he did build. (pp. 80-81) The clean, strong lines of the novel would seem to imply, then, a corresponding cleanliness and strength in the universe, a reassuring solidity which our present world has lost. The tendency which Van Ghent reflects, to think of Fielding's world as one which is not "tunneled in darkness," is by no means uncommon; this is a common assertion in Fielding criticism, and Tom Jones is the usual evidence adduced to illustrate the point. Tom Jones gives the impression of light and graceful symmetry, and from this impression, a generalization often arises about the nostalgic "good old days" when the world was solid. For example, Wayne B. Carver in "The Worlds of Tom and Tristram," observes that "Tom Jones' world is a coherent one . . . but this scarcely needs to be mentioned,"^ and similarly Martin C. Battestin sees Tom Jones as "the vision of a world ordered and benign, and therefore 'comic' in the profoundest sense (Introd., 13). Carver and Battestin are, of course, right; the world of Tom Jones is solid at the center, and its vision is basically comic, but this by no means need imply that either the world or its creator is ^Western Humanities Review, XII (Winter 1958), 69. 205 simple. Fielding's alternatives, since he himself lived in the midst of a non-ideal and non-comic world, were "comedy or despair."^ Tom Jones, mid-point between the comedy of Joseph Andrews and the despair of Amelia, seems to have found the median between those alternatives. In his next- to-last novel, Fielding was aware of the evils which inhabit the pastoral and the non-pastoral worlds, but had given into neither; thus the tone of Tom Jones is basically hopeful— the author is aware but not overwhelmed. Morris Golden's suggestion is that the legal and social systems and human nature are the same in all three novels; but Fielding varies the ways in which they interact so that the tones of the novels are different (p. 134) j I which helps to explain much about the balance of pastoral J 1 l and non-pastoral elements in the novel. j Tom Jones is Fielding's final statement of the | pastoral of innocence. Here all that can be said for the j ideal, the natural, and the innocent is said, and the I reader is allowed either to relax in his perception of the j beautiful pastoral world thus created or to observe that ! i what has been said is ultimately not sufficient for his ownj !world. ' ! : i In a very real sense, Tom Jones is a journey from innocence into experience, but it ends with what is both a I j ^Andrew Wright, Henry Fielding; Mask and Feast (Los Angeles, 1966), p. 158. 206 final retreat and a triumphal return into innocence. Tom Jones is a "bildungsroman" (Golden, p. 137). Tom must learn prudence; he must be aware of the evil potential in friends and allies. At the beginning of the novel, Tom, accepting everyone at face value, accounts Blifil a good friend, but at the end, he learns the danger of such trustfulness. Similarly, Tom's imprudence and his basic innocence are both illustrated by his affairs with Molly, Mrs. Waters, and Lady Bellaston. Each of these affairs shows a progression into experience and into a loss of innocence. The affair with Molly takes place in the country, Mrs. Waters on the journey, and Lady Bellaston in town, but as Tom draws closer to the center of experience i which is London, his affairs become less venial and more blameable. Michael Irwin has observed that the basic conflict of the novel arises from four major indiscretions: j i Tom's affair with Molly, his misconduct during Allworthy's i illness, the affair at Upton, and the alliance with Lady | B e l l a s t o n . if we count his affair with Molly and his j misconduct during Allworthy's illness as one, we can see that the major indiscretions which give rise to much of the; conflict reflect the prevailing attitude toward sexuality j in the country, the journey, and the city, and through them! lOnenry Fielding: The Tentative Realist (London, j 1967) , pp. 90-91. i 207 we can trace Tom's growing experience of the non-ideal world. In spite of his inchastity, Tom serves in Tom Jones as Joseph served in Joseph Andrews as a touchstone for the other characters; his innocence is pastoral as his journey is symbolic. Ronald Paulson states that: The basic structural unit of Tom Jones is once again the action or situation surrounded by reactions. Tom is the touchstone and throughout the novel characters are judged 'as they meet this test.'H Again, the pastoral standard is evoked, and the world of experience is seen in juxtaposition to such innocence. Tom Jones, with all its seeming solidity, is in actuality an exploration of experience itself; in the end there are some very definite moral decisions made about the world of experience and the basically innocent realm upon which it impinges, and the growth of the central character involves an exposure to and triumph over that experience. The final effect of Tom Jones, however, is itself a result of Fielding's complex feelings about the city and the country, and about the nature of innocence and goodness in this world of experience and artifice. There is a basic lightness of tone which comes from the final triumph of the pastoral world, but it is not a simple triumph, and even by the time of Tom Jones Fielding was no longer absolutely U-Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (London, 1967), p. 141. 208 certain that this "Palladian palace" was built upon unshifting sands. Tom Jones is the zenith of the pastoral of innocence in Fielding, but it marks a dangerous eminence, for, as his narrator warns: Reader, take care. I have unadvisedly led thee to the top of as high a hill as Mr. Allworthy's, and how to get thee down without breaking thy neck I do not well know. (p. 8) Paradise Hall and the Lost Eden For Henry Fielding, as we have seen, the myths of Eden and the Golden World were closely tied up with the dream of the country, of a pleasant idyllic world away from the incongruities which must have complicated life in the metropolis of London. In the first section of Tom Jones, he specifically evokes the image of Eden when he shows us human nature "in that more plain and simple manner in which it is found in the country . . ." (p. 3). There is, of course, the transparent name "Paradise Hall" given to Allworthy's estate, a name which functions, it seems to me, both literally and ironically. That is, it is meant to indicate that this house is a kind of paradise in comparison with the world around it and to represent a state of bliss from which the protagonist will be expelled, but at the same time to make the reader aware that all is far from well in this particular paradise. But even more important than the name of this country Eden is the man who lives and rules in Paradise 209 Hall. Allworthy is, at least officially, all worthy, and he attempts to create, as God had created in the garden of Eden, an innocent world where the ideal is at one with the real. His establishment of this innocent realm in the country instead of the city is no accident, for this is the only place traditionally where there is freedom to create a pastoral world. Allworthy has a scheme of life which of necessity involves his living "retired in the country" (p. 4). Indeed, the countryside surrounding Paradise Hall is hardly more than a domain in which Squire Allworthy might exercise his benevolence. In this connection, the view from Allworthy's house reflects the patterned and ordered nature of the world which he hopes to create. Wilbur Cross identifies the actual view as being from Tor Hill, northest of Glastonbury,I2 but it might as easily be from any hill in Milton's Paradise. It stood on the south-east side of a hill, but nearer the bottom than the top of it, so as to be sheltered from the north-east by a grove of old oaks which rose above it in a gradual ascent of near half a mile, and yet high enough to enjoy a most charming prospect of the valley beneath. In the midst of the grove was a fine lawn, sloping down towards the house, near the summit of which rose a plentiful spring, gushing out of a rock covered with firs, and forming a constant cascade of about thirty feet, not carried down a regular flight of steps, but tumbling in a natural fall over the broken and mossy l2The History of Henry Fielding (New York, 1945), II, 165. 210 stones, till it came to the bottom of the rock; then running off in a pebbly channel, that with many lesser falls winded along, till it fell into a lake at the foot of the hill, about a quarter of a mile below the house on the south side, and which was seen from every room in the front. Out of this lake, which filled the centre of a beautiful plain, embellished with groups of beeches and elms, and fed with sheep, issued a river, that for several miles was seen to meander through an amazing variety of meadows and woods, till it emptied itself into the sea, with a large arm of which, and an island beyond it, the prospect was closed. On the right of this valley opened another of less extent, adorned with several villages, and terminated by one of the towers of an old ruined abbey, grown over with ivy, and part of the front, which remained still entire. The left-hand scene presented the view of a very fine park, composed of very unequal ground, and agreeably varied with all the diversity that hills, lawns, wood, and water, laid out with admirable taste, but owing less to art than to Nature, could give. Beyond this the country gradually rose into a ridge of wild mountains, the tops of which were above the clouds. (pp. 7-8) Everything is there in the right proportions, the rocks, the grass, the valleys and hills with mountains in the background, even a gothic tower and a ruined abbey to conveniently compose the perfect landscape. Allworthy, or Fielding, has arranged all the elements of country scenery into a carefully balanced and patterned scene. The view is,j ! of course, "picturesque,1 1 and reflects just the type of i view that the shepherds in an ideal eighteenth-century j arcadia would have accustomed themselves to expect. It is, j for all its naturalness, a nature controlled by art. The I | ideal picturesque landscape reflects Allworthy's attempt to create an ideal human landscape. 211 Allworthy attempts to create a basically innocent world, and his essential interest is always in innocence, real or apparent. His first actual appearance in the novel shows him "eager in contemplating the beauty of innocence, appearing in those lively colours with which infancy and sleep always display it . . ." (p. 5) in the countenance of the infant Jones; it is a scene reminiscent of the biblical creator looking upon newly created and innocent man. Most of Allworthy's judgements are based upon the supposed presence or lack of innocence; for example, Jenny Jones is treated with indulgence because the "openness and sincerity" of her confession seems to augur well for her essential innocence (p. 16). In the parallel case of Patridge, however, the culprit is condemned primarily , i because: j his prevaricating and lying backward and forward was a great aggravation of his guilt; for which the only atonement he could make was by confession and repentance. (p. 50) Partridge is, of course, no more guilty than Jenny Jones, | i but Allworthy perceives him as such. It is not the crime, but the essential innocence of one's motivation that sways Allworthy's judgement. Similarly, he insists upon seeing ! j j the far from innocent Captain Blifil as a good man: Upon the whole, then, Mr. Allworthy certainly saw some imperfections in the captain; but as this was a very j artful man, and eternally upon his guard before him, j these appeared to him no more than blemishes in a good j character, which his goodness made him overlook, and : his wisdom prevented him from discovering to the 1 212 captain himself. Very different would have been his sentiments had he discovered the whole. . . . (p. 56) "Insists" is perhaps the best word for Allworthy's perceptive failure here, for he "insists" upon seeing innocence whether it exists or no. It is this same insistence on innocence which makes Allworthy incapable of understanding Thwackum, Square, and Blifil, and which makes him eager to engage upon a plan for education for his nephews which would protect them from the public schools so that "their morals would escape all that danger of being corrupted. ..." (p. 75) Allworthy's carefulness for innocence is again reflected in his treatment of Jones and Blifil. When, for instance, he can see Tom as innocent in spirit, Allworthy is most understanding and forgiving. When Tom refuses to J name his accomplice in encroaching on Western's hunting \ j preserve, Allworthy concludes that: I the boy had suffered enough already for concealing the truth, even if he was guilty, seeing that he could have i no motive but a mistaken point of honour for so doing. ! (p. 68) | But when Square suggests that Tom's motives are not j innocent. Allworthy's sympathy begins to be alienated: | I i | Indeed, what Square had said sunk very deeply into his | mind, and the uneasiness which it there created was very visible to the other. . . . It was well, perhaps, for poor Tom that no such suggestions had been made before he was pardoned; for they certainly stamped in the mind of Allworthy the first bad impression concerning Jones. (p. 120) i 213 Similarly, his sympathy for Blifil automatically takes the shape of belief in Blifil's innocence. Henceforward he saw every appearance of virtue in the youth through the magnifying end, and viewed all his faults with the glass inverted, so that they became scarce perceptible. (p. 80) And later when Blifil had maliciously freed Sophia's bird, Allworthy answered "'that he was sorry for what his nephew had done, but could not consent to punish him, as he acted rather from a generous than unworthy motive'" (p. 96). The concern for innocence of motivation as an analogue for true innocence associates Allworthy with the biblical Jehovah, yet another all worthy deity in the legend of the Golden Age, whose pastoral world was also constructed upon the ideal of innocence. Tom's expulsion from Paradise Hall reinforces the identification of Allworthy's country estate with Eden, for at this point Fielding alludes to Milton's Paradise Lost when man had been cast out to find his way in a hostile world: ! And now having taken a resolution to leave the country, j he began to debate with himself whither he should go. ; j The world, as Milton phrases it, lay all before him; j i and Jones, no more than Adam, had any man to whom he j might resort for comfort or assistance. (p. 221) i ‘ Osborne's film version of Tom Jones captures the essence of 1 Fielding's prose here when he has an autumn leaf fall as the dejected Tom walks away from Paradise Hall. It is, in a sense, the beginning of man's autumn as was the original j 214 expulsion from paradise. In the film this scene is done in somber tones of brown in contrast to the lush greenness of the preceeding scenes which Martin C. Battestin, writing of the film, describes as evoking "a sense of arcadia— an unfallen, Edenic world of bright flowers and placid waters, of gaiety and innocence."13 The country from which Tom is cast out is specifically Eden, a paradise of the human spirit, a mythically golden world where innocence is [possible if one closes one's eyes tight enough. i Fielding's critics have as a rule recognized the ' association of Allworthy's country estate with Eden. Battestin, for example, explains that: Paradise Hall, where Fielding's foundling hero was born and raised, is, like Eden itself, an imaginary estate. Yet it is composed of elements associated in the novelist's mind with his own heritage, his own ideal identity. . . . (Introd., p. 3) Aurelien Digeon, in an influential early study of Tom Jones, says: j ----- I i Nearly all the characters in Tom Jones are country i people; and the pure air of the Somerset fields blows [ through the whole book. . . . the country is the hauntj of those virtues which move the heart, and to speak of | it calls up a vision of the Golden A g e . 14 ; j Similarly, Morris Golden calls the "harmony that is Sophia j and The Country" which Tom ultimately attains "a reflection! I j of . . . Eden" (p. 87). j ■^"Osborne's Tom Jones: Adapting a Classic," Va. Quarterly Review, XLII (Summer 1966), 392. l4The Novels of Fielding (New York, 1925), p. 163. 215 The association of the first six books of Tom Jones with Eden and the Golden Age is, then, fairly well established, both from Fielding's own hints, from his portrayal of Allworthy, and from the recognition of critics that this connection does exist. Earlier we have seen that the complex of ideas of the country, Eden, the Golden Age, and the pastoral are closely interwoven, and this interconnection is again illustrated in Tom Jones, where Fielding attempts to create an ideal age of innocence in the country, an idyllic world in which a patterned and simple reality corresponds with his own ideal of what life could and should be. The world of the first six books of Tom Jones is pastorally innocent, and should represent, officially at least, the possibilities for human existence. It is, nonetheless, true that such an official interpretation is different from what we as readers perceive. While Allworthy and Jones are pastoral j i j characters, Bridget and Blifil are not; the latter two characters reflect the counterforce or pastoral tension, !a quality present in all but the most idyllic pastorals. This counterforce, as it defines itself in almost all of j the characters of the first section, is an insistent t , : |reminder of the non-pastoral world outside, the world which| !Allworthy seeks to make over in his own image. i Fielding is quite explicit in showing his reader j i I that the world of Paradise Hall is in reality quite j 216 different from the way in which Allworthy or even Tom sees it. The ideal pattern which Allworthy perceives is as often as not an illusion, and his ideal Edenic world is undermined by a non-pastoral reality which expresses itself with unmistakeable reminders of the world outside of Paradise Hall. If Allworthy will create an ideal world, it is in actuality a mere series of self-imposed illusions which fool none but the naive pastoral characters. Perhaps William Empson is speaking rather strongly when he refers to "the lethal hatreds of Paradise Hall,"'*'^ but he is right about the incongruity of what is and what ought to be. The world of Allworthy and Tom Jones is undercut by what Michael Bliss calls the "hate ethic,"1^ and innocence is always at a-disadvantage. Tom remains naturally innocent, but his innocence in this world is no match for Blifil's duplicity, Molly's faithlessness, Square's philosophy. Western's impulsiveness, Bridget's prudence, or Allworthy's ideals. In the world of Tom Jones, as Sheldon Sacks points out, compassion such as that Allworthy felt when he saw the sleeping Jones is "far from universal."-*-^ 15"Tom Jones," KR, XX (Spring 1958), 227. 16"Fielding's Bill of Fare in Tom Jones," ELH, XXX (Sept. 1963), 243. 17Fiction and the Shape of Belief; A Study of Henry Fielding 1 I I (Los Angeles, 1967), p. 135. 217 Only the good have the ideal pastoral response, but their number is small. Yet for all its duplicity and distance from the ideal which its creator would build, the world of Tom Jones is capable of producing a truly innocent and good pastoral character. Although Tom must be contrasted with the malicious and hypocritical Blifil, he nonetheless emerges as a noble savage in a Golden Age. Tom is often identified with the noble savage in criticism: Arnold Kettle speaks of Tom as "the 'natural man' as does William Empson in the last part of the passage quoted earlier where he comments that Tom "emerges as a kind of noble savage" (p. 227). Tom is by nature innocent and good, a reflection of all that a pastoral character should be. He reflects a i i pastoral healthiness and mutuality which belies the j manipulations and machinations of the inhabitants of i Paradise Hall. He is associated with summer not only by | his character, but also by his unknown father's last | name.He reflects in himself the height of a type of I goodness which does not question other's motives; he is as j simple and as harmless as the summer. j j l®An Introduction to the English Novel (London, ! 1951) , I, 79. j i l9Peter B. Murray, "Slimmer, Winter, Spring and j Autumn in Tom Jones," MLN, LXXVI (April 1961), 326. j 218 Tom is also, as Digeon observes, "a hardy country- bred youth, a lover of open air life and wide spaces, a natural vagabond. He is full of vigorous and lusty life" (p. 140). Given to sports and full of high spirits, Tom reflects the essence of physical health and he is most "at home in the pasture."20 One of the first times we see him he is impulsively trespassing into Western's territories in pursuit of a bird he had flushed, for he "was excessively eager to pursue the flying game" (p. 66). Later on we are told that: Jones was lately grown very intimate with Mr. Western. He had so greatly recommended himself to that gentleman, by leaping over five-barred gates, and by other acts of sportsmanship, that the squire had declared Tom would certainly make a great man if he had but sufficient encouragement. He often wished he had himself a son with such parts .... (p. 86) For all his spiritual fineness, Tom Jones is first of all a physical being whose high spirits reflect the healthiness J and vigour which characterize pastoral man. j In addition to this physical pastoral healthiness, j i Tom has a quality of innocence and spiritual healthiness which is reflected in his treatment of those around him. i This spiritual healthiness is part of his innocently j !animalistic attitude towards sex, an attitude which is not j 2®Martin Price, To the Palace of Wisdom: Studies in j Order and Energy from Dryden to Blake (Garden City, N.Y., j 1964) , p. 290. j 219 basically selfish since it always involves a kind of mutuality. . . . there is a . . . temper of mind which borrows a degree of virtue even from self-love. Such can never receive any kind of satisfaction from another without loving the creature to whom that satisfaction is owing, and without making its well-being in some sort necessary to their own ease. Of this latter species was our hero. (p. 105) Tom's love, even for Molly, is by no means all dross, although he accepts his release from emotional respon sibility for her with an evident and somewhat callous relief. His is, as John Middleton Murry remarks, "a really innocent soul . . . and though he loses some of his boyish naivete, he never loses his innocence."21 With Sophia, however, the purity and innocence of his love is unquestioned except by the malicious and evil characters who attempt to paint him in false colors to Allworthy. In contrast to Blifil's opportunistic and non-pastoral hunger, Tom's love goes outside of himself and is based upon mutuality. Tom's love for Sophia is associated with the pastoral, and his love for Molly with the mock-pastoral. Sophia has the traditional pastoral heroine's name, for, as Ian Watt points out, the "a" or "ia" ending on feminine names in eighteenth-century heroines is adopted from the 21"Fielding's 'Sexual Ethic' in Tom Jones," Fielding; A Collection of Critical' Essays, ed. Ronald Paulson (Englewood Cliffs, N. J., 1962), p. 93. 220 pastoral and heroic romances.22 Sophia is, in addition, introduced with metaphors which hark back to the pastoral idea, and her simplicity and innocence further reinforces this association. Significantly, Osborne's film has the courtship scenes between Tom and Sophia set in a soft green idyllic and Edenic world of lush vegetation. The love of Tom and Sophia reflects a triumph of the pastoral ideal, a triumph not at all qualified by the alternate treatment of Tom and Molly's love as mock-pastoral. The contrast, in fact, makes clear the superiority of the pastoral to the mock-pastoral. The incident where Tom is found in the woods with Molly is introduced in terms which initially and ironically evoke the idyllic pastoral spirit: It was now a pleasant evening in the latter end of June, when our hero was walking in a most delicious grove, where the gentle breezes fanning the leaves, j together with the sweet trilling of a murmuring stream, | and the melodious notes of nightingales, formed j altogether the most enchanting harmony. (p. 166) ' | The atmosphere is charged with the Golden Age, and Tom | cannot help but soliloquize romantically on Sophia's i beauty, only to be interrupted by Molly, who has indeed j I just come from a day's labor in the pasture with: i a shift that was some of the coarsest, and none of the j cleanest, bedewed likewise with some odoriferous effluvia, the produce of the day's labour, with a pitch fork in her hand . . . (pp. 166-167). 22"Naming of Characters in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding," RES, XXV (October 1949), 326. 221 The passage which follows in which Thwackum interrupts their love-making evokes a comparison between the pastoral shepherd and the beasts of the field, a parallel which Eleanor Hutchens in Irony in Tom Jones sees as "incongruous" not because of the comparison of Tom and Molly to animals, but "in its implied comparison of their i carnal interlude to the idealized love of the classical s h e p h e r d . "23 T h e incongruity is thematic here, because this incident will be the one which enables the counterforce characters to have Tom expelled from Paradise Hall. Fielding, ironically, uses the mock-pastoral to destroy the pastoral. The somewhat qualified Edenic, Golden World of j Paradise Hall is ruled over by a benevolent Squire ! Allworthy, who is reminiscent, as John Preston points out, of Shaftesbury's image of D e i t y . 24 Allworthy, as the ruler of paradise, can be seen as a type of inverted Jehovah j I figure. Ostensibly he should rule fairly and his judgement| j of right and wrong should reflect the just, ordered world j which he has created. However, this world is, as we have | seen, a world in which the non-edenic is strong, far stronger than Allworthy realizes or even suspects. The | world of Paradise Hall is deceptively based upon i 23(Alabama, 1964), p. 92. 9 A I "Tom Jones and the Pursuit of True Judgement," j ELH, XXXII (Sept. 1966) , 321. j 222 appearances; Bridget appears chaste and Blifil appears virtuous while Tom appears vicious. Allworthy does, indeed, produce the possibility for this particular type of complication by his naive assumption that he is all knowing as well as all worthy. R. S. Crane in "The Concept of Plot and Plot in Tom Jones," observes: That under certain circumstances Allworthy should be capable of such a verdict on Tom is made probable, generally, by the excessive confidence in his ability to judge of character which has led him long before to condemn Partridge, and particularly, by his implicit and, in the face of Bridget's favoritism for Tom, even aggressive belief in the good intentions of young Blifil, as well as in the integrity of the learned men he has chosen, in his wisdom, as tutors for the two boys.25 Allworthy is, in other words, convinced of his own infallibility, or at least thinks of his judgements as final, but his judgements, as we have already seen, often insist upon seeing things not as they are, but as he would have them. On one level at least, Allworthy is presented as a type of perfection, a godlike figure who attempts to j insure order in the patterned world of his own creation. Critics have tended to rebell against this version of j Allworthy: H. K. Banerji has called him a model of j "passionless p e r f e c t i o n , "26 Henry St. C. Lavin has remarked! ^ critics and Criticism (Chicago, 1952) , p. 71. ^ Henry Fielding Playwright, Journalist and Master of the Art of Fiction (New York, 1929), p. 197. 223 that Allworthy's speeches are "sermons,"27 and William B. Coley, reflecting Gide's views, has pointed out that: perfection is for Fielding something of a denaturing process, a denial of real elements in human nature. Presumably the 'mixed' world of man, so resistant to generalizations of any kind, will not tolerate the imposition of such absolutes as p e r f e c t i o n . 2 8 It is not so much Allworthy's perfection which elicits these reactions as his ignorance of his own imperfection; it is as if he sets up a world founded upon his own rules without examining their consistency and workability. Allworthy's defects are, indeed, godlike, and like the garden of Eden, the world of Paradise Hall can become chaotic as a result of these defects. Allworthy produces chaos because "he is too good for this intriguing world."29 His distance from the world of men allows the world to grow malicious; there need not have been a Thwackum or even a Captain Blifil at Paradise Hall except for Allworthy's insistence on placing them there and his persistence in seeing them as innocent and worthy. j i I For all his failures, Allworthy remains the moral j I center of the novel; the values of the novel are expressed j | I 27"Rhetoric and Realism in Tom Jones," University i j Review (Kansas City) , XXXII (Autumn 1965) , 20. j 28"Gide and Fielding," CL, XI (Winter 1959), 11. j t 29A. D. McKillop, The Early Masters of English j Fiction (Lawrence, Kansas^ 1956), p. 128. | 224 through him, and his inadequacies are reminiscent of the distance between "what human life ought to be and might be."30 ipOItl never doubts Allworthy's justice, and our sympathy with Tom helps to maintain the belief that his "uncle" is indeed a paragon. Whenever morally attractive characters like Sophia or Mrs. Miller or even Mrs. Waters come upon the scene, their reactions always recognize Allworthy's superiority. Tom, even at the moment when he has been banished from Paradise Hall, "kissed his [Allworthy's] hands with a passion difficult to be affected, and as difficult to be described" (p. 208). Allworthy is, indeed, a kind of touchstone which only the good characters recognize as good; malevolent characters like Captain Blifil, Thwackum, Wilkins, and Blifil inevitably see Allworthy as a fool to be manipulated. Only the pastorally good characters, therefore, are able to | recognize in Allworthy the moral goodness and purpose which I should be present in a truly innocent world. j I Tom's expulsion from Paradise Hall is nonetheless j only partially a result of Allworthy's mistaken judgement ! i and the manipulation of the non-pastoral characters. He is ! i i I . jhimself responsible for his own expulsion by giving the j i opportunity for such slanders. If it can be called a sin, \ as indeed it must to warrant his being cast out of Eden, j 3^Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago, j 1960), p. 217. 225 Tom's basic fault is imprudence, but prudence should be essential only in the non-pastoral world. If the world were really idyllic, there would be no need for this type of prudence, but the reality that now exists makes it imperative. The golden world of the pastoral idyll is evoked in these first six books, but it is shown to be a mixed lot. The pastoral world is never free from tension, from a counterforce, and the counterforces at Paradise Hall are both obvious and insidious. Yet compared with the experiences of London and the road which will follow, this is a relatively innocent world. Like Adam, who had all the world to wander and who sought a paradise "happier far," Tom is cast out on a world where he will gain experience that will enable him to live in paradise. The experience gained on the journey functions like Milton's "fortunate fall"; Tom's expulsion is evil in itself, but from it springs the recognition which enables him to inherit a far better land. At the end of the novel, Tom returns to Paradise Hall not as the foundling, but as the heir, and his right to both Sophia's and Allworthy's affections can no longer be questioned. The Metaphor of the Way The most memorable portion of Tom Jones to most readers is the middle section which encompasses the journey 226 from Allworthy's country estate to the city of London. This journey presents "the pure comedy of English life" in terms of the metaphoric way. With the swift, kaleidoscopic movement of a picaresque novel, Tom Jones strays from adventure to adventure, from inn to highway to city with a lightheartedness equally charming and misleading. The lightness which makes the novel so memorable, however, often becomes a barrier to a complete understanding of the journey. Michael Irwin comments: The presence, especially in Tom Jones, of squires and huntsmen, coaches and inns, induces a nostalgic euphoria that blurs critical insight and usually seeks expression in metaphors about Old Wine and God's Fresh Air. . . . Once a critic has decided that they [Fielding's novels] are 'rollicking' he is unlikely to get much farther with them. (p. 4) The rollicking can become a barricade to understanding because it offers a simple, and to some extent satisfying, j interpretation without the disturbing suggestion that the way of Tom Jones goes through any darknesses that we ourselves would rather avoid. The rollicking and picaresque road of Tom Jones does, nonetheless, lie through ! many ethical and moral darknesses, for it travels from the j relatively ideal country into the murkiness that is the j !non-ideal reality of the city. The characters must be ! ! i | : j moved from the country to the city, and the road to London j |obviously accomplishes this task, but the darkness which i these characters encounter is important thematically, both j 227 as a preparation for London and as a reflection of the non ideal world which will be concentrated in the city. From Innocence to Experience The Fall from Eden which Tom has just experienced at the end of Book VI leaves him with a world of experience to encounter; thus the metaphor of the way or road to experience is a natural symbol. Tom, having lost his rural paradise, must now confront the non-pastoral reality which has always lain just outside of Allworthy's gates, and he must learn to control that world if he is to survive. Tom in his natural state may be a "noble savage," but he is hardly equipped to meet the experiences of reality. Tom Jones "resumes the great road of Joseph Andrews ..." (Digeon, p. 129), but it should not be forgotten that the road of Joseph Andrews placed the naive and innocent pastoral characters in juxtaposition with a cruel and heartless external world where the ideal was inevitably distorted. The road of Joseph Andrews lay through a discovery of the difference between appearance and reality, and likewise Tom learns to discern the difference between the appearance of the wise and honest Quaker and the reality of his callous coldness. The Quaker's concern and sympathy for Tom last only so long as he thinks he is a gentleman, but when he learns Tom's real identity he is indignant. 228 The Quaker was no sooner assured by this fellow of the birth and low fortune of Jones, than all compassion for him vanished; and the honest, plain man went home fired with no less indignation than a duke would have felt at receiving an affront from such a person. (p. 248) Similarly, the Quaker's intractability toward his daughter and her new husband when he vows that "they may starve, or beg, or steal together, for me. I will never give either of them a farthing" (p. 247) is in obvious variance with his profession of peacefulness and love. The Honest Quaker, upon closer examination, is hardly honest with himself, nor is he a Quaker in the genuine sense. In like manner, Tom comes into contact with the maliciousness of gossip when Mrs. Whitefield's friendliness turns into rather threadbare civility upon the receipt of false information. Mrs. Whitefield is, like Tom, a victim of the false appearance that is often placed upon actions in the non-ideal world; this distortion through malicious gossip is one of the major themes of Tom Jones. Tom is presented time and time again as suffering through the false light or the distorted appearance which others place upon his actions. While he ignored such slanders at Paradise Hall, the journey teaches him his danger. Through the journey Tom also begins to learn that I jthe world outside of Paradise Hall is set up to judge 1 Iprimarily upon the possession or lack of money. Money, because of the facility with which it is found, lost, acquired, or spent, is never important in the pastoral 229 world, and the pastoral character is almost by definition careless of money and unconcerned with its acquisition. At the outset, the hero of Tom Jones seems to be unaware that money is important, and indeed the lesson comes hard for him; perhaps he never really learns it. Nonetheless, he feels the effects of money, which can buy freedom for the guilty Northerton or lend respectability where there seems to be none, as when the landlady at Upton is righteously determined to "drive all whores in rags from within the walls" (p. 345). The opinion of almost any landlady or landlord seems infallibly based upon the appearance or absence of money, a natural standard of values in a world of landlords and landladies. Everyone on the road, except the pastoral Tom and Sophia, uses this yardstick as the ultimate judge of goodness. During the journey, Tom does I not really learn the value of money, but through experience | of the world, he is exposed to the structures outside of himself which are built upon appearance and wealth. Jones' education in the nature of non-ideal reality ; l I is deepened when at Upton he is brought face to face with | I the effects of seemingly casual actions. It is true that j Tom has been aware of this before, specifically during his dilemma concerning Molly, but here the danger becomes stronger and the awareness more tinged with despair. Tom's| i reaction upon finding Sophia's muff on his unslept-in-bed ; 230 is to grow "frantic in a moment," and Fielding goes on to describe his further reactions: The behaviour of Jones on this occasion, his thoughts, his looks, his words, his actions, were such as beggar all description. After many bitter execrations on Partridge, and not fewer on himself, he ordered the poor fellow, who was frightened out of his wits, to run down and hire him horses at any rate; and a very few minutes afterwards, having shuffled on his clothes, he hastened downstairs to execute the orders himself which he had just before given. (p. 3 82) Obviously Fielding is making sport of Tom's distraction by describing him in terms of madness, but to lose Sophia because of a casual intrigue in a country inn is genuinely distracting. Jones, in spite of his exaggerated reactions, has to experience a situation which is both difficult and frightening, but the lesson which the situation teaches is essential in the world in which he must live. The road of Tom Jones runs not only through the confrontation of innocence with experience, although it is patently a "bildungsroman tracing the growth and education of a well-disposed youth" (Golden, p. 137); it also records the naive goodness of a youth who offers himself to the world of experience and finds how dangerous such an offer can be. Jones strays into the non-pastoral, non-ideal world and offers himself in terms which assume that reality is pastoral and ideal, but he is inevitably punished for this assumption. Tom offers himself to those around him whether as a soldier, a lover, or a companion, only to learn caution. JHis patriotic offers presuppose the 231 existence of such things as honor, a "cause," and a sense of mission among soldiers, but he finds instead a pack of drunkards and hangers-on. As a companion, he finds that others accept him only as he has the trappings of wealth and reputation, and as a lover he finds that the world does not understand the simplicity and purity of his love. On his journey, Tom is forced to realize the implications of his actions, specifically his sexual misdemeanors. In one sense, his affair with Mrs. Waters springs from "incautiously obliging everyone" (Golden, p. 4 8), but its consequences are dire, and from his lack of prudence here many of the later complications of the novel will spring. The effect of his action is later to bring him to the "point of ritual d e a t h " 3 1 and to almost deprive him of Sophia. The movement of Tom Jones is, unlike that of Joseph i Andrews, toward, not away from, the city. Consequently j Fielding's world becomes, as Golden comments, "both darker and more complex psychologically" (p. 97). The j confrontations and realizations which Tom experiences lead | i him away from the world of innocence into one of I l jexperience; he begins to learn the need for caution, the j j dangers and the inequities of the world around him. The j world of the road is less innocent than the world of ! 33-Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (New York, 1965), p. 179. 232 Paradise Hall, even though innocence there was often only an illusion; Tom cannot proceed here with incaution and naive faith in human nature unless he would be punished, and naturally he is punished. Although the journey itself may be light-hearted, Tom is by no means light-hearted when he reaches the city, where he will find a reality even less ideal than the road. This recognition of Tom's painful journey may be behind George Sherburn's warning that: Nowadays Parson Adams, Tom Jones, and Patridge may seem full of the joys of carefree wandering; but when Fielding died the cult of the open road had not yet come into its o w n . 32 The wandering of Jones and Partridge is not carefree, because in the end Jones is made to face not only the existence, but the primacy of a world that is frighteningly different from his own pastoral goodness. Martin C. Battestin describes the experience of the road as a "symbolic pilgrimage" into experience: . . . the theme of Joseph Andrews is implicit in its structure, the symbolic pilgrimage of its good men from the Great City to Parson Adams' country parish. For its titular hero the movement of the novel is, in effect, a quest to regain a rural paradise lost after ! the arrival in London. This motif is developed with | more scope and sophistication, if less logically, in j Tom Jones. . . . Before he may resume his country | idyll, I . . Jones must come of age morally by profiting from his indiscretions in the great world.33 j 32"Fielding's Social Outlook," PQ, XXXV (January 1956) , 3. 33The Moral Basis of Fielding's Art: A Study of "Joseph Andrews" (Middletown, Conn., 1959), pp. 90-91. 233 The great world is not only London; it is the way to London which prepares for and even symbolizes the corruption of that experience. In a sense, Tom Jones' pilgrimage is reminiscent of Bunyan's pilgrimage, but this time the city to which the protagonist goes is by no means celestial. Significantly, this Pilgrim's Progress is an ironic progress away from, not to, the celestial city. The non-pastoral world of the journey and the city demands a caution and prudence which it is Jones' task to acquire. In our non-ideal world, one must understand the self even if it is not pretty; Jones must be aware of the "fear and self-interest behind all . . . actions, especially behind the supposedly disinterested o n e s . "34 Prudence, which is a quality of villains like Blifil, in the end must be acquired to live in a world which is non ideal in its very essence. Eleanor Hutchens comments that "It is one of the larger ironies of the novel' that part of the task of the hero is to acquire one of the chief traits of the v i l l a i n . "35 Experience in the end must impress uponj Tom the importance of the light in which his actions appear j | to others; in the pastoral world, the only light is that ofj truth, but truth is a rarity in the real world. Prudence j 34A. E. Dyson, "Satire and Comic Theory in Relation ! to Fielding," MLQ, XIII (1957), 236. ; 35"prudence in Tom Jones: A Study of Connotative i Irony," PQ, XXXIX (October 1960), 501. ; 234 seems a beggarly virtue, and not always an effective one, but this weak guide is the only preservation and protection we have. Nevertheless, the virtue of prudence is frankly impossible for the good pastoral character who by his naive assumption of the ideal cannot see into others. For the pastoral character, the hypocrisy in which most characters are cloaked is reality, but one of the basic themes of Tom Jones seems to be the stripping off of the masks of hypocrisy and pretense. The readers and Fielding are aware of this hypocrisy as hypocrisy, but Jones seems to me never to be able to recognize hypocrisy for itself until its mask is removed. Even in the end, Jones has to be told what kind of woman Bellaston is. All that Tom is meant to learn from the journey and later from the town is the necessity I i of allowing for hypocrisy, of caution in one's actions so j that they cannot easily be thrown into a false light. The I lesson is a sad one, for it leads one to be aware of the j | "transparent mask" (Hutchens, Irony in Tom Jones, p. 52) ofj hypocrisy which lies behind most actions in the non- j pastoral world of experience. j i . i ! The journey is sad and threatening, but its ultimate| end for Tom is improbable. The normal probability in the j conflict of innocence and experience would be the j 1 destruction of innocence; in our own non-pastoral world j i innocence is always overwhelmed by experience. Tom's j 235 essential naive goodness is all but unbelievable; how can goodness survive such a pilgrimage? In answer, Wilbur Cross explains the action of Tom Jones this way: A boy . . . is sent out into the world and receives a temporary smirch from the contact. But he quickly learns his lesson and becomes in the end a most respectable country squire (II, 219). The real probability, it seems to me, is either that he would not learn, or that he would become disillusioned and hard in the way the Old Man of the Hill is hard. Nonetheless, Fielding in this pastoral of innocence insists that the pastoral forces will triumph even if the triumph must be an obvious fantasy. Even at the end of Tom Jones and Amelia, we are left with the distinct feeling that this one got through by luck, but the corrupt world is unchanged. Often, in fact, it takes luck that seems almost supernatural to bring the hero through. (Paulson, p. 88) The luck which seems supernatural is, I submit, Fielding1s way of insisting on the pastoral of innocence, but even the pastoral of innocence is ironic because it implicitly recognizes that life is not set up that way. How often in life are Squares discovered in the closet just in time to j free one from a pernicious emotional responsibility, or do j I men react heroically to save a Mrs. Waters from being i [ I I !strangled by her lover? Fielding, I suspect, wants us to i be aware that it does take a fiat of creation to draw the 1 i i pastoral world. Our real world is, as Kettle suggests, ! 236 ruled by the Blifils (I, 90), but the pastoral world of Tom Jones suggests that perhaps it need not be. From Eden Through a Picaresque World Tom Jones1 ramble through the English countryside has often been compared to a picaresque journey, probably because both Tom's and the picaro's journeys involve episodic adventures and a hero with a side-kick. The comparison, of course, does not sustain much critical knowledge, but there is a type of validity to it. Tom, like the picaro, is an outcast of society. The world of Paradise Hall, as we have seen, has cast him out, and he must find his way alone. Both Allworthy and Sophia, who represent the ideal pastoral world, have given up on him, and except for Partridge, he is friendless. Similarly, the picaro is traditionally alone, a solitary figure around whom the picaresque world revolves. Tom's world seems also to revolve around his actions, and many times teaches its lessons through malice and indifference. Partridge functions, as does Sancho Panza in the picaresque Don Quixote, as a comment on the actions of his master and as a contrast to his companion's idealism. Partridge is a comic analogue for Jones; he is in his. own way as naive as Tom, yet he is touched by a selfishness and corruption which are laughable only because they are ineffectual. When Partridge suggests that Tom steal the 237 Innkeeper's horses at Upton, the reader merely laughs because there is no danger of Tom taking his advice. Yet such things as Partridge suggests do happen with alarming frequency in Tom's world. Partridge, like Panza, is a comic reflection, but a reflection nonetheless, of the real world which lies outside the idealistic and pastoral dream. For the most part, however, there are obvious differences between the world of Tom Jones and the picaresque world; although there are "some traces of the I rogue" (Cross, II, 151) in Tom, he is not a rogue by vocation. The contacts which he has with the characters he meets in the English countryside are not entirely casual. I Although, for example, Tom's affair with Mrs. Waters is as | j casual as many of the picaroon's encounters, it is not | I treated amorally as such encounters usually are. The effect of this liaison is patently moralistic, and Tom does I not have the impersonal feelings about Mrs. Waters that the; ! picaro has about his sexual partners. Personal j relationships in the picaresque world, as we saw in the j ! chapter on Jonathan Wild, are usually casual. Such love j i affairs are not really personal relationships at all, but | ! ; I experiences and events which happen to the central j | icharacter; the non-pastoral picaro is, in the world of I ; I i |personal relationships, self-enclosed in a way that the pastoral Tom never can be. 238 The way of Tom and Partridge also differs from that of a Lazarillo de Tormes or a Gil Bias in that it has an ultimate destination. The structure of Tom's world is solid; Tom Jones not only contains moral judgements and rewards, but it implies a world where such judgements and rewards are coherent. In discussing "The Worlds of Tom and Tristram," Carver comments: . . . Tom Jones takes to the road where, buffeted and sore, he acquires true manliness. Soon his whole world follows him on the journey. The journey implies the destination, the destination implies the goal, the goal embodies values that are worthy of search and travail. No matter where Fielding takes us, we are not far from the unshakable world of the lunch bucket and city hall and all the naive assumptions of enduring values that that world teeters upon. (p. 70) Tom, for all his isolation, ultimately belongs to the pastoral world of the country, the ideal world which Allworthy attempted to create; he, Sophia, and Allworthy are perhaps the only inhabitants worthy to live in such a | world. | i Tom must learn to live in the non-ideal world which j i surrounds the pastoral, but he can later on retire to the | country to live according to the pastoral value judgements | I ; |and assumptions. The picaro, however, has no such solid [ I I I I superstructure upon which he can lean, for "the picaroon lives in an unsure world" and has "to create a kind of invulnerability for h i m s e l f ."36 There are no ultimate ! ^Robert Alter, Rogue's Progress: Studies in the Picaresque Novel (Cambridge, Mass., 1964) , p. 102. 239 certainties for Lazarillo as there are for Tom; morality is a genuine concern for Tom, but simply a tool or a fagade for Lazarillo. No one really starves to death in the world of Tom Jones as in the world of Lazarillo de Tonnes. The ideal world of Tom Jones is based finally upon pastoral assumptions: although there is evil in the world, it can be controlled by the good; although the city is evil, some virtuous people can live in it, and others withdraw into the less evil country; although some country girls are corrupt like Molly, some country girls personify innocence like Sophia; although Allworthy is not all-knowing, he is at least all worthy, and under the right conditions his I world could work reasonably well. Although by the time Fielding wrote his masterpiece, j English letters had largely lost the Augustan feeling j for stability and lucidity, Tom Jones is a thoroughly ! Augustan novel. The world as seen in its pages is j | solid and certain; every man has his place in a stable j social order; there is a clear-cut, common-sense ! Christian morality as a guide for action. j Concomitantly, order is the keynote for the narrative ! as well; the novel must be constantly under the perfect, control of the author who continually envisages the j unity of all the complex parts. (Alter, p. 103) The world of Fielding, or rather the world as he would like' to have it, is reflected in Tom Jones, and for all its I --------- !surface similarity, it is a very different world from that I ' inhabited by the picaroon. The genuinely picaresque world, then, implies a view; of reality which Fielding rejects; "chance rules in the j picaresque world: the individual cannot really understand I 240 his world or control it" (Alter, p. 84), and Fielding insists that at least to some extent the world is coherent and controllable, else why should Jones bother to find his way from Paradise Hall to the city and back again? There is some growth in Tom, the kind of growth that is not necessary for the picaroon, nor indeed even relevant to his experience. Fielding ultimately rejects the world of the picaresque and clings to his own vision of an ideal world and his dreams of the pastoral. The picaresque world of the contingent is not the world of Tom Jones. Why, then, does Fielding evoke comparisons with the picaresque, for the comparison is too obvious to be entirely dismissed? In part, the picaresque world in which Tom wanders is a contrast for the ultimately reassuring world to which he will return. Alter says: . . . Tom is, in fact, no less than an admirable young country gentleman on a picaro's itinerary. The journey is not a way of life for him, but a kind of penance that he is made to undertake for the sins of his youth, both actually and only apparently committed. The reader, however, can have little doubt that the young gentleman will somehow eventually be restored to his proper sphere. (p. 91) Tom simply passes through the world of experience, the world of the picaresque; the threat lies outside of him and outside of the world of Paradise Hall. This non pastoral world could, were it not for the comic tone of 241 the novel, encroach upon the pastoral of innocence, but Fielding insists that it will not. Disorganized reality, the primacy of individual experience, or self-absorption, threatens Tom if he stays in the non-pastoral world, and the reader is reassured that such a world has limited powers. "Tom is a picaroon on a string, and a golden string, at that" (Alter, p. 90). The golden string is attached to the golden age to which he belongs, and to which the world of the novel ultimately belongs. The By-Paths of the Way All of Fielding's novels, with the exception of Shamela, contain moralistic by-ways or digressions which, in an age somewhat impatient of cautionary tales and inset stories, have sometimes alienated modern readers. Homes Dudden, for example, has gone on record as opposed to the "prolix" digressions which are "at best, a superfluity."37 Dudden notwithstanding, I submit that the "digressions" of Tom Jones are closely related thematically and structurally to the novel. These digressions in Tom Jones fulfill many of the same purposes as their counterparts in Joseph Andrews, but they do so in a more efficient way. 37Henry Fielding; His Life, Works and Times (London, 1952), II, 266. 242 The two main digressions which occur in the middle section of the novel are those of the Old Man of the Hill and Harriet Fitzpatrick. R. S. Crane has called these digressive tales: negative analogies to the moral state of the listeners, from which the reader is led to infer, on the eve of the most distressing part of the complication for the hero and heroine, that nothing that may happen to them will be, in comparison, very bad. (p. 89) Neither Tom nor Sophia, because they are basically ideal characters, will ever find themselves in the condition of their "negative analogies"; the tales take similar situations and reassure the readers that this could not happen to Tom and Sophia because their natures are too good. The tales are also "object lessons" (Hutchens, "Prudence in Tom Jones," p. 497) to warn Tom and Sophia of the basic dangers to which their positions may lead, but because of the listener's native, pastoral goodness, they are not really necessary. Then too, the tales obviously prepare their listeners for the city world into which they will be entering; they show, especially in the case of the Old Man of the Hill, the depths of vice into which the hero cannot sink. It seems to me that the by-paths are not really by-paths at all, but observation points from which the reader, and the character, may glimpse London and the life of the Town in its varied colors. The colors are 243 all either gaudy or black, and both hero and heroine are repulsed by the experience into which they will soon enter. These moments in the novel also function as viewpoints for where the character is now; when they hear the tales, both Tom and Sophia are halfway from the idyllic world of innocence, but these stories mark the farthest limit of their spiritual peregrinations. Harriet Fitzpatrick's account of her courtship and marriage to the bumptious Brian Fitzpatrick illustrates the extravagance, superficiality, and self enclosure of the town values. Her attraction to Fitzpatrick was primarily a result of his air of sophistication and gallantry: He was handsome, degage, extremely gallant, and in his dress exceeded most others . . . the qualifications which he then possessed so well recommended him, that, though the people of quality at that time lived separate from the rest of the company, and excluded them from all their parties, Mr. Fitzpatrick found means to gain admittance. It was perhaps no easy matter to avoid him; for he required very little or no invitation; and as, being handsome and genteel, he found it no very difficult matter to ingratiate himself with the ladies. . . . (p. 409) Her reasons for Fitzpatrick's acceptability are, of course, superficial; Sophia with her country values would have been in no danger from a man who was merely "handsome, degage, extremely gallant, and in his dress exceeded most others." Fitzpatrick's appeal, it seems, can only be explained by a handsome countenance and the 244 town's disinclination to look beneath surface appearance. Harriet's tale defines the urban world's attitude toward marriage and its conception of what constitutes a satisfactory relationship. The heart of the matter, in contrast to the pastoral attitude of mutuality in love, is simply self-enclosed manipulation for one's own purposes. One of Harriet's reasons for marrying Fitzpatrick is to triumph over her aunt: I was pleased with my man. I was pleased with my conquest. To rival my aunt delighted me; to rival so many other women charmed me. In short, I am afraid I did not behave as I should do. . . . (p. 411) The emphasis here is not upon her affection for Fitzpatrick, but upon her vanity and her malevolence toward her aunt; the relationship is, for the most part, seen as projected outward in other's reactions. Similarly, Fitzpatrick marries Harriet because of her "ready money" and evidently would be equally willing to marry Mrs. Western for the same reason (p. 413). Initially Harriet herself assumes that Fitzpatrick's love affair with Mrs. Western is frankly larcenous in motivation, for she confesses that For my own part, I confess, I made no doubt but that his designs were strictly honourable, as the phrase is; that is, to rob a lady of her fortune by way of marriage. My aunt was, I conceived, neither young enough nor handsome enough to attract much wicked inclination; but she had matrimonial charms in great abundance. (p. 410) 245 Harriet assumes, and in this she is seconded by all of the town characters, that marriage is a type of business proposition where both sides attempt to get the most and give the least. The tale is a warning to Sophia, but it is only a "comically cautionary" tale (Wright, p. 63). Sophia's own match with Jones is only superficially like that of Harriet, and to confuse the two is to judge only by misleading externals. Yet at the same time, the tale is seriously cautionary because it exposes Mrs. Fitz patrick and the whole system of values of the world into which Sophia will soon be plunged. In a world in which Brian Fitzpatrick is an acceptable husband, Lord Fellamar will be an excellent one, and Tom Jones completely unsatisfactory. The urban world and the town values are shown to be treacherous, superficial, and predatory, and Sophia is from this time on her guard. Yet curiously enough, the town attitudes here revealed are not really very far from the non-ideal reactions of Western and Blifil in the country. What is established is a connection between the two non pastoral worlds; London fulfills the vices of the country. What only the malicious characters in the country propound is accepted as the norm in London. Harriet's parting advice as Sophia goes into the 246 London world is that Sophia should "leave the character of Graveairs in the country, for, believe me, it will sit very awkwardly upon you in this town" (p. 436). Sheldon Sacks points out that this advice is prophetic of the conflicts that Sophia will encounter: Harriet's parting injunction is a prophecy, soon to be fulfilled, that Sophia's character will indeed conflict with the ethics, attitudes, and activities of the town, and, as we might suspect, the conflict, when it does appear, centers on courtship and marriage. The prophecy, however, carries with it an implicit suggestion that Sophia is as superior to whatever makes her lack of frivolity "sit very awkward upon her" as she is to the prophetess. (p. 227) Essentially what Fielding does through Harriet's tale is to accomplish a contrast of the town and country attitudes toward love and marriage, showing the moral superiority of the country attitudes. The digression, then, polarizes the pastoral and non-pastoral world, firmly associating the pastoral attitudes toward love and marriage with Sophia's country airs and the non pastoral with Harriet's town airs. In the end, the tale is rather harmless, for who could be very seriously concerned about Harriet Fitzpatrick's marital troubles, especially since she has richly deserved them? Still, the reader perceives that throughout the remainder of the novel the superficial urban world will pose a threat to the heroine. The story of the Old Man of the Hill reveals a 247 different aspect of the world of London, this time the dark low-life world of the professional gambler and cheat. The external parallels between the Old Man's story and Tom's are obvious: both are persecuted because of a brother, both are cast out to find their own living, both are, to their own minds at least, betrayed; in addition, the Old Man's tale parallels some of Tom's later exploits in London. The differences between the two, however, are more significant than the similarities, for the Old Man, although he lives in retirement in the country, is by no means a pastoral character, and his ultimate identification is with the disturbing world of reality. With the Old Man's story, for the first time in the novel, we are exposed to the malicious, preying, self-enclosed world of London. Here we see the viciousness beneath the artificiality and silliness of the beaux monde; yet, as with Harriet's tale, the reader is aware that the pastoral character is in no real danger from exactly the same perils. Nevertheless, the Old Man's story is a kind of warning and foreshadowing of the London world which Tom will soon enter; it warns of the possibilities of that world and foreshadows its moral murkiness. Sheldon Sacks sums up this function of the Old Man's tale: In short, the recluse is not merely an older Tom who has made a wrong choice; there are radical 248 differences of character. Nevertheless, the old man's adventures in London foreshadow and transcend the sordid London world Tom is soon to enter and become prey to. (p. 202) Although even from the beginning the Old Man himself is obviously a less innocent character than Tom, he represents an alternative attitude toward life, which, under the circumstances, Tom could easily adopt were it not for his basically pastoral nature. It is incon ceivable to imagine Tom living in London as a professional gambler, not because such things do not happen, but because he is good natured. The story of the Old Man marks a turning point in Tom's growth; here for the first time he utters direct ethical comments of the type which we have already heard from Allworthy. When the Old Man condemns love and friendship as equally treacherous pursuits, Tom is ready to answer, as Allworthy himself might have: 'But you will pardon me,' cries Jones, 'if I desire you to reflect who that mistress and who that friend were. What better, my good sir, could be expected in love derived from the stews, or in friendship first produced and nourished at the gaming-table? To take the characters of women from the former instance, or of men from the latter, would be as unjust as to assert that air is a nauseous and unwhole some element, because we find it so in a jakes. I have lived but a short time in the world, and yet have known men worthy of the highest friendship, and women of the highest love.' (p. 334) This sententiousness sits a little awkwardly on Tom, especially as he is to encounter Mrs. Waters in the next 249 chapter, but his speech is seriously meant. Tom, in contrast to the Old Man, is definitely aligned with the moralistic camp; he belongs ultimately to the ideal world of Allworthy, not to the world of London or of the Old Man. Similarly, the experience of the Old Man is an analogue for Tom's experience, and introduces the lowest elements in London society so that Tom himself will not have to experience them. In this way it functions somewhat like Wilson's tale in Joseph Andrews, but the Old Man is a "Wilson of a darker fibre" (Cross, II, 205-206) . The adventures of the Old Man are a way of protecting Tom from a certain kind of harmful knowledge of the world. Tom, unsuspicious by nature, was too young and heedless to have learned suspicion through prudence. Fielding deliberately protects him from such learning, leaving it to the old Man of the Hill, his surrogate, who has made of suspicion a way of life occasioned by his unrelieved disillusionment and his consequent hatred of mankind. His deliberate isolation from humanity, placed at the center of the novel, becomes a major symbol of self-enclosure. (Golden, pp. 46-47) There is always the danger of experience pointing to disillusionment like the Old Man's, but the pastoral spirit is basically hopeful, and, while it may be blind to evil, the blindness is at least innocent and sympathetic. 250 The contrast between the Old Man in Tom Jones and Wilson in Joseph Andrews is instructive, for it helps to explain the difference between the pastoral worlds of the two books. The Old Man is a far more complex and foreboding character than is Wilson; further more, Wilson's tale leads to the discovery of Joseph's parentage, but the Old Man's tale, like his life, is a dead end. The most obvious comparison between the two men is in their ultimate retirement to the country. Wilson marries and retires into a rural golden age, a resolution of which Fielding approves, but the Old Man retires alone to hide himself away from the world, to study the scriptures, and to hate the mankind that the author of the scriptures had loved. Having seen the whole world as hypocritical and malicious, the Old Man concludes: Thus, sir, I have ended the history of my life; for as to all that series of years during which I have lived retired here, it affords no variety to entertain you, and may be almost considered as one day. The retirement has been so complete, that I could hardly have enjoyed a more absolute solitude in the deserts of the Thebias than here in the midst of this populous kingdom. (p. 332) The ideal of rural retirement, as I have pointed out in the introductory chapter, involved an active benevolence to others, not a solitary isolation of the self from the active community. The Old Man, thus, has made the wrong choice, and his retirement is an implicit contrast 251 to Tom's later retirement with Sophia. In the final analysis, then, the Old Man's story not only reveals the sinister underworld of London, it also establishes, by contrast, the supremacy of country values. The ideal quality of the country world, even with all its imperfections, is established in comparison with the self-enclosed and non-ideal world of the Old Man. The Old Man's tale reaches both forwards to the London chapters and backwards to Paradise Hall, and when the comparison is made it is obvious which world Tom belongs to. London George Sherburn's famous comment that whenever Fielding "writes about London his tone becomes grim, hard, distressing" is followed by the observation that Tom Jones, although written in more exuberant high spirits than almost any novel in English, never theless loses its effervescence and verve in its last six books, when the narrative moves to London, to the lodging house, the gaol, the gilded mansion of Lady Bellaston, who was certainly ashamed of nothing; and to events dominated by such persons as the inept and cowardly villain Fellamar, the tawdry Mrs. Fitz patrick, or so flabby a youth as Nightingale. The effect becomes grim beyond intention. (pp. 10-11) This "grim" quality in the last section of Tom Jones has often been commented upon; McKillop, for example, has noted that "the humor thins out in the London part of 252 the story" (p. 125). The tone of this section contrasts to the previous sections, for the innocent gaiety of the country and the hilarious zestfulness of the way are lacking while all the hazards of both the country and the way are retained and intensified. The Town is threatening from the moment of Jones1 entrance until his final despair in Newgate, where he is incarcerated for murder. All of a sudden life has become dreadfully real and earnest and remains so until at the end the author assures us that it was all a bad nightmare and that the pastoral characters will return to the country. Fielding himself has given his opinion of the Town when he translates Virgil's "Redeunt Saturnia Regna" in his second number of the Covent Garden Journal as "Old Sat n himself is come to Town."38 The original quotation is from Virgil's fourth, messianic, eclogue where it prophesies a new Golden Age, an Age of Saturn, which will return; the blank which Fielding leaves implies an equal probability that the age will be the Age of Satan. Perhaps the probability is higher for Satan than for Saturn, for in the books of Tom Jones which are set in town it is obvious that Satan has long been resident while Saturn has been completely forgotten. 3^ed. g . E. Jensen (New York, 1964), I, 139. 253 As Alter puts it, "the hero's way leads from country to city, from relative rural simplicity to the sphere of refined corruption" (p. 81). In the following pages I will explore the "Age of Sat n" in three aspects of London life: the masks which so many of the characters wear, the series of characters who function as alter egos or contrasts to the pastoral characters, and the sense of enclosure and delimitation which the town seems to force upon those who inhabit it. Masks in London As R. S. Crane comments, the sense of danger is increased in the London scenes (p. 84); what has been only potentially threatening before, here becomes seriously threatening. Identities in the urban world become more fluid, and the individual is lost in a welter of motivations and intrigues. Lady Bellaston, we are told, is masked, but the chief function of the mask is to hide her from herself. . . . as he [Tom] was thoroughly ignorant of the town, and had very little acquaintance in it, he had no knowledge of that character which is vulgarly called a demi-rep; that is to say, a woman who intrigues with every man she likes, under the name and appearance of virtue, and who, though some over-nice ladies will not be seen with her, is visited (as they term it) by the whole town; in short, whom everybody knows to be what nobody calls her. (p. 590) Bellaston passes as a lady of fashion, and so she is, 254 but the title "lady" is a meaningless misnomer. Similarly, Harriet appears in one guise as a friend, but soon thereafter can be recognized as a foe. Lord Fellamar, the "reluctant rapist"^^ is also a masked character, functioning on one level as a highly respectable gentleman and on the other as a villain. The quintessential masquerade occurs, appropriately enough, at Ranelagh, where Tom is invited by Bellaston or "The Queen of the Fairies." From the first, the masquerade is built upon falsity; even the promise which justifies its existence is fallacious. Our cavaliers now arrived at that temple where Heydegger, the great Arbiter Delicarium, the great high-priest of pleasure, presides; and, like other heathen priests, imposes on his votaries by the pretended presence of the deity, when in reality no such deity is there. (p. 508) Pleasure is only an ostensible purpose for the masquerade; the true and less innocent purpose of intrigue is appropriately disguised. Yet the basic idea of disguising one's identity which purportedly underlines the masquerade is inoperative here, for, as Bellaston informs Tom: You cannot conceive anything more insipid and childish than a masquerade to the people of fashion, who in general know one another as well here as when they meet in an assembly or a drawing-room. (p. 510) 39Maurice Johnson, Fielding's Art of Fiction . . . (Philadelphia, 1961), p. 113._________________ 255 The masquerade, if not built upon pleasure or anonymity', realizes its appeal in the allowance which it makes for self-enclosed passion. Here the self, transparently disguised from other selves, begins and ends in itself. Love in the urban world of London "is an unknown passion among the fashionable classes; it is rallied and played with . . ."40 and there is no more obvious symbol for the game of love than the masquerade. The masquerade, used for patently sexual purposes here, is an adequate symbol for the self-enclosed and non pastoral world of London. In the world of London, as we become aware in the last six books, pretense, deceit and disguise reign supreme; these qualities are the very antithesis to the ideal pastoral attitude of the first six books. In the pastoral world, all should be as it appears, and simple innocence should be safe. The world of the first six books does not quite attain this ideal, but it does not completely fail either. The pastoral qualities of simplicity and openness are not completely triumphant in the country world; their opposites are clearly visible in such characters as Blifil and Black George, but deceit 40Frans Pieter Van Der Voore, Henry Fielding Critic and Satirist (New York, 1966), p. 175. 256 of the country characters is only in miniature. It remains for the city to unashamedly paint its deceits larger than life. The masquerade in the city of London is used, then, for social and ethical comment upon the non pastoral life. The masquerade is the most typical of urban employments, but it is based upon principles and passions which are directly antithetical to the pastoral ideals. That the non-pastoral urban life should be based upon pretense and deceit is a patently negative value judgement upon that world's worth; in Tom Jones, Fielding: uses the man motivated by natural feeling [the pastoral character such as Tom] to criticize the conventions and customs of his society, including the aristocratic manners of the Bellastons and Fellamars. (Paulson, pp. 267-26 8) The town is an exposure and a satiric comment upon the depravities of non-pastoral reality. The Pastoral Alter Ego Through the contrast of the town and the country sections of Tom Jones, Fielding presents pairs of parallel characters who function as pastoral alter egos, that is, the pastoral character is conjoined to a non pastoral character who in many ways is parallel to himself. The differences between the city and the country characters are instructive of the differences 257 between the country and the city worlds which they reflect. One of the functions of these parallels is to give "natural reactions opposed to formalized ones" (Paulson, p. 262), and in Tom Jones natural or pastoral reactions are clearly seen as superior to formalized or non-pastoral ones. In Tom Jones, Tom and Nightingale form this kind of parallel pair as do Blifil and Bellaston, and there are numerous less important parallels such as those between Mrs. Miller and Allworthy, Squire Western and Mrs. Western, and Sophia and Harriet. Nightingale is, as Andrew Wright comments, "not, essentially, unlike Tom" although he is a "collection of townly extravagances" (p. 96). Nightingale is, in fact, a town version of the good natured but often weak-willed Tom. His comparison with Tom even in such external qualities as physical strength shows the distance of the townly from the pastoral idea. We are told that Night ingale is physically no match for his footman, and the footman is no match for Tom: and now ensued a combat between Jones and the footman, which was very fierce, but short; for this fellow was no more able to contend with Jones than his master had before been to contend with him. (p. 500) A corresponding weakness in Nightingale's character is illustrated by his actions and attitudes in the affair with Nancy. He is weak, vacillating between 258 what he instinctively desires to do, what he feels to be humanly and logically right, and what he feels bound to do by non-pastoral ideals. Torn between these desires, he completely fails to understand the effect which his actions will have upon Nancy; in this affair he is weak and self-enclosed, thinking primarily of his own pride and social standing. His methods, stealing away by night and leaving a heartless note for the girl, are cowardly and deceptive. Nightingale's conflict reveals that most of his bad actions originate not in his nature but in the affected standards of the town. When Tom reminds him of his duty toward Nancy who has innocently trusted him, Nightingale replies: 'Common sense, indeed, . . . warrants all you say; but yet you well know the opinion of the world is so contrary to it, that, was I to Tiarry a whore, though my own, I should be ashamed of ever showing my face again.' (p. 551) To such an argument and to such a sense of values, Tom's answer comes as a breath of fresh air, perhaps pastoral fresh air: 'Fie upon it, Mr. Nightingale! . . . do not call her by so ungenerous a name: when you promised to marry her she became your wife; and she hath sinned more against prudence than virtue. And what is this world which you would be ashamed to face but the vile, the foolish and the profligate?' (p. 551) Although Tom, who is at that time engaged in the affair with Bellaston, might seem an illogical choice for a 259 moral commentator, his advice to Nightingale shows the superiority of his inherently pastoral attitudes: I have been guilty with women, I own it; but am not conscious that I have ever injured any. Nor would I, to procure pleasure to myself, be knowingly the cause of misery to any human being. (p. 541) Tom's morality is natural and instinctive, based primarily on the pastoral attitude of mutuality and contrasting sharply with the self-enclosed nature of urban sexuality. Of itself, Nightingale's affair with Nancy is unlikely to end well, and it illustrates the danger of the non-pastoral world. As Golden observes: Nancy is saved from destruction— and Fielding is at considerable pains to show how likely it is that Nightingale would actually desert her— through the good offices of Tom Jones and Fielding, and through the weak goodness of Nightingale's character, which allows Tom to persuade him. This episode touches on the sordid. . . . (p. 133) Through the parallel of Tom and Nightingale, we see an underside of urban experience; even the basically good natured are in danger of corruption in the world of London. Similarly, we are forced to see Tom's initial judgement of Nightingale in both a straightforward and an ironic light. He thought he discerned in him much good sense, though a little too much tainted with town foppery; but what recommended him most to Jones were some sentiments of great generosity and humanity which occasionally dropped from him; and particularly many expressions of the highest disinterestedness in the affair of love. 260 On which subject the young gentleman delivered himself in a language which might have very well become an Arcadian shepherd of old, and which appeared very extraordinary when proceeding from the lips of a modern fine gentleman; but he was only one by imitation, and meant by nature for a much better character. (p. 503) The judgement is ironic in that Nightingale's opinions on love are meant primarily as a lure for Nancy. None theless, the judgement Tom makes is correct, for Night ingale is no villain, it is simply that he has lived in town so long that he has become "tainted" by it. Through Nightingale, Fielding illustrates the distortions which are imposed upon even basically good natures through the non-pastoral and non-ideal world of the city, and at the same time suggests the obvious superiority of the pastoral qualities to their non-pastoral counterparts. In contrast to Nightingale and Tom, Bellaston and Blifil both function as unenigmatic symbols of evil in their own worlds, but it is an interesting comment upon their worlds that of the two characters, Blifil is much the less imposing and effective. Blifil1s scheming against Tom does, of course, manage to get the latter expelled from Paradise Hall, but in the end this works for Tom's good; Bellaston's revenge, however, nearly succeeds in having him hanged. Although Bellaston's machinations are ultimately as futile as Blifil's, they are immediately more effective since they bring Tom to 261 prison and a spiritual low point from which escape must be miraculous. Bellaston is a more efficient symbol of evil than Blifil, but she is also, as Empson comments in "Tom Jones," a "satire against the worldly code" (p. 240). Blifil, in contrast, represents not a whole society, but a segment of his country society, and a segment which feels compelled to disguise itself in the clothing of innocence. Lady Bellaston feels no such compulsion. Golden calls Bellaston "the prey of pride and lust" (p. 83), but Blifil is a bloodless hypocrite. Both are, after all is said and done, completely self-enclosed and manipulative; neither has any conception of or interest in the pastoral virtues. Their natures reject openness, sincerity, mutuality, and simplicity? they complicate their world through their attempts to impose their wills upon it. Their minds are turned inward, and their outward expression is always manipulative. Golden compares their minds to a type of hell, perhaps like that of Milton's Satan, who finds that he, himself, is hell: Blifil's mind . . . must be hell because of the violence of his passions and its fear of mankind's hatred. . . . Blifil's and Lady Bellaston's lives are continuous hells, regardless of the social outcome of specific actions. (p. 83) The comparison of the urban and the rural villains 262 accomplishes primarily the realization that evil exists in both country and city. The only difference is that in the city evil is more open and more potent than in the country. Lady Bellaston never needs to put on the pretense of virtue while Blifil never dares to attack directly, but their basic qualities are essentially the same. Sense of Enclosure The horizon of Tom Jones suddenly narrows in the city; this, of course, is partially explainable in terms of the topographical density of the city, but the narrowing seems to be spiritual as well as physical. There is a feeling of disorientation and enclosure as Tom walks the streets of London looking for Sophia. But Jones, as well as Partridge, was an entire stranger in London; and as he happened to arrive first in a quarter of town the inhabitants of which have very little intercourse with the householders of Hanover or Grosvenor Square (for he entered through Gray's Inn Lane), so he rambled about some time before he could find his way. . . . (p. 490) Tom wanders through the streets in a seemingly hopeless quest, but the streets turn into still other streets and only accidentally does he find the Peer's house. The impression is of an inextricable labyrinth in which Jones has lost himself, for he has no guide in the urban world. Just as he is not prepared for the physical 263 topography of London, he is not prepared for the spiritual topography of the city; he comes to it with his pastoral assumptions of honesty and goodness, and he finds that they are inoperative. "The country people in the novel are unprepared for the complex experience of London" (Golden, p. 137), and Tom is perhaps the most unprepared; his natural goodness and naivete leave him a victim in the trap which the city seems to be for him. In London, the relationships between characters grow closer and more entangled. Lord Fellamar and Tom are rival suitors for Sophia, but both are related to Bellaston, the one as confidant, the other as lover, and Sophia herself is related to Bellaston as protege. Both of the city characters are involved in manipulation of the naive rural characters: Fellamar aspires to be Sophia's lover, Bellaston is Jones' mistress, yet all the time the lusts of both are implicitly in contrast with Sophia and Tom's pastoral love. Nightingale Jr.'s intrigue with Nancy is a violation both of the girl's trust and of her mother's good will, while her mother is associated closely with Allworthy as a "good" pastoral character; Allworthy himself functions both as a paragon and in this situation as a friend of Nightingale, Sr., but he also reflects Jones' opinion when he judges 264 Nightingale, Jr. "In general, Fielding brings all his major figures to London because that is the major scene for human action ..." (Golden, p. 144). All roads seem to cross in London, and the crossing is both thematic and structural. The environment of London allows for the realization of the sordid potentialities only latent in the country. In the country, we are always aware of Allworthy's standard of right and wrong, and of the pastoral standard which it reflects, but in the city, Allworthy's innocence does "sit very awkwardly" upon the pastoral characters. The city of London seems almost bent upon destroying the pastoral characters, and it nearly succeeds until Allworthy arrives to bring the pastoral values to the city and to free the ideal characters from its domination. The relief which we glimpse at the end of Tom Jones is that of space and air after enclosure and stifling; the physical topography of the country allows for the expansion of good nature and the simplicity of relationships which is essential to the pastoral dream. Withdrawal to the Country Fielding's characteristic method of ending a novel is through the withdrawal of all the pastoral or good characters into the country, where ostensibly they 265 live ever after in peace and joy. All three of Fielding's major novels, Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, and Amelia, end this way. The only two prose fictions which end with the city instead of the country are Shamela and Jonathan Wild, works which, significantly, we have seen as pastorals of experience, mock-pastorals which deny the pastoral ideal. The withdrawal to the country which Fielding uses in his pastorals of innocence is a way of asserting the triumph of the pastoral world over the world of experience. If the characters can withdraw to their own world of the country, for the time being at least the world of experience can be ignored; it survives in the country only as a vestigial counterforce which sharpens the relish for the pastoral. The most characteristic complaint entered against Tom Jones has had to do with this triumph of the pastoral world through the withdrawal to the country. Things, the critic usually asserts, just do not happen that way. Austin Dobson, for example, reminds us that the probability of Tom's serene reward is highly tenuous when he speaks of "the fortunate— the too fortunate— Mr. Jones."^1 Similarly, Homes Dudden complains that the story "comes perilously near the extreme verge of 4iF'ielding, English Men of Letters Series (London, 1883), p. 131. 266 what is probable" (II, 621). In the normal course of affairs, Tom's imprudence, goodness, and naivete would leave him virtually helpless, and he should, the reader recognizes, logically be made to suffer the usual consequences for these pastoral qualities. For example, the probability in real life of his escaping from Blifil's plot to perjure his witnesses or from Fellamar's plot to have him "pressed" is very small. Yet, if Tom were to suffer the consequences of his thought lessness and goodness, the happy pastoral ending would be impossible. William Empson reminds us that "the machinery of the happy ending derives from the fairy tale, as Fielding perhaps recognized ..." (p. 232). His reference to the fairy tale expresses his own value judgement, but it also evokes the type of world in which it is probable that Tom and Sophia will be able to live happily ever after on Western's estate. The point of Empson's remark, and of Digeon's and Dudden's as well, is that the ending of Tom Jones is not real; such endings are not probable no matter how much we might wish them to be. Real life, they would assert, is not fantasy or a fairy tale; people suffer, either justly or unjustly, as a result of their actions, and there is no such thing as a happily-ever-after; the 267 ugly frogs never turn into handsome princes. That is, it seems to me, the very point of Fielding's novel; the ending is not intended to be real, for it represents the triumph of the pastoral ideal over reality. The pastoral of innocence, as seen particularly in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, ultimately asserts the primacy of the ideal over the real, the pastoral over the non pastoral, and for the real to triumph would be an ultimate denial of the pastoral. The country which Tom and Sophia so improbably withdraw to assures the reader that both characters will live happily ever after amidst the blessings of life. The good characters of the novel, most of whom have been newly married, gather together at the end to celebrate their new found felicity, in a scene which foreshadows their bright future: The evening was spent in much true mirth. All were happy, but those the most who had been most unhappy before. Their former sufferings and fears gave such a relish to their felicity as even love and fortune, in their fullest flow, could not have given without the advantage of such a comparison. (p. 718) All tears will be wiped away, we are assured, and Tom will return to a Paradise Hall no longer infested with snakes. All of the non-pastoral characters— Blifil, Thwackum, Square, even Black George— have been removed, and Paradise Hall becomes the Eden which Allworthy 268 intended it to be. A Paradise Hall that really is Paradise is what the pastoral characters have deserved all along, and if their actually inheriting it is fantasy, it is at least an idealistic triumph. Morris Golden ob s e rve s: As the mind returns to the rewards of serenity after working outward to do good, so his heroes, having demonstrated courageous good will in the dangerous and complex world, earn their serene reward in the country. (p. 145) The country retirement to which the pastoral characters return is a reward, well deserved but hardly ever attained in the real world. It is a reward, but a reward for what? The answers are quite obvious in Tom Jones? Tom inherits the promised land because of his good nature, innocence, and innate virtue. In short, it is his pastoral goodness which qualifies him for such a reward. "The country is," as Digeon observes, "the haunt of those virtues which move the heart, and to speak of it calls up a vision of the Golden Age" (p. 163) . The harmony of the country reflects the harmony of the pastoral spirit of its inhabitants. Tom's marriage, Battestin makes clear, is the "only possible conclusion" that lies "within the frame of Fielding's comic vision of a just and ordered world, of a world in which Wisdom is_ attainable . . ." (Introd., p. 15). Since the world of Tom Jones is, in spite of all 269 the counterforces which pervade it, an ordered and just world, the pastoral forces in the person of Tom and his Sophia must of necessity triumph. Fielding pictures their retreat this way: To conclude, as there are not to be found a worthier man and woman than this fond couple, so neither can any be imagined more happy. They preserve the purest and tenderest affection for each other, an affection daily increased and confirmed by mutual endearments and mutual esteem. Nor is their conduct towards their relations and friends less amiable than towards one another. And such is their condescension, their indulgence, and their beneficence to those below them, that there is not a neighbour, a tenant, or a servant, who doth not most gratefully bless the day when Mr. Jones was married to his Sophia. (p. 721) The eighteenth-century ideal of rural retirement in which one practices continual benevolence to one's friends and neighbours is here seen in its full flowering. The marriage and retirement of the two central pastoral characters, then, establishes peace, joy, and a sense of rightness; it is a world where God really is in his heaven, and all really is right with the world. Tom and Sophia have always belonged to the country, and their withdrawal there is only a logical fulfillment of their nature. Lady Bellaston, in contrast, because of her basic nature, chooses to remain in London, and, indeed, she would be frightfully out of place on Western's country estate. Critics have always emphasized Tom's ultimate identification with the country; Alter, for 270 example, calls Tom "an admirable young country gentleman" (p. 91) and Cross observes that he "quickly learns his lesson" from the world and "becomes in the end a most respectable country squire" (II, 219). From the beginning, of course, there has been no question of Tom's basic orientation; he reflects all the virtues, such as health and vivacity, and the tastes, such as hunting, which are necessary in the country. In London these qualities lacked scope, and he was out of place. Yet beneath the satisfaction and rightness with which the reader sees the withdrawal to the country, he is aware of the counterforce underlying the pastoral ideal. Retirement to Paradise Hall rests, as we have seen, upon events that are realistically improbable. In our world, things cannot work out that way, and we agree with Empson when he says that Tom is "dreadfully in need of good luck" (p. 225) and Golden when he says that the triumph of innocence is "a near thing" (p. 137). The world of Tom Jones, with all its structures and values, is "providentially o r d e r e d . " ^ From Tom's low point when he lies in jail, having ostensibly lost Sophia for good, killed a man, and committed incest, Fielding 42nenry Knight Miller, "Some Functions of Rhetoric in Tom Jones," PQ, XLV (January 1966), 227. 271 raises him to the felicity in which he is found at the end of the novel through a series of improbabilities which he has made probable within the context of the n o v e l .43 in other words, Fielding has deliberately created a world in which the impossible can happen, in which virtue can be rewarded; yet all the while he does not neglect to show us the real world in which the probable always happens and where virtue is more often punished than rewarded. The world of Tom Jones is a pastorally innocent world, the characters, with the exception of the bad natured characters, are simple and innocent, and when they return to the country they go to create the ideal pastoral world as it might be. This is, of course, the comic as well as the pastoral triumph of Tom Jones. The genius of the comic author may in part be measured by his ability to visualize and concep tualize on the grand scale the felt presence of the Ideal at the same time that his comic invention fills the immediate scene with all the preversities and incongruities of the merely Social. On the one hand, his fiction must assure us that there is a world of logic, order, truth, tradition, certainty— a world of Light; and, on the other hand, it must remind us, display for us with shattering clarity, that the world as it is offers, rather, a roiled pool of illogic, 43For an extensive discussion of this point, see R. S. Crane's "The Concept of Plot and Plot in Tom Jones" in Critics and Criticism. 272 confusion, lies, self-seeking, and nonsense. From this mixture of incompatible worlds there is some how distilled, in the great comic writers, a serene essence of comedy. (Miller, p. 228) Such is the serene, pastoral, and comic world of Tom Jones. CHAPTER V THE PASTORAL WORLDS OF AMELIA The pastoral of innocence and the pastoral of experience meet in Amelia, for Fielding's last novel gives expression to and reconciles these apparently contradictory attitudes. In setting, tone, and hope fulness about the possibilities of human experience, Amelia is a pastoral of experience, but it retains the morality and dream of the pastoral of innocence. The dream of the idyllic countryside, quite foreign to a work like Jonathan Wild, permeates the novel and suffuses even those scenes set within Newgate itself. This chapter discusses Amelia primarily in relation to the pastoral of experience, however, for the pastoral dream of innocence in Amelia remains only an echo of a remembered ideal. The urban context of the novel is inescapable; it epitomizes the non-pastoral world with all its sterility and self-enclosure, and if the main characters do escape at the end of the novel into the promised land of the countryside, they tacitly confess the viability of the corrupt city-world. In the process of examining this context, I discuss the city 273 274 itself as a type of metaphor of imprisonment and masquerade, a metaphor which reflects the enclosure, duplicity, and isolation of this non-pastoral world. In a sense, the reader of Amelia finds himself submerged again in the world of Jonathan Wild; the metaphors, the inglorious city, the merely remembered dream of the country, and the darkened tone together reflect a world essentially different from that of Tom Jones or Joseph Andrews. Yet what differentiates this world from that of Jonathan Wild is the presence of the dream and the escape; there is a glorious ideal against which the London of Amelia is inadequate. Nonetheless, the ideal does exist, and one of the proofs of its existence is the felt inadequacy of the present. In examining this relationship between the felt ideal and unideal reality, I have discussed the novel's darkened tone, the symbol of London, the "Noble Model" which is so ingloriously reflected, the infallibility of the paragon, and the ultimate withdrawal into the country. Basically, the world of Amelia is non-pastoral, but juxtaposed to the ideal of a remembered pastoral world. Although the country world is never directly encountered within the work itself, it, nevertheless, looms large in such characters as Dr. Harrison, the good but fallible country parson, in the memories of Booth, 275 who reflects upon the earthly paradise he has lost, and in the eventual reward of a country retirement. It is the dream of innocence, the dream of the pastoral, which sustains a character like Amelia, and which, beneath the twisted world of Newgate and Vauxhall, sustains Fielding and perhaps his reader. I will not pretend to deal in depth with the implications for Fielding of such a reversion to the pastoral of experience after the traditional pastorals of Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews, but, of course, such implications are inescapable. The ethical horizon of Fielding undeniably darkens in his last novel, and the urban setting is a significant contribution to such darkening. By the same token, it is important to realize that Fielding's attitude has consistently been one not of simple idyllic pastoralism; the country in itself has always been only a comparative answer. Justice Fielding, dealing day after day with the dregs of London society, became even more aware than hitherto of the distance between the ideal, represented to him as simple goodness and innocence, and the reality of corruption, represented as the experience of London, but he had never been unaware of this tension. The world of experience and the world of innocence touch in Amelia, and it is not certain which is the victor. Officially, it is the 276 ideal of the pastoral of innocence which triumphs, but nonetheless there hangs a suspicion at the back of Amelia that the triumph is merely official. Darkened Tone in Amelia Amelia, eagerly awaited by the reading public as a sequel to the light-hearted Tom Jones, was at best a disappointment to its first, and perhaps to many of its subsequent readers. Fielding himself reflects the type of reception which his novel received when, in his "Proceedings at the Court of Censorial Enquiry," he has Lady Dilly Dally testify: C. TOWN. I thought your Ladyship had said that Amelia was sad Stuff from Beginning to End. L. DILLY. I believe I might say so.— Eh! I don't always remember what I say? but if I did say so, I was told it.— Oh! yes, now I remember very well, I did say so, and Dr. Dosewell, my Physician, told me so.— The Doctor said, in a great deal of Company, that the Book, I forget the Name of it, was a sad stupid Book, and that the Author had not a Bit of Wit, or Learning, or Sense, or any Thing else.l The opinion of the town often had no better foundation than Lady Dilly, but Old England's rejection, in its December 21, 1751 issue, of the "poor, wretched, depart ing Novel" was fairly consistent with public r e a c t i o n . 2 lThe Covent-Garden Journal, ed. Gerard Edward Jensen (New York, 1964), I, 180. 2Frederic T. Blanchard, Fielding the Novelist: A Study in Historical Criticism (New York, 1926), p. 83. 277 Even twentieth-century readers have been puzzled and disturbed that Fielding could have written a novel like Amelia/ and some have even concluded, with F. R. Leavis, that "by Amelia Fielding has gone soft."3 Frederic L. Blanchard has titled his reception study of the novel "Amelia Damn'd" (pp. 79-103), and, if the twentieth century is less violent in its dislike of the novel it is hardly less antipathetic, for the novel has never been enthusiastically received. Especially in its own time Amelia was not popular, and Wilbur L. Cross adequately catches the public's attitude by his observation that "To say the truth, the public could not understand how so grave a novel had come from Fielding. . . ."4 The grave and darkened tone of Amelia reflected an urban, non-pastoral world so different from the hopeful and ultimately pastoral Tom Jones that Fielding's readers were frankly puzzled; the pastoral of innocence had ended in the sad pastoral of experience. Homes Dudden sums up public reaction to this new version of the pastoral: . . . it seems clear that, while Amelia was applauded by 'the judicious few', it was disliked and depreciated by the literary world in general. 3The Great Tradition (New York, 1964), p. 4. 4The History of Henry Fielding (New York, 1963), I, 310. 278 This is proved by the declarations of the author's enemies, by the testimony of his friends, and by the frank admissions of Fielding himself.5 The novel is still somewhat of a shock to the contemporary reader who approaches it from Tom Jones with the expectation of encountering a similar work, for the buoyancy and comic life of Tom Jones has been replaced by a work which might conceivably be a didactic tract. At least three critics have related the novel to Fielding's An Enquiry into the Late Increase in Robbers; Wilbur Cross (I, 312, 313) and Homes Dudden (II, 838) see Amelia as an expansion of the tract, and Arthur Sherbo sees the tract as emerging from Amelia.** This view of the relationship of the two works has, of course, been dissented from, notably by Sheldon Sacks, who declares that Amelia is not organized as a fictional example of social disorders . . . any more than Tom Jones is organized as a fictional example of the statement that things do not always turn out well for the deserving,7 but the relationship remains generally accepted. Amelia continues to remind its readers of the Enquiry and the grim environment of the London underworld. 5Henry Fielding: His Life, Works and Times (London, 1952) , II, 882. 6"The Time-Scheme in Amelia," Boston University Studies in English, IV (Winter 1960), 223. 7Fiction and the Shape of Belief: A Study of Henry Fielding . . . (Los Angeles, 1967), p. 109. 279 To many readers, past and present, the Fielding of Amelia seemed to have aged, and the darkening tone of his last novel has seemed a pessimistic reflection of what time and experience can do. Austin Dobson observes that "... the Fielding of Amelia is suddenly a far older man than the Fielding of Tom J o n e s . "8 Homes Dudden, likewise, says, The book, indeed, gives an impression that the writer has aged. It is true that he is still but forty-four. . . . He is touched already with that melancholy which often attends advancing years. No longer the joyous observer of the comedy of existence, he now concentrates his attention of life's darker aspects, and is profoundly distressed by the sins, the obdurate follies, and the tragic sufferings of mankind. (II, 806-807) The difference in tone between Tom Jones and Amelia seems to reflect an age difference greater than the two years between 1749 and 1751 would apparently warrant; the horizon has darkened; the voice of the novel has become more mature and less hopeful about the possibilities for goodness. The usual explanation for this darkening tone is that the experience of Bow Street prematurely aged Fielding and clouded his ethical viewpoint. Daily contact with criminals in his London court was undoubtedly abrasive for a sensitive man who was given to reflections 8Fielding, The English Men of Letters Series (London, 1907), p. 154. 280 about the relationship of prudence and good nature. During the years of Bow Street, Fielding was continually exposed to the dregs of urban society; informers were the tools of his trade, and corruption was, at least before his own tenure of office, the expected thing. Seeing London society from the underside and attempting to keep his moral balance in the process must have been a disillusioning and disturbing experience. He saw the corruption of the city, decided that Bosavern Penlez should hang for the sake of society, and dealt with g Elizabeth Canning, all the time keeping himself from the edge of the abyss. He saw the corruption of the city, and it took great strength not to be emotionally engulfed. Criminal London of the time was, indeed, corrupt; H. K. Banerji observes that 9Penlez was convicted by Fielding under the Riot Act of 1715 for his participation in a riot in the Strand early in July of 1749. There was much public feeling against this conviction, but Penlez was hanged October 18, 1749. See A True State of the Case of Bosavern Penlez . . . included in The Works of He~nry Fielding, ed."william Earnest Henley (New York, 1967), XIII, 257-288. Elizabeth Canning accused two gypsies of holding her prisoner in their house during January of 1753. Fielding believed her story, but subsequently the gypsies were found to have an alibi. The gypsies were released, but Elizabeth Canning was deported. See A Clear State of the Case of Elizabeth Canning included in The Works, XIII, 228. 281 some of the most noted criminals that England has ever known, men like Jack Shephard, Jonathan Wild, and Dick Turpin, flourished during the first half of the eighteenth c e n t u r y .10 London itself was such a hot-bed of crime that it was impossible for even an armed man to enter the city alone at night, and Cross records that innocent citizens were often assaulted on the streets (II, 250). The miseries of London low life, chronicled by Hogarth in such engravings as "Beer Street" and "Gin Lane," are not pretty and do not seem apt to increase one's hope for the human race. Innocence was a fragile thing in the Bow Street Court, as was hope that all would yet be well with man; the wonder is that Fielding maintained as much of this hopefulness as he did, for Amelia is an ultimately hopeful book. Discussing the corruption and degeneracy of London in the early eighteenth century, Cross observes, Such was criminal London as Fielding found it. In his contest with the corruption of the Walpole Government, he had assumed the role of Hercules slaying the hydra; he now undertook, in his own phrase, to cleanse the Augean Stables. (II, 252) The tasks which Fielding set for himself in his lifetime were disheartening and disillusioning, and the Augean Stables is a good analogy for the London with which Fielding had to deal. The importance to Fielding's l°Henry Fielding Playwright, Journalist and Master of the Art of Fiction (New York, 1962), p. 219. 282 fiction of the experience of Bow Street, his Augean Stables, has been variously discussed by critics from Digeon to Wright,-^ but Dudden and Wright can be seen as typical of the rest. Dudden exclaims that Fielding's view of society, as expressed in this novel, is frankly pessimistic. His recent experiences at Bow Street, and his recent researches into the causes of crime, had inspired him with a depressing conviction of an almost universal wrongness of things. His old cheerfulness had well-nigh vanished. He now contemplates the world with gloomy melancholy, marking on all sides ominous signs of degeneration, and cherishing but feeble hope of any improvement in the future. (II, 838) Wright's comments are similar, but the emphasis is put upon Fielding's personal suffering and the "personal fate which was overtaking him" as well as "the experience of Bow Street" which led to a "crueller sense of life and a sterner purpose of art" (p. 53). Years of pain and constant contact with the lowest strata of society could not help but have a disturbing effect on Fielding's tenuous belief in the eternal fitness of things. The experience of Bow Street confirmed Fielding in what we llDigeon, 221; Dudden, II, 838; Robert Halsband, "Fielding: the Hogarth of Fiction," SRL, V (September 30, 1950), 20-21; Michael Irwin, Henry Fielding: The Tentative Realist (Oxford, 1967) , p. 112; Allan Dugald McKillop, The Early Masters of English Fiction (Lawrence, Kansas, 1967), p. 136; Allan Wendt, "The Naked Virtue of Amelia," ELH, XXVII (June 1960), 147; Andrew Wright, Henry Fielding Mask and Feast (Los Angeles, 1966), pp. 51, 53-54. 283 have called elsewhere the "pastoral of experience"; forced to live in the atmosphere of The Beggar's Opera and Jonathan Wild, he could not help but be affected by the wasteland of the human spirit which surrounded him. It is no wonder that in Amelia the tone is darker and hope is dimmer, for London and the non-ideal world of urban society must have seemed omnipresent. Andrew Wright relates not only the increased pessimism, but a new belief in "the sterner purpose of art" to Fielding's work at Bow Street. The persuasive tone, often remarked upon in Amelia, is undoubtedly related in part to Fielding's work as a magistrate in the Bow Street Court. One of the inescapable character istics of Amelia is its moral content and tone. Martin C. Battestin, significantly, has compared Wilson's tale in Joseph Andrews with the whole of Amelia.George S h e r b u r n l 3 and W. Ross Winterowd have discussed the persuasive nature of the novel, the latter commenting upon the "urgency" of the "moral tone of the b o o k . " - ^ 12The Moral Basis of Fielding's Art: A Study of Joseph Andrews (Middletown, Conn., 1959), p. 123. 13"Fielding's Social Outlook," PQ, XXXV (January 1956), pp. 16-17. 14"Rhetoric in a Novel," Rhetoric: A Synthesis (New York, 1968), p. 202. 284 The novel's basic purpose is patently didactic and its author has "in terms of his own experience, moved from the position of successful writer to that of successful public servant" (Winterowd, pp. 198-199). This didacticism is, in itself, saddening when taken in conjunction with Fielding's frequent assertions in his other novels that virtue can never be learned, for, with Joseph Andrews, he was convinced that "if a young Horse was vicious in his Nature, no Correction would make him otherwise; I take it to be equally the same among Men. . . ."15 Amelia is "an explicitly didactic novel by a writer who does not believe that lessons can be taught, or learned" (Wright, pp. 16 8-169). And is not the total effect of such didacticism a form of pessimism? Nevertheless, Amelia is build upon an irresolvable paradox about the nature of public and private corrup tion. Amelia will demonstrate, Fielding tells us, that Life may as properly be called an art as any other; and the great incidents in it are no more to be considered as mere accidents than the several members of a fine statue or a noble poem.16 Amelia does not quite demonstrate this; instead, it seems to me to demonstrate that if life is an art, it is an 15Joseph Andrews, ed. Martin C. Battestin (Middletown, Conn., 1967), p. 231. l^Amelia (London, 1966), I, 4. 285 art based not upon skill or moral intent but upon capricious fortune. Only the possession of enough money to manipulate or withdraw from a corrupt society could ensure Booth of justice. The novel is, as Dudden observes, "perhaps the earliest example of a story constructed on the theme of the tragedy of poverty ..." (II, 822) . Poverty is a tragedy because it exposes us to the injustice of a corrupt world, a world the values of which are based upon the possession of wealth; desert is nothing, as the country gentleman assures Dr. Harrison: "My dear, dear sir . . . what is the merit of a subaltern officer? . . . Do you think it is possible to provide for all men of merit" (II, 2 2 1 ) 1 Society is not set up to reward Booth with any more than half-pay and genteel starvation. In the urban world of Amelia, the normal fate of the Good Natured Man would be either starvation or imprisonment, for such a man is an infant unprotected from a malevolent fortune apparently in league with a corrupt society. Morris Golden observes that "not before Amelia had he [Fielding] shown so clearly the normal danger to the good."17 Parson Adams will somehow exist on his twenty-three pounds a year, but Billy Booth on ^ Fielding's Moral Psychology (Amherst, Mass., 1966) , p. 53. 286 his half-pay of forty pounds is lost in the jungles of London. Innocence is no longer a quality which guarantees ultimate victory; Booth is rescued from London, but the reader perceives that his normal fate would have been gradual slipping into greater and greater degrees of poverty, debt, and degradation. Fielding became increasingly concerned, in Amelia, about the responsi bilities of the good and the innocent to guard themselves from the traps of the malicious. The good man is often doomed to succumb to temptation whether he will or no; Booth is not particularly fond of gambling, nor given to lechery, yet both of these become serious indiscretions which threaten his ruin. Booth's succumbing to these temptations is a reflection not of his nature, but of a character too weak to overcome the temptations of the urban world. He is not malicious, but he is indiscrete and In the world of Amelia there is a real possibility that indiscretion may have consequences involving the imprudent person in guilt— unintentional, in a sense undeserved, but serious guilt.18 Booth is, on one hand, seriously threatened by his lack of discretion and prudence, but it is difficult to prove that he would be much better off even with much 18coolidge, John S., "Fielding and 'Conservation of Character', MP, LVII (May 1960), pp. 254-255. 287 more prudence. It is true, as Golden says, that "in Amelia the social consequences of unguarded innocence are so bad as to make it culpable," and "Fielding's sympathy with innocence was mixed with impatience at the folly and pride with which it can meet the world" (p. 138). Innocence alone is no longer enough to engage Fielding's unqualified sympathy; the individual has a moral responsibility to gird himself against the selfishness and temptations which he will inevitably meet. George Sherburn has asserted that Booth's basic failing is that "his moral courage is weak because he believes men act from their natural and not from their rational appetites. . . . "I9 Booth's deterministic outlook places him at the mercy of those around him? Sherburn assures us that Fielding always asserts the moral responsibility of the individual; even in Amelia, where social conditions loom large, he, unlike some modern novelists, never allows society to become the scapegoat for the individual. (pp. 15-16) But there is a sense in which Booth is most notably the victim of his social situation, an innocent from the country, trapped in the city which he can neither control nor comprehend. Most of the complexities in which he 19"Fielding's Amelia: An Interpretation," ELH, III (March 1936), p. 6. 288 finds himself are the direct result of his basic innocence of the society in which he must live. Michael Irwin asserts that it is not a lack of moral courage, but a moral impotence which limits Booth: . . . Booth's failure to obtain promotion renders him morally impotent. He is confined to the verge of the court, with no prospect of employment and no obvious course of action open to him. The lack of moral courage which Sherburn describes cannot, in these circumstances, be easily demonstrated.20 There is no way, seemingly, to escape the dilemma of the innocent and unprotected man in society, no way except withdrawal from society as represented by the city. The alternative to the corrupt society of London is the remembered ideal of the country, to which Booth and Amelia withdraw at the end of the novel. In this connection, Golden asserts: . . . the regular retreat of his heroes to the country implies continuous pressure in the author supporting withdrawal. But never before was it so explicit as in the last, sad novel. (p. 51) The last novel is sad because it implies that man cannot make an ideal life for himself, that society is corrupt, and that the good man cannot live within its confines. The withdrawal to the country in Tom Jones and Joseph Andrews is a joyous reward; in Amelia it is still a 20Henry Fielding: The Tentative Realist (Oxford, 1967), p. 119. 289 reward, but it is also a retreat mingled with defeat. Booth may be afraid of the city either because he lacks moral courage or because he is morally impotent, but either explanation tacitly admits that reality is stronger than the ideal world. The consequent darkening of tone in Amelia might reflect a failure of Fielding's belief in the possibil ities of human nature. In Fielding's novels the real world has always been discernible beneath the surface of the ideal; the country has never been the unqualified sanctuary of goodness and beauty except in his happy endings, yet in Amelia the real world seems somehow overshadowing. Only in Amelia does the ideal seem so distant as to be only a sad dream of what might be on some other planet. Michael Irwin reflects this when he says: . . . often in his work, as in Jonathan Wild, there is an underlying moral uncertainty. Only in Amelia does Fielding explicitly face the fact that the society he is living in is infinitely remote from the Christian ideal. (p. 49) The society in which Fielding and Booth are living is not only infinitely remote from the Christian ideal; it is remote from the pastoral ideal as well, since both ideals are part of the same dream. The dream, seeingly lost in the world of Amelia, is of a golden age of perfection obtainable in human form within human life, a perfection 290 unmarred by the filth and corruption in which human lives must of necessity be spent. This recognition is implicit in much of Fielding's work, but it is often covered up by the comic tone. Hamilton Macallister writes, "In Amelia, I think for the only time, Fielding gives way to, and indulges in, the melancholy which hangs at the back of his other writings."2^ - The realization that man can never attain even a reasonable approximation of the ideal, that he lives in a corrupt and unideal world perched tentatively on the edge of chaos, is part of this melancholy. The city of London with its prisons and masquerades, the world of the metropolis, the world of reality which denies the ideal, in which every man is imprisoned within himself and isolated by his mask from every other man, is not an accidental setting for Amelia. Such a world seems almost to deny the existence of the simple, open country in which appearance and reality are the same. But it does not: man is sometimes good, and love can exist, but the ideal is only a memory, and the hero and heroine, we are told (for we are never completely convinced), with draw into that beautiful ideal world, while we are trapped in the world of reality and darkness. 2^-Fielding (London, 1967) , p. 131. 291 London as Symbol In Amelia Fielding elaborates at full-length the symbol of London. Until this time, with the exception of Jonathan Wild and Shamela, the primary orientation of his novels has been the countryside through which his characters so exuberantly wander. Irwin comments that in Amelia "the journey which plays so important a part in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones is missing" (p. 114), and upon this significant omission hangs a tale, for the journey was always set in the country. The world described in Amelia, however, is urban, a world full of crowds, amusements, sponging houses, and traps for the unwary, yet the dream, the remembered ideal, is a rural dream of an "earthly paradise" where "meadows . . . [are] washed by a clear trout stream ..." (I, 49). This concentration on the urban is integrally related to the quality in the novel which evokes such comments as "the total effect of Amelia is undeniably depressing" (Irwin, p. 133), for, as Sherburn observes of Fielding, "whenever he writes about London his tone becomes grim, hard, distressing" ("Fielding's Social Outlook," p. 10). Urban London becomes for Fielding a metaphor of a moral and ethical state; in Amelia the vice and duplicity of the city become a reflection of the state of man individually and in society. London 292 is a symbol for the state of man, but at the same time it is also an underworld experience, with the image of Newgate and the sponging house dominant. Amelia, for all its official hopefulness, could not have been set in the country; the city and its pitfalls are a necessary projection of the ethically darkened cast of man's spirit. London as a symbol reflects the thematic images which recur and intertwine, producing a world not entirely dissimilar to that of Jonathan Wild. As in that early novel, to which Amelia has been called a retrogression (Wright, p. 173), such images partially account for the darkened texture of the work, but their primary function seems to be a thematic statement of the corruption of the city-world. In Amelia images of imprisonment, masquerade, duplicity, and doubleness dominate, leading finally to a vision of an urban inferno almost Dantesque in effect. Like Dante's inferno, visions of the intended paradise can be glimpsed through the cracks of the universe, but most of the inhabitants of the waste land are doomed. In Amelia these images become a vision of London as a type of hell, an inferno of the human spirit, and it is no accident that at the end of the novel the heroine and her family are removed to a country paradise, having undergone the inferno and 293 purgatory of the city. Imprisonment At the very beginning of Amelia, the reader is plunged into the midst of the inferno which is London by his introduction into the injustice of Judge Thrasher's court and by the Newgate scenes which follow immediately. The tone and basic "case" of the novel are firmly established by the first three books (Winterowd, p. 206), but these early scenes in Newgate also serve the function of introducing the basic imagery of imprisonment and masquerade, giving them their initial, even quintes sential, statement. These images create an awareness, inescapable even in the first chapter of the first book, that the world in which the hero and heroine must move is hopelessly corrupt, that the novelist "finds rotten the very fabric upon which the art of life ought to be stitched" (Wright, p. 10 8). Judge Thrasher's court in the first book serves as an initiation into the duplicity and injustice of urban life, a type of vestibule to the inferno of Newgate. In this chapter, the reader is oriented; he knows where he is and what he is to expect from this world. The lesson, to be inculcated again and again, that here justice is inverted is made by a succession of innocent "criminals" and guilty "victims" in the court 294 of justice, by a "wretch . . . charged with a battery by a much stouter man than himself" (I, 7), and by a young servant girl who was sent to "fetch a midwife" and declared "guilty within the statute of street- walking" (I, 8). We know by now that we are in an inverted world where desert and reward are unconnected and where innocence is a far weaker guarantee of immunity from the law than is a well placed pence. There is a sense of helplessness for the poor wretches trapped in the legal system and the society symbolized by Thrasher's court. This same feeling of helplessness is reinforced later on in the Newgate scenes by a succession of unjustly imprisoned "felons." Indeed, one of the unavoidable lessons of Newgate is that in the world of Amelia appearance and reality do not often coincide, and guilt is seldom linked with punishment. Booth's introduction into Newgate is accomplished through an almost ritualistic explanation of the "evils" of that society. The ritual "uncasing" (I, 11) of the penniless Booth is followed by his encounter with "Blear-eyed Moll, a woman of no very comely appearance" (I, 12) who in spite of her moral and physical wretchedness, "was one of the merriest persons in the whole prison" (I, 13). Moll appears almost as a gorgon guarding the gate of the city 295 of Dis, but Booth is rescued not by a word of Power from on high, but by the disreputable Robinson, who substitutes for Virgil in this descent into the hell that is Newgate. The chapter entitled "Disclosing further secrets of the prison-house" introduces Booth still further into the knowledge that here appearance and reality are disparate, that nothing is so much suspect as the appearance of innocence. Here condemned men make merry, young girls with "great innocence" in their countenances reply with a volley of indecent oaths, and an old man dies from starvation in prison for having received a loaf of bread "knowing it to be stolen" (I, 17). If a pious Methodist appears to discourse on religion, the Methodist will also search Booth "to the bottom" and make away with any moveables. The pleasures and occupations of Newgate are likewise intended to expose the hollowness and emptiness of the people who engage in them. Futile and hopeless, even compulsive, searching after pleasure is the most dominant characteristic, where gamesters play even though there is nothing to win, men pick each other's pockets of useless goods, and the hero himself engages in a furtive intrigue productive of nothing but confusion and uneasiness for the future. As Milton's angels amuse themselves on the brink of the great abyss, so the 296 inhabitants of Newgate ignore or forget their pain. Fielding remarks that these regions are "not improperly called infernal" (I, 47), and not the least infernal quality is the isolation of the individual. Booth was destitute of the common necessaries of life, and consequently unable to subsist where he was; nor was there a single person in town to whom he could, with any reasonable hope, apply for his delivery. (I, 21) In the city, and the prison which stands symbolically in the midst of the city, the good man is inevitably alone, isolated almost from himself. For the first time in a Fielding novel, real isolation and want face the hero, and he is not adequate to them. The Newgate which physically imprisons Booth, emotionally imprisons him by isolating him from Amelia, the focus of innocence and good for him, thus becoming the catalyst which allows him to sink into the vices of gaming and adultery. Newgate is not an accidentally chosen site for the narration of the two long informative tales by Booth and Miss Matthews, tales which set the stage for the succeeding action, and inform us of the backgrounds of the narrators. For both Miss Matthews and Booth, Newgate is, in a sense, the total result of their pasts; each has been led to his present imprisonment not by unaided chance, but because of certain character traits and 297 weaknesses. Booth, unjustly imprisoned more because of his imprudence and poverty than because of his Culpability, is essentially the victim of a society in which he cannot succeed and a nature which is basically passive. Miss Matthews, characteristically, is imprisoned for an act of passion, the attempted murder of her seducer. The tales of both prisoners reveal them each imprisoned by his own nature, Booth for his passivity, Miss Matthews for her passion. Later in the novel we will see that virtually everyone, with the exception of Amelia herself, is likewise imprisoned within his nature, or his dominant passion. Newgate and London become, in one sense, a symbol for the slavery one chooses for oneself, the slavery of self-enclosure and selfishness. All of London, because of his guilt and his poverty, is a prison for Booth, a prison from which he escapes only at the end of the novel when he returns to the country. His consciousness of guilt, incurred as a result of his liaison with Miss Matthews, makes it impossible for him to be innocently at ease with Amelia. He was just delivered from a prison, and in the possession of his beloved wife and children . . . yet it is certain that there were very few men in the world more seriously miserable than he was at this instant. A deep melancholy seized his mind, and cold damp sweats overspread his person, so that he was scarce animated. . . . He endeavoured . . . to act the part of a happy man; 298 but he found no supply of spirits to carry on this deceit. . . . (I, 169) Booth's emotions, at least, are still imprisoned by his consciousness of guilt. His poverty makes him a prisoner in yet another sense, and, coupled with his consciousness of his guilt with Miss Matthews, it makes his relationship with Amelia seem a type of prison. Mrs. Ellison speaks truer than she imagines when she says to Booth, "... you must be a close prisoner with your lady; and I believe there is no man in England but would exchange his liberty for the same gaol" (I, 225) . Perhaps no man in England would hesitate to change places with Booth, but his position as an improvident husband and father weighed down by guilt and the fear of poverty is certainly unenviable. Booth is emotionally imprisoned by circumstances of his own making and by the malevolence of urban fortune. Booth is also imprisoned physically within the verge of the court during most of the novel. Six days of every seven he is confined to that neighbourhood near Whitehall and St. James, where he is free from arrest for debt, a limitation symptomatic of his insecurity in urban society. This limitation severely restricts his ability to extricate himself from the economic and moral perils of his situation. Repeated chapters open with 299 such information as When that happy day came, in which unhallowed hands are forbidden to contaminate the shoulders of the unfortunate, Booth went early to the colonel's house. . . . (I, 186) or . . . as it was not that day in the week in which all parts of the town are indifferent, Booth could not wait on the colonel. (I, 257) Always in the background, and often in the foreground, there is a consciousness of the threat of the bailiff and of arrest for debt. Physically and emotionally, Booth is imprisoned within the verge of the court, surrounded by the misfits of society, and by his poverty and improvidence. Repeated arrests interrupting the enlarged imprisonment of the verge only ring changes upon the theme of liberty and imprisonment. Booth wishfully speculates, for example, on the relative freedom of the laborers whom he sees on the street: . . . he in reality envied every labourer whom he saw pass by him in his way. The charms of liberty, against his will, rushed on his mind; and he could not avoid suggesting to himself how much more happy was the poorest wretch who, without control, could repair to his homely habitation and to his family, compared to him, who was thus violently, and yet lawfully, torn from the company of his wife and children. (II, 58) Ironically, Booth's precarious gentility makes economic liberty impossible; if his body is enchained by the bailiff, his spirit is likewise in bondage by his failure 300 to find a place within London's economic and social structure. The bailiff himself becomes an almost symbolic figure, standing as he does for the corruption and degeneracy both of the laws and of the entire social fabric which they represent. The bailiff has his own conception of liberty and his place in society, but Fielding shows us that it is a sad society indeed which places such men in power. The bailiff's concept of liberty is vaguely connected with the constitution of England and the "freedom" to arrest a man for debt. With Harrison, the paragon and consequently the ethical voice of the novel, we cynically observe that We do, indeed, with great justice and propriety value ourselves on our freedom if the liberty of the subject depends on the pleasure of such fel Lows as these, (II, 106) Ironically, Booth's freedom is always at the mercy of just "such fellows as these." "Such fellows as these" make up the society which will always imprison the Booths of this world. Booth's weakness makes him the legal prey of such men until, during his third imprisonment, he is so converted by reading Barrow that he is able to escape the prison of his own philosophy and passivity. Before this time, Booth is lost; Amelia has temporarily lost faith in him, and Dr. Harrison is in virtual despair of his reformation. 301 This final imprisonment, the apparent triumph of the symbolic city, leads ironically to a final rescue and release. Fielding has Harrison make this release explicit by saying that "as the devil hath though proper to set you free, I will try if I can prevail on the bailiff to do the same" (II, 288). Booth's new belief in Christianity and the order of things enables him, in the world of the novel at least, to be redeemed and set free from the prison of London because it sets his spirit free from his pessimistic determinism. The image of the prison has functioned in a number of ways: as a revelation of the injustice of society, as a means of isolation, as a reflection of guilt and maladjustment, and as an unfair means of taking away the liberty of a free but unfortunate man. The bondage Booth has been subjected to has been psychological and spiritual as well as physical, and his very presence in the city of London, far from the trout streams of Harrison's rural paradise, in itself is a type of imprisonment. The spirit of Amelia is one of bondage, of imprisonment; all of society is a kind of prison within which Booth and Amelia find themselves. Of this prison, John Butt has said, . . . the reader recognizes that Newgate was only a somewhat more lurid epitome of society outside, where merit counts for nothing, where civil and 302 military places go by influence exerted for a bribe, where those in high places have rogues, pimps and bawds in their pay, and where gallantry is a cover-up for fornication and adultery. . . .22 London is a trapped and imprisoned world, in bondage to its own vice and degeneracy, and Newgate, which introduces the novel, stands as a fit symbol of that world. Masquerade We have seen that in the ideal pastoral world appearance is^ reality and only the non-pastoral characters like Blifil and Bridget are other than they seem. The truly pastoral character is always unmasked; the face he shows to the world is his true face. Yet in the urban world of Amelia the image of the mask, of duplicity and doubleness, is a major symbol. Appearance here is seldom reality; society is composed of a collection of individual wills, each determined to manipulate and control, and to employ any means of deception possible for such control. Appearances are always shifting into incongruous realities in the world of Amelia and Booth, and even the good characters are not simple. . . . in this climactic descent into hell, all motives but Amelia's and Booth's are shoddy, manipulative, devious. The stakes are mean— military promotion, prestige at the expense of others, sexuality without a trace of exuberance— and the game is wearying. Any reminder of virtue 22Fielding, Writers and Their Work Bibliographic Series no. 57 (London, 1954), p. 25. 303 is a roaring joke. We are approaching the very modern world of The Waste Land and NO' Exit. (Golden, p. 51) At the heart of this image of masquerade is a pessimistic condemnation of man's motives and goals. London becomes the stage for a gigantic masquerade which we call human life, a masquerade in which we disguise our true selves from each other and ourselves. As Golden indicated, the masquerade image is directly connected with the descent into hell; as man becomes more and more entrapped in the London world, identities become permanent facades. The Noble Lord who constitutes one of the more important threats to Amelia's virtue serves as an appropriate symbol of social relationships in this world; his identity is fluid, first as the man at the Oratorio, later as Mrs. Ellison's lodger, as the benevolent Uncle, as the sympathetic patron, and as the heartless seducer. At one point, in the history of Mr. Trent, he is associated with Jupiter, that master of many identities, when Fielding informs us that . . . after some debate with himself in what manner he [the Noble Lord] should approach his love, he at last determined to do it in his own person; for he conceived, and perhaps very rightly, that the lady, like Semele, was not void of ambition, and would have preferred Jupiter in all his glory to the same deity in the disguise of an humble shepherd. (II, 237) 304 The Noble Lord's fluid identities are intended primarily as a trap, a deceptive device for Amelia's vanity, but they also reflect the society which produces and sustains him. For not only does he employ such masks; he is known by the whole town to do so. All the Town, with the exception of Booth and Amelia, knows him as well beneath his mask as in his normal dress; it is only their innocence which makes the pastoral characters unaware of his multiple identities. It is typical of the Lord that his final seductions customarily are the result of a masquerade ticket, a device which he practices with success upon Mrs. Bennett, but which is unsuccessful with Amelia. Minor characters who cluster around the Noble Lord are, likewise, given to masks. Mrs. Ellison cultivates the fagade of a genteel cousin of the Noble Lord, but upon closer examination proves to be a fraud, although she is a complex character simultaneously capable of compassion and calculated cruelty. Trent, the ex-hero and pimp, fluctuates back and forth between the respectable fagade which he presents to Booth and his alternate role as the Lord's dupe and solicitor. Similarly, Mrs. Bennett, although a sympathetic character in the main, is complex and at least once in the novel employs the device of disguise for her own 305 uses at the masquerade when she pretends to be Amelia. She is, for the most part, "a strayed lamb rather than a black sheep" (Sacks, p. 216), but her character is not completely clear. She is, for example, apparently addicted to drink and learning, and her condescending attitude toward Sargeant Atkinson while amusing is not presented approvingly. Even a sympathetic urban character like Mrs. Bennett has an identity which, in the final analysis, is ambiguous. The less sympathetic Colonel James also alternates between two roles or masks, since he poses as Booth's benefactor while being, in reality, his oppressor. He is simultaneously Booth's friend and Amelia's would-be seducer, making use of his friendship and his role as counselor and general treasurer for Booth as a means of coming at Amelia. We are told at his first infatuation with Amelia that His mind, however, no sooner suggested a certain secret to him than it suggested some degree of prudence to him at the same time; and the knowledge that he had thoughts to conceal, and the care of concealing them, had birth at one and the same instant. (I, 262) His preservation of the mask of friendship is so success ful that Dr. Harrison himself is chagrined at his own gullibility: . . . he hath the fairest and most promising appearance I ever yet beheld. A good face, they say, is a letter of recommendation. 0 Nature, 306 Nature! why art thou so dishonest as ever to send men with these false recommendations into the world? (II, 131) Yet, Colonel James's is not a simple mask, for at the end of the novel tranquility is restored, and the Booths go to dine with the Jameses, supposedly with no hard feelings or hypocrisy. The mask of the friend and the patron, like that of the seducer, is assumed and resumed at will. At least twice in the novel places of pleasure and masquerades are explicitly introduced, both times with disturbing results. The first encounter with public places of pleasure is at Vauxhall, where Amelia's pleasant little idyll with her children and Dr. Harrison is smashed by the two young wags who pretend to take her for a Lady of Pleasure. The clergymen who attend Amelia prove ineffective in protecting her, and it is only the chance encounter with Trent, a man of dubious reputation himself, which saves the situation. Hamilton Macallister remarks of this scene that "There is a bitterness in this scene which, I think, is very revealing. Fielding was beginning to dislike the world he lived in" (p. 130). The first public encounter with identity has been barely saved by chance, and the world of Amelia is seen to be a treacherous one in which apparent identity is paramount, and reality is nothing. 307 The masquerade scenes which follow at Ranelagh function as an explicit statement of the masquerade motif. Almost all of the main characters, with the exception of good Dr. Harrison, Amelia, and Atkinson, are present here, and all are, for various reasons, disguised from each other. The ostensible Amelia is approached by both her would-be lovers, each in a perceptible enough disguise; Booth is accosted by two masks, one a former mistress, the other a potential mistress; and Mrs. Bennett employs a double disguise. Ironically, Miss Matthews, the other woman of the novel, appears in the garb of an innocent shepherdess (II, 170), thus complicating the intrigue with Booth and leading to his third arrest. The purpose of the masquerade is ostensibly pleasure, but in reality its purpose is deception and seduction, since each of the characters at the masquerade is attempting to deceive or manipulate at least one other character. The masquerade also serves as the scene for an incongruous sermon against adultery, incongruous because all of the circumstances in which it is read are intended for the purpose of adultery. This is the "reminder of virtue" which, Golden observes, is "a roaring joke" in this world (p. 51). There is a nightmare quality about the Ranelagh scenes, an explicit descent into deception 308 which reinforces the image of an urban and moral inferno. Ranelagh marks the moral low point in the novel, the descent into the underworld, into a moral hell. The images of imprisonment and masquerade are interlocking; they body forth a world of experience, a distorted society, a Newgate pastoral. In this respect, the world of Amelia is remarkably like that of Jonathan Wild, but at least here there is still hope of another world. Ronald Paulson describes the world of Amelia thus: Evil in the Juvenalian world is pervasive. Amelia makes monotonously regular all the isolated evils of the earlier books: whenever a good sergeant appears there is bound to be a fifteen-year-old colonel to countermand his wise order; if a man does a good deed, he will certainly be thrown into prison by the police. Every person to whom one turns is prepared to betray him, and whenever he leaves home a sister is bound to forge a will and take the family fortune herself. Friends are potential corruptors of his wife, philosophers are sharpers, and religious pretenders are pickpockets.23 But for all the deception and hypocrisy of Amelia's world, there is still the remembrance of another world, an ideal world, outside of the corrupt city where man will be free and where appearance will be reality. The ideal, however, is only remembered, and the escape, when 23satire and the Novel in Eighteenth-Century England (New Haven, Conn., 1967), p. 162. 309 it comes, only official. Amelia and the Aeneid Fielding assures us that the epic argument of Amelia will be "The various accidents which befel a very worthy couple after their uniting in a state of matrimony ..." (I, 3), and the classically oriented reader can hardly help but remember another epic argument, Virgil's, when he declares "Arma Virumque Cano." Fielding, however, does not sing of arms and the man, but of a man disarmed in a hostile, threatening, and inglorious world. The relationship between the novel and the epic, although officially well established, is nevertheless of uncertain dimensions, more often than not functioning ironically. It is not a direct correspondence of the type of Joyce's Ulysses; rather it is a loose and ironic relationship of two epics widely separated in time. Fielding himself explicitly acknowledged Virgil as his model at the convention of the "Court of Censorial Enquiry" in his Covent Garden Journal. Here, in a much quoted passage, Fielding asserts that he has . . . followed the Rules of all those who are acknowledged to have writ best on the Subject; and if her [the novel's] Conduct be fairly examined, she will be found to deviate very little from the strictest Observation of all those Rules; neither Homer nor Virgil pursued them with greater Care 310 than myself, and the candid and learned Reader will see that the latter was the Noble model, which I made use of on this Occasion. (I, 186) This much Fielding informs the reader, but the question of degree and method of influence is left for the "candid and learned reader" to determine for himself. Two modern critics, Lyall Powers and Maurice Johnson, discuss such relationships in detail, and from such discussions certain acknowledged parallels have been agreed upon. Booth, they have agreed, is patently Father Aeneas (eventually to be Pious Aeneas), in search of his world, and Miss Matthews is Carthaginian Dido who lures Aeneas from the path of duty. Powers argues that Booth and Aeneas share a common destiny: each is seeking to provide a secure foundation for his progeny, and each already has some family to care for.2^ Johnson, conscious of the disparity between the Roman hero and the English debtor, explains: Storied Aeneas, the son of a goddess, had his greatness as founder of the Roman nation sung in epic verse. Fielding's transposition causes Booth, the little officer on half-pay, to assume some reflected, universal significance. Booth's characteristics, experiences, and fortunes take point from those of Virgil's hero, lifting him above the absurd diminutiveness to be expected in mock-heroic.25 24"The Influence of the Aeneid on Fielding's Amelia," MLN, LXXI (May 1956), 331. 25Fielding's Art of Fiction (Philadelphia, 1961), pp. 152-153. 311 The point is well taken that the Aeneid is a pattern upon which the framework of the novel is laid? often the figure of Aeneas looms in the background of London where Booth seeks his own inglorious destiny. At least as often as not, however, the function of the framework seems to be to produce an ironic tension between the two works through the disparity between the noble model and the ignoble reality. The Aeneid evokes an ideal of greatness and grandeur which doubly exposes the sordidness of the world in which Amelia is set. The exploits of storied Aeneas dwarf the frustrations of Billy Booth, who lacks the "moral courage" (Sherburn, "Fielding's Amelia," p. 6) to survive. Here the relationship between the two works is ironic and bathetic in Alan Kernan's sense, for while in irony appearance is always shifting away from reality or reality breaking up into contradictory parts; in bathos the existent is falling away from the ideal.26 When the pattern of Roman nobility and glory is incarnated in eighteenth-century London, the result is the sordid. Fielding's choice of the Aeneid as his "noble 26The Plot of Satire (New Haven, Conn., 1965), p. 23. 312 model" is by no means casual; the ideal which Booth fulfils so inadequately is specifically Roman. The ideal is of Virgil's Aeneas, founder of the city of Rome, the city associated in the eighteenth-century mind with a lost golden age. Carl L. Becker in The Heavenly City of the Eighteenth-Century Philosophers points out the imaginative potency of the idea of Rome for the eighteenth-century philosophers who, although they contemptuously dismissed the Garden of Eden as myth, looked enviously back to the golden age of Roman virtue, or across the waters to the unspoiled innocence of an Arcadian civilization that flourished in Pennsylvania.27 The myth of Arcadia and the Garden of Eden seem an inevitable part of civilized man who longs for and must believe in an ideal golden age located somewhere either in time or in space. For the eighteenth century, this ideal age was Roman. The dream of the golden age is, as we have seen, integrally related to the impulse that produced the pastoral, and the themes of the lost innocence of the Arcadian shepherd and the corruption of the urban world are bound up with the image of the city Rome. When, however, as in the case of Amelia, the Roman myth is evoked, there is often a doubleness of 27(New Haven, Conn., 1932), p. 30. 313 attitude, an ambivalence about both the myth and the present reality. The glorious city of Rome serves as the backdrop to the inglorious city of London, but at the bottom of this attitude there is a fear and an awareness that perhaps the ideal in time was uncomfortably close to the diminished reality. Paulson points out the relation between Amelia and Juvenal's Third Satire, in which Umbricius, "the last upholder of Roman values in an un-Roman Rome where money . . . controls preferment, justice and of course chastity and honor," rails against his corrupt urban world (p. 161). In many ways, Umbricius is closer to Booth and to actual Roman life than is Aeneas, and herein rests a world of disillu sionment; all the glory and greatness of the Arcadian myth, the myth of innocence and goodness, tarnishes in the face of inevitable reality. The Third Satire "Rome" also ends, as does Amelia, with withdrawal (or is it retreat?) into the country, perhaps the only way to preserve mythic innocence. But the suspicion lingers that such preservation is seldom possible in the real world of experience. Johnson's and Powers' treatment of the parallels between the two epics (if the reader will grant the application of such a term to Amelia) illustrates the facility with which these relationships can be traced, 314 but it seems ultimately that the purpose of the parallels is to show up the present as unheroic. The present is unheroic, but was the heroic past really any better? It seems to me that one of the functions of the parallel is to suggest that perhaps the ancient heroes and their way of life were after all quite similar to the unheroic present. After all, the streets of urban Rome, one cannot help suspecting, were at least as muddy as those of Booth's London. The final duel between Turnus and Aeneas in the Aeneid, when compared with the duelling scene between Bath and Booth in Amelia, furnishes a convenient example of this double attitude toward the unheroic present. In the Aeneid the closing scene depicts what is in actuality a duel between two civilizations, between two men who represent alternative futures for the world, between East and West and between rivalling segments of the gods. It is a finely keyed narrative that overwhelms its reader with resounding phrases, portentous prophesies, and representations of heroic struggles. Even while the heroes struggle, Jove promises Juno that the line [will] be Roman, the qualities making it great . . . Italian. Troy's gone; may it be gone in name as well as reality.2® 2 8The Aeneid of Virgil, trans. C. Day Lewis (Garden City, NT Y., 1952), p. 316 (XII, 827-828). 315 The god promises also that From this blend of Italian and Trojan blood shall arise A people surpassing all men, nay even the gods in godliness. No other nation on earth will pay such reverence to Juno. (XII. 838-840) In the battle, it is the gods themselves who unarm Turnus' strength: Ice-bound were his veins, and his legs felt like water. So too the stone he hurled, flying through empty air, Failed to make the distance, fell short of its objective. But, as it is in a nightmare, when sleep's narcotic hand Is leaden upon our eyes, we seem to be desperately trying To run and run, but we cannot— for all our efforts, we sink down Nerveless; our usual strength is just not there, and our tongue Won't work at all— we can't utter a word or produce one sound: So with Turnus, each move he bravely attempted to make, The unearthly demon brought it to nothing. Now did his feelings Veer this way and that in distraction: he gazed at the city, the Rutuli; Faltered with fear; trembled at the weapon menacing him. He could see no way to escape and no way to get at Aeneas . . . So Turnus faltered. . . . (XII. 905-919) Here is savage beauty and a significance beyond the immediate, indeed, a significance so far-reaching as to transform the immediate. In contrast, the duelling theme in Amelia is 316 focused not on brave Aeneas but on Colonel Bath, a grotesque amalgam of false honor and genuine good-humor. In a chapter mockingly entitled "Containing much heroic Matter," Booth and Bath enter upon a duel, not to decide the fate of the Roman people, but for no other reason on Booth's side than that he has been called a "scoundrel" (I, 229). Only later is the reader able to discover any discernible motive for Bath except his passion for duelling, and then we find the "Casus Belli" James's mere assertion that Booth "had used him [Colonel James] dishonourably, and had divellicated his character behind his back" (I, 335-336). The account of the duel itself is distanced from the reader by its brevity and matter- of-factness: The two combatants now engaged with great fury, and, after two or three passes, Booth ran the colonel through the body and threw him on the ground, at the same time possessing himself of the colonel's sword. (I, 230) The immediateness and savagery of the Aeneas-Turnus duel is missing, and in its place is a caricature with two unoccupied soldiers fighting over phantoms of honour. The contrast between this duel and Aeneas's is obvious, but it would likewise be possible to see the duel scene in the Aeneid as a hollow puppet show, with heroes acting out predetermined and ultimately meaningless exploits. Where now, it would be possible to say, are the Latin people, the glorious world of Rome which was 317 at stake? Where but in the imagination of men for whom Rome is a dream of ideal order and glory? Similarly, the parallel between Dido-Aeneas and Miss Matthews-Booth evokes a sense both of contrast and sameness between the epic ideal and the present reality. In both accounts, the hero, diverted from his ultimate goal, is led into an intrigue by a strange woman met upon his travels. The intrigue of Dido and Aeneas, however, is given the sanction of the goddesses Juno and Venus, and is part of Venus' scheme to establish the Roman race; she has Cupid "set a match to her [Dido's] very marrow" (I. 660) in order that "no deity may swerve her if she is mine, possessed by love for Aeneas" (I. 6 74-675). Miss Matthews and Booth have no such sanction, except that of Fortune which seems bent upon destroying Booth, for from this alliance will spring many of the complications of the novel. The amours of Booth and of Aeneas are recounted with equal detachment: Dido and Aeneas, seeking refuge from a storm . . . found themselves In the same cave. Primordial Earth and presiding Juno Gave the signal. The firmament flickered with fire, a witness Of wedding. (IV. 165-167) Booth and Miss Matthews in their Newgate cell, "passed that evening in a manner inconsistent with the strict rules of virtue and chastity" (I. 161). While Dido, 318 inspired by a goddess, burned from the story of Aeneas's journey in search of a home, Miss Matthews, inspired by a more earthy Venus, burns from Booth1s extended account of his romance and family life with Amelia, even though she must find the story somewhat dampening. Dido and Aeneas in the Cave and Miss Matthews and Booth in Newgate are curiously parallel; the latter seems formed to show the essential sordidness of the former, for both liaisons are merely intrigues, interludes in the heroes1 lives which are unconnected with their destinies. Is storied Aeneas, it seems fair to ask, just such another weak, "young fellow in the highest vigour of life" (Amelia, I, 161) as his English equivalent, Billy Booth? The supernatural element in the Aeneid seems to be debased into the subnatural in Amelia. Venus, in the Dido-Miss Matthews incident, becomes sheer sexuality; Jove's destiny, in the duel with Colonel Bath, becomes a meaningless wrangling over "honor," and the sense of Destiny which hovers about Aeneas becomes a hopelessly malevolent "Fortune" which prohibits Booth from finding any place in his society. Irony and bathos are the proper equivalents for epic glory in the world of eighteenth- century London. Fielding's choice of Virgil, the highly polished urban chronicler of Roman glory, as a model for his vision of the corruption of London, reveals his 319 own estimate of how far the present world has fallen. The most optimistic interpretation we can make is that the present is diminished by the comparison, but it is also possible that the comparison is merely an illusion in time and the golden age of heroes might conceivably have been just such a world as that of Booth and Amelia. Dr. Harrison: The Fallible Paragon In each of his three novels, Tom Jones, Joseph Andrews, and Amelia, Fielding employs a paragon, a character delineating the moral center or focus of the work. The paragon functions as a touchstone of moral virtue, the standard which the hero and heroine, and indeed all the good people in the novel, look up to and finally emulate. Usually, of course, these paragons are examples of goodness for others to follow, but they are also an ideal of man's potentialities if he would but give rein to his benevolent nature. R. S. Crane explains the eighteenth-century belief that benevolent feelings were "natural" to man, since the age saw the "heart of man as 'naturally' good in the sense that when left to its own native impulses it tends invariably to humane and sociable feelings. . . ."29 The benevolent 29"Some Suggestions toward a Geneology of the Man of Feeling," ELH, I (December 1934), 220. 320 paragon is, then, first of all naturally good, an ideal standard of human nature unwarped by the selfishness of ulterior motivation, the apotheosis of human nature at its finest. The "moral center" who beautifully illustrates benevolent nature in Fielding's novels possesses, none theless, a tendency toward human weakness of one sort or another, for all Fielding's paragons have a flaw in their makeup which endangers the safety of the other good characters. Because of this weakness, Sheldon Sacks has called this type of character the "fallible paragon": If the male heroes are not 'models of perfection,' neither are Allworthy, Harrison, or Adams, despite the fact that each becomes a standard of virtue in the novel in which he appears. For though these do not sin, they err: the first casts Tom Jones from him and draws Blifil to his bosom; the second leaps to an erroneous conclusion and imprisons the much-imprisoned Booth despite the potentially dreadful effect of his action on Amelia and her children; the last is harmlessly vain and has pretensions to Christian Stoicism. (p. HO) Adams is rather loveably vain in his opinion that as a clergyman and teacher he has no equal since he has been virtually ordained of God, but the fun that Fielding has at his expense has the effect, not of making him totally ridiculous, but of affirming our affection for him. In Tom Jones, however, Allworthy's gullibility and moral outrage against Tom have much more serious effects and strike the reader unpleasantly. Fielding attempts to 321 compensate for this effect by showing that Allworthy was not in possession of the truth of Jones' case, but none theless, his paragon lacks insight, and to lack insight into characters like Blifil or Tom is to lack everything. The fallibility of Fielding's paragon in a given novel is one method of determining how close that novel is to the unambiguous pastoral of innocence. As Joseph Andrews is more "pastoral" than Tom Jones, so is Parson Adams a more likeable and sympathetic character than Squire Allworthy. It is significant, then, that Dr. Harrison in Amelia is the most complex and, in some ways, the most fallible of paragons, for as the world becomes less pastoral, the moral center, represented by the paragon, becomes more ambiguous. Dr. Harrison, the "fallible paragon" of Amelia, is undoubtedly a good man; everyone agrees on this fact, including, one suspects, Dr. Harrison himself. What makes Dr. Harrison somewhat less sympathetic than either Adams or Allworthy is a seeming moral complacency; he is aware of himself as a paragon in a way that the other two are not. Allworthy is, of course, aware of his own moral righteousness, but he is so far idealized and seen through the eyes of either Tom or the narrator that the reader accepts him almost at face value and seldom reacts against his complacency; with Harrison, however, it is 322 different because he is altogether a more real character, and we are tempted to judge him as a man. Harrison's complexity as a character is reflected in the critics' rather mixed response to him. Sacks, as we have seen above, judges him because he "leaps to an erroneous conclusion . . . despite the potentially dreadful effect of his action on Amelia and her children" (p. 110) . Battestin, comparing Harrison with Parson Adams, proclaims the former "stiff and lifeless" (Moral Basis, p. 108), an understandable prejudice from Battestin's viewpoint, but a prejudice reiterated by many readers and critics. Harrison the man does not have Adams' ability to inspire affection. Andrew Wright, for example, reflects this attitude by seeing Harrison as inadequate as a man, calling him "a major weakness in Amelia because he is seen too little to be anything much more than a half-deified deus ex machina ..." (p. 169). A. R. Towers, however, calls Harrison "the novel's formidable custodian of morals,"3° an appellation which would seem to place him in the realm of infallible paragons, while simultaneously making him sound inestimably stuffy. Sacks denies Harrison's moral stuffiness, explaining that the fallible paragon is 30"Amelia and the State of Matrimony," RES, new series V (1954), 151. 323 convincing as the result partially of his transferring to his paragon much of the wit and sarcastic bite he had hitherto reserved for his commentator, and partially of his endowing the paragon with the conscious and articulate awareness that paragons may be boring. (p. 143) What Sacks sees, then, is not a stiff, lifeless paragon, but a real, even exciting character who possesses the quality, rare in a paragon, of a sense of humor about himself. Whatever personal effect Harrison has upon the reader, all agree that he is intended as a vision of some ideal in human nature. The question which Harrison's presence in Amelia raises is, just how valid is that ideal, how truly moral is the moral center of this pastoral of experience? Harrison has a curious combination of character traits which tend to make a critic's response to him almost a reflection of his own sensibility. Harrison is ambiguous in the way that men are often ambiguous, and we seem to come away with fragmented images, each critic calling his image the whole. In the world of Amelia, as in our own world, "private character is . . . difficult to judge" (Paulson, p. 160). If we can accept the testimonies of all the good characters, of many of the bad and of his own deeds, then Harrison is a truly good man. Booth in prison praises him to Miss Matthews, agreeing that Harrison is "one of the 324 best of men" (I, 69), even though he does so in response to Miss Matthews' somewhat suspect proclamation that the good doctor is "one of the best men in the world . . . and an honour to the sacred order to which he belongs" (I, 6 7). Similarly, Amelia has so good an opinion of Harrison that when she hears that he is responsible for Booth's imprisonment, she declares, "Well, then, there is an end of all goodness in the world. I will never have a good opinion of any human being more" (II, 52). If one cannot believe in the goodness of Harrison, human goodness, evidently, does not exist. It is true that his fatherly protectiveness is most attractive when he calls Amelia his "Daughter" and her children his "grandchildren" (II, 145-146), and this protectiveness helps establish the image of a good and benevolent paragon. Yet for all this, Harrison remains basically ambiguous; as we have already observed, he is simul taneously less distant than Allworthy and less endearing than Adams, and he is a figure neither of unalterable good nor of affectionate leniency. We are appraised of Harrison's bounty, not insignificantly, by a country parson who has been duping him; the clergyman, neither to his honor nor Harrison's, sees his patron as a fool. . . . he hath been always a fool in private life; for I question whether he is worth £ 100 in the world, 325 more than his annual income. He hath given away above half his fortune to the Lord knows who. I believe I have had above £ 200 of him, first and last; and would you lose such a milch-cow as this for want of a few compliments? (II, 161-162) Fielding is, of course, condemning the parasitical parson with his own words, but Harrison's dignity suffers from the appellation "milch-cow." The conclusion would officially seem to be that Harrison is self-sacrificing and benevolent even to the unworthy, but beneath this portrait of goodness rankles Fielding's earlier warning about the motivation of seeming benevolence. Earlier in the novel, Fielding has sounded this warning in connection with Colonel James, himself hardly a benevolent paragon. James in Book IV, Chapter 4 has just given the habitually penniless Booth twenty pounds when Fielding hesitates for a moment to reflect upon such an act of generosity, and lament that "so few are found of this benign disposition," and concludes that: Nay give me leave to wonder that pride, which is constantly struggling, and often imposing on itself, to gain some little pre-eminence, should so seldom hint to us the only certain as well as laudable way of setting ourselves above another man, and that is, by becoming his benefactor. (I, 178) This passage has the effect of casting doubt upon the purity of James' motivation, suggesting that the origin of his seeming benevolence is actually a form of pride, but such a generalization is as applicable, once it has 326 been suggested, to Dr. Harrison as to James. Intentionally or not, Fielding has cast doubt upon the purity of all benevolence, including the Doctor's. Sometimes Harrison is shown in an unpleasant personal light; one example of this is that scene where he teases Booth's son that if he does not behave he will take Booth "away . . . again" (II, 114). This speech alienates the reader who, at this point, has hardly forgiven Harrison for Booth's imprisonment. The teasing is in bad taste, but it seems to me that it also borders on the sadistic. Harrison's "joke" reminds the boy, if he is aware of it, of the parson's benevolence in releasing his father, and of his continual power over the family. Of course the scene is quickly brushed over by Harrison turning the conversation to the principles of Christian forgiveness, but the reader is at least forced to sympathize with the boy when he says, "I would forgive you; because a Christian must forgive everybody; but I should hate you as long as I live" (II, 114). Although in general Harrison's goodness and dignity are taken for granted, in at least one scene, that at the masquerade, he becomes the object of ridicule. This in one way, of course, is natural, but the setting of his sermon on adultery is at best ambiguous. Intended evidently as a realization of the serious warning of the 327 sermon, the setting nonetheless makes the message weakly incongruous. The letter containing the sermon is read aloud to a mocking, singularly uncomprehending and unreceptive audience, most of whom were gathered at the masquerade for adulterous purposes. Quixotically, Colonel Bath ends the recitation by his interference and, surprisingly enough, places himself for once on the side of right by approving of the sermon's contents. But Colonel Bath himself is a weak enough recommendation for any serious moral principle, and he seems an improbable choice for the defender of truth. Although Fielding probably intends that the sermon function as a revelation of the moral degradation epitomized by the masqueraders, the ineffectiveness of the sermon itself is painfully obvious; as a condemnation of adultery it does not seem to be relevant, or even understandable, to those most in need of it. Symptomatically, Mrs. Bennett, busily engaged in manipulating the Noble Lord's adulterous desires, misinterprets the whole thing as "a sermon . . . in praise of adultery ..." (II, 184). The ideal here becomes a laughingstock, and just a little of the laughter rubs off on the paragon. The complexity of Harrison's character as a moral center reminds the reader of Golden's warning that "Human nature, Amelia demonstrates for Fielding, is too 328 complicated for abstract formulation" (p. 70), and Irwin's similar observation that the context of Amelia has "much of the complexity of real life" (p. 126). To say simply that Harrison is a fallible paragon is not to distinguish either his fallibility or his quality as a paragon from that of Allworthy or Adams, but nonetheless he emerges, with all the necessary qualifications, as a symbol of goodness within the framework of the novel. It is symptomatic of the world of Amelia, however, that the character who functions as a moral standard is capable of being vitriolic and suspicious, and of employing a corrupt institution for the personal satisfaction of revenge. Harrison's arrest of Booth for debt gives sanction to a corrupt institution and exposes Amelia and her children to the disheartening prospect of starvation. Harrison is flawed in the way that human beings are flawed, but his actions nearly have irreversible consequences. In the world of Amelia, even the good are seriously limited by their weaknesses and by them selves. For all his goodness, Harrison is by no means ideal; he is limited perhaps not least by the urban context of the novel itself, for he is hardly less naive than Booth. Nevertheless, with all his suspicions and fallibility, he remains the official, if not the infallible, paragon of Amelia. 329 Withdrawal or Retreat The darkened world of Amelia reflects a world in which the grimness of urban London is overwhelming. The darkened horizon is primarily a result of the urban locale, for if Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones appear lighter in tone than Amelia, it is only because the scene is laid more frequently in the country. (Butt, p. 25) Hitherto the countryside has been a light-hearted and comic alternative to the grimness of the city. In Tom Jones, for example, the observation has often been made, the tone which has been light in the first two-thirds of the book, darkens as the scene of action shifts to London.31 Historically, as Lewis Mumford points out in The City in History, the city has often been seen as threatening and malevolent in contrast to the peaceful sanctuary offered by the country. Being partly an expression of intensified anxiety and aggression, the walled city replaced an older image of rural tranquillity and peace. The early Sumerian bards looked back to a pre-urban golden age, where 'there was no snake, no scorpion, no hyena, no lion, no wild dog, no wolf1: when 'there was no fear, nor terror; man had no rival.' That mythical age never existed and doubtless the Sumerians themselves were dimly aware of this fact.32 3lThe best statement of this idea is in George Sherburn's "Fielding's Social Outlook," pp. 10-11. 32(New York, 1961), p. 50. 330 At the edge of history, then, there was a myth of a rural age, a necessary sanctuary from the anxieties and threats of urban life. Fielding's novels have behind them a dream of a beautiful rural world where human relations are clear and pure, where faithful love like that of Joe Atkinson for Amelia can flourish, and where even Billy Booth can make a decent living. The good, the innocent, and the ideal are easily equated with the pastoral, with the country in which all is as it should be. The love between Joe Atkinson and Amelia is, for example, pastoral in this sense, for the simple country boy innocently attains that which the more complex city characters, Colonel James and the Noble Lord, cannot buy.33 The rural, in Fielding's novels, is persistently associated with the beautiful, the good, and the paradisiacal. Allworthy's Paradise Hall is an explicit instance, as is Harrison's calling his country home his "earthly paradise" (I, 149). Booth, in the depths of Newgate, remembers his days in that Paradise in that time long ago before he fell: The whole was one continued series of love, health, and tranquillity. Our lives resembled a calm sea. 33sheridan Baker, "Fielding's Amelia and the Materials of Romance," PQ, XLI (April 1962), 444. 331 . . . who can describe the pleasures which the morning air gives to one in perfect health; the flow of spirits which springs up from exercise; the delights which parents feel from the prattle and innocent follies of their children; the joy with which the tender smile of a wife inspires a husband; or lastly, the chearful, solid comfort which a fond couple enjoy in each other's conversation? All these pleasures and every other of which our situation was capable we tasted in the highest degree. (I, 151-152) The country was, in short, all the possible good things in life, all the blessings of serenity which might inhabit a paradise on earth. Both Battestin and Towers point out that the country is an ideal setting for the married life of the Booths,34 and Harrison himself observes to Booth that they would prefer "a country life, where you could be always together" (I, 150). These two ideals, the country life and the happy married life, form an alternative to the great world of the city with its social and personal corruption. If the city evokes a grim tone and a darkened vision, the country is the good life, the source of light; yet the light does not exclude an awareness of the darkness. There is always the "grim substructure" (Wendt, p. 147) against which the country and the simple good life is only a dream; the existence of paradise, remembered and ideal, presupposes a fallen 3^Moral Basis of Fielding's Art, p. 120; "Amelia and the State of Matrimony," p. 145. 332 present. The pastoral, country life is a type of personal salvage from a corrupt world, but it is only a salvage; there is no ultimate answer, only the rescue of a few lives from the inevitable flood. The world in which Amelia and Booth find themselves is one in which the vision of good is blurred and far off; it is after the fall when the paradise of love is all but destroyed: "Amelia, centring [sic] on marriage and the domestic life, contains an idyll smashed all too readily" (Wright, p. 44). The dream of love and genuine human relationships evaporates in the cool light of the London sunshine filtering through the windows of Newgate. This world still remembers the good, but exists within the corrupt and realistic present; here "satiric and satiro-melodramatic scenes" alternate with "visions of the good which are idealized and sentimentalized" (Paulson, p. 234). Reality is mixed; a tension is built up by the constant interplay of rural goodness and urban viciousness. The tension is a version of the ironic pastoral ideal. The world of London in which Fielding's characters find themselves literally trapped is cut off from the ideal of pastoral goodness epitomized in the country life and rural retirement. London, we have seen, is a symbol of the dark places of the human soul and spirit, 333 an embodiment of those unideal forces which keep man from realizing his dreams. Beneath the darkness of London, there is the belief that a better world could exist; the symbol of London contains the implicit recognition that a better order, an ideal world, is possible. To see a society as corrupt is to recognize the existence of another ideal society, and to see morals as degraded is to acknowledge a moral standard higher than the one which exists. The tension between the remembered ideal and the present reality is an inescapable fact in Amelia. This tension may make the dream of pastoral goodness seem only a weak, remembered ideal, for corrupt reality threatens to be overwhelming. Morris Golden in Fielding's Moral Psychology points out the ineffectiveness of the good in relation to the corruption of London. He [Fielding's naive hero] cannot make his vision prevail over marred circumstances— all the virtuous figures from the country cannot make of the city the ideal commonwealth that Plato caused them to expect— the attempt, while often laughable, is praiseworthy. (p. 138) Booth, virtually alone in London, is nearly engulfed in the world of debtor's prisons and police courts; even Dr. Harrison is not completely able to extricate him this time, and it is only when he leaves London that he is safe. Amelia herself is almost tricked by the Noble Lord and led to doubt both Harrison and Booth. The 334 threat symbolized by the city-world of London seems for a moment to dominate Fielding's world. To Fielding, however, as in the picaresque tradition, virtue is no shield, and even reason . . . no certain help. With Swift, Pope, Richardson, and Smollett, he shares the central fear of eighteenth-century literature, a vision of a disintegrating world under the sway of chaos and cold night. (Golden, p. 146) This vision of Chaos and cold night is part of the conflict between the ideal or semi-ideal figures associated with the country and the corrupt denizens of the city-world. The children of the city— Mrs. Ellison, Colonel James, Trent, the Noble Lord— are in irrecon cilable opposition to Amelia, Joe Atkinson, Booth, and Dr. Harrison, all closely associated with the country. Through most of the novel it seems that the ideal has been destroyed, that the ideal characters have been defeated, that Booth and his family will starve in London, that either James or the Noble Lord will seduce Amelia; perhaps this is even the ultimate message of Amelia. Indeed, it is even more true here than in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones that beneath the surface of the happy ending and the return to rural serenity, the normal probabilities still exist. Even at the end of Tom Jones and Amelia, we. are left with the distinct feeling that this one got through by luck, but the corrupt world is unchanged. Often, in fact, it takes luck that seems almost supernatural to bring the hero through. Fielding's resolution does not 335 necessarily change satire into comedy; it produces a particular muffling effect that seems to be Fielding's final comment on his subject. (Paulson, p. 88) The myth of withdrawal to the country, the happy ending in which Fielding rewards his good characters with pastoral bliss in a rural setting, is offered as the solution in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones as well as Amelia, but in Amelia the case seems more desperate and the possibility of solving the hero's problems more remote. In Amelia the withdrawal to the country seems more like retreat; Booth defeated by the city withdraws into the country and nevermore returns; at the end of the novel we are told that In about six weeks after Booth's first coming into the country he went to London and paid all his debts of honour; after which, and a stay of two days only, he returned into the country, and hath never since been thirty miles from home. (II, 311) The country is usually a reward for the innate goodness of Fielding's heroes, an observation substan tiated by many of his critics. Most notably, George Sherburn has commented in "Fielding's Social Outlook" that . . . virtue's last-page reward in Fielding's novels is a quiet life in the country. . . . Fielding makes Pamela's ex-brother Joseph declare in a final sentence that he will imitate his parents, the Wilson's, in their retirement. . . . Captain Booth and Amelia gladly quit the town, the scene of so many of their woes, and so, of course do Tom and Sophia. (p. 260) 336 Similarly, Golden has observed that As the mind returns to the rewards of serenity after working outward to do good, so his [Fielding's] heroes, having demonstrated courageous good will in the dangerous and complex world, earn their serene reward in the country. (p. 145) But has Booth done anything, save read Barrow, which makes him worthy of such a reward and of such serenity? In Amelia it seems almost as if this reward for goodness has been earned by default. There seems to be no real escape possible for Booth, triply imprisoned by his poverty, his guilt, and his society, and if he does escape can the reader believe that such things happen in the world in which Booth lives? Critics of Fielding have been disturbed by Booth's miraculous triumph via the myth of rural retirement. Andrew Wright, for example, asserts that "the happy ending" is "too huddled, too little prepared for, to be convincing" (p. 120) . Who can believe that a man like Booth could escape? Similarly, George Sherburn says that in this withdrawal Fielding "turns his back on his larger theme, and content to make his worthy couple happy, lets them retire to Wiltshire and an untroubled country life" ("Fielding's Amelia," p. 14). The withdrawal to the country solves the problem of Booth's sustaining himself amidst the temptations of London; he has not found a place in the corrupt society of London, 337 so he simply withdraws; he cannot be trusted to live in London, so he is transported into the country where, under the tutelage of Dr. Harrison and Amelia, he can survive. It is true that in Amelia the withdrawal is less triumphant than in any other Fielding novel; Booth and Amelia return to their earthly paradise not merely because of its trout streams, but because they are afraid of London. Dr. Harrison advises Amelia that "if you are wise, you will not trust your husband a day longer in this town" (II, 279), and the warning does not lose its potency even when Booth is converted by Barrow and Amelia inherits her legacy. The happy ending is prepared for only because nothing less could rescue the Booths from the threats epitomized by urban London. Tom Jones might possibly have married the Widow Hunt or settled in some respectable trade, but Booth is hopeless. The reader is prepared for the happy ending, but when it comes, it is nonetheless incongruous, and that is just the point: the withdrawal into the country asserts the existence of a different world incongruous with reality, an ideal world in which basic goodness such as Booth's will be safe even if it is unaccompanied by prudence. The two worlds, the ideal world of the country and the real world of the city, are irresolvable. The 338 country is a retreat from the pressures and tensions of the real world, but is the existence of such a retreat probable? Whether the answer is "yes" or "no," there is a country into which the good can withdraw, and perhaps its very existence implies the triumph of the ideal over the facts of unideal existence. The triumph is precarious, the paradisiacal garden can become snake- infested overnight without the guiding prudence of Dr. Harrison, yet Booth, and perhaps Fielding, can retreat into this fragile ideal to assert their inde pendence from the satiric, malicious world represented by the city. Withdrawal into the country is, then, a type of retreat from active participation in the affairs of the city; it is a way of running away from a segment of life, but it represents a possibility of protest against the corrupt world. Man has limited himself so that he can never really attain his ideal, but at least he need not be overwhelmed by the reality which the urban world represents. Golden sums up Fielding's final attitude about withdrawal or retreat: He [Fielding] is under no delusions about the imperfections of the country or about its stultifying effects upon the uneducated or lazy; he is only sure that under the right circumstances of wealth, family, and internal satisfaction it 339 can permit serene retirement, whereas the city provides constant, perhaps even insurmountable, challenges to integrity. (p. 144) The country world is not perfect, but it at least offers a hope which the city does not; it offers the hope and the dream of a golden age. CHAPTER VI CONCLUSION Henry Fielding was a complex man who lived in a complex world, but he was a man with a simple and yet an eternal dream. His dream was the dream of the pastoral, a dream of innocence, simplicity and fecundity attainable in an earthly golden age. His dream was not unusual; it is, as I have said, an eternal dream and was shared by Virgil, Theocritus, and the author of Genesis. It is not even unusual that Fielding's attitude toward his dream was ambivalent; like most men he sometimes did not believe in the things he cared most deeply about. What is unusual about Fielding is that he left the imprint of his spiritual ambivalence in his prose fictions: Shamela, Jonathan Wild, Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, and Amelia. In these prose fictions many of the central themes and concerns— the high and the low, the transparent mask of hypocrisy, the danger of unprotected innocence, the great and the good, the city and the country— can be traced back to the tension between his belief in the simple pastoral ideal and his recognition that such simplicity and such idealism did not accord with the world 340 341 in which he lived. Fielding dreamed of a world where simple goodness was safe, where man was innocent, where the fecundity of nature reflected the joyousness of the pastoral spirit, but he lived in a world for which the mask and the prison are more appropriate symbols than the shepherd's song and the lush countryside. The city and the country are spiritual landscapes for Fielding, as is the symbolic journey from innocence to experience which all his pastorally good men must make. Fielding's novels reflect two alternate versions of the pastoral; these I have termed the pastoral of innocence and the pastoral of experience, or the tradi tional and the mock-pastoral. The Fielding most people know is the traditional pastoralist who paints a basically solid and innocent world from which a man may return with his dreams and illusions intact. There is, however, another Fielding, the mock-pastoralist who draws a world from which few readers may make return without feeling that they have somehow seen the underside of their own experience. This second kind of Fielding novel mocks and travesties the idyllic ideal world; this version of pastoral implies that the ideal is the same as the real, or that human experience falls so far short of the ideal as to negate it. These two versions of pastoral contrast in setting, in treatment of characters, in moral assumptions, 342 and in their world's essential fecundity and healthiness. The traditional pastoral of innocence is basically rural in setting and values; its characters are, for the most part, divided into ideal pastoral characters and non-ideal, non-pastoral characters who are usually treated without irony. In these traditional pastorals, the ideals of the narrator and the reader are at one; it is a world in which goodness not greatness is paramount and where honesty and truthfulness are unambiguous virtues. The pastoral world is fertile; life is fecund and abundant, and man's physical healthiness reflects his spiritual robustness. On the other hand, the pastoral of experience is set in a basically urban world, and it usually is built around one character who personifies the viciousness of the city. The world of such a novel is ironic, the central vice character is usually treated ironically, and the stated values of the narrator are at odds with his real values and the beliefs of the reader. Similarly, the urban world of the pastoral of experience is sterile and unhealthy, its physical deformity symbolizing its spirit ual ugliness. The apocalyptic pastoral of innocence reasserts the pastoral values over against the non-ideal reality which attempts to destroy them. To this version of pastoral belong those novels, Joseph Andrews, Tom Jones, and Amelia, 343 which are recognized as being in the mainstream of Fielding's fiction. In these novels besieged innocence always triumphs, masks are penetrated, and the characters always withdraw into the country, where their pastoral goodness is safe. Yet, when one reads these novels chronologically, one becomes aware that the clarity of the pastoral vision recedes; the victory of the pastoral forces of life becomes less clearcut from Joseph Andrews to Amelia. Most convincing in the effervescent Joseph Andrews, the victory becomes miraculous in Tom Jones where the hero is almost engulfed by the reality of London, but by the time of Amelia the victory is more than a little tinged by defeat and nothing less than an authorial fiat can re-establish pastoral harmony for Amelia's Booth. The demonic pastoral of experience denies the pastoral values even though it implicitly recognizes the presence of a violated ideal. Shamela and Jonathan Wild, Fielding's two pastorals of experience, clearly invert the pastoral ideal. Set in the city, they reveal a nightmare world where all dreams and ideals are dead; although the reader and the novelist remember the ideal, no one in the novel does. In comparison to the lush countryside of Tom Jones, the world of Shamela and Jonathan Wild is a sterile wasteland where all life has 344 vanished. This is the antithesis of the dream, a repu diation of the hope, a leaden world which can no longer even remember the golden one. In Amelia, Fielding1s last novel, the pastorals of experience and innocence meet in a battle between the forces of life and death, the forces of hope and despair. In the final analysis, the pastoral of innocence is victorious, but the reality of the non-pastoral city is haunting. For Fielding the implications of this conflict between the ideal and the real, the simple and the complex, the pastoral of innocence and the pastoral of experience, are basic, and the existence of this conflict explains many problems in his novels. For example, the usual complaints about Fielding's over-simplification are often a result of seeing only one part of the pastoral dichotomy. It is not always realized that Fielding's novels are tonally complex; even Joseph Andrews, the lightest and brightest of his novels, contains a world in which appearance and reality are most sadly out of step, where pastoral simplicity is threatened and nearly engulfed by non-pastoral forces. By the time of Amelia, the oppressive reality has become so overwhelming that his last novel is usually referred to as "dark" or "grim." The darkness which permeates Fielding's last novel is not, as many readers 345 have thought, new; it was there in Joseph Andrews, but in different proportions. In Fielding's complex vision, the simplicity of Joseph Andrews1 pastoral world echoes against the nightmarish irony of Jonathan Wild and the pessimistic determinism of Amelia. Throughout Fielding's major novels there is an increasing tendency to set his characters in an urban milieu, and an accompanying tendency to view vice as specifically associated with the city. About one-tenth of Joseph Andrews is set in the city, one-third of Tom Jones, and all of Amelia, and in each the urban locale is symbolic of the separate ethical and moral darknesses which Fielding's protagonists must encounter. Fielding's world is all of a piece; there are no startling changes between Joseph Andrews and Amelia, but the reader is led to explore darker and darker corners of what seemed initially a world of light. The recognition of pastoral tensions in Fielding's novels explains or forestalls many over-simplifications which have crept into discussions about the "Father of the English Novel." For example, Joseph Andrews is almost always commended for its lightness of tone, but such a commendation is usually a form of condescension. Recog nizing the presence of a darker pastoral tension in this effervescent novel not only relates it to Fielding's ethical development,, but helps to clarify the suspicion, 346 which many readers have felt, that there is somehow a darkness beneath so much light. Similarly, Jonathan Wild and Shamela are often described as apart from the main stream of Fielding's ethical and artistic development, but this is not entirely true. The overwhelming irony of Jonathan Wild and the cynical burlesque of Shamela are in reality not so much departures from Fielding's ethical and novelistic development as explorations of dark corners in the human experience. These two are pastorals of experience; they mock the pastoral of innocence. Fielding's tendency to mock his own ideals, since it reflects another side of the experience which created the novels, is significant. The sardonic and cynical irony of Jonathan Wild is as much a version of the pastoral as the revivifying hopefulness of Joseph Andrews. Much of the appeal of Tom Jones can be explained by the pastoral of innocence, for this novel represents the apotheosis of the pastoral dream. Through its psychic journey from innocence to experience and the triumphal return to innocence, Tom Jones is a victory of the forces of life and fecundity. The novel's appeal rests partially upon its balance between the ideal and the reality which threatens to overcome the ideal. The reality is amply recognized, but the ideal is unconquer able . 347 An understanding of the pastoral tensions beneath Fielding's writings helps to explain what happened to the author of Joseph Andrews that he could produce such a "grim" novel as Amelia. In tracing the pastoral elements in his novels we have seem that many of the tensions which make Amelia so dark are, in fact, implicit in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, and that Fielding has never been the jolly, rollicking, over-simple writer of the popular imagination. Always he was torn between his perception of what reality ought to be and his realization of what it is. What happens in Amelia is simply that his weariness comes to the surface, and for a moment he gives in to despair. But at the last he reasserts, even in the midst of his most pessimistic and disillusioned novel, his belief in pastoral innocence, in the ideal, and in the possibilities of human life. Finally, it seems to me that the pastoral dream of Henry Fielding, a dream confronted and all but overwhelmed by a non-pastoral reality, relates Fielding's London and Wiltshire to Virgil's Rome and Arcadia, and Steinbeck's California. Our own world, as well as Virgil's and Fielding's, is tunneled in darkness? the dream of the pastoral is as old as time, and so is the non-ideal reality with which it must conflict. Fielding's novels make clear that the basic pastoral conflict is as viable 348 in the eighteenth century as in the first, and again, as in the twentieth. 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Mumford, Lewis. The City in History: Its Origins, Its Transformations, and Its Prospects. New York: Harcourt, Brace & World, Inc., 1961. Murray, Peter B. "Summer, Winter, Spring and Autumn in Tom Jones," Modern Language Notes, LXXXVI (April 1961), 324-326. Needier, Henry. The Works of Mr. Henry Needier. 2nd ed. London, 172 8. The Newgate Calendar or Malefactor's Bloody Register. New York: G. P. Putnam's Sons, 1962. Nourse, Timothy. Campania Faelix: Or, a Discourse of the Benefits and improvements of Industry; Containing Directions for all Manner ofTillage, Pasturage, and Plantation; as also for the Making of Cyder and Perry. London, 1700. Panofsky, Erwin. "Et in Arcadia Ego: Poussin and the Elegiac Tradition." In Meaning in the Visual Arts. Garden City, N. Y.: Doubleday & Co., Inc., 195 7. 360 Paulson, Ronald. Satire and the Novel in Eighteenth- Century England. New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1967. Plumb, J. H. 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Creator Doland, Virginia Marie (author)

Core Title Versions Of Pastoral In Henry Fielding'S Prose Fiction

Degree Doctor of Philosophy

Degree Program English

Publisher University of Southern California (original), University of Southern California. Libraries (digital)

Tag Literature, General,OAI-PMH Harvest

Language English

Contributor Digitized by ProQuest (provenance)

Advisor Winterowd, W. Ross (committee chair), Arnold, Aerol (committee member), Butler, James H. (committee member)

Permanent Link (DOI) https://doi.org/10.25549/usctheses-c18-402661

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Identifier 7016862.pdf (filename),usctheses-c18-402661 (legacy record id)

Legacy Identifier 7016862.pdf

Dmrecord 402661

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