Sheldon Sacks, "Fiction and the shape of Belief - a study of Henry Fielding with

fances at swift, Johnson and Richardson"

Coleridge wrote that one cannot emerge from reading of Fielding's novels "withou
t an intense conviction that he could not be guilty of a base act."
Fielding, who had asserted that his "sincere endeavor" in Tom Jones was "to reco
mmend goodness and innocence," would certainly have been pleased to learn that s
o sensitive and intelligent a critic had testified to the success with which he
had embodied his moral purpose in a "history" - that is, what we now call a nove
l.
But no novelist - even of an age resolutely determined to differentiate moral an
d aesthetic values - could be more aware than Fielding was that he was not writi
ng a "system,' and that he did, in fact, have to write a good "history" in order
to implement his moral intention.
The generations of intelligent and sensitive men that have read and still contin
ue to read Fielding with pleasure provide strong, if partial, testimony that he
somehow did include his moral beliefs, opinions, and prejudices in works coheren
tly organized as novels without seriously detracting from their artistic effect.
How? Or, more generally, how can any novelist embody his beliefs in novels? The
impetus for the whole of this book derives from a desire to answer these questio
ns.
Though there have been nearly as many ostensible answers to the former question
as there have been critics of Fielding's writing, the disagreements have been co
ncerned with the substance of Fielding's beliefs rather than with how they are e
mbodied in his novels.
Indeed, some of the favorite critical languages of our own day, useful as they m
ay be for answering some kinds of questions about literary works, prevent the qu
estion "how" from ever being asked.
Those systems with which we seem most enamoured presume, as an unarticuled artic
le of faith, that the answer to the question "how" is a self-evident proposition
applicable with only minor variations to all kinds of prose fiction or even to
all forms of literature.
Fielding's works are all fictional examples of the truth of some universal-or-pa
rticular, subtle-or-simple, buried-or-apparent but always formulable statement a
bout specifiable though possibly obscure subject.
Either the statement or, more frequently and impressively, the one- or two-word
subject about which the book makes an ineffable statement (appearance-reality; b
eing-becoming; darkness-light; chaos-order) is the organizing theme of the work.
If we begin with such a framework of critical terminology, we need not bother to
read Fielding at all to discover in a general way how he embodied his ethical b
eliefs in "Tom Jones"; we answered the question before we ever asked it.
Fielding's ethical beliefs, opinions, prejudices, must take the shape of fiction
al examples - possibly obvious, possibly so obscure as to need historical elucid
ation - of the truth of a statement about a subject.
As devotees of close readings of texts, of course, we would not be content to ex
plain Fielding without reading him; we would diligently uncover the prominent th
emes in his work and his characteristic modes of embodying those themes.
But no matter what degree of love, care, intelligence, and sensitivity we, as cr
itics, bring to this task, what we can discover is almost startlingly limited by
the frame of reference implicit in the terms we have adopted.
If we have started out to find themes, themes we shall find; it is impossible no
t to.
If we are sensitive and intelligent enough our perceptions may give us incidenta
l but invaluable insight into Fielding's art, but the kinds of critical discrimi
nations we can make are nevertheless rigidly controlled by our initial perceptio
ns.
Using the aesthetically acceptable word "theme", with its musical overtones, for
"subject" or "statement" and carefully cultivating the ability to discover in t
he most poetically suggestive or abstruse of terms the particular themes of part

icular works, we are likely to disguise from ourselves the fact that we are trea
ting "Tom Jones" as a species of apologue, which differs from the conventional m
oral tale only in that its themes are more inaccessible and the relationship of
its parts to its controlling ethical statements so tenuous that to describe it d
emands the highest degree of ingenuity.
We sometimes seem doomed, in discussing the relation between Fielding's beliefs
and his novels, to treat the latter as if they were organized as apologues, like
Johnson's Rasselas, though always with the proviso that Fielding, since he was
actually writing a novel, embodied his themes more subtly - so subtly that exper
ienced critics can sometimes infer diametrically opposed ethical beliefs from th
e novels.
But to praise Fielding as a writer of fiction because of his obscurity may be as
unfair to him as it is to condemn Johnson as a writer of fiction because of his
clarity.
For if Fielding's novels are not organized as fictional examples of the truth of
a statement, or a series of such statements, when we do regard them for special
purposes as if they were apologues we may well miss the subtlety and dexterity
with which Fielding has, in fact, expressed his beliefs and opinions; we will ha
ve ignored the extremely important task Fielding had to perform in making those
opinions an integral part of his novels.
The task we face, then , in trying seriously to investigate the relationship bet
ween a writer's moral beliefs and the literary works he has created is not limit
ed to answering the questions that puzzle us; like Pamela's, our most serious pr
oblem is first to get the question asked in a legitimate manner so that our answ
ers will testify to something more than sincerity and respectability of our desi
res.
To ensure even minimal significance for the answer, we may not ask the question
in a manner that prevents our enquiry into the different principles of coherence
of variant forms of prose fiction.
Such an enquiry is a prerequisite for investigating the possibility that, in wri
ting a work organized like Tom Jones, Fielding could not have embodied his moral
beliefs as fictional examples of ethical statements without destroying the nove
l's coherence; to reverse the coin, it is also a prerequisite for exploring the
possibility that, in writing a work like Rasselas, Johnson could not have employ
ed the techniques which would constitute the minimal virtues of any novel withou
t destroying both the coherence and effectiveness of his apologue.
Any question so formulated that it identifies the principles of organization of
the two works simply on the grounds that they both prose fictions prevents such
an enquiry.
Investigation might lead to the conclusion that all works of prose fiction do ,
in fact, have the same general principle of coherence - for example, they are al
l fictional exploitation, more or less subtle, of identifiable themes.
But we cannot investigate even this possibility if our initial question excludes
alternative solutions.
Let us assume that there is a third class of prose fiction, "represented action"
, which is organized neither as satire nor apologue nor even as a complicated re
conciliation of the two. In any work which belongs to this class, characters abo
ut whose fates we are made to care are introduced in unstable relationships whic
h are then further complicated until the the complications are finally resolved
by the complete removal of the represented instability.
Actions differ from each other in so many particulars that it would be impossibl
e to list even the important ones.