We would seem to have here a writer not quite in his native element.  He intends to interest us in a serious situation.  Sophia is on the whole natural and winning, although one may stop to imagine what kind of an agony is that which allows of so mathematical a division of time as is implied in the statement that she looked at her lover—­tenderly, too, forsooth!—­“almost a minute.”  The mood of mathematics and the mood of emotion, each excellent in itself, do not go together in life as they do in eighteenth century fiction.  But in the general impression she makes, Sophia, let us concede, is sweet and realizable.  But Jones, whom we have long before this scene come to know and be fond of—­Jones is here a prig, a bore, a dummy.  Sir Charles Grandison in all his woodenness is not arrayed like one of these.  Consider the situation further:  Sophia is in grief; she has blood and tears on her face—­what would any lover,—­nay, any respectable young man do in the premises?  Surely, stanch her wounds, dry her eyes, comfort her with a homely necessary handkerchief.  But not so Jones:  he is not a real man but a melodramatic lay-figure, playing to the gallery as he spouts speeches about the purely metaphoric bleeding of his heart, oblivious of the disfigurement of his sweetheart’s visage from real blood.  He insults her by addressing her in the third person, mouths sentiments about his “odious rival” (a phrase with a superb Bowery smack to it!) and in general so disports himself as to make an effect upon the reader of complete unreality.  This was no real scene to Fielding himself:  why then should it be true:  it has neither the accent nor the motion of life.  The novelist is being “literary,” is not warm to his work at all.  When we turn from this attempt to the best love scenes in modern hands, the difference is world-wide.  And this unreality—­which violates the splendid credibility of the hero in dozens of other scenes in the book,—­is all the worse coming from a writer who expressly announces his intention to destroy the prevalent conventional hero of fiction and set up something better in his place.  Whereas Tom in the quoted scene is nothing if not conventional and drawn in the stock tradition of mawkish heroics.  The plain truth is that with Fielding love is an appetite rather than a sentiment and he is only completely at ease when painting its rollicking, coarse and passional aspects.

In its unanalytic method and loose construction this Novel, compared with Richardson, is a throw-back to a more primitive pattern, as we saw was the case with Fielding’s first fiction.  But in another important characteristic of the modern Novel it surpasses anything that had earlier appeared:  I refer to the way it puts before the reader a great variety of human beings, so that a sense of teeming existence is given, a genuine imitation of the spatial complexity of life, if not of its depths.  It is this effect, afterwards conveyed in fuller measure by Balzac, by Dickens, by Victor Hugo and by Tolstoy, that gives us the feeling that we are in the presence of a master of men, whatever his limitations of period or personality.