Henry Fielding's Novels and the Classical Tradition (review)

Abstract

356 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY FICTION 9:3 always ostensibly stay close to her topic, but that has the effect of giving her work an unfocused, rambling quality. More important, she has simply declined to construct the kind of thesis I have been arguing for. Some readers may not mind; they may see it as a welcome freedom from tendentiousness. But many will regret that the intelligence displayed in Douglas's best moments is not brought to bear upon the problem of telling us what this material really has to teach us. Robert Mayer Oklahoma State University Nancy A. Mace. Henry Fielding's Novels and the Classical Tradition. Cranbury, N.J.: University of Delaware Press, 1996. 198pp. US$32.50. ISBN 0-87413-585-0. Nancy Mace's Henry Fielding's Novels and the Classical Tradition seeks to redress a balance and clarify blood lines. She reconsiders some familiar arguments—that Fielding's classical allusions are mere ornaments, that his fictions are inferior to Richardson's because less suited to presumed middle-class tastes, and that the most significant classical influence on Fielding is Lucian. Actually, she argues, that influence was a combination of Homer, Horace, Virgil , and Aristotle. She also argues for the continuing vigour of the classics in the eighteenth century. Fielding shared his classical learning with three different groups of readers: those with significant knowledge, those with modest knowledge gleaned from basic pedagogical tools, and those with knowledge drawn only from translations. To help make her case, she supplies several tables, including the authors and works taught at Eton, authors recommended by six of the most respectable guides to classical learning, and tables for the Latin and Greek authors cited in several of Fielding's works. Fielding quotes Horace, for example , twenty-two times and alludes to him thirteen times in Tom Jones—for 21 per cent of such classical materials. In Tom Jones as elsewhere, though, Fielding uses classical contexts tactfully, as both sources of knowledge and value and as ancestors often superseded by superior Christianity. Many of these points are sound and the documentation helpful. There is no reason other than populist snobbery that a putative "middle-class" genesis and genealogy should be superior to an "élite" genealogy. Fielding draws the fruits of his version of the novel from varied domestic and exotic plants. Lucian 's influence indeed is significantly overstated on the basis of inadequate and sometimes misread evidence. We may nonetheless offer only two cheers for this book and its modest goals. Mace sometimes belabours the obvious. Fielding knew epic theory and wanted his audience to do so as well (p. 67); "he does not think that novelists can, or should, imitate epics in every detail" (p. 69); Mrs Partridge as an Amazon REVIEWS 357 is "unsavory" (p. 72). Mace needs further to consider the disparity between Fielding's theory and practice (pp. 69-70). He surely denigrates one kind of heroic romance, while also using recognizable romance conventions, such as the youth of mysterious but ultimately well-born parentage. Her discussion of the popular Lucian is comparably tentative. Between 1634 (Hicks) and 1780 (Francklin) there were at least twenty translations or dialogues in his presumed manner, and numerous other works demonstrably patterned after some version of his dialogues of the dead or between the dead and the living. The French added their own tenderized meat to the stew and softened the Lucianic dialogue, as in the French and English versions of works by Fontenelle and Fénelon. Swift is more harshly Lucianic than Fielding, but especially in the Journeyfrom This World to the Next Fielding adapts the ameliorated Lucianic tradition, as in Tom Jones he adapts the ameliorated epic tradition. Mace wisely says that Fielding questions the heroic ideal, but her uncertain support for that reading suggests the difficulty of reclaiming contemporary response , which she assumes to be like her own. Aeneas's killing of Turnus may be morally dubious; but it is personally necessary when Aeneas sees Turnus sporting Pallas's spoils and is psychologically transformed into vengeful Pallas; it is politically necessary for the fledgling nation that Augustus was said to perfect after he eliminated his own competitors; and it was typologically...