TIME AND THE NOVELIST
639
Don Juan
is not so very remote in spirit from a favorite novel
of
Byron's-Tom Jones;
but while the poem represents the dandi–
fied, artificially rejuvenated old age of the form in which it was
cast, Fielding's novel may stand for the vigorous, if rather heavily
swaddled infancy of prose fiction . A Herculean infant, grappling one
of the most ingenious plots ever devised, it remains as remarkable for
the encumbrances it has to cope with as for its sheer strength. The
novel has wrested itself free of the poetic form. but remains loaded
with nearly all the epic trappings. Invocations, inductions, catalogues,
set pieces, heroic similes, all are there, and the fact that they are all
treated with jocularity makes Fielding's sense of obligation no less
obvious.
Tom Jones
comes only a generation after
The Rape of the
Lock,
but where Pope's heroicomical devices are of the essence of
his
poem, the same devices, tremendously enlarged in Fielding's prose,
begin to grow tremendously extraneous. Fielding's apparent compul–
sion to use all the 'business' of epic poetry was perhaps in part a
reaction against the journalist monotone of Defoe, in part a conscious
effort to give dignity to the form of the novel.
It
was also a part of
his education, which he could not escape. What is most remarkable
is that, underlying all the pseudo-epic business, and the personal
harangues, there is a close and matter-of-fact preoccupation with
time. Fielding's chapter-headings, which often denote no more than
the amount of time covered, are not merely a joke, an attempt to
escape giving the chapter's content a name. They show that he was
continually measuring the time of his narrative, mentally, with a
pair of calipers.
One of the chief reasons for the existence of the novel is that
it is not dominated by any indispensable formal pattern which might
interfere with or superimpose a difficulty on the pattern of events in
time with which it deals.
It
has the advantages and disadvantages of
being the freest of all literary forms, and it was, in a way, the disad–
vantages that were at first the most obvious. Fielding, Richardson
and Sterne, each in a different way, had to contrive barriers against
the chaos of too much freedom. Sterne's choice was the most curious
and the most difficult of the three, because it comes nearest to that
chaos.
In
a way he made his whole novel consist of the personal ir–
relevances which were a part of the current convention. Almost, he
made a novel out of not being able to write a novel. His display of
