likes, in spite of her name) prefers the handsome Jones with his
blooming complexion and many amatory adventures. And, since we
are in the simple-minded days of fiction when it was the
business of the sensible novelist to make us happy at the close,
the low-born lover, assisted by Squire Allworthy, who is a deus
ex machina a trifle too good for human nature's daily food, gets
his girl (in imitation of Joseph Andrews) and is shown to be
close kin to Allworthy--tra-la-la, tra-la-lee, it is all
charmingly simple and easy! The beginners of the English novel
had only a few little tricks in their box in the way of incident
and are for the most part innocent of plot in the Wilkie Collins
sense of the word. The opinion of Coleridge that the "Oedipus
Tyrannus," "The Alchemist" and "Tom Jones" are "the three most
perfect plots ever planned" is a curious comment upon his
conception of fiction, since few stories have been more plotless
than Fielding's best book. The fact is, biographical fiction
like this is to be judged by itself, it has its own laws of
technique.

The glory of "Tom Jones" is in its episodes, its crowded canvas,
the unfailing verve and variety of its action: in the fine open-air
atmosphere of the scenes, the sense of the stir of life they
convey: most of all, in an indescribable manliness or humanness
which bespeaks the true comic force--something of that same
comic view that one detects in Shakspere and Moliere and
Cervantes. It means an open-eyed acceptance of life, a
realization of its seriousness yet with the will to take it with
a smile: a large tolerancy which forbids the view conventional
or parochial or aristocratic--in brief, the view limited. There
is this in the book, along with much psychology so superficial