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