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.

How delightful are the subsidiary characters in the book! One
such is Partridge, the unsophisticated schoolmaster who, when he
attends the theater with Tom and hears Garrick play "Hamlet,"
thinks but poorly of the player because he only does what
anybody would do under the circumstances! All-worthy and Blifil
one may object to, each in his kind, for being conventionally
good and bad, but in numerous male characters in less important
roles there is compensation: the gypsy episode, for example, is
full of raciness and relish. And what a gallery of women we get
in the story: Mrs. Honour the maid, and Miss Western (who in
some sort suggests Mrs. Nickleby), Mrs. Miller, Lady Bellaston,
Mrs. Waters and other light-of-loves and dames of folly, whose
dubious doings are carried off with such high good humor that we