Amelia — Complete by Fielding, Henry, 1707-1754

It is, however, usual to detect a lack of vivacity in the book, an evidence of declining health and years. It may be so; it is at least certain that Fielding, during the composition of _Amelia,_ had much less time to bestow upon elaborating his work than he had previously had, and that his health was breaking. But are we perfectly sure that if the chronological order had been different we should have pronounced the same verdict? Had _Amelia_ come between _Joseph_ and _Tom,_ how many of us might have committed ourselves to some such sentence as this: "In _Amelia_ we see the youthful exuberances of _Joseph Andrews_ corrected by a higher art; the adjustment of plot and character arranged with a fuller craftsmanship; the genius which was to find its fullest exemplification in _Tom Jones_ already displaying maturity"? And do we not too often forget that a very short time--in fact, barely three years--passed between the appearance of _Tom Jones_ and the appearance of _Amelia?_ that although we do not know how long the earlier work had been in preparation, it is extremely improbable that a man of Fielding's temperament, of his wants, of his known habits and history, would have kept it when once finished long in his desk? and that consequently between some scenes of _Tom Jones_ and some scenes of _Amelia_ it is not improbable that there was no more than a few months' interval? I do not urge these things in mitigation of any unfavourable judgment against the later novel. I only ask--How much of that unfavourable judgment ought in justice to be set down to the fallacies connected with an imperfect appreciation of facts?

To me it is not so much a question of deciding whether I like _Amelia_ less, and if so, how much less, than the others, as a question what part of the general conception of this great writer it supplies? I do not think that we could fully understand Fielding without it; I do not think that we could derive the full quantity of pleasure from him without it. The exuberant romantic faculty of Joseph Andrews and its pleasant satire; the mighty craftsmanship and the vast science of life of _Tom Jones;_ the ineffable irony and logical grasp of _Jonathan Wild_, might have left us with a slight sense of hardness, a vague desire for unction, if it had not been for this completion of the picture. We should not have known (for in the other books, with the possible exception of Mrs. Fitzpatrick, the characters are a little too determinately goats and sheep) how Fielding could draw _nuances_, how he could project a mixed personage on the screen, if we had not had Miss Matthews and Mrs. Atkinson--the last especially a figure full of the finest strokes, and, as a rule, insufficiently done justice to by critics.