novelistsonnovel00allo

THE NATURE OF PROSE FICTION
weight.—But a hint is sufficient .'
. . ^). What seems to her to
be absurd is that people who 'venerate the epic' should at the
same time 'decry the romance'. ^ The fables 'of the old classic
Poets' are often 'far more wild and extravagant, and infinitely
more incredible'.^ In her view, the romance continued a tradition
of fantasy and heroic adventure which the epic had begun.
She herself was attracted by the inventive imagination of this
tradition, although she admitted its frequent extravagance, and
she thought too that on the whole it inculcated high standards
of virtue and honour.
Those eighteenth-century noveUsts who continued to lean on
the epic reserved their disapproval for the romance, refusing to
identify the one kind with the other and, unlike Clara Reeve,
failing to see any inconsistency in enjoying 'the marvellous'
when it was 'classical' and suspecting it when it was not. Fielding
may have been aware that the apparent inconsistency
needed some thinking out, but he is expert at leaving his reader
in two minds about his real meaning. As his novels testify on
almost every page, he went through the 'grand old fortifying
curriculum' at Eton. We expect him to be among those whom
Clara Reeve describes as 'venerating the epic' while they 'decry
the romance', and he seems to come up to expectation in the
'Author's Preface' to Joseph Andrews (1742). He places this
work with Archbishop Fenelon's Telemaque (1699) in the same
category as the Odyssey because, metre aside, these two narratives
contain all the epic's 'other parts' as enumerated by Aristotle,
i.e. 'fable, action, characters, sentiments and diction'. It
is
'fairer and more reasonable' to relate Joseph Andrews to the
epic 'from which it differs only in a single instance than to
confound it with . . . the voluminous works, commonly called
Romances, namely Clelia, Cleopatra, Astraea, Cassandra, the
Grand Cyrus, and innumerable others, which contain, as I
apprehend, very little instruction or entertainment'.*
It is quite possible that Fielding is having as much fun at
Aristotle's expense as he is at the expense of the romancers. It
is hard indeed to think of any narrative which does not contain
*fable, action, characters, sentiments and diction'. What is certain,
however, is that Fielding expresses a general feeling about
1 Vol. II, p. 82. 2Vol. I, p. 17.
^ Vol. I, p. 2 1 * See below, pp. 59-60.