Sheldon Sacks, "Fiction and the shape of Belief - a study of Henry Fielding with fances at swift, Johnson and Richardson"Coleridge wrote that one cannot emerge from reading of Fielding's novels "without an intense conviction that he could not be guilty of a base act."Fielding, who had asserted that his "sincere endeavor" in Tom Jones was "to recommend goodness and innocence," would certainly have been pleased to learn that so sensitive and intelligent a critic had testified to the success with which he had embodied his moral purpose in a "history" - that is, what we now call a novel.But no novelist - even of an age resolutely determined to differentiate moral and aesthetic values - could be more aware than Fielding was that he was not writing a "system,' and that he did, in fact, have to write a good "history" in order to implement his moral intention.The generations of intelligent and sensitive men that have read and still continue to read Fielding with pleasure provide strong, if partial, testimony that he somehow did include his moral beliefs, opinions, and prejudices in works coherently organized as novels without seriously detracting from their artistic effect.How? Or, more generally, how can any novelist embody his beliefs in novels? The impetus for the whole of this book derives from a desire to answer these questions.Though there have been nearly as many ostensible answers to the former question as there have been critics of Fielding's writing, the disagreements have been concerned with the substance of Fielding's beliefs rather than with how they are embodied in his novels. Indeed, some of the favorite critical languages of our own day, useful as they may be for answering some kinds of questions about literary works, prevent the question "how" from ever being asked.Those systems with which we seem most enamoured presume, as an unarticuled article of faith, that the answer to the question "how" is a self-evident proposition applicable with only minor variations to all kinds of prose fiction or even to all forms of literature.Fielding's works are all fictional examples of the truth of some universal-or-particular, subtle-or-simple, buried-or-apparent but always formulable statement about specifiable though possibly obscure subject.Either the statement or, more frequently and impressively, the one- or two-word subject about which the book makes an ineffable statement (appearance-reality; being-becoming; darkness-light; chaos-order) is the organizing theme of the work.If we begin with such a framework of critical terminology, we need not bother to read Fielding at all to discover in a general way how he embodied his ethical beliefs in "Tom Jones"; we answered the question before we ever asked it.Fielding's ethical beliefs, opinions, prejudices, must take the shape of fictional examples - possibly obvious, possibly so obscure as to need historical elucidation - of the truth of a statement about a subject.As devotees of close readings of texts, of course, we would not be content to explain Fielding without reading him; we would diligently uncover the prominent themes in his work and his characteristic modes of embodying those themes.But no matter what degree of love, care, intelligence, and sensitivity we, as critics, bring to this task, what we can discover is almost startlingly limited by the frame of reference implicit in the terms we have adopted.If we have started out to find themes, themes we shall find; it is impossible not to.If we are sensitive and intelligent enough our perceptions may give us incidental but invaluable insight into Fielding's art, but the kinds of critical discriminations we can make are nevertheless rigidly controlled by our initial perceptions.Using the aesthetically acceptable word "theme", with its musical overtones, for "subject" or "statement" and carefully cultivating the ability to discover in the most poetically suggestive or abstruse of terms the particular themes of particular works, we are likely to disguise from ourselves the fact that we are treating "Tom Jones" as a species of apologue, which differs from the conventional moral tale only in that its themes are more inaccessible and the relationship of its parts to its controlling ethical statements so tenuous that to describe it demands the highest degree of ingenuity.We sometimes seem doomed, in discussing the relation between Fielding's beliefs and his novels, to treat the latter as if they were organized as apologues, like Johnson's Rasselas, though always with the proviso that Fielding, since he was actually writing a novel, embodied his themes more subtly - so subtly that experienced critics can sometimes infer diametrically opposed ethical beliefs from the novels.But to praise Fielding as a writer of fiction because of his obscurity may be as unfair to him as it is to condemn Johnson as a writer of fiction because of his clarity. For if Fielding's novels are not organized as fictional examples of the truth of a statement, or a series of such statements, when we do regard them for special purposes as if they were apologues we may well miss the subtlety and dexterity with which Fielding has, in fact, expressed his beliefs and opinions; we will have ignored the extremely important task Fielding had to perform in making those opinions an integral part of his novels.The task we face, then , in trying seriously to investigate the relationship between a writer's moral beliefs and the literary works he has created is not limited to answering the questions that puzzle us; like Pamela's, our most serious problem is first to get the question asked in a legitimate manner so that our answers will testify to something more than sincerity and respectability of our desires.To ensure even minimal significance for the answer, we may not ask the question in a manner that prevents our enquiry into the different principles of coherence of variant forms of prose fiction.Such an enquiry is a prerequisite for investigating the possibility that, in writing a work organized like Tom Jones, Fielding could not have embodied his moral beliefs as fictional examples of ethical statements without destroying the novel's coherence; to reverse the coin, it is also a prerequisite for exploring the possibility that, in writing a work like Rasselas, Johnson could not have employed the techniques which would constitute the minimal virtues of any novel without destroying both the coherence and effectiveness of his apologue.Any question so formulated that it identifies the principles of organization of the two works simply on the grounds that they both prose fictions prevents such an enquiry.Investigation might lead to the conclusion that all works of prose fiction do , in fact, have the same general principle of coherence - for example, they are all fictional exploitation, more or less subtle, of identifiable themes.But we cannot investigate even this possibility if our initial question excludes alternative solutions.Let us assume that there is a third class of prose fiction, "represented action", which is organized neither as satire nor apologue nor even as a complicated reconciliation of the two. In any work which belongs to this class, characters about whose fates we are made to care are introduced in unstable relationships which are then further complicated until the the complications are finally resolved by the complete removal of the represented instability.Actions differ from each other in so many particulars that it would be impossible to list even the important ones.