ESC: English Studies in Canada

S L I D I N G D O W N T O G E T H E R : F I E L D I N G , A D D I S O N , A N D T H E P L E A S U R E S O F T H E I M A G I N A T I O N I N T O M ] O N E S DAVID OAKLEAF University of Calgary I n the fourth chapter of Book i of Tom Jones, the narrator leads the reader down the garden path. The garden, the prospect from Allworthy’s house, deserves its place as an example of “the philosophical and moral overtones of the new landscape garden” in John Dixon Hunt and Peter Willis’s an­ thology of garden literature,1 for the narrator’s description of the garden establishes many of the novel’s moral and social values. At the same time, however, that narrator tricks the reader into a comic slide from elevated values and rhetoric down to the bitchily comic reality of Bridget Allworthy and the values of the selfishly hypocritical characters so common in the society of the novel that contains this elevated assertion of value. This ploy seems so emphatically to undercut asserted value that it deserves attention. Since Fielding so obviously explores the value of imaginative writing in a novel that has, for its interplay between narrative and comment, been related to the tradition of the periodical essay,2Addison’s discussion of the pleasures of the imagination in the Spectator seems an appropriate foil. Less ponder­ ously but no less seriously than Addison, the narrator attempts to form an imaginative taste militantly opposed to pedantic criticism and uncritical romance alike; that is, to the extremes of imagination stifled and imagination indulged. In fact, the description of the prospect from Paradise Hall em­ bodies not only this conventional horizontal tension of opposites, which operates on all levels of Tom Jones as well as in the union of art and nature praised in the landscape, but also, in the soaring and plunging of the nar­ rator, a vertical movement that makes the values of the imagination as much a feature of the style of the narrative as of the matter presented. Read as a parable of the imagination, the fourth chapter of Tom Jones reveals a witty and coherent embodiment of the pleasures of the imagination stated less self-consciously by Addison. When the narrator finds a double in the obses­ sively solemn Man of the Hill, the reader recognizes that the narrator’s slippery manner is as important as the matter it presents. The matter of the narrator’s description of Allworthy’s estate, the Eden from which the hero is expelled, is rich but straightforward. Exploiting the English Studies in Canada, ix, 4, December 1983 rich tradition of reading both emblematic descriptions and actual landscapes, the narrator makes this prospect a full expression of the values of its owner.3 The house itself, “as commodious within, as venerable without,”4 strikes the beholder with awe while combining utile with dulce; nobly in “the Gothic Stile of Building,” it nevertheless rivals “the Beauties of the best Grecian Architecture.” Sensibly located “on the South-east Side of a Hill, but nearer the Bottom than the Top of it,” as it must be to remain com­ fortable during the British winter, it is nevertheless a happy rural seat of various view: “yet high enough to enjoy a most charming Prospect of the Valley beneath.” This, of course, is familiar ground, and the narrator’s syntax reflects his balance of opposites. The predictable shelter of “a Grove of old Oaks” reflects the utilitarian but venerable grandeur of the house. The “gradual Ascent” of the hill itself suggests an ideally controlled order containing the energy of the cascade that moves the eye outward, “tumbling in a natural Fall over the broken and mossy Stones” rather than “down a regular Flight of Steps” to reach a lake visible from every window at the front of the house. The language describing this union of art and nature is extremely artful. The lake occupies the...