It is difficult to say whether Fielding was a realist or an idealist, and after having read him one is tempted rather to declare that the words have no meaning. Ought he to be called a realist “because he selected Jonathan Wild for a hero, or an idealist because he took Amelia for a heroine ! He found the second as he found the first—in nature ; and the first, like the second, was idealized, that is, transformed into a type in accordance with the eternal laws of art. As for calling Fielding a realist simply because in showing things as they are he sometimes called them by their names, it is a childish application of the word, and I note, merely in passing, the dreary stuff which passes with some people for the Alpha and Omega of criticism. What is sure and clear is that Fielding is a great classic. Walter Scott calls him the father of the English novel. Characters like Sophia and her maid, Squire Weston, Mrs. Weston, Sergeant Atkinson, Major Bath, Amelia, are evidently primordial types created to be reproduced in an infinity of copies. Parson Adams passes immediately into the Vicar of Wakefield, and Sterne. so different from Fielding, comes under his powerful influence. It was not Dickens who first invented the novel with a purpose (M. Stapfer alludes of course to “Amelia,’ and its purpose of prison reform). George Eliot read Fielding with admiration, sometimes correcting his morality, much oftener with a view to develop it and to establish upon his philosophy, so full of human feeling, that great romance of sympathy and love which did not originate in Russia. “Amelia' founded in England the good domestic novel. No one knew better than the loose-lived Fielding the value of the pure home affections which are the most solid buttress of happiness.”
--Reviews of Reviews, Vol. II
