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ARRING certain candid autobiographers, the two Englishmen whose youth has been most thoroughly made known to the world are the heroes of Henry Fielding's "Tom Jones" and Somerset Maugham's "Of Human Bondage." Perhaps not even the autobiographers need be excepted; if poetry is more true than history, so is fiction, at its best, more true than confession, since the novelist can be impartial toward his characters as the confessant can hardly be toward himself. Without much doubt, no other novel rivals these two. Thackeray, whose "Pendennis" comes as close as any third, whimpered that his age would not let him be as honest as Fielding, and so admittedly gave his protagonist a more conventional character than the facts warranted. Whatever the reason, Thackeray did not dare do in the nineteenth century what franker men did in the eighteenth and the twentieth. Pendennis is occasionally masked, while Jones and Carey are drawn to the life, without apology. That Fielding was humorous and Mr. Maugham serious raises no real distinction. With about the same respect for truth, they set out each to trace the career of a young man during the troubled years in which he is finding

his proper gait and place. They had, of course, very different young men to follow, but this was due neither to mere accident nor to mere personal difference of taste in heroes. The novelists belonged to centuries far apart in their mental and moral attitudes, and the two novels reflect those attitudes with notable fidelity.

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Something, at the outset, must be credited to the special experience of the novelists. When Fielding wrote "Tom Jones," he was, or was shortly to become, a magistrate, busily enforcing a systematic code in which he had been trained and in which he believed. Since his own youth had been active and adventurous, he knew how to sympathize with temporary departures from the code, but he did not bring against it any speculative questions. And with the judicial code, in his opinion, went the practical codes of behavior which his social class accepted. Some things, the members of that class agreed, a gentleman should not and some things he would not do; the line between them was sharply drawn. In all such matters, Fielding weighed the circumstances as a magistrate, though an enlightened magistrate, would: that is, he studied the

actual deeds and their consequences. Mr. Maugham, on the other hand, when he wrote "Of Human Bondage," was an intellectual free-lance, who had been trained in medicine. He might agree with Fielding that the only unpardonable offenses are lying and meanness, but he held to no such systematic codes as a magistrate and Georgian gentleman might hold to. As any enlightened physician must, Mr. Maugham believed that to the muddled race of man almost anything in the way of conduct is possible. Moreover, he was interested less in positive deeds and consequences than in motives and processes. Given the incredible in conduct, how should the spectator explain it? It would not do, this spectator seems to have concluded, to look for an answer in the type. The individual must be studied for whatever knowledge may be arrived at. Philip is therefore so much a person, not a type, that he is commonly guessed to be only a transcript of his creator, whereas Tom is the less individualized quintessence of many

men.

These attitudes toward character influence the methods followed in "Tom Jones" and "Of Human Bondage." Fielding could be content with nothing but a comedy virtually as large as England. Provided he knew Provided he knew enough and put forth enough effort, he saw no reason why he should not do in easy prose what Homer had done in heroic verse. To do that, he laid down a noble ground plan and built upon it a solid structure of which the parts fit together with the rich economy so often praised. Time in the narrative marches almost as steadily as in the calendar; the topography is so accurate that most of the scenes can

be assigned to their places on the map. The various groups of characters lead their separate existences on something like their own terms, though they keep touching one another and so rounding out the central situation in which they are all involved. A general suspense carries the whole narrative along in a converging flood. When the end comes, to change the simile, it is as if the keystone of a laborious arch had been deftly dropped into position and all the scaffolding suddenly whisked away. For the elaboration of this form, more than art was necessary. There had to be a positive conception of the meaning of human life and a settled opinion as to human behavior. Tom does not learn by a progressive discovery of what lies within him; he learns by coming in contact with one item after another of the experience which awaits him, already prepared, in the world of established rewards and punishments. That Fielding was himself full of the magnanimity which gives so great a look of tolerance to the record should not hide the fact that he based his record upon a body of doctrine which he owed rather to his knowledge of men at large than to his knowledge of Tom. That is to say, he had a pattern to which in advance he believed that his hero ought to be cut. The episodes of folly in Tom's career, therefore, become naturally episodes of the plot of the novel. They mean relatively little in the entire scheme, and so can be governed with a confident hand. If Fielding gave his masterpiece a classic form, it is in part, at least, because he adhered to a classic philosophy.

Mr. Maugham is of another school. He shows Philip as starting about where Tom leaves off. The doctrine

of regular rewards and punishments, of failures and successes, has come down to this later hero as one of the traditions of his race. His career is a search for them; but he does not find them. Though each new blunder knocks a little wisdom, or caution, into him, he looks in vain for the happiness which he believes he could feel if he might discover some chart of life and might, as he thinks he could, adapt himself to it. Such a career demands a chronicle very different from that of Tom's. "Of Human Bondage" has not, in the classic sense, any plot at all. It is merely a single thread drawn out through a wilderness of adventures. Time drags or hastens in accordance with Philip's mood. The topography of his story is the narrow strip of earth along which he walks. Actual as are all the persons whom he meets in his wanderings, they exist essentially in his own perception of them; if they go away, they become phantasms till they come back and are rendered incarnate by his notice. The central suspense of the story is concerned altogether with Philip's spiritual development. Without a definite goal to struggle toward, he can arrive at any goal whatever only when some chapter of his growth has reached its conclusion and he can, looking back over it, see drift and direction in it. The triumph of his pilgrimage comes not when he makes a fortune or wins a bride, as with most heroes, but when he has that vision of his plight in which Mr. Maugham sums up his reading of human destiny.

"Suddenly the answer occurred to him: he chuckled: now that he had it, it was like one of the puzzles which you worry over till you are shown the solution and then cannot imagine how it

could ever have escaped you. The answer was obvious. Life had no meaning. On the earth, satellite of a star speeding through space, living things had arisen under the influence of conditions which were part of the planet's history; and as there had been a beginning of life upon it so, under the influence of other conditions, there would be an end: man, no more significant than other forms of life, had come not as the climax of creation but as a physical reaction to the environment. ... There was no meaning in life, and man by living served no end. It was immaterial whether he was born or not born, whether he lived or died. Life was insignificant and death without consequence. Philip exulted, as he had exulted in his boyhood when the weight of a belief in God was lifted from his shoulders: it seemed to him that the last burden of responsibility was lifted from him; and for the first time he was utterly free. . . . If life was meaningless, the world was robbed of its cruelty. What he did or left undone did not matter. Failure was unimportant and success amounted to nothing. He was the most inconsiderable creature in that swarming mass of mankind which for a brief space occupied the surface of the earth; and he was almighty because he had wrenched from chaos the secret of its nothing

ness.

"Out of the manifold events of his life, his deeds, his feelings, his thoughts, [a man] might make a design, regular, elaborate, complicated, or beautiful; and though it might be no more than an illusion that he had the power of selection, . . . that did not matter: it seemed, and so to him it was. In the vast warp of life, (a river arising from no spring and flowing endlessly to no

sea), with the background to his fancies that there was no meaning and that nothing was important, a man might get a personal satisfaction in selecting the various strands that worked out the pattern. There was one pattern, the most obvious, perfect, and beautiful, in which a man was born, grew to manhood, married, produced children, toiled for his bread, and died; but there were others, intricate and wonderful, in which happiness did not enter and in which success was not attempted; and in them might be discovered a more troubling grace. Happiness mattered as little as pain.

Whatever happened to him now would be one more motive to add to the complexity of the pattern, and when the end approached he would rejoice in its completion. It would be a work of art, and it would be none the less beautiful because he alone knew of its existence, and with his death it would at once cease to be."

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To comprehend the difference between Tom and Philip it is enough to imagine how Tom would have felt if he could have been faced with this conclusion of Philip's. Perhaps he could not have been faced with it. Perhaps so subtle a diagnosis of man's fate would have been to Tom mere gossamer, brushed aside without notice, or mere starry music, quite inaudible to his robust ear. But if some less subtle version of it could have reached him, he would at the worst have been uncomfortable, feeling that something which was somehow blasphemous had been said; and at the best he would have felt sorry for Philip, thus led astray by his sad fancies. To Tom's mind, at least, the problem was

simple. The pattern of life was obvious, perfect, and beautiful. Any difficulty which there might be lay in his will. It had the task of forcing his high spirits, his hot desires, his stubborn individuality, into obedience. Nor would it ever have occurred to him to be distressed because his young passions yielded only gradually to discipline. The pattern, he assumed, would wait for him. .He could sow wild oats from Somersetshire to London and back again without ever doubting that he could later settle down all the more easily for having worked off the energy which confused his will during the first days of his manhood. Meanwhile, no vision of perfection mocked him. Though now and then he winced with chagrin or remorse, he saw his misdeeds all in a secular light. He did not brood. He was what beef and beer had made him, without any tincture of reflection. For him, nerves

were nonsense.

It is in respect to nerves that Philip most emphatically differs from Tom. Between them stretches out a century and a half of thought. Philip cannot, like Tom, follow his instincts and study the results. He is obliged, as a creature of his age, to inherit in his childhood a mass of abstract ideas, many of them contradictory. Obliged, out of the multitude, to choose some ideas to be tested, he is bewildered. Effects seem not to follow their accepted causes. The obvious, perfect, and beautiful pattern does not emerge. Moreover, the pain of seeking it is almost unendurable. Philip has thought till his nerves are raw. Brought up sharp by obstacle after obstacle, he suffers without respite. Before he has ceased to brood over his last frustration, he has begun to fear the next.

A quarrel or a kiss which Tom would have done with in a paragraph, Philip draws out through a chapter or numerous chapters. His mind cannot take its ease in modest secular aims. He demands of the universe nothing less than perfect justice. Unable to be satisfied with a rough approximation to his desires, he goes through agonies because he does not feel accurately adjusted to his environment. By reason of his tender nerves, he suffers more from his crippled foot than Tom suffers from his illegitimacy. Because Philip is intelligent and imaginative, he has had his eyes opened to the endless menace of existence, much as he has had them opened to the swarming bacteria of which it was possible for Tom to be calmly unaware. Knowledge has populated the world with complexities for Philip, but it has not correspondingly toughened him to resist their assaults. Whether his problem baffles him because he has sensitive nerves or he has sensitive nerves because his problem baffles him, it is impossible to determine. In any case, his strength and his task are matched less favorably than Tom's.

Is this a difference between two persons or a difference between two centuries? Of course, Fielding might have selected for his hero some youth of thinner, and Mr. Maugham might have selected one of thicker, skin. But each novelist selected a fair enough representative of his age. For Philip to be as happily obtuse as Tom would mean that he had been untouched by the increase both of knowledge and of doubt since Tom's time. Knowledge during that period has shown that the moral universe is actually more complex than the eighteenth century in England generally held. Doubt

during the period has hinted that the moral universe is relatively more complex than the eighteenth century in England even dreamed. And there has been no steady ratio between knowledge and doubt. Now one and now the other has developed at the cost of the other. On the whole, however, doubt is probably just at present in the lead. It has driven reflective and honest men like Philip into such uncertainty that all their science cannot furnish them a substantial place to stand on. Many facts as they may know, they lack the audacity to generalize from them. Such generalization springs from simpler times, like the eighteenth century, when for a comfortable number of years England came near to resting in a sort of moral equilibrium. Tom was spared the pains of doubt, because for him and for his kind they did not exist. His strength, therefore, instead of being wasted upon general problems, could be devoted to specific tasks. And tasks, of course, are always simpler than problems. The mind, lost in the infinite complexity of speculation, grows bewildered. It must fight its battles over and over again. It imagines

many enemies where there are possibly a few. Only when it addresses itself to definite tasks does it bring its fullest powers into action. Only then can it forget its relations to the universe at large in its concern with its relations to the next step before it. Tom, thus bending his energies to their effective uses, is more likely to be exhilarated than to be depressed by the struggle, even when when fortune goes against him. His blood tingles and his spirit rises refreshed from each engagement, whether defeat or victory.