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Many critics, Martin C. Battestin and C. J. Rawson perhaps most prominent among them, have described Henry Fielding both as the last and one of the greatest representatives of the Augustan Age in English literature. In their rather different accounts of Fielding's achievement, Battestin and Rawson share an implicit sense that the Augustan spirit in literature is characterized by concern for significant literary form. Rawson argues that in Fielding's novels the allegiance to "formal ordering" of earlier Augustan writers such as Alexander Pope and Jonathan Swift comes under "stress." Rawson is fascinated by Serjeant Atkinson's physical awkwardness in Amelia (1751), fascinated by tokens of Fielding's sympathies with the disorderly and unruly. Battestin is fascinated by the careful artifice of Tom Jones (1749)--the counterpointing of characters, the richly orchestrated plotting, the recurrent suggestion of an emblematic dimension in the characterization. He sees in all this an echoing by Fielding of Pope's famous lines in An Essay on Man (part 1, 1732):
All Nature is but Art, unknown to thee;
All Chance, Direction, which thou canst not see;
All Discord, Harmony, not understood;
All partial Evil universal Good[.]
Battestin goes beyond the term Augustan and finds in Fielding's novels a design "as artificial as the pure geometrical shapes of a building by Palladio, in which the principles of symmetry and balance, the harmonious relationship of part to part, are strictly observed." In finding a "Palladian" structure in Fielding's work, Battestin extends and enriches an insight that goes back at least as far as Samuel Taylor Coleridge's oft-cited remark: "What a master of composition Fielding was! Upon my word, I think the
Oedipus Tyrannous, The Alchemist, and
Tom Jones, the three most perfect plots ever planned."
The form of Fielding's novels is important because it embodies the faith of Fielding and his age in Order.
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