GENERAL INTRODUCTION.
There are few amusements more dangerous for an author than theindulgence in ironic descriptions of his own work. If the irony isdepreciatory, posterity is but too likely to say, "Many a true word isspoken in jest;" if it is encomiastic, the same ruthless and ungratefulcritic is but too likely to take it as an involuntary confession offolly and vanity. But when Fielding, in one of his serio-comicintroductions to _Tom Jones_, described it as "this prodigious work," heall unintentionally (for he was the least pretentious of men)anticipated the verdict which posterity almost at once, and withever-increasing suffrage of the best judges as time went on, was aboutto pass not merely upon this particular book, but upon his whole geniusand his whole production as a novelist. His work in other kinds is of avery different order of excellence. It is sufficiently interesting attimes in itself; and always more than sufficiently interesting as his;for which reasons, as well as for the further one that it iscomparatively little known, a considerable selection from it is offeredto the reader in the last two volumes of this edition. Until the presentoccasion (which made it necessary that I should acquaint myself withit) I own that my own knowledge of these miscellaneous writings was byno means thorough. It is now pretty complete; but the idea which Ipreviously had of them at first and second hand, though a littleimproved, has not very materially altered. Though in all this hack-workFielding displayed, partially and at intervals, the same qualities whichhe displayed eminently and constantly in the four great books heregiven, he was not, as the French idiom expresses it, _dans sonassiette_, in his own natural and impregnable disposition and situationof character and ability, when he was occupied on it. The novel was forhim that _assiette_; and all his novels are here.
Although Henry Fielding lived in quite modern times, although by familyand connections he was of a higher rank than most men of letters, andalthough his genius was at once recognised by his contemporaries so soonas it displayed itself in its proper sphere, his biography until veryrecently was by no means full; and the most recent researches, includingthose of Mr Austin Dobson--a critic unsurpassed for combination ofliterary faculty and knowledge of the eighteenth century--have notaltogether sufficed to fill up the gaps. His family, said to havedescended from a member of the great house of Hapsburg who came toEngland in the reign of Henry II., distinguished itself in the Wars ofthe Roses, and in the seventeenth century was advanced to the peeragesof Denbigh in England and (later) of Desmond in Ireland. The novelistwas the grandson of John Fielding, Canon of Salisbury, the fifth son ofthe first Earl of Desmond of this creation. The canon's third son,Edmond, entered the army, served under Marlborough, and married SarahGold or Gould, daughter of a judge of the King's Bench. Their eldest sonwas Henry, who was born on April 22, 1707, and had an uncertain numberof brothers and sisters of the whole blood. After his first wife'sdeath, General Fielding (for he attained that rank) married again. Themost remarkable offspring of the first marriage, next to Henry, was hissister Sarah, also a novelist, who wrote David Simple; of the second,John, afterwards Sir John Fielding, who, though blind, succeeded hishalf-brother as a Bow Street magistrate, and in that office combined anequally honourable record with a longer tenure.
Fielding was born at Sharpham Park in Somersetshire, the seat of hismaternal grandfather; but most of his early youth was spent at EastStour in Dorsetshire, to which his father removed after the judge'sdeath. He is said to have received his first education under a parson ofthe neighbourhood named Oliver, in whom a very uncomplimentary traditionsees the original of Parson Trulliber. He was then certainly sent toEton, where he did not waste his time as regards learning, and madeseveral valuable friends. But the dates of his entering and leavingschool are alike unknown; and his subsequent sojourn at Leyden for twoyears--though there is no reason to doubt it--depends even less uponany positive documentary evidence. This famous University still had agreat repute as a training school in law, for which profession he wasintended; but the reason why he did not receive the even then far moreusual completion of a public school education by a sojourn at Oxford orCambridge may be suspected to be different. It may even have hadsomething to do with a curious escapade of his about which not very muchis known--an attempt to carry off a pretty heiress of Lyme, namedSarah Andrew.
Even at Leyden, however, General Fielding seems to have been unable orunwilling to pay his son's expenses, which must have been far less therethan at an English University; and Henry's return to London in 1728-29is said to have been due to sheer impecuniosity. When he returned toEngland, his father was good enough to make him an allowance of L200nominal, which appears to have been equivalent to L0 actual. And aspractically nothing is known of him for the next six or seven years,except the fact of his having worked industriously enough at a largenumber of not very good plays of the lighter kind, with a few poems andmiscellanies, it is reasonably enough supposed that he lived by his pen.The only product of this period which has kept (or indeed which everreceived) competent applause is _Tom Thumb, or the Tragedy ofTragedies_, a following of course of the _Rehearsal_, but full of humourand spirit. The most successful of his other dramatic works were the_Mock Doctor_ and the _Miser_, adaptations of Moliere's famous pieces.His undoubted connection with the stage, and the fact of thecontemporary existence of a certain Timothy Fielding, helped suggestionsof less dignified occupations as actor, booth-keeper, and so forth; butthese have long been discredited and indeed disproved.
In or about 1735, when Fielding was twenty-eight, we find him in a new,a more brilliant and agreeable, but even a more transient phase. He hadmarried (we do not know when or where) Miss Charlotte Cradock, one ofthree sisters who lived at Salisbury (it is to be observed thatFielding's entire connections, both in life and letters, are with theWestern Counties and London), who were certainly of competent means, andfor whose alleged illegitimacy there is no evidence but an unsupportedfling of that old maid of genius, Richardson. The descriptions both ofSophia and of Amelia are said to have been taken from this lady; hergood looks and her amiability are as well established as anything of thekind can be in the absence of photographs and affidavits; and it iscertain that her husband was passionately attached to her, during theirtoo short married life. His method, however, of showing his affectionsmacked in some ways too much of the foibles which he has attributed toCaptain Booth, and of those which we must suspect Mr Thomas Jones wouldalso have exhibited, if he had not been adopted as Mr Allworthy's heir,and had not had Mr Western's fortune to share and look forward to. It istrue that grave breaches have been made by recent criticism in the verypicturesque and circumstantial story told on the subject by Murphy, thefirst of Fielding's biographers. This legend was that Fielding, havingsucceeded by the death of his mother to a small estate at East Stour,worth about L200 a year, and having received L1500 in ready money as hiswife's fortune, got through the whole in three years by keeping openhouse, with a large retinue in "costly yellow liveries," and so forth.In details, this story has been simply riddled. His mother had died longbefore; he was certainly not away from London three years, or anythinglike it; and so forth. At the same time, the best and soberest judgesagree that there is an intrinsic probability, a consensus (if a vagueone) of tradition, and a chain of almost unmistakably personalreferences in the novels, which plead for a certain amount of truth, atthe bottom of a much embellished legend. At any rate, if Fieldingestablished himself in the country, it was not long before he returnedto town; for early in 1736 we find him back again, and not merely aplaywright, but lessee of the "Little Theatre" in the Haymarket. Theplays which he produced here--satirico-political pieces, such as_Pasquin_ and the _Historical Register_--were popular enough, butoffended the Government; and in 1737 a new bill regulating theatricalperformances, and instituting the Lord Chamberlain's control, waspassed. This measure put an end directly to the "Great Mogul's Company,"as Fielding had called his troop, and indirectly to its manager's careeras a playwright. He did indeed write a few pieces in future years, butthey were of the smallest importance.<
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After this check he turned at last to a serious profession, enteredhimself of the Middle Temple in November of the same year, and wascalled three years later; but during these years, and indeed for sometime afterwards, our information about him is still of the vaguestcharacter. Nobody doubts that he had a large share in the _Champion_, anessay-periodical on the usual eighteenth-century model, which began toappear in 1739, and which is still occasionally consulted for the workthat is certainly or probably his. He went the Western Circuit, andattended the Wiltshire Sessions, after he was called, giving up hiscontributions to periodicals soon after that event. But he soon returnedto literature proper, or rather made his _debut_ in it, with theimmortal book now republished. The _History of the Adventures of JosephAndrews, and his Friend Mr Abraham Adams_, appeared in February 1742,and its author received from Andrew Millar, the publisher, the sum ofL183, 11s. Even greater works have fetched much smaller sums; but itwill be admitted that _Joseph Andrews_ was not dear.
The advantage, however, of presenting a survey of an author's lifeuninterrupted by criticism is so clear, that what has to be said about_Joseph_ may be conveniently postponed for the moment. Immediately afterits publication the author fell back upon miscellaneous writing, and inthe next year (1743) collected and issued three volumes of_Miscellanies_. In the two first volumes the only thing of much interestis the unfinished and unequal, but in part powerful, _Journey from thisWorld to the Next_, an attempt of a kind which Fontenelle and others,following Lucian, had made very popular with the time. But the thirdvolume of the _Miscellanies_ deserved a less modest and gregariousappearance, for it contained, and is wholly occupied by, the wonderfuland terrible satire of _Jonathan Wild_, the greatest piece of pure ironyin English out of Swift. Soon after the publication of the book, a greatcalamity came on Fielding. His wife had been very ill when he wrote thepreface; soon afterwards she was dead. They had taken the chance, hadmade the choice, that the more prudent and less wise student-hero andheroine of Mr Browning's _Youth and Art_ had shunned; they had no doubt"sighed deep, laughed free, Starved, feasted, despaired," and we neednot question, that they had also "been happy."
Except this sad event and its rather incongruous sequel, Fielding'smarriage to his wife's maid Mary Daniel--a marriage, however, which didnot take place till full four years later, and which by all accountssupplied him with a faithful and excellent companion and nurse, and hischildren with a kind stepmother--little or nothing is again known ofthis elusive man of genius between the publication of the _Miscellanies_in 1743, and that of _Tom Jones_ in 1749. The second marriage itself inNovember 1747; an interview which Joseph Warton had with him rather morethan a year earlier (one of the very few direct interviews we have); thepublication of two anti-Jacobite newspapers (Fielding was always astrong Whig and Hanoverian), called the _True Patriot_ and the_Jacobite's Journal_ in 1745 and the following years; some indistincttraditions about residences at Twickenham and elsewhere, and some, moreprecise but not much more authenticated, respecting patronage by theDuke of Bedford, Mr Lyttelton, Mr Allen, and others, pretty well sum upthe whole.
_Tom Jones_ was published in February (a favourite month with Fieldingor his publisher Millar) 1749; and as it brought him the, for thosedays, very considerable sum of L600 to which Millar added anotherhundred later, the novelist must have been, for a time at any rate,relieved from his chronic penury. But he had already, by Lyttelton'sinterest, secured his first and last piece of preferment, being madeJustice of the Peace for Westminster, an office on which he entered withcharacteristic vigour. He was qualified for it not merely by a solidknowledge of the law, and by great natural abilities, but by histhorough kindness of heart; and, perhaps, it may also be added, by hislong years of queer experience on (as Mr Carlyle would have said) the"burning marl" of the London Bohemia. Very shortly afterwards he waschosen Chairman of Quarter Sessions, and established himself in BowStreet. The Bow Street magistrate of that time occupied a most singularposition, and was more like a French Prefect of Police or even aMinister of Public Safety than a mere justice. Yet he was ill paid.Fielding says that the emoluments, which before his accession had butbeen L500 a year of "dirty" money, were by his own action but L300 ofclean; and the work, if properly performed, was very severe.
That he performed it properly all competent evidence shows, a foolish,inconclusive, and I fear it must be said emphatically snobbish story ofWalpole's notwithstanding. In particular, he broke up a gang ofcut-throat thieves, which had been the terror of London. But his tenureof the post was short enough, and scarcely extended to five years. Hishealth had long been broken, and he was now constantly attacked by gout,so that he had frequently to retreat on Bath from Bow Street, or hissuburban cottage of Fordhook, Ealing. But he did not relax his literarywork. His pen was active with pamphlets concerning his office; _Amelia_,his last novel, appeared towards the close of 1751; and next year sawthe beginning of a new paper, the _Covent Garden Journal_, whichappeared twice a week, ran for the greater part of the year, and died inNovember. Its great author did not see that month twice again. In thespring of 1753 he grew worse; and after a year's struggle with illhealth, hard work, and hard weather, lesser measures being pronounceduseless, was persuaded to try the "Portugal Voyage," of which he hasleft so charming a record in the _Journey to Lisbon_. He left Fordhookon June 26, 1754, reached Lisbon in August, and, dying there on the 8thof October, was buried in the cemetery of the Estrella.
Of not many writers perhaps does a clearer notion, as far as theirpersonality goes, exist in the general mind that interests itself at allin literature than of Fielding. Yet more than once a warning has beensounded, especially by his best and most recent biographer, to theeffect that this idea is founded upon very little warranty of scripture.The truth is, that as the foregoing record--which, brief as it is, is asufficiently faithful summary--will have shown, we know very littleabout Fielding. We have hardly any letters of his, and so lack the bestby far and the most revealing of all character-portraits; we have butone important autobiographic fragment, and though that is of the highestinterest and value, it was written far in the valley of the shadow ofdeath, it is not in the least retrospective, and it affords but dim andinferential light on his younger, healthier, and happier days and ways.He came, moreover, just short of one set of men of letters, of whom wehave a great deal of personal knowledge, and just beyond another. He wasneither of those about Addison, nor of those about Johnson. No intimatefriend of his has left us anything elaborate about him. On the otherhand, we have a far from inconsiderable body of documentary evidence, ofa kind often by no means trustworthy. The best part of it is containedin the letters of his cousin, Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, and thereminiscences or family traditions of her grand-daughter, Lady LouisaStuart. But Lady Mary, vivacious and agreeable as she is, had with allher talent a very considerable knack of writing for effect, of drawingstrong contrasts and the like; and it is not quite certain that she sawvery much of Fielding in the last and most interesting third of hislife. Another witness, Horace Walpole, to less knowledge and equallydubious accuracy, added decided ill-will, which may have been due partlyto the shrinking of a dilettante and a fop from a burly Bohemian; but Ifear is also consequent upon the fact that Horace could not afford todespise Fielding's birth, and knew him to be vastly his own superior ingenius. We hear something of him again from Richardson; and Richardsonhated him with the hatred of dissimilar genius, of inferior socialposition, and, lastly, of the cat for the dog who touzles and worriesher. Johnson partly inherited or shared Richardson's aversion, partlywas blinded to Fielding's genius by his aggressive Whiggery. I fear,too, that he was incapable of appreciating it for reasons other thanpolitical. It is certain that Johnson, sane and robust as he was, wasnever quite at ease before genius of the gigantic kind, either in deador living. Whether he did not like to have to look up too much, or wasactually unable to do so, it is certain that Shakespeare, Milton,Swift, and Fielding, those four Atlantes of English verse and prose, allaffected him with lukewarm adm
iration, or with positive dislike, forwhich it is vain to attempt to assign any uniform secondary cause,political or other. It may be permitted to hint another reason. AllJohnson's most sharp-sighted critics have noticed, though most havediscreetly refrained from insisting on, his "thorn-in-the-flesh," thecombination in him of very strong physical passions with the deepestsense of the moral and religious duty of abstinence. It is perhapsimpossible to imagine anything more distasteful to a man so buffeted,than the extreme indulgence with which Fielding regards, and the easyfreedom, not to say gusto, with which he depicts, those who succumb tosimilar temptation. Only by supposing the workings of some subtleinfluence of this kind is it possible to explain, even in so capriciousa humour as Johnson's, the famous and absurd application of the term"barren rascal" to a writer who, dying almost young, after having formany years lived a life of pleasure, and then for four or five one oflaborious official duty, has left work anything but small in actualbulk, and fertile with the most luxuriant growth of intellectualoriginality.
Partly on the _obiter dicta_ of persons like these, partly on the stillmore tempting and still more treacherous ground of indications drawnfrom his works, a Fielding of fantasy has been constructed, which inThackeray's admirable sketch attains real life and immortality as acreature of art, but which possesses rather dubious claims as ahistorical character. It is astonishing how this Fielding of fantasysinks and shrivels when we begin to apply the horrid tests of criticismto his component parts. The _eidolon_, with inked ruffles and a towelround his head, sits in the Temple and dashes off articles for the_Covent Garden Journal_; then comes Criticism, hellish maid, and remindsus that when the _Covent Garden Journal_ appeared, Fielding's wild oats,if ever sown at all, had been sown long ago; that he was a busymagistrate and householder in Bow Street; and that, if he had towelsround his head, it was probably less because he had exceeded in liquorthan because his Grace of Newcastle had given him a headache by wantingelaborate plans and schemes prepared at an hour's notice. Lady Mary,apparently with some envy, tells us that he could "feel rapture with hiscook-maid." "Which many has," as Mr Ridley remarks, from XanthiasPhoceus downwards; but when we remember the historic fact that hemarried this maid (not a "cook-maid" at all), and that though he alwaysspeaks of her with warm affection and hearty respect, such "raptures" aswe have of his clearly refer to a very different woman, who was both alady and a beautiful one, we begin a little to shake our heads. HoraceWalpole at second-hand draws us a Fielding, pigging with low companionsin a house kept like a hedge tavern; Fielding himself, within a year ortwo, shows us more than half-undesignedly in the _Voyage to Lisbon_ thathe was very careful about the appointments and decency of his table,that he stood rather upon ceremony in regard to his own treatment of hisfamily, and the treatment of them and himself by others, and that he wasaltogether a person orderly, correct, and even a little finikin. Nor isthere the slightest reasonable reason to regard this as a piece ofhypocrisy, a vice as alien from the Fielding of fancy as from theFielding of fact, and one the particular manifestation of which, in thisparticular place, would have been equally unlikely and unintelligible.
It may be asked whether I propose to substitute for the traditionalFielding a quite different person, of regular habits and methodicaleconomy. Certainly not. The traditional estimate of great men is rarelywrong altogether, but it constantly has a habit of exaggerating anddramatising their characteristics. For some things in Fielding's careerwe have positive evidence of document, and evidence hardly less certainof probability. Although I believe the best judges are now of opinionthat his impecuniosity has been overcharged, he certainly hadexperiences which did not often fall to the lot of even a cadet of goodfamily in the eighteenth century. There can be no reasonable doubt thathe was a man who had a leaning towards pretty girls and bottles of goodwine; and I should suppose that if the girl were kind and fairlywinsome, he would not have insisted that she should possess Helen'sbeauty, that if the bottle of good wine were not forthcoming, he wouldhave been very tolerant of a mug of good ale. He may very possibly havedrunk more than he should, and lost more than he could conveniently pay.It may be put down as morally ascertained that towards all theseweaknesses of humanity, and others like unto them, he held an attitudewhich was less that of the unassailable philosopher than that of thesympathiser, indulgent and excusing. In regard more especially to whatare commonly called moral delinquencies, this attitude was so decidedas to shock some people even in those days, and many in these. Just whenthe first sheets of this edition were passing through the press, aviolent attack was made in a newspaper correspondence on the morality of_Tom Jones_ by certain notorious advocates of Purity, as some say, ofPruriency and Prudery combined, according to less complimentaryestimates. Even midway between the two periods we find the admirableMiss Ferrier, a sister of Fielding's own craft, who sometimes hadtouches of nature and satire not far inferior to his own, expressing bythe mouth of one of her characters with whom she seems partly to agree,the sentiment that his works are "vanishing like noxious exhalations."Towards any misdoing by persons of the one sex towards persons of theother, when it involved brutality or treachery, Fielding was pitiless;but when treachery and brutality were not concerned, he was, to say theleast, facile. So, too, he probably knew by experience--he certainlyknew by native shrewdness and acquired observation--that to look toomuch on the wine when it is red, or on the cards when they areparti-coloured, is ruinous to health and fortune; but he thought notover badly of any man who did these things. Still it is possible toadmit this in him, and to stop short of that idea of a careless andreckless _viveur_ which has so often been put forward. In particular,Lady Mary's view of his childlike enjoyment of the moment has been, Ithink, much exaggerated by posterity, and was probably not a littlemistaken by the lady herself. There are two moods in which the motto is_Carpe diem_, one a mood of simply childish hurry, the other one wherebehind the enjoyment of the moment lurks, and in which the enjoyment ofthe moment is not a little heightened by, that vast ironic consciousnessof the before and after, which I at least see everywhere in thebackground of Fielding's work.
The man, however, of whom we know so little, concerns us much less thanthe author of the works, of which it only rests with ourselves to knoweverything. I have above classed Fielding as one of the four Atlantes ofEnglish verse and prose, and I doubt not that both the phrase and theapplication of it to him will meet with question and demur. I have onlyto interject, as the critic so often has to interject, a request to thecourt to take what I say in the sense in which I say it. I do not meanthat Shakespeare, Milton, Swift, and Fielding are in all or even in mostrespects on a level. I do not mean that the three last are in allrespects of the greatest names in English literature. I only mean that,in a certain quality, which for want of a better word I have chosen tocall Atlantean, they stand alone. Each of them, for the metaphor isapplicable either way, carries a whole world on his shoulders, or looksdown on a whole world from his natural altitude. The worlds aredifferent, but they are worlds; and though the attitude of the giants isdifferent also, it agrees in all of them on the points of competence andstrength. Take whomsoever else we may among our men of letters, and weshall find this characteristic to be in comparison wanting. These fourcarry their world, and are not carried by it; and if it, in the languageso dear to Fielding himself, were to crash and shatter, the inquiry,"_Que vous reste-t-il?_" could be answered by each, "_Moi!_"
The appearance which Fielding makes is no doubt the most modest of thefour. He has not Shakespeare's absolute universality, and in fact notmerely the poet's tongue, but the poet's thought seems to have beendenied him. His sphere is not the ideal like Milton's. His irony,splendid as it is, falls a little short of that diabolical magnificencewhich exalts Swift to the point whence, in his own way, he surveys allthe kingdoms of the world, and the glory or vainglory of them. AllFielding's critics have noted the manner, in a certain sense modest, inanother ostentatious, in which he seems to confine himself to thepresentation of things English. They might h
ave added to thepresentation of things English--as they appear in London, and on theWestern Circuit, and on the Bath Road.
But this apparent parochialism has never deceived good judges. It didnot deceive Lady Mary, who had seen the men and manners of very manyclimes; it did not deceive Gibbon, who was not especially prone toovervalue things English, and who could look down from twenty centurieson things ephemeral. It deceives, indeed, I am told, some excellentpersons at the present day, who think Fielding's microcosm a "toylikeworld," and imagine that Russian Nihilists and French Naturalists havegone beyond it. It will deceive no one who has lived for some competentspace of time a life during which he has tried to regard hisfellow-creatures and himself, as nearly as a mortal may, _sub specieaeternitatis_.
As this is in the main an introduction to a complete reprint ofFielding's four great novels, the justification in detail of theestimate just made or hinted of the novelist's genius will be best andmost fitly made by a brief successive discussion of the four as they arehere presented, with some subsequent remarks on the _Miscellanies_ hereselected. And, indeed, it is not fanciful to perceive in each book asomewhat different presentment of the author's genius; though in no oneof the four is any one of his masterly qualities absent. There istenderness even in _Jonathan Wild_; there are touches in _JosephAndrews_ of that irony of the Preacher, the last echo of which is heardamid the kindly resignation of the _Journey to Lisbon_, in the sentence,"Whereas envy of all things most exposes us to danger from others, socontempt of all things best secures us from them." But on the whole itis safe to say that _Joseph Andrews_ best presents Fielding'smischievous and playful wit; _Jonathan Wild_ his half-Lucianichalf-Swiftian irony; _Tom Jones_ his unerring knowledge of human nature,and his constructive faculty; _Amelia_ his tenderness, his _mitissapientia_, his observation of the details of life. And first ofthe first.
_The History of the Adventures of Joseph Andrews and his friend MrAbraham Adams_ was, as has been said above, published in February 1742.A facsimile of the agreement between author and publisher will be givenin the second volume of this series; and it is not uninteresting toobserve that the witness, William Young, is none other than the assertedoriginal of the immortal Mr Adams himself. He might, on Balzac's plea ina tolerably well-known anecdote, have demanded half of the L183, 11s. Ofthe other origins of the book we have a pretty full account, partlydocumentary. That it is "writ in the manner of Cervantes," and isintended as a kind of comic epic, is the author's own statement--nodoubt as near the actual truth as is consistent with comic-epic theory.That there are resemblances to Scarron, to Le Sage, and to otherpractitioners of the Picaresque novel is certain; and it was inevitablethat there should be. Of directer and more immediate models orstarting-points one is undoubted; the other, though less generallyadmitted, not much less indubitable to my mind. The parody ofRichardson's _Pamela_, which was little more than a year earlier (Nov.1740), is avowed, open, flagrant; nor do I think that the author was sosoon carried away by the greater and larger tide of his own invention assome critics seem to hold. He is always more or less returning to theironic charge; and the multiplicity of the assailants of Joseph's virtueonly disguises the resemblance to the long-drawn dangers of Pamela froma single ravisher. But Fielding was also well acquainted with Marivaux's_Paysan Parvenu_, and the resemblances between that book and _JosephAndrews_ are much stronger than Fielding's admirers have always beenwilling to admit. This recalcitrance has, I think, been mainly due tothe erroneous conception of Marivaux as, if not a mere fribble, yet aDresden-Shepherdess kind of writer, good at "preciousness" andpatch-and-powder manners, but nothing more.
There was, in fact, a very strong satiric and ironic touch in the authorof _Marianne_, and I do not think that I was too rash when some yearsago I ventured to speak of him as "playing Fielding to his ownRichardson" in the _Paysan Parvenu_.
Origins, however, and indebtedness and the like, are, when great work isconcerned, questions for the study and the lecture-room, for theliterary historian and the professional critic, rather than for thereader, however intelligent and alert, who wishes to enjoy amasterpiece, and is content simply to enjoy it. It does not reallymatter how close to anything else something which possesses independentgoodness is; the very utmost technical originality, the most spotlesspurity from the faintest taint of suggestion, will not suffice to confermerit on what does not otherwise possess it. Whether, as I rather think,Fielding pursued the plan he had formed _ab incepto_, or whether hecavalierly neglected it, or whether the current of his own geniuscarried him off his legs and landed him, half against his will, on theshore of originality, are questions for the Schools, and, as I ventureto think, not for the higher forms in them. We have _Joseph Andrews_ asit is; and we may be abundantly thankful for it. The contents of it, asof all Fielding's work in this kind, include certain things for whichthe moderns are scantly grateful. Of late years, and not of late yearsonly, there has grown up a singular and perhaps an ignorant impatienceof digressions, of episodes, of tales within a tale. The example of thiswhich has been most maltreated is the "Man of the Hill" episode in _TomJones_; but the stories of the "Unfortunate Jilt" and of Mr Wilson inour present subject, do not appear to me to be much less obnoxious tothe censure; and _Amelia_ contains more than one or two things of thesame kind. Me they do not greatly disturb; and I see many defences forthem besides the obvious, and at a pinch sufficient one, thatdivagations of this kind existed in all Fielding's Spanish and Frenchmodels, that the public of the day expected them, and so forth. Thisdefence is enough, but it is easy to amplify and reintrench it. It isnot by any means the fact that the Picaresque novel of adventure is theonly or the chief form of fiction which prescribes or admits theseepisodic excursions. All the classical epics have them; many eastern andother stories present them; they are common, if not invariable, in theabundant mediaeval literature of prose and verse romance; they are notunknown by any means in the modern novel; and you will very rarely heara story told orally at the dinner-table or in the smoking-room withoutsomething of the kind. There must, therefore, be something in themcorresponding to an inseparable accident of that most unchanging of allthings, human nature. And I do not think the special form with which weare here concerned by any means the worst that they have taken. It hasthe grand and prominent virtue of being at once and easily skippable.There is about Cervantes and Le Sage, about Fielding and Smollett, noneof the treachery of the modern novelist, who induces the conscientiousreader to drag through pages, chapters, and sometimes volumes which havenothing to do with the action, for fear he should miss something thathas to do with it. These great men have a fearless frankness, and almosttell you in so many words when and what you may skip. Therefore, if the"Curious Impertinent," and the "Baneful Marriage," and the "Man of theHill," and the "Lady of Quality," get in the way, when you desire to"read for the story," you have nothing to do but turn the page till_finis_ comes. The defence has already been made by an illustrious handfor Fielding's inter-chapters and exordiums. It appears to me to bealmost more applicable to his insertions.
And so we need not trouble ourselves any more either about theinsertions or about the exordiums. They both please me; the second classhas pleased persons much better worth pleasing than I can pretend to be;but the making or marring of the book lies elsewhere. I do not thinkthat it lies in the construction, though Fielding's following of theancients, both sincere and satiric, has imposed a false air ofregularity upon that. The Odyssey of Joseph, of Fanny, and of theirghostly mentor and bodily guard is, in truth, a little haphazard, andmight have been longer or shorter without any discreet man approving itthe more or the less therefor. The real merits lie partly in theabounding humour and satire of the artist's criticism, but even more inthe marvellous vivacity and fertility of his creation. For the veryfirst time in English prose fiction every character is alive, everyincident is capable of having happened. There are lively touches in theElizabethan romances; but they are buried in verbiage, swathed in stagecostume, choked and fettered by their authors' wan
t of art. The qualityof Bunyan's knowledge of men was not much inferior to Shakespeare's, orat least to Fielding's; but the range and the results of it were crampedby his single theological purpose, and his unvaried allegoric or typicalform. Why Defoe did not discover the New World of Fiction, I at leasthave never been able to put into any brief critical formula thatsatisfies me, and I have never seen it put by any one else. He had notonly seen it afar off, he had made landings and descents on it; he hadcarried off and exhibited in triumph natives such as Robinson Crusoe,as Man Friday, as Moll Flanders, as William the Quaker; but he hadconquered, subdued, and settled no province therein. I like _Pamela_; Ilike it better than some persons who admire Richardson on the whole morethan I do, seem to like it. But, as in all its author's work, thehandling seems to me academic--the working out on paper of aningeniously conceived problem rather than the observation or evolutionof actual or possible life. I should not greatly fear to push thecomparison even into foreign countries; but it is well to observelimits. Let us be content with holding that in England at least, withoutprejudice to anything further, Fielding was the first to display thequalities of the perfect novelist as distinguished from the romancer.
What are those qualities, as shown in _Joseph Andrews_? The faculty ofarranging a probable and interesting course of action is one, of course,and Fielding showed it here. But I do not think that it is at any timethe greatest one; and nobody denies that he made great advances in thisdirection later. The faculty of lively dialogue is another; and that hehas not often been refused; but much the same may be said of it. Theinterspersing of appropriate description is another; but here also weshall not find him exactly a paragon. It is in character--the chief_differentia_ of the novel as distinguished not merely from its eldersister the romance, and its cousin the drama, but still more from everyother kind of literature--that Fielding stands even here pre-eminent. Noone that I can think of, except his greatest successor in the presentcentury, has the same unfailing gift of breathing life into everycharacter he creates or borrows; and even Thackeray draws, if I may usethe phrase, his characters more in the flat and less in the round thanFielding. Whether in Blifil he once failed, we must discuss hereafter;he has failed nowhere in _Joseph Andrews_. Some of his sketches mayrequire the caution that they are eighteenth-century men and women; somethe warning that they are obviously caricatured, or set in designedprofile, or merely sketched. But they are all alive. The finicalestimate of Gray (it is a horrid joy to think how perfectly capableFielding was of having joined in that practical joke of the younggentlemen of Cambridge, which made Gray change his college), whiledismissing these light things with patronage, had to admit that "parsonAdams is perfectly well, so is Mrs Slipslop." "They _were_, MrGray," said some one once, "they were more perfectly well, and in ahigher kind, than anything you ever did; though you were a prettyworkman too."
Yes, parson Adams is perfectly well, and so is Mrs Slipslop. But so arethey all. Even the hero and heroine, tied and bound as they are by thenecessity under which their maker lay of preserving Joseph'sJoseph-hood, and of making Fanny the example of a franker and lessinterested virtue than her sister-in-law that might have been, aresurprisingly human where most writers would have made them sticks. Andthe rest require no allowance. Lady Booby, few as are the strokes givento her, is not much less alive than Lady Bellaston. Mr Trulliber,monster and not at all delicate monster as he is, is also a man, andwhen he lays it down that no one even in his own house shall drink whenhe "caaled vurst," one can but pay his maker the tribute of that silentshudder of admiration which hails the addition of one more everlastingentity to the world of thought and fancy. And Mr Tow-wouse is real, andMrs Tow-wouse is more real still, and Betty is real; and the coachman,and Miss Grave-airs, and all the wonderful crew from first to last. Thedresses they wear, the manners they exhibit, the laws they live under,the very foods and drinks they live upon, are "past like the shadows onglasses"--to the comfort and rejoicing of some, to the greater or lesssorrow of others. But _they_ are there--alive, full of blood, full ofbreath as we are, and, in truth, I fear a little more so. For somepurposes a century is a gap harder to cross and more estranging than acouple of millenniums. But in their case the gap is nothing; and it isnot too much to say that as they have stood the harder test, they willstand the easier. There are very striking differences between Nausicaaand Mrs Slipslop; there are differences not less striking between MrsSlipslop and Beatrice. But their likeness is a stranger and morewonderful thing than any of their unlikenesses. It is that they areall women, that they are all live citizenesses of the Land of MattersUnforgot, the fashion whereof passeth not away, and the franchisewhereof, once acquired, assures immortality.
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