Another circumstance may in the present day greatly interfere with the success of dramatic authors, and arises from the decay of that familiar acquaintance with the stage and its affairs, which prevailed during the more splendid days of the British theatre. It requires a frequent and close attendance upon the stage to learn the peculiar points which interest an audience, and the art of forming the situations, as they are technically called, which arrest attention and bring down applause. This is a qualification for dramatic excellence, which fashionable hours and modern manners render difficult to any one who is not absolutely himself an actor. Nevertheless it is of such consequence, that it will be found, that the dullest and worst plays, written by authors who have themselves trod the stage, are, however intolerable in the closet, redeemed, in action, by some felicitous position or encounter of persons, which makes them pass muster on the boards. But this observation, though arising naturally out of the subject, cannot be said to apply to Fielding, much of whose life had probably been passed behind the scenes, and who had, indeed, as we shall see, been at one time a sort of manager himself.
We have noticed, that until the year 1737, or thereabouts, Fielding lived the life of a man of wit and pleasure about town, seeking and finding amusement in scenes of gaiety and dissipation, and discharging the expense incidental to such a life, by the precarious resources afforded by the stage. He even became, for a season, the manager of a company, having assembled together, in 1735, a number of discarded comedians, who, he proposed, should execute his own dramas at the little theatre in the Haymarket, under the title of the Great Mogul’s Company of Comedians. The project did not succeed; and the company, which, as he expressed it, had seemed to drop from the clouds, were under the necessity of disbanding.
During his theatrical career, Fielding, like most authors of the time, found it impossible to interest the public sufficiently in the various attempts which he made to gain popular favour, without condescending to flatter their political animosities. Two of his dramatic pieces, Pasquin, and The Historical Register, display great acrimony against Sir Robert Walpole, from whom, in the year 1730, he had in vain sought for patronage. The freedom of his satire is said to have operated considerably in producing a measure which was thought necessary to arrest the license of the stage, and put an end to that proneness to personal and political satire which had been fostered by the success of Gay’s Beggars’ Opera. This measure was the discretional power vested in the Lord Chamberlain, of refusing a license to any piece of which he should disapprove. The regulation was the cause of much clamour at the time; but licentious satire has since found so many convenient modes of access to the public, that its exclusion from the stage is no longer a matter of interest or regret; nor is it now deemed a violent aggression on liberty, that contending political parties cannot be brought into collision within the walls of the theatres, intended, as they are, for places of public amusement, not for scenes of party struggle.
About 1736, Fielding seems to have formed the resolution of settling in life. He espoused a young lady of Salisbury, named Craddock, beautiful, amiable, and possessed of £1500. About the same time, by the death, it has been supposed, of his mother, he succeeded to a small estate of about £200 per annum, situated at Stower, in Derbyshire, affording him, in those days, the means of decent competence. To this place he retired from London, but unfortunately carried with him the same improvident disposition to enjoy the present at expense of the future, which seems to have marked his whole life. He established an equipage, with showy liveries; and his biographers lay some stress on the circumstance, that the colour, being a bright yellow, required to be frequently renewed, — an important particular, which, in humble imitation of our accurate predecessors, we deem it unpardonable to suppress. Horses, hounds, and the exercise of an unbounded hospitality, soon aided the yellow livery-men in devouring the substance of their improvident master; and three years found Fielding without land, home, or revenue, a student in the Temple, where he applied himself closely to the law, and after the usual term was called to the bar. It is probable, he brought nothing from Derbyshire save that experience of a rural life, and its pleasures, which afterwards enabled him to delineate the inimitable Squire Western.
Fielding had now a profession, and, as he strongly applied his powerful mind to the principles of the law, it might have been expected that success would have followed in proportion. But those professional persons who can advance or retard the practice of a young lawyer, mistrusted, probably, the application of a wit and a man of pleasure, to the business they might otherwise have confided to him; and it is said, that Fielding’s own conduct was such as to justify their want of confidence. Disease, the consequence of a free life, came to the aid of dissipation of mind, and interrupted the course of Fielding’s practice by severe fits of the gout, which gradually impaired his robust constitution. We find him, therefore, having again recourse to the stage, where he attempted to produce a continuation of his own piece of The Virgin Unmasked; but, as one of the characters was supposed to be written in ridicule of a man of quality, the Chamberlain refused his license. Pamphlets of political controversy, fugitive tracts, and essays, were the next means he had recourse to for subsistence; and as his ready pen produced them upon every emergency, he contrived, by the profits, to support himself and his family, to which he was fondly attached.
Amid this anxious career of precarious expedient, and constant labour, he had the misfortune to lose his wife; and his grief at this domestic calamity was so extreme, that his friends became alarmed for the consequences to his reason. The violence of the emotion, however, was transient, though his regret was lasting; and the necessity of subsistence compelled him again to resume his literary labours. At length, in the year 1741 or 1742, circumstances induced him to engage in a mode of composition, which he retrieved from the disgrace in which he found it, and rendered a classical department of British literature.
The novel of Pamela, published in 1740, had carried the fame of Richardson to the highest pitch; and Fielding, — whether he was tired of hearing it over-praised, (for a book, several passages of which would now be thought highly indelicate, was in those days even recommended from the pulpit,) or whether, as a writer for daily subsistence, he caught at whatever interested the public for the time; or, whether, in fine, he was seduced by that wicked spirit of wit which cannot forbear turning into ridicule the idol of the day, — resolved to caricature the style, principles, and personages of this favourite performance. As Gay’s desire to satirize Philips gave rise to The Shepherd’s Week, so Fielding’s purpose to ridicule Pamela produced the History of Joseph Andrews; and in both cases, but especially in the latter, a work was executed infinitely better than could have been expected to arise out of such a motive, and the reader received a degree of pleasure very different, as well as far superior, to what the author himself appears to have proposed. There is, indeed, a fine vein of irony in Fielding’s novel, as will appear from comparing it with the pages of Pamela; but Pamela, to which that irony was applied, is now in a manner forgotten, and Joseph Andrews continues to be read, for the admirable pictures of manners which it presents, and, above all, for the inimitable character of Mr. Abraham Adams, which alone is sufficient to stamp the superiority of Fielding over all writers of his class. The worthy parson’s learning, his simplicity, his evangelical purity of heart, and benevolence of disposition, are so admirably mingled with pedantry, absence of mind, and with the habit of athletic and gymnastic exercise, then acquired at the universities by students of all descriptions, that he may be safely termed one of the richest productions of the Muse of Fiction. Like Don Quixote, Parson Adams is beaten a little too much, and too often; but the cudgel lights upon his shoulders, as on those of the honoured Knight of La Mancha, without the slightest stain to his reputation; and he is bastinadoed without being degraded. The style of this piece is said, in the preface, to have been an imitation of Cervantes; but both in Joseph Andrews and Tom Jones, the author appears als
o to have had in view the Roman Comique of the once celebrated Scarron. From this author he has copied the mock heroic style, which tells ludicrous events in the language of the classical Epic; a vein of pleasantry which is soon wrought out, and which Fielding has employed so often as to expose him to the charge of pedantry.
Joseph Andrews was eminently successful; and the aggrieved Richardson, who was fond of praise even to adulation, was proportionally offended, while his group of admirers, male and female, took care to echo back his sentiments, and to heap Fielding with reproach. Their animosity survived his life, and we find the most ungenerous reproaches thrown upon his memory, in the course of Richardson’s correspondence. Richardson was well acquainted with Fielding’s sisters, and complained to them, — not of Eielding’s usage of himself, that he was too wise, or too proud to mention, — but of his unfortunate predilection to what was mean and low in character and description. The following expressions are remarkable, as well for the extreme modesty of the writer who thus rears himself into the paramount judge of Fielding’s qualities, as for the delicacy which could intrude such observations on the ear of his rival’s sister: “Poor Fielding! I could not help telling his sister, that I was equally surprised at, and concerned for, his continued lowness. Had your brother, said I, been born in a stable, or been a runner at a spunging-house, one should have thought him a genius, and wished he had had the advantage of a liberal education, and of being admitted into good company!” — After this, we are not surprised at its being alleged that Fielding was destitute of invention and talents; that the run of his best works was nearly over; and that he would soon be forgotten as an author! Fielding does not appear to have retorted any of this ill-will; so that, if he gave the first offence, and that an unprovoked one, he was also the first to retreat from the contest, and to allow to Richardson those claims which his genius really demanded from the liberality of his contemporaries. In the fifth number of the Jacobite Journal, Fielding highly commends Clarissa, which is by far the best and most powerful of Richardson’s novels, and, with those scenes in Sir Charles Grandison which refer to the history of Clementina, contains the passages of deep pathos on which his claim to immortality must finally rest. Perhaps this is one of the cases in which one would rather have sympathized with the thoughtless offender, than with the less liberal and almost ungenerous mind which so long retained its resentment.
After the publication of Joseph Andrews, Fielding had again recourse to the stage, and brought out The Wedding-day, which, though on the whole unsuccessful, produced him some small profit. This was the last of his theatrical efforts which appeared during his life. The manuscript comedy of The Fathers was lost by Sir Charles Hanbury Williams, and, when recovered, was acted after the author’s death for the benefit of his family. An anecdote respecting the carelessness with which Fielding regarded his theatrical fame, is thus given by former biographers: —
“On one of the days of its rehearsal, (i.e. the rehearsal of the Wedding-day,) Garrick, who performed a principal part, and who was even then a favourite with the public, told Fielding, he was apprehensive that the audience would make free with him in a particular passage, and remarked, that as a repulse might disconcert him during the remainder of the night, the passage should be omitted,— ‘No, d — n ‘em,’ replied he, ‘if the scene is not a good one, let them find that out.’ Accordingly, the play was brought out without alteration, and, as had been foreseen, marks of disapprobation appeared. Garrick, alarmed at the hisses he had met with, retired into the green-room, where the author was solacing himself with a bottle of champaign. He had by this time drank pretty freely; and, glancing his eye at the actor, while clouds of tobacco issued from his mouth, cried out,— ‘What’s the matter, Garrick? what are they hissing now?’— ‘Why, the scene that I begged you to retrench,’ replied the actor; I knew it would not do; and they have so frightened me, that I shall not be able to collect myself again the whole night.’— ‘Oh! d — n ‘em,’ rejoined he, with great coolness,’ they have found it out, have they?’”
Besides various fugitive pieces, Fielding published in, or about, 1743, a volume of Miscellanies, including The Journey from this World to the Next, a tract containing a good deal of Fielding’s peculiar humour, but of which it is difficult to conceive the plan or purport. The History of Jonathan Wild the Great next followed. It is not easy to see what Fielding proposed to himself by a picture of complete vice, unrelieved by anything of human feeling, and never by any accident even deviating into virtue; and the ascribing a train of fictitious adventures to a real character, has in it something clumsy and inartificial on the one hand, and, on the other, subjects the author to a suspicion that he only used the title of Jonathan Wild in order to connect his book with the popular renown of that infamous depredator. But there are few passages in Fielding’s more celebrated works, more marked with his peculiar genius, than the scene betwixt his hero and the Ordinary, when in Newgate.
Besides these more permanent proofs of his industrious application to literature, the pen of Fielding was busily employed in the political and literary controversies of the times. He conducted one paper called The Jacobite Journal, the object of which was to eradicate those feelings and sentiments which had been already so effectually crushed upon the Field of Culloden. The True Patriot, and The Champion, were works of the same kind, which he entirely composed, or in which, at least, he had a principal share. In these various papers he steadily advocated what was then called the Whig cause, being attached to the principles of the Revolution, and the royal family of Brunswick, or, in other words, a person well affected to church and state. His zeal was long unnoticed, while far inferior writers were enriched out of the secret-service-money with unexampled prodigality. At length, in 1749, he received a small pension, together with the then disreputable office of a Justice of Peace for Westminster and Middlesex, of which he was at liberty to make the best he could by the worst means he might choose. This office, such as it was, he owed to the interference of Mr., afterwards Lord Lyttleton.
At this period, the Magistrates of Westminster, thence termed Trading Justices, were repaid by fees for their services to the public; a mean and wretched system, which made it the interest of these functionaries to inflame every petty dispute which was brought before them, to trade, as it were, in guilt and in misery, and to wring their precarious subsistence out of thieves and pickpockets. The habits of Fielding, never choice or select in his society, were not improved by that to which his place exposed him. Horace Walpole gives us, in his usual unfeeling, but lively manner, the following description of a visit made to Fielding in his capacity of a Justice, by which we see his mind had stooped itself completely to his situation.
“Rigby gave me as strong a picture of nature. He and Peter Bathurst, t’other night, carried a servant of the latter’s, who had attempted to shoot him, before Fielding, who, to all his other avocations, has, by the grace of Mr. Littleton, added that of Middlesex Justice. He sent them word he was at supper, — they must come next morning. They did not understand that freedom, and ran up, where they found him banqueting with a blind man, [Fielding’s brother probably,] a wh — , and three Irishmen, on some cold mutton, and a bone of ham, both in one dish, and the dirtiest cloth. He never stirred, or asked them to sit. Rigby, who had seen him come so often to beg a guinea of Sir C. Williams, and Bathurst, at whose father’s he had lived for victuals, understood that dignity as little, and pulled themselves chairs, on which he civilized.”
This is a humiliating anecdote, even after we have made allowance for the aristocratic exaggeration of Walpole, who, in acknowledging Fielding’s talents elsewhere, has not failed to stigmatize the lowness of his society and habits. Yet it is consoling to observe, that Fielding’s principles remained unshaken, though the circumstances attending his official situation tended to increase the careless, disrespectability of his private habits. His own account of his conduct respecting the dues of the office on which he depended for subsistence, has never b
een denied or doubted. “I will confess,” says he, “that my private affairs, at the beginning of the winter, had but a gloomy aspect; for I had not plundered the public, or the poor, of those sums which men, who are always ready to plunder both as much as they can, have been pleased to suspect me of taking; on the contrary, by composing, instead of inflaming, the quarrels of porters and beggars, (which, I blush when I say, hath not been universally practised,) and by refusing to take a shilling from a man who most undoubtedly would not have had another left, I had reduced an income of about £500 a-year, of the dirtiest money upon earth, to little more than £300; a considerable portion of which remained with my clerk.”
Besides the disinterestedness, of which he set an example unusual in those days, Fielding endeavoured, by various suggestions, to abridge the catalogue of crimes and depravity which his office placed so closely under his eye. His Inquiry into the Increase of Thieves and Robbers, contains several hints which have been adopted by succeeding statesmen, and some which are still worthy of more attention than they have yet received. As a magistrate, indeed, he was desirous of retrieving the dignity and independence of his own office; and his zeal on that subject has led him a little further than he will be followed by the friends of rational freedom. But we cannot omit mentioning, that he was the first to touch on the frequency of pardons, rendered necessary by the multiplication of capital punishments, and that he placed his finger on that swelling imposthume of the state, the poor’s-rates, which has wrought so much evil, and is likely to work so much more. He published also a Charge to the Grand Jury of Middlesex, some Tracts concerning Law Trials of importance, and left behind him a manuscript on Crown Law. On the subject of the poor, he afterwards published a scheme for restricting them to their parishes, and providing for them in work-houses, which, like many others which have since appeared, only showed that he was fully sensible of the evil, without being able to suggest an effectual or practical remedy. A subsequent writer on the same thorny subject, Sir Frederick Morton Eden, observes, that Fielding’s treatise exhibits both the knowledge of the magistrate, and the energy and expression of the novel writer. It was, however, before publishing his scheme for the provision of the poor, that he made himself immortal by the production of Tom Jones.
Complete Fictional Works of Henry Fielding Page 421
