The two hundredth anniversary of Henry Fielding is very justly
celebrated, even if, as far as can be discovered, it is only celebrated
by the newspapers. It would be too much to expect that any such merely
chronological incident should induce the people who write about
Fielding to read him; this kind of neglect is only another name for
glory. A great classic means a man whom one can praise without having
read. This is not in itself wholly unjust; it merely implies a certain
respect for the realisation and fixed conclusions of the mass of
mankind. I have never read Pindar (I mean I have never read the Greek
Pindar; Peter Pindar I have read all right), but the mere fact that I
have not read Pindar, I think, ought not to prevent me and certainly
would not prevent me from talking of “the masterpieces of Pindar,” or
of “great poets like Pindar or Æschylus.” The very learned men are
angularly unenlightened on this as on many other subjects; and the
position they take up is really quite unreasonable. If any ordinary
journalist or man of general reading alludes to Villon or to Homer,
they consider it a quite triumphant sneer to say to the man, “You
cannot read mediæval French,” or “You cannot read Homeric Greek.” But
it is not a triumphant sneer—or, indeed, a sneer at all. A man has got
as much right to employ in his speech the established and traditional
facts of human history as he has to employ any other piece of common
human information. And it is as reasonable for a man who knows no
French to assume that Villon was a good poet as it would be for a man
who has no ear for music to assume that Beethoven was a good musician.
Because he himself has no ear for music, that is no reason why he
should assume that the human race has no ear for music. Because I am
ignorant (as I am), it does not follow that I ought to assume that I am
deceived. The man who would not praise Pindar unless he had read him
would be a low, distrustful fellow, the worst kind of sceptic, who
doubts not only God, but man. He would be like a man who could not call
Mount Everest high unless he had climbed it. He would be like a man who
would not admit that the North Pole was cold until he had been there.
But I think there is a limit, and a highly legitimate limit, to this
process. I think a man may praise Pindar without knowing the top of a
Greek letter from the bottom. But I think that if a man is going to
abuse Pindar, if he is going to denounce, refute, and utterly expose
Pindar, if he is going to show Pindar up as the utter ignoramus and
outrageous impostor that he is, then I think it will be just as well
perhaps—I think, at any rate, it would do no harm—if he did know a
little Greek, and even had read a little Pindar. And I think the same
situation would be involved if the critic were concerned to point out
that Pindar was scandalously immoral, pestilently cynical, or low and
beastly in his views of life. When people brought such attacks against
the morality of Pindar, I should regret that they could not read Greek;
and when they bring such attacks against the morality of Fielding, I
regret very much that they cannot read English.
There seems to be an extraordinary idea abroad that Fielding was in
some way an immoral or offensive writer. I have been astounded by the
number of the leading articles, literary articles, and other articles
written about him just now in which there is a curious tone of
apologising for the man. One critic says that after all he couldn’t
help it, because he lived in the eighteenth century; another says that
we must allow for the change of manners and ideas; another says that he
was not altogether without generous and humane feelings; another
suggests that he clung feebly, after all, to a few of the less
important virtues. What on earth does all this mean? Fielding described
Tom Jones as going on in a certain way, in which, most unfortunately, a
very large number of young men do go on. It is unnecessary to say that
Henry Fielding knew that it was an unfortunate way of going on. Even
Tom Jones knew that. He said in so many words that it was a very
unfortunate way of going on; he said, one may almost say, that it had
ruined his life; the passage is there for the benefit of any one who
may take the trouble to read the book. There is ample evidence (though
even this is of a mystical and indirect kind), there is ample evidence
that Fielding probably thought that it was better to be Tom Jones than
to be an utter coward and sneak. There is simply not one rag or thread
or speck of evidence to show that Fielding thought that it was better
to be Tom Jones than to be a good man. All that he is concerned with is
the description of a definite and very real type of young man; the
young man whose passions and whose selfish necessities sometimes seemed
to be stronger than anything else in him.
The practical morality of Tom Jones is bad, though not so bad,
_spiritually_ speaking, as the practical morality of Arthur Pendennis
or the practical morality of Pip, and certainly nothing like so bad as
the profound practical immorality of Daniel Deronda. The practical
morality of Tom Jones is bad; but I cannot see any proof that his
theoretical morality was particularly bad. There is no need to tell the
majority of modern young men even to live up to the theoretical ethics
of Henry Fielding. They would suddenly spring into the stature of
archangels if they lived up to the theoretic ethics of poor Tom Jones.
Tom Jones is still alive, with all his good and all his evil; he is
walking about the streets; we meet him every day. We meet with him, we
drink with him, we smoke with him, we talk with him, we talk about him.
The only difference is that we have no longer the intellectual courage
to write about him. We split up the supreme and central human being,
Tom Jones, into a number of separate aspects. We let Mr. J.M. Barrie
write about him in his good moments, and make him out better than he
is. We let Zola write about him in his bad moments, and make him out
much worse than he is. We let Maeterlinck celebrate those moments of
spiritual panic which he knows to be cowardly; we let Mr. Rudyard
Kipling celebrate those moments of brutality which he knows to be far
more cowardly. We let obscene writers write about the obscenities of
this ordinary man. We let puritan writers write about the purities of
this ordinary man. We look through one peephole that makes men out as
devils, and we call it the new art. We look through another peephole
that makes men out as angels, and we call it the New Theology. But if
we pull down some dusty old books from the bookshelf, if we turn over
some old mildewed leaves, and if in that obscurity and decay we find
some faint traces of a tale about a complete man, such a man as is
walking on the pavement outside, we suddenly pull a long face, and we
call it the coarse morals of a bygone age.
The truth is that all these things mark a certain change in the general
view of morals; not, I think, a change for the better. We have grown to
associate morality in a book with a kind of optimism and prettiness;
according to us, a moral book is a book about moral people. But the old
idea was almost exactly the opposite; a moral book was a book about
immoral people. A moral book was full of pictures like Hogarth’s “Gin
Lane” or “Stages of Cruelty,” or it recorded, like the popular
broadsheet, “God’s dreadful judgment” against some blasphemer or
murderer. There is a philosophical reason for this change. The homeless
scepticism of our time has reached a sub-conscious feeling that
morality is somehow merely a matter of human taste—an accident of
psychology. And if goodness only exists in certain human minds, a man
wishing to praise goodness will naturally exaggerate the amount of it
that there is in human minds or the number of human minds in which it
is supreme. Every confession that man is vicious is a confession that
virtue is visionary. Every book which admits that evil is real is felt
in some vague way to be admitting that good is unreal. The modern
instinct is that if the heart of man is evil, there is nothing that
remains good. But the older feeling was that if the heart of man was
ever so evil, there was something that remained good—goodness remained
good. An actual avenging virtue existed outside the human race; to that
men rose, or from that men fell away. Therefore, of course, this law
itself was as much demonstrated in the breach as in the observance. If
Tom Jones violated morality, so much the worse for Tom Jones. Fielding
did not feel, as a melancholy modern would have done, that every sin of
Tom Jones was in some way breaking the spell, or we may even say
destroying the fiction of morality. Men spoke of the sinner breaking
the law; but it was rather the law that broke him. And what modern
people call the foulness and freedom of Fielding is generally the
severity and moral stringency of Fielding. He would not have thought
that he was serving morality at all if he had written a book all about
nice people. Fielding would have considered Mr. Ian Maclaren extremely
immoral; and there is something to be said for that view. Telling the
truth about the terrible struggle of the human soul is surely a very
elementary part of the ethics of honesty. If the characters are not
wicked, the book is. This older and firmer conception of right as
existing outside human weakness and without reference to human error
can be felt in the very lightest and loosest of the works of old
English literature. It is commonly unmeaning enough to call Shakspere a
great moralist; but in this particular way Shakspere is a very typical
moralist. Whenever he alludes to right and wrong it is always with this
old implication. Right is right, even if nobody does it. Wrong is
wrong, even if everybody is wrong about it.