Illusions.
Fielding is one of the most striking figures in our literary history, and
he is one of the most popular as well. But it is questionable if many
people know very much about him after all, or if the Fielding of
legend--the potwalloper of genius at whom we have smiled so often--has
many things in common with the Fielding of fact, the indefatigable
student, the vigorous magistrate, the great and serious artist. You hear
but little of him from himself; for with that mixture of intellectual
egoism and moral unselfishness which is a characteristic of his large and
liberal nature he was as careless of Henry Fielding's sayings and doings
and as indifferent to the fact of Henry Fielding's life and personality
as he was garrulous in respect of the good qualities of Henry Fielding's
friends and truculently talkative about the vices of Henry Fielding's
enemies. And what is exactly known people have somehow or other
contrived to misapprehend and misapply. They have preferred the evidence
of Horace Walpole to that of their own senses. They have suffered the
brilliant antitheses of Lady Mary to obscure and blur the man as they
might have found him in his work. Booth and Jones have been taken for
definite and complete reflections of the author of their being: the parts
for the whole, that is--a light-minded captain of foot and a hot-headed
and soft-hearted young man about town for adequate presentments of the
artist of a new departure and the writer of three or four books of
singular solidity and finish. Whichever way you turn, you are confronted
with appearances each more distorted and more dubious than the other.
Some have chosen to believe the foolish fancies of Murphy, and have
pictured themselves a Fielding begrimed with snuff, heady with champagne,
and smoking so ferociously that out of the wrappings of his tobacco he
could keep himself in paper for the manuscripts of his plays. For others
the rancour of Smollett calls up a Fielding who divides his time and
energy between blowing a trumpet on a Smithfield show and playing Captain
Bilkum to a flesh-and-blood Stormandra at the establishment of a living,
breathing, working Mother Punchbowl. With Dr. Rimbault and Professor
Henry Morley others yet evolve from their inner consciousness a Fielding
with a booth in Smithfield, buffooning for the coppers of a Bartlemy Fair
audience. The accomplished lawyer has had as little place in men's
thoughts as the tender father, the admirable artist as little as the
devoted husband and the steadfast friend. Fielding has been so often
painted a hard drinker that few have thought of him as a hard reader; he
has been suspected of conjugal infidelity, so it has seemed impossible
that he should be other than a violent Bohemian. In certain chapters of
_Jonathan Wild the Great_ there is enough of sustained intellectual
effort to furnish forth a hundred modern novels; but you only think of
Fielding reeling home from the Rose, and refuse to consider him except as
sitting down with his head in a wet towel to scribble immodest and
ruffianly trash for the players! A consequence of all these exercises in
sentiment and imagination has been that, while many have been ready to
deal with Fielding as the text for a sermon or the subject of an essay,
as the point of a moral or the adornment of a tale, few have cared to
think of him as worthy to dispute the palm with Cervantes and Sir Walter
as the heroic man of letters.
Facts.
He is before all things else a writer to be studied. He wrote for the
world at large and to the end that he might be read eternally. His
matter, his manner, the terms of his philosophy, the quality of his
ideals, the nature of his achievement, proclaim him universal. Like
Scott, like Cervantes, like Shakespeare, he claims not merely our
acquaintance but an intimate and abiding familiarity. He has no special
public, and to be only on nodding terms with him is to be practically
dead to his attraction and unworthy his society. He worked not for the
boys and girls of an age but for the men and women of all time; and both
as artist and as thinker he commands unending attention and lifelong
friendship. He is a great inventor, an unrivalled craftsman, a perfect
master of his material. His achievement is the result of a life-time of
varied experience, of searching and sustained observation, of unwearying
intellectual endeavour. The sound and lusty types he created have an
intellectual flavour peculiar to themselves. His novels teem with ripe
wisdom and generous conclusions and beneficent examples. As Mr. Stephen
tells you, 'he has the undeniable merit of representing certain aspects
of contemporary society with a force and accuracy not even rivalled by
any other writer'; and it is a fact that not to have studied him 'is to
be without a knowledge of the most important documents of contemporary
history.' More: to contrast those fair, large parchments in which he has
stated his results with those tattered and filthy papers which the latter-
day literary rag-picker exists but to grope out from kennel and sewer is
to know the difference between the artist in health and the artist
possessed by an idiosyncrasy as by a devil.
The Worst of It.
But the present is an age of sentiment: its ideals and ambitions are
mainly emotional; what it chiefly loves is romance or the affectation of
romance, passion, self-conscious solemnity, and a certain straining after
picturesque effects. In Fielding's time there was doubtless a good deal
of sentimentalism, for his generation delighted not only in Western and
Trunnion and Mrs. Slipslop but in Pamela and Clarissa and the pathetic Le
Fevre. But for all that it was--at all events in so far as it was
interesting to Fielding and in so far as Fielding has pictured it--a
generation that knew nothing of romance but was keenly interested in
common sense, and took a vast deal of honest pleasure in humour and wit
and a rather truculent and full-blooded type of satire. It is plain that
such possibilities of sympathy and understanding as exist between a past
of this sort and such a present as our own must of necessity be few and
small. Their importance, too, is greatly diminished when you reflect on
the nature and tendency of certain essential elements in Fielding's art
and mind. The most vigorous and the most individual of these is probably
his irony; the next is that abundant vein of purely intellectual comedy
by whose presence his work is exalted to a place not greatly inferior to
that of the _Misantrope_ and the _Ecole des Femmes_. These rare and
shining qualities are distinguishing features in the best and soundest
part of Fielding. Of irony he is probably the greatest English master;
of pure comedy--the intellectual manipulation and transmutation into art
of what is spiritually ridiculous in manners and society--he is both in
narrative and in dialogue the greatest between Shakespeare and Mr. George
Meredith. And with both our sympathy is imperfect. We have learned to
be sentimental and self-sufficient with Rousseau, to be romantic and
chivalrous with Scott, to be emotional with Dickens, to take ourselves
seriously with Balzac and George Eliot; there are touches of feeling in
our laughter, even though the feeling be but spite; we have acquired a
habit of politeness--a tradition of universal consideration and respect;
and our theory of satire is rounded by the pleasing generalities of Mr.
Du Maurier on the one hand and the malevolent respectability of Mr. W. S.
Gilbert on the other. It is an age of easy writing and still easier
reading: our authors produce for us much in the manner of the
silkworm--only their term of life is longer; we accept their results in
something of the spirit of them that are interested, and not
commercially, in the processes of silkworms. And M. Guy de Maupassant
can write but hath a devil, and we take him not because of his writing
but because of his devil; and Blank and Dash and So-and-So and the rest
could no more than so many sheep develop a single symptom of possession
among them, and we take them because a devil and they are incompatibles.
And art is short and time is long; and we care nothing for art and almost
as much for time; and there is little if any to choose between Mudie's
latest 'catch' and last year's 'sensation' at Burlington House. And to
one of us it is 'poor Fielding'; and to another Fielding is merely gross,
immoral, and dull; and to most the story of that last journey to Lisbon
is unknown, and Thackeray's dream of Fielding--a novelist's presentment
of a purely fictitious character--is the Fielding who designed and built
and finished for eternity. Which is to be pitied? The artist of
_Amelia_ and _Jonathan Wild_, the creator of the Westerns and Parson
Adams and Colonel Bath? or we the whippersnappers of sentiment--the
critics who can neither read nor understand?