novelists who were most popular in the middle of our own and of the
preceding century. The intellectual affinity which made Smollett the
favourite author of Dickens is scarcely so close as that which commended
Fielding to Thackeray. The resemblance between 'Pickwick' and 'Humphrey
Clinker,' or between 'David Copperfield' and 'Roderick Random,' consists
chiefly in the exuberance of animal spirits, the keen eye for external
oddity, the consequent tendency to substitute caricature for portrait,
and the vivid transformation of autobiography into ostensible fiction,
which are characteristic of both authors. Between Fielding and Thackeray
the resemblance is closer. The peculiar irony of 'Jonathan Wild' has its
closest English parallel in 'Barry Lyndon.' The burlesque in 'Tom Thumb'
of the Lee and Dryden school of tragedy may remind us of Thackeray's
burlesques of Scott and Dumas. The characters of the two authors belong
to the same family. 'Vanity Fair' has grown more decent since the days
of Lady Bellaston, but the costume of the actors has changed more than
their nature. Rawdon Crawley would not have been surprised to meet
Captain Booth in a spunging-house; Shandon and his friends preserved the
old traditions of Fielding's Grub Street; Lord Steyne and Major
Pendennis were survivals from the more congenial period of Lord Fellamar
and Colonel James; and the two Amelias represent cognate ideals of
female excellence. Or, to take an instance of similarity in detail,
might not this anecdote from 'The Covent Garden Journal' have rounded
off a paragraph in the 'Snob Papers?' A friend of Fielding saw a dirty
fellow in a mud-cart lash another with his whip, saying, with an oath,
'I will teach you manners to your betters.' Fielding's friend wondered
what could be the condition of this social inferior of a mud-cart
driver, till he found him to be the owner of a dust-cart driven by
asses. The great butt of Fielding's satire is, as he tells us,
affectation; the affectation which he specially hates is that of
straitlaced morality; Thackeray's satire is more generally directed
against the particular affectation called snobbishness; but the evil
principle attacked by either writer is merely one avatar of the demon
assailed by the other.
The resemblance, which extends in some degree to style, might perhaps be
shown to imply a very close intellectual affinity. I am content,
however, to notice the literary genealogy as illustrative of the fact
that Fielding was the ancestor of one great race of novelists. 'I am,'
he says expressly in 'Tom Jones,' 'the founder of a new province of
writing.' Richardson's 'Clarissa'[7] and Smollett's 'Roderick Random'
were indeed published before 'Tom Jones;' but the provinces over which
Richardson and Smollett reigned were distinct from the contiguous
province of which Fielding claimed to be the first legislator. Smollett
(who comes nearest) professed to imitate 'Gil Blas' as Fielding
professed to imitate Cervantes. Smollett's story inherits from its
ancestry a reckless looseness of construction. It is a series of
anecdotes strung together by the accident that they all happen to the
same person. 'Tom Jones,' on the contrary, has a carefully constructed
plot, if not, as Coleridge asserts, one of the three best plots in
existence (its rivals being 'Oedipus Tyrannus' and 'The Alchemist'). Its
excellence depends upon the skill with which it is made subservient to
the development of character and the thoroughness with which the working
motives of the persons involved have been thought out. Fielding
claims--even ostentatiously--that he is writing a history, not a
romance; a history not the less true because all the facts are
imaginary, for the fictitious incidents serve to exhibit the most
general truths of human character. It is by this seriousness of purpose
that his work is distinguished from the old type of novel, developed by
Smollett, which is but a collection of amusing anecdotes; or from such
work as De Foe's, in which the external facts are given with an almost
provoking indifference to display of character and passion. Fielding's
great novels have a true organic unity as well as a consecutive story,
and are intended in our modern jargon as genuine studies in
psychological analysis.[8]
Johnson, no mean authority when in his own sphere and free from personal
bias, expressly traversed this claim; he declared that there was more
knowledge of the human heart in a letter of 'Clarissa' than in the whole
of 'Tom Jones;' and said more picturesquely, that Fielding could tell
the hour by looking at the dial-plate, whilst Richardson knew how the
clock was made.[9] It is tempting to set this down as a Johnsonian
prejudice, and to deny or retort the comparison. Fielding, we might say,
paints flesh and blood; whereas Richardson consciously constructs his
puppets out of frigid abstractions. Lovelace is a bit of mechanism; Tom
Jones a human being. In fact, however, such comparisons are misleading.
Nothing is easier than to find an appropriate ticket for the objects of
our criticism, and summarily pigeon-hole Richardson as an idealist and
Fielding as a realist; Richardson as subjective and morbid, Fielding as
objective and full of coarse health; or to attribute to either of them
the deepest knowledge of the human heart. These are the mere banalities
of criticism; and I can never hear them without a suspicion that a
professor of æsthetics is trying to hoodwink me by a bit of technical
platitude. The cant phrases which have been used so often by panegyrists
too lazy to define their terms, have become almost as meaningless as the
complimentary formulæ of society.
Knowledge of the human heart in particular is a phrase which covers very
different states of mind. It may mean that power by which the novelist
or dramatist identifies himself with his characters; sees through their
eyes and feels with their senses; it is the product of a rich nature, a
vivid imagination, and great powers of sympathy, and draws a
comparatively small part of its resources from external experience. The
novelist knows how his characters would feel under given conditions,
because he feels it himself; he sees from within, not from without; and
is almost undergoing an actual experience instead of condensing his
observations on life. This is the power in which Shakespeare is supreme;
which Richardson proved himself, in his most powerful passages, to
possess in no small degree; and which in Balzac seems to have generated
fits of absolute hallucination.
Fielding's novels are not without proof of this power, as no great
imaginative work can be possible without it; but the knowledge for which
he is specially conspicuous differs almost in kind. This knowledge is
drawn from observation rather than intuitive sympathy. It consists in
great part of those weighty maxims which a man of keen powers of
observation stores up in his passage through a varied experience. It is
the knowledge of Ulysses, who has known
Cities of men
And manners, climates, councils, governments;
the knowledge of a Machiavelli, who has looked behind the screen of
political hypocrisies; the knowledge of which the essence is distilled
in Bacon's 'Essays;' or the knowledge of which Polonius seems to have
retained many shrewd scraps even when he had fallen into his dotage.
In reading 'Clarissa' or 'Eugénie Grandet' we are aware that the soul
of Richardson or Balzac has transmigrated into another shape; that the
author is projected into his character, and is really giving us one
phase of his own sentiments. In reading Fielding we are listening to
remarks made by a spectator instead of an actor; we are receiving the
pithy recollections of the man about town; the prodigal who has been
with scamps in gambling-houses, and drunk beer in pothouses and punch
with country squires; the keen observer who has judged all characters,
from Sir Robert Walpole down to Betsy Canning;[10] who has fought the
hard battle of life with unflagging spirit, though with many falls;
and who, in spite of serious stains, has preserved the goodness of his
heart and the soundness of his head. The experience is generally given
in the shape of typical anecdotes rather than in explicit maxims; but
it is not the less distinctly the concentrated essence of observation,
rather than the spontaneous play of a vivid imagination. Like Balzac,
Fielding has portrayed the 'Comédie Humaine;' but his imagination has
never overpowered the coolness of his judgment. He shows a superiority
to his successor in fidelity almost as marked as his inferiority in
vividness. And, therefore, it may be said in passing, it is refreshing
to read Fielding at a time when this element of masculine observation
is the one thing most clearly wanting in modern literature. Our novels
give us the emotions of young ladies, which, in their way, are very
good things; they reflect the sentimental view of life, and the
sensational view, and the commonplace view, and the high philosophical
view. One thing they do not tell us. What does the world look like to
a shrewd police-magistrate, with a keen eye in his head and a sound
heart in his bosom? It might be worth knowing. Perhaps (who can tell?)
it would still look rather like Fielding's world.
The peculiarity is indicated by Fielding's method. Scott, who, like
Fielding, generally describes from the outside, is content to keep
himself in the background. 'Here,' he says to his readers, 'are the
facts; make what you can of them.' Fielding will not efface himself; he
is always present as chorus; he tells us what moral we ought to draw; he
overflows with shrewd remarks, given in their most downright shape,
instead of obliquely suggested through the medium of anecdotes; he likes
to stop us as we pass through his portrait gallery; to take us by the
button-hole and expound his views of life and his criticisms on things
in general. His remarks are often so admirable that we prefer the
interpolations to the main current of narrative. Whether this plan is
the best must depend upon the idiosyncrasy of the author; but it goes
some way to explain one problem, over which Scott puzzles
himself--namely, why Fielding's plays are so inferior to his novels.
There are other reasons, external and internal; but it is at least clear
that a man who can never retire behind his puppets is not in the
dramatic frame of mind. He is always lecturing where a dramatist must be
content to pull the wires. Shakespeare is really as much present in his
plays as Fielding in his novels; but he does not let us know it; whereas
the excellent Fielding seems to be quite incapable of hiding his broad
shoulders and lofty stature behind his little puppet-show.
There are, of course, actors in Fielding's world who can be trusted to
speak for themselves. Tom Jones, at any rate, who is Fielding in his
youth, or Captain Booth, who is the Fielding of later years, are drawn
from within. Their creator's sympathy is so close and spontaneous that
he has no need of his formulæ and precedents. But elsewhere he betrays
his method by his desire to produce his authority. You will find the
explanation of a certain line of conduct, he says, in 'human nature,
page almost the last.' He is a little too fond of taking down that
volume with a flourish; of exhibiting his familiarity with its pages,
and referring to the passages which justify his assertions. Fielding has
an odd touch of the pedant. He is fond of airing his classical
knowledge; and he is equally fond of quoting this imaginary code which
he has had to study so thoroughly and painfully. The effect, however, is
to give an air of artificiality to some of his minor characters. They
show the traces of deliberate composition too distinctly, though the
blemish may be forgiven in consideration of the genuine force and
freshness of his thinking. If manufactured articles, they are not
second-hand manufactures. His knowledge, unlike that of the good Parson
Adams, comes from life, not books.
The worldly wisdom for which Fielding is so conspicuous had indeed been
gathered in doubtful places, and shows traces of its origin. He had been
forced, as he said, to choose between the positions of a hackney
coachman and of a hackney writer. 'His genius,' said Lady M. W. Montagu,
who records the saying, 'deserves a better fate.' Whether it would have
been equally fertile, if favoured by more propitious surroundings, is
one of those fruitless questions which belong to the boundless history
of the might-have-beens. But one fact requires to be emphasised.
Fielding's critics and biographers have dwelt far too exclusively upon
the uglier side of his Bohemian life. They have presented him as
yielding to all the temptations which can mislead keen powers of
enjoyment, when the purse is one day at the lowest ebb and the next
overflowing with the profits of some lucky hit at the theatre. Those
unfortunate yellow liveries which contributed to dissipate his little
fortune have scandalised posterity as they scandalised his country
neighbours.[11] But it is essential to remember that the history of the
Fielding of later years, of the Fielding to whom we owe the novels, is
the record of a manful and persistent struggle to escape from the mire
of Grub Street. During that period he was studying the law with the
energy of a young student; redeeming the office of magistrate from the
discredit into which it had fallen in the hands of fee-hunting
predecessors; considering seriously, and making practical proposals to
remedy, the evils which then made the lowest social strata a hell upon
earth; sacrificing his last chances of health and life to put down with
a strong hand the robbers who infested the streets of London; and
clinging with affection to his wife and children. He never got fairly
clear of that lamentable slough of despond into which his follies had
plunged him. His moral tone lost what delicacy it had once possessed; he
had not the strength which enabled Johnson to gain elevation even from
the temptations which then beset the unlucky 'author by profession.'
Some literary hacks of the day escaped only by selling themselves, body
and soul; others sank into misery and vice, like poor Boyce, a fragment
of whose poem has been preserved by Fielding, and who appears in
literary history scribbling for pay in a sack arranged to represent a
shirt. Fielding never let go his hold of the firm land, though he must
have felt through life like one whose feet are always plunging into a
hopeless quagmire. To describe him as a mere reckless Bohemian, is to
overlook the main facts of his story. He was manly to the last, not in
the sense in which man means animal; but with the manliness of one who
struggles bravely to redeem early errors, and who knows the value of
independence, purity, and domestic affection. The scanty anecdotes which
do duty for his biography reveal little of his true life. We know,
indeed, from a spiteful and obviously exaggerated story of Horace
Walpole's, that he once had a very poor supper in doubtful company; and
from another anecdote, of slightly apocryphal flavour, that he once gave
to 'friendship' the money which ought to have been given to the
collector of rates. But really to know the man, we must go to his books.
What did Fielding learn of the world which had treated him so roughly?
That the world must be composed of fools because it did not bow before
his genius, or of knaves because it did not reward his honesty? Men of
equal ability have drawn both those and the contradictory conclusions
from experience. Human nature, as philosophers assure us, varies little
from age to age; but the pictures drawn by the best observers vary so
strangely as to convince us that a portrait depends as much upon the
artist as upon the sitter. One can see nothing but the baser, and
another nothing but the nobler, passions. To one the world is like a
masque representing the triumph of vice; and another placidly assures us
that virtue is always rewarded by peace of mind, and that even the
temporary prosperity of the wicked is an illusion. On one canvas we see
a few great heroes stand out from a multitude of pygmies; on its rival,
giants and dwarfs appear to have pretty much the same stature. The world
is a scene of unrestrained passions impelling their puppets into
collision or alliance without intelligible design; or a scene of
domestic order, where an occasional catastrophe interferes as little
with ordinary lives as a comet with the solar system. Blind fate governs
one world of the imagination, and beneficent Providence another. The
theories embodied in poetry vary as widely as the philosophies on which
they are founded; and to philosophise is to declare the fundamental
assumptions of half the wise men of the world to be transparent
fallacies.
We need not here attempt to reconcile these apparent contradictions. As
little need we attempt to settle Fielding's philosophy, for it resembles
the snakes in Iceland. It seems to have been his opinion that philosophy
is, as a rule, a fine word for humbug. That was a common conviction of
his day; but his acceptance of it doubtless indicates the limits of his
power. In his pages we have the shrewdest observation of man in his
domestic relations; but we scarcely come into contact with man as he
appears in presence of the infinite, and therefore with the deepest
thoughts and loftiest imaginings of the great poets and philosophers.
Fielding remains inflexibly in the regions of common-sense and everyday
experience. But he has given an emphatic opinion of that part of the
world which was visible to him, and it is one worth knowing. In a
remarkable conversation, reported in Boswell, Burke and Johnson, two of
the greatest of Fielding's contemporaries, seem to have agreed that they
had found men less just and more generous than they could have imagined.
People begin by judging the world from themselves, and it is therefore
natural that two men of great intellectual power should have expected
from their fellows a more than average adherence to settled principles.
Thus Johnson and Burke discovered that reason, upon which justice
depends, has less influence than a young reasoner is apt to fancy. On
the other hand, they discovered that the blind instincts by which the
mass is necessarily guided are not so bad as they are represented by the
cynics. The Rochefoucauld or Mandeville who passes off his smart
sayings upon the public as serious, knows better than anybody that a man
must be a fool to take them literally. The wisdom which he affects is
very easily learnt, and is more often the product of the premature
sagacity dear to youth than of a ripened judgment. Good-hearted men, at
least, like Johnson and Burke, shake off cynicism whilst others are
acquiring it.
Fielding's verdict seems to differ at first sight. He undoubtedly lays
great stress upon the selfishness of mankind. He seldom admits of an
apparently generous action without showing its alloy of selfish motive,
and sometimes showing that it is a mere cloak for selfish motives. In a
characteristic passage of his 'Voyage to Lisbon' he applies his theory
to his own case. When the captain falls on his knees, he will not suffer
a brave man and an old man to remain for a moment in that posture, but
forgives him at once. He hastens, however, utterly to disclaim all
praise, on the ground that his true motive was simply the convenience of
forgiveness. 'If men were wiser,' he adds, 'they would be oftener
influenced by that motive.' This kind of inverted hypocrisy, which may
be graceful in a man's own case (for nobody will doubt that Fielding was
less guided by calculation than he asserts), is not so graceful when
applied to his neighbours. And perhaps some readers may hold that
Fielding pitches the average strain of human motive too low. I should
rather surmise that he substantially agrees with Johnson and Burke. The
fact that most men attend a good deal to their own interests is one of
the primary data of life. It is a thing at which we have no more right
to be astonished than at the fact that even saints and martyrs have to
eat and drink like other persons, or that a sound digestion is the
foundation of much moral excellence. It is one of those facts which
people of a romantic turn of mind may choose to overlook, but which no
honest observer of life can seriously deny. Our conduct is determined
through some thirty points of the compass by our own interest; and,
happily, through at least nine-and-twenty of those points is rightfully
so determined. Each man is forced, by an unavoidable necessity, to look
after his own and his children's bread and butter, and to spend most of
his efforts on that innocent end. So long as he does not pursue his
interests wrongfully, nor remain dead to other calls when they happen,
there is little cause for complaint, and certainly there is none for
surprise.
Fielding recognises, but never exaggerates, this homely truth. He has a
hearty and generous belief in the reality of good impulses, and the
existence of thoroughly unselfish men. The main actors in his world are
not, as in Balzac's, mere hideous incarnations of selfishness. The
superior sanity of his mind keeps him from nightmares, if its calmness
is unfavourable to lofty visions. With Balzac, women like Lady Bellaston
become the rule instead of the exception, and their evil passions are
the dominant forces in society. Fielding, though he recognises their
existence, tells us plainly that they are exceptional. Society, he says,
is as moral as ever it was, and given more to frivolity than to
vice[12]--a statement judiciously overlooked by some of the critics who
want to make graphic history out of his novels. Fielding's mind had
gathered coarseness, but it had not been poisoned. He sees how many ugly
things are covered by the superficial gloss of fashion, but he does not
condescend to travesty the facts in order to gratify a morbid taste for
the horrible. When he wants a good man or woman he knows where to find
them, and paints from Allen or his own wife with obvious sincerity and
hearty sympathy. He is less anxious to exhibit human selfishness than to
show us that an alloy of generosity is to be found even amidst base
motives. Some of his happiest touches are illustrations of this
doctrine. His villains (with a significant exception) are never
monsters. They have some touch of human emotion. No desert, according to
him, is so bare but that some sweet spring blends with its brackish
waters. His grasping landladies have genuine movements of sympathy; and
even the scoundrelly Black George, the game-keeper, is anxious to do Tom
Jones a good turn, without risk, of course, to his own comfort, by way
of compensation for previous injuries. It is this impartial insight into
the ordinary texture of human motive that gives a certain solidity and
veracity to Fielding's work. We are always made to feel that the actions
spring fairly and naturally from the character of his persons, not from
the exigencies of his story or the desire to be effective. The one great
difficulty in 'Tom Jones' is the assumption that the excellent Allworthy
should have been deceived for years by the hypocrite Blifil, and blind
to the substantial kindliness of his ward. Here we may fancy that
Fielding has been forced to be unnatural by his plot. Yet he suggests a
satisfactory solution with admirable skill. Allworthy is prejudiced in
favour of Blifil by the apparently unjust prejudice of Blifil's mother
in favour of the jovial Tom. A generous man may easily become blind to
the faults of a supposed victim of maternal injustice; and even here
Fielding fairly escapes from the blame due to ordinary novelists, who
invent impossible misunderstandings in order to bring about intricate
perplexities.